For some reason I came up with a *bunch* of new NIFE ideas at work today. One of them was an idea to build some kind of pokemon demo in NIFE, which sort of morphed into its own thing with some interesting updates to the Summons system:
Summons can be unsummoned, which will either drop their non-permanent items and delete them or:
Summons can be "Familiars" on a per-summon or global basis. When you unsummon a familiar they move to limbo and when you resummon them you get the same one back.
Characters can have limits on the number of summons they can have. This limit should just be a stat ideally.
Adds "soul capture crystals" that capture characters and turn them into summons of either type. There can be some conditions placed on this based on the character or soul crystal or both.
Similarly, "soul splitter crystals" that do the above but don't remove the character.
Being able to switch minions from within the NIFE interface is planned
As an update to this, the player can also set minions to automatically follow you into new rooms or not.
I did a bit more work on the Squads plugin, which lets you group together minions, track them more easily and copy actions across multiple minions.
Adds "character shields", which will absorb damage to you from any source provided that they're in the same room. These don't necessarily have to be minions.
Training items (not sure on the name yet) that give a character various items (probably permanent weapons but there's no sense limiting it) when consumed. These training items can optionally be many-use.
The overall game idea is a kind of pokemon-inspired sandbox called "Eidolon Playground" where:
Eidolons spawn according to the new spawn rate rules
You can wear their health down and capture them and then resummon them later to fight other eidolons.
They level up through some kind of system (probably the Leveling plugin but maybe also Skills). Leveling up would be pretty fast.
This system makes new weapons available to them
You can also use training items to teach them other things
Procedurally generating some Eidolons automatically through Genesis would be interesting.
Letting players create their own custom Eidolons somehow would be pretty cool too.
