NetGore

Battle Swirls

• Only seen by team members
• Person who collides with an enemy is 'invincible and frozen' during the swirl
• Red swirl: person got ambushed --> swirl is smaller and lasts a few seconds
• Green swirl: person ambushes enemy --> swirl is bigger and lasts longer
• Neutral swirl: no ambush --> swirl is in between green and red, also lasts somewhere in between
• These swirls also apply to enemy AI, but of course, for them it's the other way around (player ambushing an enemy = enemy gets ambushed --> red swirl for enemy AI)

Psychedelic backgrounds

1. aPhRo suggested blurred fractals
2. Darkfrost linked to a topic with more information

Outside battle view possibilities:
Lowered opacity (team: pulsating) - Several icons (outsiders, team members, ...) - SMAAAAAASH icon when a smaaaaash happened inbattle
Option of spectating the battle - not full screen - semi transparant - vulerable to ambushes

Single Player

Timing - Timed battle

• 2 minutes time to select a move
• When no move is selected after 2 min --> auto-turn (controlled by AI, customizable) for one turn
• Disconnection from game --> Autoturn
• Run away: Enemy & player blink 4s (invincible)
• Die: 50% of cash on hand is lost + warped to last telephone to dad location (Save Point / Home Point)
• Shout for help: Takes a battle turn - anyone can join to help out - no items drop, no exp gets given, cash is split into 30%-30%

Multiple players (No NPC Allies)

Things of single player apply

Group Leader

• Person who creates the group is 'group leader'
• You make a group when you invite someone and they join
• Group leader can kick people out of the group
• Group leader can pass along 'leader' to another group member
• When group leader gets disconnected the second member to join the group gets leader (and so forth).
• Only Group leader can invite more people

Timing

Start of each turn: 1minute time to select your move, no move selected => auto turn

Misc

• Exp/cash shares: 1p (100%), 2p (65%), 3p (45%), 4p (35%) ==> higher exp shares encourages grouping
• Level difference higher than 5: Extra equation based on level (only for EXP)
• When dead at the end of a battle: Warped back to homepoint (for alpha)
• 'Drawn in' range: half a gamescreen
• When in battle: Click on or run into enemy to join battle (after current battle turn)
• What happens if the teamleader disbands the group when there are still items in the treasure pool?
• Teams cannot be disbanded entirely
• When there's 2 people left in the team, and person A leaves, then all the remaining items in the pool go to person B
• Boss battles have an extra condition
• The highest level user in the battle cannot be more than 5 levels higher than the lowest one
• What about when someone tries to run away? Does the entire group exit the battle? Only the person trying to run away?
• Only the person who is trying to run will exit the battle

Trigger battle event

• Object collision detection system by object distance (e.x object distance < or any netgore related or SMFL collision function(if it exists). Possible loop while moving around to check if someone is around wouldn't take much, performance wise anyways. Which means even the mob shall have this loop so if it runs on you it will initiate a battle with it having advantage, now if you run into it the battle initiates automatically once again but you have the advantage.
• Battle advantages/initiation parameters
• Run into a mob as a player(requires client side firstly and secondly server side coding)
• A mob runs into you(requires sever side coding)
• Once the battle is initiated the server shall send a signal to the client and the client will redraw and load a new frame with a new screen that will be the battle system screen.
• Battle details as mentioned below. + server checking the battle progress
• End of battle, server calculates the outcome and sends it to the client also stores it in some form of statistic in the database

I was thinking about design patterns and for actually creating the games i think a factory and observer patterns may fit well. I'll explain more when i have time.

All you are going to need to do is expand, not rewrite. That is, you will just be building on top of what NetGore already does. On a high level, it may look something like:

Create a class for holding battle instance information (who the user is, who the NPCs are, and anything else you might want)
Add a reference to this class to User so you know what battle they are in (if any)
When they are in battle (when the reference is not null), do not allow certain events (movement, using items, etc) and allow battle-only events (this step is just a tedious game-logic one where you have to break down every action and determine if its allowed at the given time)
When a user enters a battle, send all relevant information to the client to start the battle display. Of course, also tell the client when a battle is over.
That should be about all it takes. The server still sees the user as just standing there, while the client is displaying this completely different screen. But things remain mostly the same.