SEQUELS!

I like them both! It all depends on where the last game left off and how much plot got answered. If I enjoyed the characters and their world enough, then sure, a direct sequel won't be a complain.

I find that a lot of the games that don't feature direct sequels are the games where you have goals like: save the world. Zelda and older FF games comes to mind. I like that style, since you have options to make both direct and indirect sequels.

The names of the series/games play a small role in this too, I believe.

I have made a sequel yes. It's fun, but it was harder for me than to make a whole new game(basically because everything in a direct sequels has to make sense with the previous game). You're usually more limited when making sequels.

In this case, it was a fan made sequel, so I had to keep in touch and get things straight with the series creator. I kept the core concept(both story and gameplay), refined about everything the last games had to offer and added some new things as well.

I think sequels are great if:

A) You don't necessarily want to move onto a different world with different characters and still want to write in the same "universe" of current/past games.
B) There's a demand for it from people who enjoyed one of your games.

I'm making a sequel myself, and it's a bit of both points. The first game took the better part of a decade to finish (LOTS of off and on breaks from the game during that period), and I grew attached to the world I had created. Sort of like with authors who go back and revisit characters or settings in later books, I did the same thing. I felt like there was more story to tell in the world, and I wanted to show a sense of evolution in the world by setting the sequel one hundred years after the first.

There's also the second point, demand from people who enjoy one of your games. I had several people ask for a sequel over the span of a year or so. I wasn't really planning on it originally because I wanted to do something else, but the next project I started didn't get much feedback at all and felt like it was stagnating. Meanwhile, people were still posting and saying "we want a sequel!"

Almost a year later, and here I am working on a sequel that, for the most part, people seem to be enjoying much more than the first game. It was a good decision to go the sequel route in my eyes, even if my game is a fangame. There's still an audience for it, they wanted more, so I decided to deliver!

If they weren't planned as multipart stories from the very beginning, story sequels almost always turn out terrible. That goes for movies, books, games and so on. Using the same setting, mechanics or even including a cameo appearance of an older character etc. can work perfectly fine, but taking characters from an already finished story and forcing them into a new plot feels cheap and fake 99% of the time. Stories are just meant to end at a certain point.
In short, I dislike "traditional" sequels. As always, exceptions are perfectly possible.

author=Sooz
For those that have done sequels following characters, how did you handle the fact that, presumably, your characters were superduper powerful at the end of the last story, but needed a rise in power in the next?

I think an easy solution would be to make the sequel set many many years after the first game, when the characters are done with their quest and tried to settle down for a new life. The long time period means that characters would get out of practice, weaker, and not being able to pull off their abilities as easily.

A different solution would be to have a lower level cap in the first game and start players at that level or slightly lower for the sequel.

Every time I'm done a game I want to make a sequel to it. But by the time I'm 20% of the way done with the sequel, I've become so embarassed by the quality of my previous game that I decide to distance the new game from it and cut all the ties between them.

Vindication was original known as Double Trouble 2: The Third until I changed the title and removed 95% of the references to the original game Double Trouble. I'm on the verge of probably renaming Iniquity & Vindication to something else, if I can come up with something not-super-serious-sounding that's related to both paranormal activity and sharks. Best I have so far is Five Rows of Teeth and a Portal to Hell, which would much more accurately reflect the game than the current title, but is way too long.

That makes sense. It's like making a fangame about your own IP. Much less creativity required, cash in on the fans, lose out on the non-fans. Unfortunately your RPG Maker game you finished last year has way fewer fans than Chrono Trigger or Touhou, so you'd be better off just making a fan game.

Personally though my temptation to make a sequel isn't to cash in, it's because I realize I could do better now. So I want to focus on the things I know I can do better without having to start over from scratch on everything else. Iniquity & Vindication was originally going to use the exact same story as Vindication so that I could focus on improving the gameplay, because I knew that the plot structure and characters from that game worked well enough and felt no need to change them. (Later I changed my mind, though.)

Sequels are a great opportunity to expand on the world that you created. For example: Half-Life 1 took place in a lab and on an alien planet. But Half-Life 2 allowed you to explore the world and see what kind of effects the events of the first game had on it. So it still felt fresh for those that have played the first game while appealing to newcomers.

Personally, I like to see a new main character in a sequel, to offer a new perspective on the same world that the first game established. Perhaps you could play as the antagonist(s) of the first game, or have the sequel take place 30-50 years later so that the first game's main character(s) aren't around. Or at least not around to be prominent in the story.


Say you are going to make a sequel: What are your thoughts on art style changes? You started off with VX style character sprites, but you wanted to go with taller sprites like you see in XP for the next game? Would that be too jarring for you? Or is such a change not important?