CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

author=Ratty524
I seriously wish people would stop getting worked up over "avoiding cliches" and crap. It's like a plague in the RM community as a whole, and it does nothing but confuse newer developers trying to get their work out there.

There is no such thing as true originality, period. We've come to a point where almost every idea was already done by someone at some point. Get over it.

Who is this post directed at? I'm counting a total of zero people in this topic who seems worked up over avoiding clichés. Also, since when was "has been done before" the definition of a cliché?

If Sephiroth is poorly copied, I credit the old "let's try what worked for someone else without actually understanding why it worked" method. It's what caused a lot of people to attempt flight by strapping wings to their arms.

Style is rarely transferable. What works on one character will look out of place on almost anyone else. For an extreme example, if you've played Breath of Fire IV, try transferring Kefka's laugh to Fou Lu or Fou Lu's speech pattern to Kefka and see how well it works. If you're taking a successful character and then transfer it's style to another character, you're committing an error on a very basic level.

Style is hard to give a guideline to since what works is pretty much individual to each character. But here's a test to try; when you want to add a style to a character, try imagining it one other characters instead. Does it fit the intended character better than the others? If the answer isn't yes, then chance is the style doesn't really add to the intended character.

Personally, there's a lot of things that have to be at a decent level for the game to work for me. Or rather, if it's in the game, it has to be decent. I can enjoy a game without a story, but I find a bad story detrimental. ASCII based visuals work, but not the dreaded large and empty rooms in RPG maker games.

So most things can be meh and still work for me. However, when checking out RPGs, I can think of two things that rarely can afford to be on the meh category.

The first is gameplay. I used to tolerate bad gameplay if the story was good enough, but I have grown rather intolerant of that. In fact, I'm playing JRPG far less now than before because of their general failure to provide engaging combat. As such, if I see a project and there's very little about it that suggests it's fun to play, I'm likely to just move on.

The second is likable characters. A good characterization helps a lot more here than a complicated backstory and character development. I'm controlling certain characters and I want to feel that I want them to succeed, else why am I guiding them towards success? The exception to that rule is games where the characters don't even have any character at all, they are just a bundle of stats and skills. In that case I'm content with guiding my bundle of stats and skills towards greater efficiency.

As far as I'm concerned, custom is not necessarily better then standard. For example, non RTP is better than RTP if it looks better and worse if it looks worse. I seen plenty of RM projects with custom graphics that looked worse than RTP. The same goes for any other custom stuff.

Pick whatever helps your game the most and factor in the amount of effort needed. Weight the benefit of whatever piece of custom stuff you're considering against the added chance of your project not being finished. Granted, sometimes adding custom stuff actually increases the chance of you finishing a project. For example, making your game look better can improve your motivation to work on it.

How many donuts do you have to give a girl to compensate for backhanding her while calling her a whore?

In my experience, the ability to earn friendship/romance points via gift giving usually leads to absurdities. Heck, any grindable method usually does. Any plans on preventing absurdities?