CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

I try to spread the choice trough multiple characters.

My plan is to first make defense mandatory. The player has to use skills who's purpose is to decrease the amount of damage enemies can inflict rather than injuring them. Offense and healing will not let you survive for long. This means that I have to make it more costly to just take the damage and then heal it than mitigating it with defensive skills.

There are multiple ways to mitigate damage. There's status effects, defense buffs and tanking. Different characters have different ways to mitigate damage. If you overuse defensive skills, you also end up wasting MP because not only do those skills have a cost, but it will take longer to win the battle and buffs/debuffs will run out and have to be recast. So, the idea is to find the best balance and choose the skills that mitigate damage as much as possible with the least amount of actions for that particular battle.

From an offensive perspective, the characters are also good at different areas. The thief character for example, can deal great damage to low defense enemies, but is very ineffective against high defense enemies. So, which enemies the characters are good at killing also has to be taken into account when planning who does what.

At least that's the idea. I know of a full 0% of commercial RPGs which have pulled something like that off.

author=slashphoenix
As a sidenote, I think enemy randomness can be used to effectively add to this tension. If the enemy has two attacks - both equally powerful but essentially different (say a direct attack and a slow but powerful poison) - and the player knows this, it's the player's job to be prepared for either inevitability. This is not the same as a boss having a small chance to OHKO your party, because the player can avoid dying to either possible attack if they've assessed things properly before it's too late. If the player gets into a situation where one attack will kill them and the other won't, they've already screwed up - and now they just have to hope the enemy screws up too.

I think it would be awesome if one could take it to a new level and not only make it so that the player has to plan for either attack, but if the RNG also altered the flow of battle. Basically, the enemies can trough their actions render certain tactics ineffective and that way force the player to change tactics. The same encounter could lead to a different battle.

Most indie games are canceled, so it falls to reason that this would apply to good indie games as well. Of course, you are more likely to notice when a good game gets canceled than if a bad one does. Other than that, good indie games most likely has a lot of effort put into them which may increase the chance of them getting canceled. On the other hand, a person who puts effort into them may be more diligent, so maybe the latter reason isn't really a factor.

author=Clareain_Christopher
I like characters that go into different roles every once and awhile, but I try to limit them to one of the trinities 90% of the time.
Guild wars 2 tried to get a rid of the trinity, and one of the flaws with that game is that the player would suffer from role confusion.

I hope this is less of an issue when you control all of your characters yourself. With multiple players, I can see how it would be hard to coordinate without an easy way to describe your role in combat. However, if you're in control of all characters, you shouldn't need easily defined roles.

Usually, games will ask for more than one skill. If you're lacking in a skill, you can compensate by having an abundance in another.

I played Contra a lot for a while. I never got very good at timing or had particular good reflexes, but I did learn how to avoid getting into the situations where those skills were required. For example, I learned how the constantly randomly spawning enemies moves and could predict which spots are safe and which spots will be safe in a few seconds. I had similar experiences with other platformers.

I have also read blogs from people playing competitive FPS saying that they aren't very good at dodging or aiming, but they are good at knowing where the opponents are due to clues like door opening sounds, which pickups are taken and which are still on the ground and so on. They use that skill to ambush their opponents and that way usually don't have to dodge or try to aim at a dodging target.

For RPGs, there are often in battle tactics and out of battle strategy that can be used. I have noticed that the better you are at customizing the characters, the less important it becomes to use your skills in a clever way as you can instead just overpower your opponents. There are also people who manages to play low level runs by using their skills in creative ways (although they often also rely on luck.)

As long as your game asks for more than one skill and it's possible to compensate for a lack of one skill by being good at the other, the player is less likely to get stuck than if a challenge solely checks one skill. What can be frustrating then is if your game suddenly bottlenecks a skill that the player has been relying on so far. For example, we have a platformer where bosses have patterns, all save one that is, who instead moves very random.

Personally, I think that you can design challenges like that, but they should not be designed to also be particular hard. The randomly moving boss becomes extra hard for pattern recognition players, but not so much for reflex players. If pattern recognition players find said boss one of the hardest while reflex players finds it one of the easier ones, it will work out. However, if instead the reflex players think that the boss is one of the hardest, then the pattern recognition players are screwed.

For that reason I think that whenever you design a challenge that for one or another reason differs from the rest, said challenge should not also be designed to be one of the hardest ones.

I noticed I said you don't need good writing in order not to stereotype characters, but didn't give any suggestions.

If you aren't very good at writing, there's one method you can still employ (and this is also useful if you are a good writer) and that's to take a look at your characters and compare them to each other. For simplicity's sake, let's take gender as an example. What you do is to compare your male characters with your female characters. What traits did you give them and what events have you planned for your characters?

Let's say you have two female party members and you notice that you made both of them more emotional than all the male members. This could be a problem. You could also find that you have planned events for your male characters where they do something awesome, but no such events exist for the female characters. This will be a problem. However, not every instance of you finding that one gender is more X than the other has to be changed, you could for example notice that your male characters are more hot-headed than your female characters and decide that you are okay with it being that way.

The same can be done with black vs white characters, homosexual vs heterosexual and whatever vs whatever. Just remember to compare them to each other, not to real life humans. The characters do not exist in a vacuum, how the audience views a character is dependent not only by the character in question, but also by other characters.

Even if you're skilled at writing characters and don't intend to stereotype them, it's very easy to subconsciously slip something in. It's also very easy to deceive yourself, so actually looking critically at the notes you've put down on paper may let you notice something your brain rationalized away.