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DFalcon
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Software engineer and amateur game developer with a focus on challenging non-twitch gameplay. I set the bar for "challenging" pretty high.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
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Pages links when browsing games with tag combinations strip down to one tag (e.g., links at the bottom of http://rpgmaker.net/games/?tag=STRAT&tag=RPG go to http://rpgmaker.net/games/?tag=RPG&p=2).
Whatchu Workin' On? Tell us!
LockeZ: Changing the box to around 85% alpha helps a lot, so thanks for making sure that wasn't relegated to the nebulous low-priority "making the boxes pretty" phase.
Probably I'll end up changing things so you can hit a button to get a cursor on the right-hand status area, where you can move up or down to see explanations for the individual elements. I'd been doing a similar thing in the character command menu (displaying help for only the ability where the cursor is) and two or three lines at a time is certainly a lot more manageable.
Probably I'll end up changing things so you can hit a button to get a cursor on the right-hand status area, where you can move up or down to see explanations for the individual elements. I'd been doing a similar thing in the character command menu (displaying help for only the ability where the cursor is) and two or three lines at a time is certainly a lot more manageable.
Rewards for good blog post.
I would tend to argue that the best reward for posting a good blog would be increasing its visibility. Didn't somebody suggest in another thread a by-latest-response sort for blogs?
Whatchu Workin' On? Tell us!
author=LockeZ
Do terrains even do anything then? That's the only thing they do in most TRPGs. Your maps might as well just have every tile the same.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. OH has varying terrain movement costs. What I took out was the ability to vary it for a tile depending on the direction a unit moves into the tile. (The comparable feature in RM would be the way you can set separate passability for each of the four cardinal directions of a tile.)
author=LockeZ
I think you mean "always bad". More complexity is better! If I ever figure out how to play the game, I stop being interested in it! For all practical purposes I've beaten it at that point. (Okay, that's aslightmoderategross exaggeration, but you get the idea - I have never seen a game with too much complexity for me.)
Before (this example is the deploy menu, looking at my fire mage):
After:
So even though I'm concerned enough about the size of the current help popup that I've wondered if I can present some of that differently, I'll admit I'm not seeing huge gains in screen real estate here. It's at least as much of an issue that putting, say, a "weak to earth" tag on a creature is kind of like waving a "You should deploy Chantal (the earth mage) on this map!" flag, and I don't think I want to constrain what the optimum parties are that tightly.
Craze: But without automatic wipe to a FOE the first time you hit B2F, it's just not the same! =P
Whatchu Workin' On? Tell us!
Simplifying.
Terrains don't really need possibly different costs to enter them from different directions (excepting that diagonal cost is always different), and removing them lets pathing and the AI handle terrain manipulation better. Magic users' damage spells are already different enough that they don't really need elemental types, and removing those gets rid of the amount of junk on the screen, which is always good.
Craze: Is it even possible for someone to go wrong by saying he'll make something more like Etrian Odyssey? =)
Terrains don't really need possibly different costs to enter them from different directions (excepting that diagonal cost is always different), and removing them lets pathing and the AI handle terrain manipulation better. Magic users' damage spells are already different enough that they don't really need elemental types, and removing those gets rid of the amount of junk on the screen, which is always good.
Craze: Is it even possible for someone to go wrong by saying he'll make something more like Etrian Odyssey? =)
Whatchu Workin' On? Tell us!
Status effects! Man, status effects are my single biggest cause of schedule (though I can't call it scope) creep. Makes me wish I'd found a different way to accomplish some things in the design, kind of.
Specifically, I've been regularizing the framework for how the AI knows conditions change during a turn it's still figuring out (e.g., when it defeats a player unit, that unit no longer blocks a space or projects ZOC, so the AI's units that move afterward can move differently - which is information it can use after it decides to defeat a unit to figure out which units to use to do that). There's been a version handling just defeated units in for a long time, but it needed reworking to allow a broader range of possibilities, especially since this is tied into some other stuff like pathing - it's not solely an AI-turn concern.
Specifically, I've been regularizing the framework for how the AI knows conditions change during a turn it's still figuring out (e.g., when it defeats a player unit, that unit no longer blocks a space or projects ZOC, so the AI's units that move afterward can move differently - which is information it can use after it decides to defeat a unit to figure out which units to use to do that). There's been a version handling just defeated units in for a long time, but it needed reworking to allow a broader range of possibilities, especially since this is tied into some other stuff like pathing - it's not solely an AI-turn concern.
What we did horribly on our first games.
The first mistake was using Sim RPG Maker! This allowed me somewhat less freedom to make additional mistakes, but plot and characterization were also both fairly make-it-up-as-you-go.
(Not counting the minigamey stuff I'd done in RM2K before then, which wasn't bad.)
(Not counting the minigamey stuff I'd done in RM2K before then, which wasn't bad.)
Random Number Generation: The death of the Critical Hit
author=LockeZ
Randomly getting a game over 1% of the time is not really better game design than randomly getting a game over 5% of the time. It still has the exact same game-crippling problem, that problem just shows up a little less often. I mean, ultimately, in either case, you could just make it so that when the battle starts, it has a random chance to not even let you attempt to fight, and just instead instantly gives you a game over for no reason. And your game would be exactly the same, except with less animated graphics.
Let me talk for a minute about Freecell. Its credentials as both single-player and depending entirely on randomness are, I think, impeccable. For a stretch I played it pretty often, several hundred hands with a win rate of around 98-99%. And one of the hands I encountered was Microsoft's random seed #11982, which is unbeatable - the only one of the 32000 randomly generated hands early Microsoft Freecell shipped with that is.
So mostly, I would say randomly getting a game over 1% of the time is better game design than randomly getting a game over 5% of the time. Randomness is a powerful tool to make things play out in interesting ways, if it's used right - even though that can mean every once in a while, someone just can't catch a break.
Healing for Health and Mana and Burst and Rage and Break and TP and SP and -
more resources means both more damage types and more healing
Which can also be more ways to stack multiplicative modifiers, if you're not careful.
Examples:
a) Several games have characters who can spend MP on either healing or damage who have very little reason to use it for damage - it's more resource-efficient to trade MP for somebody's HP, and that person's HP for the time needed to do more free attack damage.
b) To take V&V (especially the non-leveling version), at first it looks like a very resource-limited game, to the point where every combat is a serious matter. So it was fun to mess around with polarity and the skills to see what I could eke out. After some practice, though, and another character or two, I hit the point where stealing and the polarity-based WP/SF regen was enough to consistently end battles in some areas in better shape than I went in... if I spent enough time on it.
So more generally, I would caution people to avoid "sit and regen with one enemy left" perverse incentive and be careful with loops that will let the player make a circle of trades.
Tanking for Health and... well, Health
If you are considering making a tank in a "traditional" RPG, then they have to have skills that draw fire towards them!
Ok, so it can be nice to have both a reason to direct attacks toward someone and a method of doing so (and of course various ways of achieving those will have various tradeoffs of effort for effectiveness).
I would just point out that having them both on the same character comes largely from games that let you mix and match characters in groups. If, like a significant share of RM games, yours doesn't have a lot of party flexibility, splitting the role up might be interesting.
Games - Tester
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