VIDEOWIZARD'S PROFILE

Pride is a sin. You don't want it to rise up and Giga-Graviton everything, do you?

All kidding aside, I think we need to break out of the cookie-cutter feel of RPG Maker games- and I'm not saying that I'm not guilty of this- and find a way to stand out. We all must have SOMETHING that we can do in this field, right?

What'd I like to see is people that can customize resources for games for those that can't do certain things. And in order for that to happen, we must attract more people to the community. It's a bit of a Catch-22: Our games generally aren't appealing, so people don't come to the community, and so we stagnate: Such has been the case since 2003 or so.

I think a big, big, HUGE part of the problem is insisting on using RPG Maker 2000/2003 for new projects. I don't mean throw away projects you've spent months or years making in those programs, but expect that standing out will be that much harder!

Believe it or not, there are programs out there that can do things RPG Maker (even VX) can't. I saw a program on YouTube that can make 2000-era 3D graphics without programming, and the rest is no more than our switches (what IF-THEN is), and variables. The databases already exist.

Isn't the forum going to basically die off, with the fact that many of the features will be on the RMN main page? I hope this emphasizing the games thing takes off...

As for introductions, couldn't they just post their thoughts on games whenever? I'm guessing that's the reason that Introductions is being closed.

(Perhaps I should clarify. The forum, not the main site, might die off. Or at the least, activity would decrease on the forums.)

author=halibabica link=topic=2730.msg53749#msg53749 date=1230993426
All right, I put this off for a while, but here it is. I played a bunch of the games from the list I made earlier, and here's what I thought of them. In alphabetical order…

Dragon Kingdoms IV

You'll have to forgive me if this sounds harsh, but this game needs a lot of work.

This game…is lacking in almost every area of its design. The graphics are mismatched and don't blend well at all. The mapping is flat and uninspiring, and several map errors allow you to walk on walls and water.

The characters aren't much better than stereotypes, and the dialogue doesn't sound natural at all. Couple this with fourth-wall breaking and RTP jokes, and it all starts coming off very weak.

The gameplay consists mostly of DBS enter-mashing. The monsters aren't even remotely difficult, although they might be tougher if you didn't find the AI controlled guard NPCs to join you.

The story is cliché and the intro is force-fed to you. The intro is also very long, opening with what seems more like a trailer for the game you're already playing.

The most impressive “feature” of the game is its day / night animations, which look nice when they're playing, but happen entirely too often. Every day and night seems to last less than five minutes, and the animations for them get tiresome in a hurry. The dialogue boxes announcing the time shift interrupt cut scenes and really disrupt the game's flow.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but this game is fundamentally flawed in multiple ways. VideoWizard, I would recommend that you take a step back and seriously look at what you've done so far. This game doesn't have to be terrible, and it can be improved, but you need to be able to see its weaknesses in order to fix them. There isn't a single area of this game that excels, and the whole thing feels really crappy. Take a good, long look, put your thinking cap on, and fix this mess one piece at a time. It might not be easy, but game making rarely is. Better luck next time!

Not as bad as I feared, I can remove the dialog at the day-night event and change the day-night timing. Knowing what I do now with mapping, I can fix that up, too. You could say that this hasn't aged well, according to the RPG Maker standards of today, having been released in 2001.

The intro, yeah, that's a mess. As for the characters' speech, I'll have to see what I can do with that- it's been so long now, that I barely remember what they said!

Let's see what Dragon Kingdoms IV can look like, eight years later.

In any event, thanks for giving the feedback that this game needed, and not outright trashing it.

I'm actually considering doing so at this point, maybe we could get something going, Max?

And I wonder why everyone wants to pretend to be a production company or team. Does GameOverGames actually have a site somewhere, or something?

...You know, RPG Maker was originally called Dante, right? And the database is called Lucifer. Could that be why sometimes making a game feels like going through nine layers of hell?

RPG Maker 95 allowed for 100,000 events (using 0 as the start event), so I could hardly imagine RPG Maker 2003 allowing less. Of course, that number for RM95 is for the entire game, not just one map. So, I'd guess it's 5,000 events per map, just like everything else in the database.