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Where I Went Wrong
Strangeluv- 02/22/2011 01:22 PM
- 3081 views
Back in 2005, I was doing my A' Level exams. I had a difficult time studying for them because I had just stumbled across a little but powerful program called RPG Maker two weeks before. I suppose we would all remember our first few weeks or months of discovering RPG Maker, especially to those of us who had always wanted to create a game but were unwilling to go through the ranks of "starving gam designer" or "B.Sc. Computer Science".
Me? Ever since I'd played RPG's like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, I'd wanted to make a game. Not become a game designer, really... but make a game. And I was about eight years old when these thoughts began. So, discovering RPG Maker helped me achieve a dream much sooner than expected. All I had to do was wait ten years! Only a couple days after discovering the program, I decided to begin making a game in it. There was close to no pre-planning, so we can already see where this is going. At the time, I had a terrible unfinished novel called "Wyesse", my own banal attempt to mock the Lord of the Rings craze at the time. Both the game and novel have remained unfinished, with no regrets. Sword and sorcery has never been my strong suit, and will never be.
Three novels and a score of short stories later, I've also come to realize that anything purely dramatic or serious has never been my strong suit either. But where did I go wrong with Wyesse? Firstly, it wasn't even totally based on the awful unfinished work of the same title due to limited resources and my unwillingness to edit any resources back then. Secondly, all the planning done was done during the process of actually making the game. This is not a good idea, but I don't blame myself for just jumping into a game one week of opening the program. I had a lot of fun, but it didn't produce a good game.
Thirdly, I had planned the game to be about thirty hours long. There's two main problems with this. One: A first-timer usually does not try to do an epic. Like, say, a film-maker? Even George Lucas had his "THX-1138" before he made Star Wars, and even Darren Aronofsky had his "Pi" before making "Requiem for a Dream" and "Black Swan". Or even authors - the only example I can prattle off my head right now is Stephen King writing a bunch of magazine short stories before he could publish his first novel, "Carrie", a short work, and then move on later to write his "Dark Tower" magnum opus. Nobody just dives in trying to make an enormous project unless you're an RM'er.
The thing is, even if you plan the hell out of a game and create very organized "to-do" lists to follow over a course of three years, there will always be a shift in quality of the game from the beginning to, say, ten hours of gameplay in. I had this problem with Wyesse. The game began ridiculously vague and jumbled, but it actually started to improve about ten hours in. Of course, everyone would have quit by then.
After two years of working on it, I just completely ditched it. Couldn't stand to look at it anymore.
So, around Christmas 2007, I decided to start a new project. I mapped the few opening key scenes and opened up "Wordpad" and began taking a lot of notes on what I wanted to set out to do. I named this one "A Home Far Away" and I decided to completely ditch the epic fantasy storyline and try to make something more simple. Like say, a seven hour game? Something more feasible, and with the proper management, I completed my first game. "Leo & Leah" wasn't even supposed to be as long as it is now. I originally planned it to be three hours. No fodder. Just three hours of fun. And to be honest, I'd play a three hour amateur game over a twenty hour amateur game. There are very few examples of amateur games that are longer than ten hours that I can view as more than "terrible".
Custom systems are great and all, but people just want to open up a game and be entertained. It is difficult to do in RPG Maker because RPG Maker games are often so similar, they are viewed as dime-a-dozen. So instead of focusing on length, I found that focusing on detail is much, much more fun. I am sure games like Space Funeral, Clock of Atonement, Paradise Blue, even Beautiful Escape and hopefully the upcoming Anagram, will have benefited from such a concept. Custom systems are nice but to see a level of detail be placed in your story, style, mapping and characters... That's what makes a game stand out.
I might just be talking out of my ass for this one, but: The difference between most indie games and RPG Maker games is that most indie game developers try not to do Mario and Sonic re-hashes. They try to implement some new angle, idea or gimmick into it, even if it's meant solely for humour purposes than gameplay. Whereas most RPG Makers open the game with the sole intent of fleshing out their drawn-out childhood dreams in maps and pixels or mimicking their favourite Square-Enix games. It is very tempting when all of the basic code has already been done for you. But at the end of the day, it'll just be a Square-Enix demake. And, you know, there's a big target audience for that. Too bad 99% of those never get completed!!
Think smaller. Learn to live small first. It's much more manageable and rewarding to actually work on something and slap a green "COMPLETE" next to it than to toil with something for three years... to just... let life catch up with you and go on a gaming "Hiatus". Let your charsets skip and hop and cry, let your chipsets come alive, let your story shine, give your items weird names, give the Defend command an actual purpose to exist, make some minigames, let your imagination run wild! You're in the RPG Maker World, bro! You aren't confined to the hero's burning village or the seventh crystal cave or even the obligatory world map. ANYTHING can happen in ANY space of time!
How many blags must we read... "Too many custom systems, not enough time," before we will learn? It's not too late...
Me? Ever since I'd played RPG's like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, I'd wanted to make a game. Not become a game designer, really... but make a game. And I was about eight years old when these thoughts began. So, discovering RPG Maker helped me achieve a dream much sooner than expected. All I had to do was wait ten years! Only a couple days after discovering the program, I decided to begin making a game in it. There was close to no pre-planning, so we can already see where this is going. At the time, I had a terrible unfinished novel called "Wyesse", my own banal attempt to mock the Lord of the Rings craze at the time. Both the game and novel have remained unfinished, with no regrets. Sword and sorcery has never been my strong suit, and will never be.
Three novels and a score of short stories later, I've also come to realize that anything purely dramatic or serious has never been my strong suit either. But where did I go wrong with Wyesse? Firstly, it wasn't even totally based on the awful unfinished work of the same title due to limited resources and my unwillingness to edit any resources back then. Secondly, all the planning done was done during the process of actually making the game. This is not a good idea, but I don't blame myself for just jumping into a game one week of opening the program. I had a lot of fun, but it didn't produce a good game.
Thirdly, I had planned the game to be about thirty hours long. There's two main problems with this. One: A first-timer usually does not try to do an epic. Like, say, a film-maker? Even George Lucas had his "THX-1138" before he made Star Wars, and even Darren Aronofsky had his "Pi" before making "Requiem for a Dream" and "Black Swan". Or even authors - the only example I can prattle off my head right now is Stephen King writing a bunch of magazine short stories before he could publish his first novel, "Carrie", a short work, and then move on later to write his "Dark Tower" magnum opus. Nobody just dives in trying to make an enormous project unless you're an RM'er.
The thing is, even if you plan the hell out of a game and create very organized "to-do" lists to follow over a course of three years, there will always be a shift in quality of the game from the beginning to, say, ten hours of gameplay in. I had this problem with Wyesse. The game began ridiculously vague and jumbled, but it actually started to improve about ten hours in. Of course, everyone would have quit by then.
After two years of working on it, I just completely ditched it. Couldn't stand to look at it anymore.
So, around Christmas 2007, I decided to start a new project. I mapped the few opening key scenes and opened up "Wordpad" and began taking a lot of notes on what I wanted to set out to do. I named this one "A Home Far Away" and I decided to completely ditch the epic fantasy storyline and try to make something more simple. Like say, a seven hour game? Something more feasible, and with the proper management, I completed my first game. "Leo & Leah" wasn't even supposed to be as long as it is now. I originally planned it to be three hours. No fodder. Just three hours of fun. And to be honest, I'd play a three hour amateur game over a twenty hour amateur game. There are very few examples of amateur games that are longer than ten hours that I can view as more than "terrible".
Custom systems are great and all, but people just want to open up a game and be entertained. It is difficult to do in RPG Maker because RPG Maker games are often so similar, they are viewed as dime-a-dozen. So instead of focusing on length, I found that focusing on detail is much, much more fun. I am sure games like Space Funeral, Clock of Atonement, Paradise Blue, even Beautiful Escape and hopefully the upcoming Anagram, will have benefited from such a concept. Custom systems are nice but to see a level of detail be placed in your story, style, mapping and characters... That's what makes a game stand out.
I might just be talking out of my ass for this one, but: The difference between most indie games and RPG Maker games is that most indie game developers try not to do Mario and Sonic re-hashes. They try to implement some new angle, idea or gimmick into it, even if it's meant solely for humour purposes than gameplay. Whereas most RPG Makers open the game with the sole intent of fleshing out their drawn-out childhood dreams in maps and pixels or mimicking their favourite Square-Enix games. It is very tempting when all of the basic code has already been done for you. But at the end of the day, it'll just be a Square-Enix demake. And, you know, there's a big target audience for that. Too bad 99% of those never get completed!!
Think smaller. Learn to live small first. It's much more manageable and rewarding to actually work on something and slap a green "COMPLETE" next to it than to toil with something for three years... to just... let life catch up with you and go on a gaming "Hiatus". Let your charsets skip and hop and cry, let your chipsets come alive, let your story shine, give your items weird names, give the Defend command an actual purpose to exist, make some minigames, let your imagination run wild! You're in the RPG Maker World, bro! You aren't confined to the hero's burning village or the seventh crystal cave or even the obligatory world map. ANYTHING can happen in ANY space of time!
How many blags must we read... "Too many custom systems, not enough time," before we will learn? It's not too late...
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Ashes of Emerald
2573
I had a similar experience but 2 years in my computer crashed and I lost everything, next bout I got almost 2 years in again and almost to the end of the game with out any planning and realized the game mechanics where interesting and neat since no one had ever done them before but ultimately the characters and the story was rash and all over the place. I found I pre-designed the entire game on one map and everything you could do on that one map, then wrote the entire storyline before setting out to pave the road ahead.
Strangeluv
2787
Thanks for the replies =) Unfortunately everyone here who has posted is not currently afflicted with the problems described here...
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