LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

I think I was pretty clear that providing a specific and capped amount of power gives the developer more control over the player's power level when they're attempting each part of the game, and providing that power from one-time-only tasks other than level ups helps give the player a wider variety of short-term goals that feel more completable and less endless. Endless treadmills are less enticing than goals that the player can actually see how to accomplish in their immediate future.

If you don't agree with those points, or think they don't apply to your game, then that's fine. This article is not designed to tell you what's best for your game, only to explain the reasoning behind this methodology so that you can decide whether it fits in your game. But don't just act like I didn't even write the last four paragraphs of the article and ask me to repeat them.

author=StormCrow

(Players) generally won't do the things that are most fun to them ... That's how human brains work.

You're not 100% wrong about everything but this statement is just...I can't. Your thinking is idiotic. I'm done. Peace.

For example, right now, you are arguing with some asshole on the internet instead of watching Classic Doctor Who or playing the Final Fantasy Tactics randomizer. Not because it's more fun, but because something about the situation psychologically compelled you to do so. You've decided that this article is a boss battle and for some reason you need to defeat it, so now you're doing that instead of going off and doing something fun. You're probably going to come back and argue with this post too. However, if the comment section provided some strong incentive to post exactly one comment and no more, you would be less likely to do that, and more likely to give up and go pick a game to play from your Steam library.

Your job is to get players to do things that are fun. That's what game design is, in one sentence.

author=Kylaila

author=LockeZ
Both of these problems can be solved a lot of ways, but one of the more enjoyable ways to solve them is to make it so that leveling up doesn't actually grant you a lot of power, it mostly just unlocks the ability to gain power in other ways. This pushes the game's primary methods of gaining power to being rewards from the game's primary content - bosses, dungeons, treasure chests, crafting systems, etc. This makes all of these things feel rewarding, because they give you almost all of your actual power.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, I just can't see why and how equipment level requirements are the one and only solution to this. These things you mentioned and wish to see the power on usually (crafting, dungeons, other main content) already are the main source of power.

In simple terms, the idea is to make leveling up still feel like a big deal, so the player feels like battles are rewarding. Obviously, an alternative is to remove levels from the game entirely, or make them have almost no benefit, instead providing all of the player's major power upgrades purely via finding them. But if your combat is fun - and hopefully it is - then it's nice to make it also feel rewarding, at least for as long as it keeps being fun. Otherwise a lot of people won't do it. They'll just skip past all the skippable enemies and fight the bosses that give rewards.

It's more important in a game like World of Warcraft where the power-ups come from bosses, or a game like Dragon Age where they come from quest completion and treasure chests, than it is in a game like Diablo 3 where they come from literally everything.

The other idea is to prevent players from skipping 90% of the game in multiplayer games, which is something they'll do given the chance, because if you say "Hey kid you want an awesome legendary sword?" a lot of people are gonna be like "Fuck yeah!" without thinking too hard about the details first. But then that powerup makes the next eight hours of the game not fun, because the sword comes from way later in the game, and is so good that it's essentially an invincibility cheat.

"How long will it take you (the developer) to make the game?"

If I had any idea how to figure that out, I wouldn't be reading an article about scoping. Somewhere between two months and thirty years, I guess?

This walkthrough says to make sure your screenshot is no larger than 320x240, and is linked to from the submission rules, which is apparently a little confusing and makes people think that's a rule. Also that's terrible advice for anyone using an engine later than RM2K3, since all later makers use higher resoluitions. Can you reword it plz?

I mean, don't add the titles for my sake. IMO blogs should be game-specific and it doesn't make any sense to me for people to read blogs of games they're not already following. If something is worth reading to people other than followers of your game, it should be in the forums.