LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
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The Unofficial Squaresoft MUD is a free online game based on the worlds and combat systems of your favorite Squaresoft games. UOSSMUD includes job trees from FFT and FF5, advanced classes from multiple other Square games, and worlds based extremely accurately upon Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasies 5, 6, and 7. Travel through the original worlds and experience events that mirror those of the original games in an online, multiplayer format.

If a large, highly customized MUD, now over 10 years old and still being expanded, with a job system and worlds based on some of the most popular console RPGs seems interesting to you, feel free to log on and check it out. Visit uossmud.sandwich.net for information about logging on.
Born Under the Rain
Why does the jackal run from the rain?

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Monsters, stats, damage and balance. A game of numbers.

OK, I was looking at the graphs with buffs and debuffs active because apparently I have ADD and ignore the words and only look at the pretty pictures, I guess without buffs/debuffs the same thing happens around 55 def

Monsters, stats, damage and balance. A game of numbers.

Right, when you have enemies with that big of a defense increase, it's very noticable. I was just saying that defense, when compared to elements, also gives you the possibility of a sliding scale where one enemy might take 5% or 15% or 22% more damage from single-hit attacks. At 85 defense, on your graphs, the difference between a single-hit attack and a multi-hit attack still exists, but is much smaller. With elements your choices for enemy defense are usually limited to "low" or "high" but with defense you can have any value in between as well. This is good in some ways but bad in others. If you use this kind of formula, I think the small differences probably need to either be easily discernable somehow (non-random damage, or a scan spell that shows enemy defense values), or else the game needs to be easy enough that a 10% difference in damage doesn't actually matter.

Monsters, stats, damage and balance. A game of numbers.

It's simply clearer to notice +50% damage from an elemental weakness than +12.3% damage from multiple hits. Especially if you can scan the enemy's elemental properties, or if hits against its weakness come up in a different color with the word "WEAK" or something. "Because I said so" is actually more obvious to the player than "because of the math," simply because in the former case you are actually saying so.

I don't think there's anything inherently "fake" about elements. They're just a defensive stat that usually only has four or five possible values. A formula with only four or five possible outcomes is often easier for a player to understand, because even if they don't understand the formula, they can see the pattern.

Like a boss

author=Runekn
His armor is incredibly strong, but using a ice attack will greatly slow him down. Using a fire-based attack will then crack it, decreasing his defense while making him more mobile and faster.
Changing how your abilities work for one boss like this is confusing to the player. It's also illogical. If fire and ice work this way against this boss, why don't they work this way in the rest of the game? It's a very nice skill combo, so I'd do that for the whole game, but I wouldn't do it for one boss.

The rest of it is very good. Prophet is interesting too, I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that each round takes a full minute though. ;) I usually imagine them being about 3-6 seconds, if it were playing out in real time.

Monsters, stats, damage and balance. A game of numbers.

A subtractive formula for defense basically turns "multiple hits" into an element that enemies can be weak against.

Of course, with divisive defense, you could get a similar result by using an actual element. But you won't have that sliding scale. Which means you'll have a little less control over your game, but also that things'll be clearer to the player.

How can I improve my maps ?

Getting way better. I love the bags of garbage by the road. That purplish shadow under the trash cans is supposed to be semi-transparent - you have to click it to make it the shadow color when you import the tileset, I think. Or maybe shadows work differently in Ace?

Holy shit it's the year 20X6 and every desk has a computer now

Battle Pacing

author=Jude
author=LockeZ
They don't even necessarily need to summon allies for the gradually-joining enemies thing to work. They could be in rows, so that the back rows can't attack or be attacked until the front row is dead.

I realize listing ideas from FF1 of all things isn't the height of creativity. But in FF1 it wasn't used for this purpose, really. The back enemies were almost always the same strength as the front ones, so it stretched out the initial danger phase for longer but didn't add any new danger. So to get it to cause this effect, you'd need to make the back row be stronger, and also get rid of or severely limit skills that can ignore rows, at least for enemies. (Player skills that can hit the back row don't quite ruin the effect, but enemy skills that can hit from the back row do.)
You must've played a completely different FF1 than I did, because enemy position didn't mean squat in the NES, PSX, GBA, PSP, iOS, etc, etc versions. They could attack regardless of where their sprte was located.

Fuck was it FF3 or something, I don't know, it was one of those terrible old ones with twenty rows of goblins and no commands except attack

Battle Pacing

They don't even necessarily need to summon allies for the gradually-joining enemies thing to work. They could be in rows, so that the back rows can't attack or be attacked until the front row is dead.

I realize listing ideas from FF1 of all things isn't the height of creativity. But in FF1 it wasn't used for this purpose, really. The back enemies were almost always the same strength as the front ones, so it stretched out the initial danger phase for longer but didn't add any new danger. So to get it to cause this effect, you'd need to make the back row be stronger, and also get rid of or severely limit skills that can ignore rows, at least for enemies. (Player skills that can hit the back row don't quite ruin the effect, but enemy skills that can hit from the back row do.)

Battle Pacing

author=slashphoenix
Make sure battles have a chance of wiping out some of the player's "pieces", whether they're characters or special abilities, and possibly allow the sacrifice of some pieces for others, so the player has difficult choices to make.
Once-per-battle abilities are something I'm doing in my current project. I should do more of them, especially with healing skills. It really does work. Using the ability momentarily lowers tension, but it goes back up even higher afterwards. Currently all my revival skills are once-per-battle, and so are a lot of utility skills, status effects, and stun skills.

Other skills have long enough cooldowns that they can typically only be used multiple times in boss battles, which I think is another good idea - if the battle is short you're gradually losing skills as the battle goes on, and if it's longer you're going through cycles of tension as you lose skills and gain them back.

Also, this is so obvious that it almost goes without saying, but MP decreases as the battle goes on, and if you make running out of MP actually be a serious threat (meaning it's something that can happen pretty easily, and also something that really matters when it does happen), then you will get some great battle pacing without doing anything fancy. You just need to set the enemy HP so that the battles last long enough to almost run out of MP every time.

elegant rmn

author=Melkino
author=LockeZ
Arial + bright colors = failure, Melkino.
It's Helvetica, and a reference to an infamous logo change :)


I had to search for a while to find it. Gap, right? It looked so bad I discarded the idea that it was based on a real major brand logo. I should have known better...