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WHEN TO DECIDE ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?
Posts
Darkflamewolf
2178
Darkflamewolf
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CloseDon't feel so bad, I've been working on Amulet of Fate since 2001 and it is like...2013 now?! Granted, I scrapped the entire game twice already and its in its third iteration and is now on hiatus due to real life concerns, but still! It is a friggin long time for any game to be in development. And I'd wager I'm not even 50% done. Now if I could just buckle down and spend every ounce of my free time to pour into the game, I could potentially have it done by Christmas of this year, but is it going to happen? Probably not. So I'll settle for working on it a little bit each day!
Xenomic
1752
@Corfaisus: I'll try to go point for point here.
1) Most of the characters I've given depth to (my game is based off of an existing universe already, though not everyone is black and white with their personalities and whatnot) in terms of personality, dialogue, abilities, etc., but not all aye. When you're dealing with 100 characters from one universe (no, I'm not cutting out characters either), it gets a bit rough to define each and every character. Which honestly, I'd expect just about anyone to for the most part (though I know there's some people that can do a pretty damn good job at that). The one thing that I will admit that's lacking is some characters DO lack depth or personality in comparison to others, though that may be due to me not spending any real time with them (I can think of 3-4 characters right off the bat that the player has control over that have no real personality because I don't DO anything with them outside of their arc). But cutting it down to 10 (which I will admit, would save on coding and all) just wouldn't work for the story as it's set up. Though I'm also trying to set it up so that you don't have to really grind at all (hell, in my game for the most part, levels don't really matter too much as far as I'm concerned. It does to SOME degree, don't get me wrong, but not as much as it would in other games).
As for the scenarios that would've been in the sidegame, they are pretty important to the plot. Some are going to be cutscenes yes, though not everything (mostly due to just how many cutscenes I'd probably have to do at this point, but I guess the player doesn't need to know EVERYTHING that happens behind the scenes). Again, they're basically things that happen behind the scenes that you wouldn't even see normally. Though I can agree, there is at least one particular story arc that is pretty fillerish, but without that arc, another story arc makes absolutely no sense, and without THAT arc (which isn't really done well storywise after reviewing it with another person), suddenly having upgraded summons out of nowhere makes no sense. @_@;
2) It's not really that. It's more of a way to spice up and flavor characters, so that they don't feel all the same. Of course, it's inevitable that there's going to be things that are the same between characters, since there's only so much one can do (and how can you make it so that not two separate characters in the entire game DON'T have access to like a Fire-elemental attack or some such? It's just not going to happen). The field abilities (prior to your posting actually) for those who didn't already have one I already decided weren't going to get one (can only come up with so many ideas), and these abilities are things like Double Encounter Rates, Half Encounter Rates, Increased Initiative, and Jeff's repairing ability thing from Earthbound. Things like that...not exactly things like action commands or anything (though I wanted to do that originally, but I dropped it as it'd be too much to change the game core around to match with that). So yeah...if it's about action commands like "man, I need to break this boulder with this character!", then it's not field abilities like those. It's more of a perk for having the character in the party is all.
3) Um...I intended on doing things with their AIs and whatnot, so that they're not just randomly using whatever ability they have (some do have restrictions and conditions, yes, but for the most part, it's just set to fire off any ability it has at whatever priority it's set to). Which I honestly don't think is a good idea on my part. So yeah, I'm not just increasing/decreasing enemy stats. For the most part, the enemy stats are fine. It's just that their attacks and AI patterns (or lack of AI patterns thereof) is what I'm intending to fix up.
And I'm not sure what you're referring to with the special items either. o_O
The exploding save point thing I honestly don't see as being THAT big of a deal. It happens, you just heal up from it. And it's only there twice in the entire game (I made a point to not use it anymore than I already did). Besides, if something is TOO bad, I just get rid of it and try something else more sane (for instance, Bamboo Forest had instant death traps. Those all got removed in favor of just a pitfall that sends you into a forced battle, then spits you out one screen backwards. I think that's a lot fairer compared to what I had before, as well as the puzzles that it originally had).
As for the special restrictions, I honestly don't see that much problem with it myself. It's not like I'm putting in the gimmick, and then going to make everything rapetastically hard. I'm not that cruel after all.
4) Yeeeeah no. I'm not scrapping this game. Seriously, it's not in that bad of a condition to require being scrapped at all. I've brought up my ideas over on other forums and nobody's really objected against most of the stuff I've suggested (I HAVE had objections against some things, and I've taken many peoples suggestions about fixing things up and whatnot).
Now, I'm not trying to start no fight or argument or anything here. Just stating a civil response in all. Just saying. ^^;
1) Most of the characters I've given depth to (my game is based off of an existing universe already, though not everyone is black and white with their personalities and whatnot) in terms of personality, dialogue, abilities, etc., but not all aye. When you're dealing with 100 characters from one universe (no, I'm not cutting out characters either), it gets a bit rough to define each and every character. Which honestly, I'd expect just about anyone to for the most part (though I know there's some people that can do a pretty damn good job at that). The one thing that I will admit that's lacking is some characters DO lack depth or personality in comparison to others, though that may be due to me not spending any real time with them (I can think of 3-4 characters right off the bat that the player has control over that have no real personality because I don't DO anything with them outside of their arc). But cutting it down to 10 (which I will admit, would save on coding and all) just wouldn't work for the story as it's set up. Though I'm also trying to set it up so that you don't have to really grind at all (hell, in my game for the most part, levels don't really matter too much as far as I'm concerned. It does to SOME degree, don't get me wrong, but not as much as it would in other games).
As for the scenarios that would've been in the sidegame, they are pretty important to the plot. Some are going to be cutscenes yes, though not everything (mostly due to just how many cutscenes I'd probably have to do at this point, but I guess the player doesn't need to know EVERYTHING that happens behind the scenes). Again, they're basically things that happen behind the scenes that you wouldn't even see normally. Though I can agree, there is at least one particular story arc that is pretty fillerish, but without that arc, another story arc makes absolutely no sense, and without THAT arc (which isn't really done well storywise after reviewing it with another person), suddenly having upgraded summons out of nowhere makes no sense. @_@;
2) It's not really that. It's more of a way to spice up and flavor characters, so that they don't feel all the same. Of course, it's inevitable that there's going to be things that are the same between characters, since there's only so much one can do (and how can you make it so that not two separate characters in the entire game DON'T have access to like a Fire-elemental attack or some such? It's just not going to happen). The field abilities (prior to your posting actually) for those who didn't already have one I already decided weren't going to get one (can only come up with so many ideas), and these abilities are things like Double Encounter Rates, Half Encounter Rates, Increased Initiative, and Jeff's repairing ability thing from Earthbound. Things like that...not exactly things like action commands or anything (though I wanted to do that originally, but I dropped it as it'd be too much to change the game core around to match with that). So yeah...if it's about action commands like "man, I need to break this boulder with this character!", then it's not field abilities like those. It's more of a perk for having the character in the party is all.
3) Um...I intended on doing things with their AIs and whatnot, so that they're not just randomly using whatever ability they have (some do have restrictions and conditions, yes, but for the most part, it's just set to fire off any ability it has at whatever priority it's set to). Which I honestly don't think is a good idea on my part. So yeah, I'm not just increasing/decreasing enemy stats. For the most part, the enemy stats are fine. It's just that their attacks and AI patterns (or lack of AI patterns thereof) is what I'm intending to fix up.
And I'm not sure what you're referring to with the special items either. o_O
The exploding save point thing I honestly don't see as being THAT big of a deal. It happens, you just heal up from it. And it's only there twice in the entire game (I made a point to not use it anymore than I already did). Besides, if something is TOO bad, I just get rid of it and try something else more sane (for instance, Bamboo Forest had instant death traps. Those all got removed in favor of just a pitfall that sends you into a forced battle, then spits you out one screen backwards. I think that's a lot fairer compared to what I had before, as well as the puzzles that it originally had).
As for the special restrictions, I honestly don't see that much problem with it myself. It's not like I'm putting in the gimmick, and then going to make everything rapetastically hard. I'm not that cruel after all.
4) Yeeeeah no. I'm not scrapping this game. Seriously, it's not in that bad of a condition to require being scrapped at all. I've brought up my ideas over on other forums and nobody's really objected against most of the stuff I've suggested (I HAVE had objections against some things, and I've taken many peoples suggestions about fixing things up and whatnot).
Now, I'm not trying to start no fight or argument or anything here. Just stating a civil response in all. Just saying. ^^;
author=mawkauthor=bulmabriefs144you can set this to the most inspirational music you can find, but a masterpiece still isn't created by throwing a load of half-baked ideas into a blender. you're confusing the phrase "giving it your all" with the "I dunno, put it all in there" philosophy that leads to feature creep.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for caring enough to put those extra features in.
In the rare event all the extra features work together, you don't have a mish-mash, you have something else. A masterpiece. A masterpiece is what happens when you put art first, by not skimping on stuff, and the art actually says something meaningful. It's generally difficult to pull off, because it's a very fine line of knowing when to stop (too long spent on a project, and you lose perspective).
I didn't say that.
Genuinely giving it your all, keeping it organized and well designed, and spending that amount of time. That's a masterpiece. It's the time of game that doesn't come along often, because the creator actually wants a good game. It also helps to have a backup team (debuggers, testers, etc) to take some of the load off.
I'm gonna examine several games and let you decide.
Love And War (2007-2013)
He's been working on it six years (I've noticed it updated recently). It's good. In fact, it's good enough that he can actually move on to Act II. This is actually feature creep to some extent, but the plot and characters are such that the amount of time is excusable.
Oracle of Tao (2010-2013)
The game is huge, I've been working on it about three years, it already has more junk in it than Love and War. But that's also the problem, I can't easily check over the game, short of playtesting.
I will need to scale back (nah, screw that) or at least, decide to just finish with what I have, after bugfixing anything/everything I spot.
Quick Quest (2011, no major updates)
This is probably a month (or less game). I'm not even gonna play it. And that should be the point. The creator doesn't care enough about me to give it a year at least of work, why should I care enough about him, to give him an hour of my time?
Forever's End (2008 (demo) - 2011 (complete))
I'd say this is about a three year+ game, though it was probably in demo mode longer. It has plenty of polish, each of the characters has their own abilities and mechanic, and plenty of development. Whatever amount of time it spent, this is a complete game (meaning, he actually got it right). Act II on the other hand still seems to be not submitted from 2011. (Grr, I wanna play FE2)
And yes, you can spend too long. But feature creep and total lack of consideration, are opposite sides of a spectrum. The only issue with feature creep is telling the person JUST LAUNCH IT ALREADY. Call it a demo, whatever. But don't let it be vaporware that never gets downloaded, despite looking awesome (I see that alot here, and I see thrown-together games more on RpgRevolution). The opposite extreme is the worse sin though. Every anime cooking show in existence talks about "the needs of the customer." This is what you should focus on, attempting to appeal to a fanbase. Since if you can honestly say "will people care that I made the clock show in ten timezones" (No.) you also have your answer to feature creep.
It's better to have a "feature creep" mish-mash put together and submitted than something that never gets published because the creator doesn't want it to be finished.
Where is Kingdom Hearts III?
You... you wouldn't play a game that was made in a month or less? A beautiful but compact game can be made in a month, and absolute slop can still take 6 years to release. Time does affect how good a game is, but so does a lot of stuff.
ubon
66
author=bulmabriefs144
It's better to have a "feature creep" mish-mash put together and submitted than something that never gets published because the creator doesn't want it to be finished.
you do know that half the problem with feature creep is that it puts a project into development limbo, right? "well, at least it gets things released" is not a thing you can say about feature creep unless I've woken up in a completely different world with a different set of rules.
I'm very much pro-Doin-A-Thang, and I understand how you could think that these changes we're proposing will slow someone down, but here is a man who has not put together a full product in five sustained years and has no idea what he wants out of the project. some changes are obviously necessary.
clearing the brush and paving a road blocks it up for a day or so, but makes travel on it much quicker
you get me?
author=bulmabriefs144
Where is Kingdom Hearts III?
it came out for the PSP in 2010 and got a final mix in 2011
or if that doesn't count it came out for the 3DS in 2012
I don't really know what you're trying to say here, they're churning out kindgom hearts games like crazy
author=slashy
You... you wouldn't play a game that was made in a month or less?
Nope, I wouldn't.
And I can usually sort out the slop that looks like a months worth in 8 years, too.
One year to three years of solid work (generally, closer to one is acceptable enough) is a good rule of thumb for a quality game. More, and the creator often has trouble letting it go (<---the person speaking right now), less and... well, let's just say it takes me a month to throw together a good mechanic, gather the resources, and make about ten maps with lined characters/monsters in them.
Unless it's Tetris or a similarly one-screened game, or unless the person is working on it during their job time (shame on you), I'd have trouble believing anything decent could be done in a month. A year of solid work could probably get you 100 maps, enough for a decent ten-boss and multi-town mini-RPG. If those bosses had a good mechanic and were key to the plot, you'd only need 10 (SoM had 40 or so).
-------------
It's important to push through feature creep, to keep what you can (I'm generally opposed to cutting, because then it generally makes however long you have spent on the game become a waste, not to mention there's a possibility you'll cut wrong and create missing file errors), but fix everything before moving on. If you can't finish something, rather than cutting it, it's better to just simplify it, by leaving what you have and making the rest work without it.
The problem I've seen is people are so like "Oh noes, I have feature creep! I must fix this." Ten years later, the game still has no download. Programmers of professional games would often just dummy out material. This is why you'd have stuff like negative levels in the old Marios. It's an imperfect solution. But you have three options:
Advertising a game that never appears (and fans abandon you)- Cutting your losses, figuring out a quick fix, and leaving it a bit messy.
Making it absolutely clean, submitting it three years late, and having people find errors anyway, accuse you of doing little work in the ten years or whatever you spent on it.
Sorry, you have one option. To suck it up, and get over the fact that your game might have feature crawl, and fix any real errors. Because the others are non-options.
BBS is not KH3. 3DS is not KH3. There was slated to be a sort of conclusion to Sora's story (as seen from many of the other game endings), on the PS console. They said it would supposedly come out on PS3, but now PS4 is in the works.Supposedly it's been pushed back all the way to 2016. They've been churning out (spinoff) games and extending the story to avoid the fact that it has no conclusion as of yet.
ubon
66
oh, you posted while I was editing
I'm just gonna post this again, then:
I'm very much pro-Doin-A-Thang, and I understand how you could think that these changes we're proposing will slow someone down, but here is a man who has not put together a full (editor's note: I should have said "appreciable" xoxo) product in five sustained years and has no idea what he wants out of the project. some changes are obviously necessary.
clearing the brush and paving a road blocks it up for a day or so, but makes travel on it much quicker
you get me?
(I also understand the impulse to leap to the defense of someone receiving criticism. however, he literally asked for it, and the advice he's had so far is generally agreed upon by actual published game developers as suitable for his situation. by pretending that none of this is valid using your platitudes and rushed examples, you are doing him harm. you understand? we're not going to eat him. we just have advice.)
I'm just gonna post this again, then:
I'm very much pro-Doin-A-Thang, and I understand how you could think that these changes we're proposing will slow someone down, but here is a man who has not put together a full (editor's note: I should have said "appreciable" xoxo) product in five sustained years and has no idea what he wants out of the project. some changes are obviously necessary.
clearing the brush and paving a road blocks it up for a day or so, but makes travel on it much quicker
you get me?
(I also understand the impulse to leap to the defense of someone receiving criticism. however, he literally asked for it, and the advice he's had so far is generally agreed upon by actual published game developers as suitable for his situation. by pretending that none of this is valid using your platitudes and rushed examples, you are doing him harm. you understand? we're not going to eat him. we just have advice.)
I just gotta disagree on this. Wine & Roses had some of the better-designed combat I've seen in a turn-based game in a while. Binding of Isaac took three months to make and it's easily one of the best games I've played in years.
I don't know, I get the feeling that everybody wants to create an epic before they've even written a short story. Very few people can pull an epic off with no experience, though.
I don't know, I get the feeling that everybody wants to create an epic before they've even written a short story. Very few people can pull an epic off with no experience, though.
Xenomic
1752
All I can say, and not to sound rude or anything, but Rome wasn't built in one day. When you're working on literally everything alone, and want to make something that's a good 30-50 hours of story and gameplay, it's gonna take time regardless. Also, I haven't worked on the game for 5 straight years, there's obviously been breaks (I've had a 6 month break before due to needing it). Just saying.
Though I'm confused as to where the "has no idea what he wants out of the project" even came from. I'm pretty sure I know what I want out of my own game? o_O??
Though I'm confused as to where the "has no idea what he wants out of the project" even came from. I'm pretty sure I know what I want out of my own game? o_O??
ubon
66
it's a common fallacy among inexperienced workers in any medium to directly correlate time, effort, and quality
"if I spent the entire day trying to decide how the protagonist's hair should look," they say, "then that is a solid day's worth of effort."
"if I only have nine hundred more of those days," they say, "my game will be the greatest in history."
rome wasn't built in a day, but you are not building rome. you have not even assembled the architectural plans for rome. you have built a couple of fountains and a couple of walkways and now you're arguing with yourself about where you should place your seven separate coliseums.
the truth is that time is not necessarily effort, and effort alone does not necessarily lead to quality. how difficult something was to make is, at best, a minor footnote in its story. how long it took is even less of a Thing -- it's nothing but a hyphen between two numbers.
there is no trick to making a game
always learn, and always move forward
if you have a better process, please let me know
e:
yes, you want it to be everything. if you think this is a doable goal, we can close this topic right now and you can go on your merry way
"if I spent the entire day trying to decide how the protagonist's hair should look," they say, "then that is a solid day's worth of effort."
"if I only have nine hundred more of those days," they say, "my game will be the greatest in history."
rome wasn't built in a day, but you are not building rome. you have not even assembled the architectural plans for rome. you have built a couple of fountains and a couple of walkways and now you're arguing with yourself about where you should place your seven separate coliseums.
the truth is that time is not necessarily effort, and effort alone does not necessarily lead to quality. how difficult something was to make is, at best, a minor footnote in its story. how long it took is even less of a Thing -- it's nothing but a hyphen between two numbers.
there is no trick to making a game
always learn, and always move forward
if you have a better process, please let me know
e:
author=Xenomic
Though I'm confused as to where the "has no idea what he wants out of the project" even came from. I'm pretty sure I know what I want out of my own game? o_O??
yes, you want it to be everything. if you think this is a doable goal, we can close this topic right now and you can go on your merry way
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=Xenomic
Rome wasn't built in one day.
The thing is, you're not building Rome; closer to an iron shack. The main difference between your game and Rome is that, although history will speak of how they rose and fell, Rome left a distinct cultural mark on the world. Your RPG Maker game is going to get the attention of all of maybe a hundred people on the net, who only a very few of that number will appreciate it even a tenth as much as you do.
If you want to build Rome, you'd better know exactly what you're doing and how to do it efficiently. Unfortunately, your "ostrich" routine has proven to us (or to me, at least) that you don't.
What became of that bright-eyed, young, promising developer that took critique from the screenshot thread and bettered his work significantly near instantly? Where did he go?
Xenomic
1752
@Mawk: Um...I never claimed I wanted it to be everything? o_O
@Corfaisus: It was just a statement that wasn't meant to be taken THAT literally ya know ^^;;. I never said that my game is ever going to leave any sort of mark on anything. Dunno what you're talking about with "ostrich" routine now though.
@Corfaisus: It was just a statement that wasn't meant to be taken THAT literally ya know ^^;;. I never said that my game is ever going to leave any sort of mark on anything. Dunno what you're talking about with "ostrich" routine now though.
ubon
66
so, what are your thoughts on the advice in the thread so far? has it changed your short-term plans?
author=mawk
"if I spent the entire day trying to decide how the protagonist's hair should look," they say, "then that is a solid day's worth of effort."
omg, I totally want to do that.
We'd have to define a days worth of effort, then. It usually takes me 3-8 hours to edit my entire battle events (294 monster on last count). This is not even a solid day (though I'm usually too tired/bored to do much else afterwards), so you'd need to do better than that.
Planning =/= effort. This much we can say though.
slash, 3 months is still better than one month. Without a team, a person couldn't even make a story-only rpg of any effective length.
Xenomic
1752
Looking at an earlier post, you do realize that that's the older version of that map, yes? That map was already redone, and I even did a video to showcase the new map. *raises eyebrows*
"Stay the course and just make the game you are already making. See, that wasn't so hard and didn't require a whole topic devoted to itself. You were clearly going to take this route, anyway."
Also, this isn't what the topic was about at all. It was about whether or not to keep working in the database or split up the work (in my case. The rest was more overall in working on games).
"Stay the course and just make the game you are already making. See, that wasn't so hard and didn't require a whole topic devoted to itself. You were clearly going to take this route, anyway."
Also, this isn't what the topic was about at all. It was about whether or not to keep working in the database or split up the work (in my case. The rest was more overall in working on games).
ubon
66
so you decided you didn't want to change once you realized it'd be harder than staying the course
can't say I'm surprised, RM being RM. everyone thinks they're the single crazy exception to the rules, and that the people who tell them otherwise are just the naysayers that prove they're the protagonist of their own little story.
I'm honestly not sure how someone can take an entire thread's worth of measured advice, articles, and examples of how this applies to their situation specifically and pretend it didn't happen, but it seems to crop up more often than not. this wasn't exactly a waste of time, since I'm pretty sure someone else can glean something good from reading this topic, but it's close.
good luck on your solipsistic, meandering sempiternus opus
can't say I'm surprised, RM being RM. everyone thinks they're the single crazy exception to the rules, and that the people who tell them otherwise are just the naysayers that prove they're the protagonist of their own little story.
I'm honestly not sure how someone can take an entire thread's worth of measured advice, articles, and examples of how this applies to their situation specifically and pretend it didn't happen, but it seems to crop up more often than not. this wasn't exactly a waste of time, since I'm pretty sure someone else can glean something good from reading this topic, but it's close.
good luck on your solipsistic, meandering sempiternus opus
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.
5958
You are incredibly presumptive, annoying and insulting.
It kinda turns me on.
It kinda turns me on.
ubon
66
feel free to rebut anything I've said instead of doing an ollie 360 into a pile of tone arguments
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.
5958
I agree with what you said, I just kinda think you're talking more to a strawman than to anyone in the thread. I never got the feeling that Xenomic's game was a huge disorganized mess of unstoppable feature creep from this thread, just that he's trying to decide to what extent it's worth revamping the aspects of the game that are unplayably bad, because he has several.
Personally I think it's worth deciding what's unplayably bad and what's just bad
Personally I think it's worth deciding what's unplayably bad and what's just bad
author=bulmabriefs144
slash, 3 months is still better than one month. Without a team, a person couldn't even make a story-only rpg of any effective length.
That's what I'm saying though - the time it took to produce isn't a reasonable measure of quality, and the time it takes to consume isn't either. Far too often it makes sense to trim fat and get a beautiful 3 hour game over a middling and indecisive 40 hour game. Take a look at Portal, an embodiment of succinctness and a 2-hour romp that ends right when it should.
I really like the imagery of a skateboard dude doing flips into a pile of idiots arguing, yelling sense and throwing up the horns.
