THE WELP ADVICE CORNER

Ribbon is a great name for your world if the game follows a strong magical girl anime motif. Otherwise not as great.

Thread or String might be a better base word. And maybe alter the word somehow to make it sound more like a planet name. Like, uh... Ribbonia, Threadooine or Stringaia, to name some really awful examples that I hope you won't actually use verbatim.

Well I killed the thread, I guess I have to revive it~

So, in my game, you get points when you level up/kill monsters, and you can spend those points on stat upgrades(not new skills or anything, just stats). There are twenty "levels" of upgrades, to access each one you have to "buy" that level, and each level contains 5 stat-ups that you can buy. You'll start with only 5 levels available to buy, then you'll unlock another the other 15 in blocks of 5 throughout the game.

My question is this: would you, as a player, prefer to be able to buy these "levels" in any order, or have to buy them in sequence? I'm leaning towards more freedom, but I'm just not sure.

Basically, what I'm saying is you'd get "growth points" when you kill stuff/level up. There'd be a menu with stat bonuses grouped into levels. You'd unlock each level using the growth points, then be able to buy the sat-ups with-in that level in any order you like(or even just buy another level). You wouldn't be able to buy all the levels from the start, you unlock the right to buy them as the game goes on, and each level would have better stat bonuses, but cost more growth points. So should you have to buy level 1 before you buy level 2, or should be able to buy any of the available levels regardless?

Yeah, I was thinking about having the lower levels more cost-efficient than later levels, for lower total gain(Final Fantasy 13's Crystalarium does this). Part of what I would want out of delineating this system is the ability to not just choose how much you get, but also what you get- There are more than 5 stats you can raise, and each level is vaguely "themed".

I'll probably end up going for player choice.

I think they're just there for the sake of it. They have some potential, but good luck not making them look terrible/finding an actual use for them.

Assuming that RM treats the map as a layer when you're using blending modes then you could theoretically have some cool things happen that you couldn't with a normal blend.

For instance using Add/Neg with a 100% opacity overlay would have some pretty drastic colour effects (you'd see the darker or lighter things "through" the overlay but not the converse, depending on whether you used add or neg, at least I think so).

Simply.. It's like.. Subtract layers will minus the difference in colour value (where 255 is white and 0 is black) so that "darker than" "wins" (the difference is subtracted, shifting everything down in value toward 0 by the value of the difference between the layers).

and Addition layers add the difference in colour value and when your maximum value is 255 (white) then the colour values between layers are added together and everything moves up by the amount of the difference in value between the two layers (closer to white).

That's not the best explanation ever, but it's close to a practical explanation.

I have never actually used VX though so I don't know. I'm just using image editing knowledge :)

If VX doesn't treat the map as a layer then meh, I guess there's not as much cool stuff it could do... But it could still be useful with multiple layers of fog/pictures or however VX works.

I take notes and use design documents. I re-read them to re-familiarize myself with the designs and ideas I had for the project (mechanics, story, quests, equipment, stats, etc..). Before I even crack open the editor I will usually revamp or tweak the designs therein, just to get an even deeper feel for the project (plus my ideas never look as good months after I conceived them). I then open the project and start some of the more menial tasks (like say mapping or database editing) to get me back into the flow of mak gam.

The longest I've gone...hmmm... Probably 2+ years for Runelords, but that doesn't really count because I only revisited it to polish it a little before releasing a demo and cancelling the project. Other than that, there was about a year and a half or so hiatus between leaving Hellion and starting it back up again and finishing it off.

Anywho, the trick is taking detailed notes while you work and using design documents.

@Max McGee:
Vindication, picked it back up after almost five years. No notes or documents whatsoever. The only way to refamiliarize myself with it was to play through it several times, and get feedback from people. Actually, feedback on the 5-year-old unfinished version was what prompted me to pick it back up.

My design style in Vindication involved creating everything sequentially in the order that the player would get to it. So each time I made a map, I decided on the spot what would happen immediately next in the story at that point, made the events for it, made the monsters for it, determined whether the player needed any new skills at that level, created any new party members who joined the team then, and fixed any bugs or problems that the new content could cause with earlier parts of the game. It occurs to me now, being more experienced, that this was a pretty awful way to make a game.

Picking it back up, I knew there were a lot of problems with it. There were illogical plot holes. The ending left major villains unaccounted for. There were skills that weren't learned until you got 20-30 levels higher than you were when you fought the final boss. You didn't get to pick your team members until the second to last dungeon. One of the party members was nearly useless; another was capable of one-shotting some battles with a single area attack. The RM2K3 experience curves made grinding too easy. A lot of maps were utter shit.

What I'm trying to say is that trying to figure out what my mindset and my plans were 5 years ago didn't matter. I'd learned too much about game design in the meantime for my original goals to be worth pursuing. I had new goals; a new direction to take the game while using as much of the old material as possible. I had to make significant alterations to almost every aspect of the game; I started with the system and combat rehauls, and then moved on to fixing the pacing and adding more dungeons, and then solved some plot holes and rewrote the ending about fifteen times, and finished by editing a lot of maps. Due to the haphazard way it got made, I'm still fixing various issues that I become aware of as people leave feedback, even though the game was "finished" about eight months ago.

As a big example of a situation where I totally disregarded what I had planned in 2005: the current ending of the game was not supposed to be the ending. It was supposed to keep going after that; that's why some of the villains were still alive, and why the party options opened up so late. I had originally planned to add more dungeons and ultimately a different final boss. But, as it stood when I picked it back up, the current final boss, though not intended to really be final, was extremely climactic, and felt like the end of the game. I had to change it somewhat, but I ended up adding all my new content before it instead of after it.