WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

Scribbling your areas on a piece of paper before opening RPGMaker really does wonder for mapping.
It's one of those "spend 5 minutes at the beginning, save 20 minutes at the end" situations.

I am contemplating how much of a flippin pain making a collision system is.

EDIT: Seems I am a topic killer. ._.

Now that my contest entry is done, I'm thinking about starting a new game.

GOD. DAMNIT.

author=Despain

Thinking about recording a "Let's Smoke" where I smoke lots of pot and then try to play an RPG maker game and record it.

yesssssssss

I was getting really excited about this, and then I realized how easily this name is traced back to my real name and how I might like to actually get a real job one day and how having "HELLO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS I SMOKE TONS OF POT" on the internet is a really fucking bad idea.

Hmmm...maybe.

The sheer volume of work that still remains to be done on a project I thought was finished back in 2009 continues to amaze me. Every time I fix one problem, or add a feature to improve something, it is like throwing a pebble into a pond. The main difference, though, is that here I have to go in and manually remove each ripple by editing thousands of events across a couple hundred maps.

Killer Wolf
The sheer volume of work that still remains to be done on a project I thought was finished back in 2009 continues to amaze me. Every time I fix one problem, or add a feature to improve something, it is like throwing a pebble into a pond. The main difference, though, is that here I have to go in and manually remove each ripple by editing thousands of events across a couple hundred maps.

I do almost everything via common events and/or scripting so that this doesn't happen. Open up Edifice and you'll see that basically everything is done in a common event (with snippets of script to grease the machine). A lot of events have variables/switches that I set in the on-map event and affect the CE, but still.

author=Craze
I do almost everything via common events and/or scripting so that this doesn't happen.

I do this in my newer stuff too, always taking extra time to set things up in such a way that they will be easily modified/expanded upon. The main problem with the project in question is that it has been going since late 2004, and I wasn't quite as good at planning ahead back then as I've gotten lately. It was right about the time I figured out it was a good idea to use hero names in the database for names of locations/terms that I might want to change later. Unfortunately, I seem not to have figured it out until I was two areas into the game, so now all these years later, I'm having to go in and change every reference of "Kestral" to \n0034.

Between things like that and having to make alterations to every enemy and monster group, it just makes a lot of annoying busy work.

It all comes out positive in the end though, since I do think the next game I start will definitely benefit from what I've gone through with this one in the last few weeks.

The main thing I've learned, which is probably pretty Day One/First of May for everyone else, is to always take the player into consideration! In my earlier drafts, so many aspects of the game went unexplained, just because when I play tested them, I already knew what I had to do. That has always been a problem of mine, even going back to being 10 and 11 and making stuff in Qbasic. I think I've FINALLY got it now.

Killer Wolf
The main thing I've learned, which is probably pretty Day One/First of May for everyone else, is to always take the player into consideration! In my earlier drafts, so many aspects of the game went unexplained, just because when I play tested them, I already knew what I had to do. That has always been a problem of mine, even going back to being 10 and 11 and making stuff in Qbasic. I think I've FINALLY got it now.

This is, like, the most important aspect of game design. A game is made for a player, yet so many devs, indie and commercial alike, decide to forget that entirely. A player that doesn't know how to play won't be playing long!