WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

@wildwes: Number 1 and 2 are fairly common and can be made to work easily enough. With number 1, sometimes the rewards are not worth the effort of getting a bunch of keys, so keep that in mind. Also, something that bothers me is that going back to a chest you couldn't open before often requires a lot of backtracking. So, how about upon finding a chest you cannot open you can still take it home with you or something? - With number two, just remember to balance things out. You don't want players to get too powerful too soon, or completely ruin their builds... Number 3 I don't recall to have seen in any game before and may make for a decent game-mechanic. So, go for it, I say. Just don't keep players completely in the dark about how the mechanic works. (Success rates, etc.)

@LockeZ: Haha! Now I'll have to include a macrame mini-game in Nightfall or something. xD

Nah, it doesn't sound too unfair. It sounds rather intuitive, actually. But while in you may want to give the player options, remember not to make things too complicated. For example, how are you going to determinate how much is "a good amount" of any stat? Are you going to pick a value arbitrarily depending on each situation? ...How about instead of depending on stats AND skills, you do this solely with skills? Fire 1 may be enough to burn down bushes, fire 2 may take down wooden barricades, fire 3 may even melt rock. This way the player has to memorize less information and can derive more enjoyment from the gameplay.

Since I'm probably going to do the whole non-RM indiegame thing, I'm going to have to learn how to sprite (from scratch with subpar art skills).

I'm really going to miss being able to use all the RMXP resources. A lot of what I've found has a license that specifies it can only be used in RPGMaker games. Or it's ripped. I can't imagine my own art looking all that great, so I'm kinda bummed out about it. Especially seeing screenshots of all these other indiegames with flashier graphics than I could ever make.

But there's no other option, so I guess this will be the start of my own little pixelart adventure.

I gave myself a deadline of August 1st to solidify at least a story summary for my game. I'm struggling right now trying to settle on something I am least partially okay with.

I'm finding it difficult thinking of a good way to suspend disbelief about the whole idea of the hero never losing a battle / being the strongest ever. But maybe it's something I don't need to worry about.

author=Avee
By the end of any game, after you beat the ultimate boss, the heroes become the strongest people alive in the world. If your game takes place after such an event, like in "Be Mine Hero, I Refuse!", it's believable.

Uh this is only true if the villain was previously one of the stronger people alive in the world. And also if the hero beat him one-on-one in single combat with no help. Neither of which is very likely!

I think everyone who exists is sick to death of stories where the villain is trying to destroy the entire planet. If your villain is trying to take over the city, he only has to be the strongest person in the city who is involved in the fight. If he's kidnapped the hero's wife and child, he only has to be the strongest person in his own criminal organization. The hero beating him, then, only puts the hero one step of strength higher than the villain.

And even if world domination were the villain's goal, the heroes would most likely have a lot of help taking him/her down. This probably include the support of all the world's major governments and a healthy amount of divine intervention. But also, at the very least, a really good strategy that probably involves destroying the villain's source of power first, so that they're no longer insanely powerful.

I am getting SO fed up with this one script that literally only changes the way the battle HUD is displayed destroying itself during gameplay. It's like "whoops, guess I'm going to vanish and not reappear for whatever reason." Of course, the "whatever reason" happens to be other scripts, so... Still kinda irritated.

Like there are so many things it just doesn't play well with. Had the same issue with something else that was causing unimaginable amounts of lag. The joys of not being a scripter and just copy-pasting what you think might work well together, but eventually ends up not. .-.

EDIT: Okay... got THAT fixed but... now I'm pulling my hair out on just how dumb it is to draw a window with the current map name in it... Urgh...

Hmm? Whether the antagonist is Pure Evil(tm) or not is irrelevant to what Mawk's saying. You can totally have a single person representing the enemy group whose downfall will result in the protgonists' victory, no matter what the goals and motives of that group and that individual are.

I don't think the enemy group having a leader whose death will result in the protagonists winning is unrealistic at all, though. Whatever the enemies are doing that you want to stop them from doing, it seems very realistic for there to be one or two key figures who are leading the charge. And in many cases, if they die, even though others will step up and take over their organization, the others won't do the same thing. It depends how big the enemy group is though, I guess. If your game spans the entire world and involves all the major governments, then it makes less sense to have a single supervillain as the villain. It also makes less sense in general and is kind of a stupid trope, heh. The lack of realism there isn't that there's one central villain to target; it's that the one villain is capable of doing so much on such a huge scale.

But like, in Final Fantasy 12, killing the Evil Emperor doesn't stop the Empire from existing. That's true. Someone else is in line for the throne. Lots of people are sympathetic to his cause. But! He's the only one who knows how to speak with the invisible ghostlike creature that taught him about the gods. And also the guy next in line for the throne is a good kid who was a temporary party member earlier in the game. It makes perfect sense that if you kill the Emperor you can stop his plans to destroy the gods of magic or whatever the fuck he's doing.

Of course, in cases where that's not true, the alternative is to take a cue from Taken and go all Liam Neeson on the enemies, and kill every single motherfucker in their entire organization to make sure no one is left to ever kidnap your wife and daughter again. But there'll be a sequel anyway.

I'm thinking about making a sort of same damage x 10 effect. But every time I try it either doesn't work, or it works too well, not reverting to 0 after one use.

I might have to just do the TotalHP-CurrentHP thing, which is not what I wanted...

I would only bother if the song had like a really noticable fade out at the end and/or a sudden bang at the beginning, honestly. Most songs won't play long enough to reach the end in the first place for 99% of players. Like seriously, if you have a battle every 30 steps, and no cut scenes inside of a certain dungeon, you're not ever gonna hear more than two minutes of the song tops. And if you hear even that much it's gonna be because you're ass-deep in skill/equipment menus and not actually doing the part of the game that the music is supposed to accompany (which is dungeon exploration). Similarly, unless you pause the game and come back 15 minutes later, you're not ever gonna hear an entire cut scene song.

Should I set loop points for every song? Ideally, yes, probably. A professional game would. Do I set loop points for every song? Hell no.

It doesn't help that I don't know how to music, and it always sounds really noticable and bad. So I only bother if it would be really really noticable and bad if I didn't.