WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

author=Schwer-von-Begriff
Hunger/Thirst: Fish or do another minigane in order to have a steady supply of food, search for it, trade with a ghost merchant etc.

Day/Night: Events that only trigger at certain times. A ghost that blocks a path until it's evening, for example. Multiple solutions for the same problem - find a candle or wait till morning. Jumpscares that only trigger at midnight etc.

What do you guys think? One, none or both?

I really don’t enjoy games that much that have a hunger / thirst meter where you have to constantly keep an eye on your character or you’ll end getting a game over because of it, really ruins the flow of a game for me and generally gives me a sense of panic that I don’t welcome very well.

I don’t mind the day or night system since more prominent games like the Legend Of Zelda series use it quite well. It’s really up to you, I guess. Maybe doing it where not feeding or having your character get anything to drink for a while will only weaken them in their general statistics but not actually kill them outright wouldn’t be so bad.

I guess the question is what you're trying to achieve by adding those systems, and whether that's something that fits in your game?

A hunger system would have totally fit perfectly in, say, Breath of Fire 5. The whole game is about beating a timer, fighting for survival against all odds, escaping from a prison while the female lead is on the verge of death for the entire game, perpetually being completely out of resources, and losing and starting over with improved chances. It's a game where you're being eaten away at as the game goes on, and instead of winning by becoming stronger, you win by keeping yourself from becoming too much weaker. You're already carefully managing XP, the dragon curse, and time; one more thing to perservere through would accent it nicely. It's a survival game, at its core, and anyone who's playing the game enjoys that type of resource management gameplay.

But if you added it to a game like Earthbound or FF4 I'd mostly just punch you in the face. The main point of those games is different. The reason people play them is different, and the taste and expectation of the type of player who likes those games is different. The player in those games is focused on either wandering around discovering the world, or trying to defeat the villains. In a game like Final Fantasy Tactics or Shin Megami Tensei, it again doesn't make sense - the player is focused on gaining power and strategizing his way past the game's challenges. Getting penalized because you ran out of Peanut Cheese Bars in such games is distracting from the point of the game, not adding to it.



Meanwhile I'm not really sure a day/night system adds or subtracts anything meaningful to any game I've ever played? It's always super weird and off-putting to me that days are three minutes long instead of about twelve hours, and there never really seems to be a point besides just only having to design half as many zones to get in the same amount of content (which I guess is a fair point).

The Hunger/Thirst System wouldn't be in the game all the time - but I had the idea that it could be pretty useful for certain events that happen in the game. My horror game plays in three dimensions, so to say. The first one is the real world, the second one the ghost dimension and the third one the dimension of hell - some of the characters will get trapped in the ghost dimension, for example.

An idea I had that could use the Hunger/Thirst (Or rather, health.) system for a certain amount of time: One of the characters get's hurt and has to search for medication - the goal, obviously, is to find the correct medication. On the way you can find painkillers and such that refill your health. That way you would have to be careful how much you run around, but it would be a feature that could be seen as a minigame more than an actual feature of the whole game. Do you guys think that is something worth to implement?

@LockeZ: Well, the day/night system wouldn't really effect days, just the time. The most prominent feature of the game is it's different story paths - the whole game is seperated into chapters and every chapter has one true ending and a lot of bad ends. You have to make many choices - if you choose wrong that could lead to a bad end, but not necessary a complete game over right after the wrong choice. A day and night system could help me to make the replay value higher. For example: You can either choose to do X at day, which would lead to a sucessful mission, or you could do it at night, which includes a ghost chase scene that you can survive - or you might die.

Basically I want to branch things out as best as possible and I think it could be interesting to make the same missions/quests/events happen at different times which leads to different things. There could be more endings that way, more character interaction, more...atmosphere, maybe. I want to give the player the feeling that they can actually choose to do something when they want. Not a simple 'go left or right', but rather a 'do X in the morning and you will see/play something else than if you do X in the evening'. Is that something that could play out nicely? I don't really know that - but I know that it could potentially lead to a new sort of actual involvement of the player with the game world.

if you want diagonally based maps make them yourselves god I give up im done bye

i need more coffee

edit: I'm working on a map I've been avoiding for months because it's a map that uses diagonal movement primarily rather than 4-dir. Why? I'd assume because I'm a masochist...and I want some variety.

1) i need to get back to focusing on wyrm warriors (thanks life)

2) i want to make a topic about resources in various genres and why they make for complex/interesting games. like the tcg/ccg concepts of health vs. tempo vs. card advantage, what makes magic deeper than hearthstone on top of that trio, and how other genres have a balancing act -- specifically looking at how risk of rain forces the player to spin the plates of time, money and health in order to not die horribly on stage 2

but right now my brain is "haha cat videos. i need to sleep" so

Lighting effects in indoor zones with flourescent lighting doesn't make sense, no. It would probably make sense for some areas in your game. I don't use them in mine.

I don't even use shadows for the tiles and sprites in my game. I think shadows look stupid unless you can use them in a way that makes sense. It annoys the hell out of me when shadows are on the wrong side of objects from the light source, or when random things don't have shadows. They're damn near impossible to do in any sort of sane manner if your map is lit by anything other than the sun. So I just don't use lighting effects at all, and the only things that have shadows are flying sprites/enemies, which is really just a gameplay thing so you can see where they are.

author=Feldschlacht IV
So I was thinking about those 'Focus' moves that a lot of RPGs have that do 2x damage for the price of not attacking for 2 turns (basically saving up Attack) and I go 'wow fukken useless rite???'. I mean, why not attack twice? BUT nobody ever things of implementing something like that in a game where enemy counterattacks are common and feared enough to want to eliminate them in as little hits as possible.

In the SNES RPG 7th Saga, the Defend command doubled attack power for the next round. Since the damage formula was subtractive you would perform more than twice the damage--far more if your attack was near or below the target's defense stat. And since this was coupled with the defend command, you also took less overall damage in the two rounds. This was neat at the time, but has the huge downsize of making a non-charged attack nearly useless by comparison, such that the charged attack is the de facto action.

I’m thinking of a possible boss battle situation where the enemy will deliberately target the only character in your group who can use magic and keep attacking that character until he is KOed since magic is the most effective on this boss (in other words, a smart boss). Regular attacks and other means still do damage to it, yes, but using magic will kill this boss in less than six turns compared to a whole lot more. So it’d be one of those boss battles where you would need to keep the decoy alive, otherwise your chances to win get a whole lot simmer. As once that character is KOed, it will just focus on attacking the two remaining characters and quickly dispatch them as fast as he can (perhaps a charging attack that will finish the remaining characters off in a few turns and then it gets cancelled once you revive the one character who can use magic).