WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

It will be the most impressive abandonware on the site

lockez why did they redraw the most boring and aggressively terrible world map in the series' history? at least do 1 or 3, which have intelligently designed overworlds (1 for its visual design and use of npcs describing locations based on geography; 3 for how you can ride around the entire world on a chocobo + the lore of it being the one continent that hasn't been swallowed by the abyss or w/e).

I personally am thinking about how i need to do other maps because i've been avoiding my project more than necessary due to a really annoying forest. i need to just do some interiors or whatever to get my willpower back.

That's pretty much how I always map.

Planning my story and dungeons for this project is very hard for me. (It's one where you're a member of a gang of airship riding bandits).

On one hand, I want to make sure I don't overscope. Which is hard, since each "mission" I make (despite not having any open-world-map-exploring), has two very involved phases. The "Town" phase where you gather money and intel for the upcoming mission, and the "dungeon" phase where you raid a place looking for a plot-critical maguffin. With each phase having multitudes of unique locks and pockets to pick and patrols to dodge. So I want to keep the overall number of them down. Like, no more than 3 missions overall, maybe 4 if the last one has no town phase.

I ALSO want a secondary arc involving a recurring group of people who are trying to stop you, with a particular set of events cementing what they stand for, and...other stuff.

Trying to reconcile these two concerns in a natural way, and making the events happen without them being too fast and unnatural, while also ensuring you don't fight the group too often since that feels like it'd kinda cheapen them...Ugh, this is a hard writing vs scoping concern. :(

I'm probably going to side on the "scope" side of the internal argument, but still...

I'm spending more time on what kind of accessories and recipes the player gets instead of working on the actual game... Oops.
At least it's better than nothing?

author=PCTRASH
I'm spending more time on what kind of accessories and recipes the player gets instead of working on the actual game... Oops.
At least it's better than nothing?

I do that a lot too. It IS important design stuff that's good to get out of the way sooner than later, so you don't end up implementing shitty design, and having to redo stuff you've already built.

As someone whose only game engine experience has been with RPG Maker, trying to make a RPG in GameSalad is really frustrating and terrible.

bahleted

author=Sated

author=Gretgor
I'm constantly thinking about how I'll design my game's world for it to feel expansive and inviting for exploration (said game still doesn't have a project page since I still didn't start turning it into a game).

I've been thinking about this for my RTP game. The key concepts that I've boiled it down to are these:

• The world has to go on around the heroes, they can't be the only ones going around and swinging swords at things.
• Any quest that isn't part of the main storyline still needs to have a tangible impact on the game world.
  
• Not all random encounters need to be battles (this is super important and how I am going to achieve this is going to take soooo much work but would be awesome if I could pull it off.
  
• Finally, quests don't necessarily need to be linear. If your heroes happen to drop in on some smuggling going down, they can still go tell the guard about it, and get a complete quest as if they'd been asked to go and do it. Or maybe without being told about it, the quest plays out differently as if you got there "too early" or something like that. The world has to be fluid.

It's a lot of work to do these things though, and a hell of a lot of playtesting once you get enough of them into a game. That's what I've been thinking about anyway...

Tip for the random encounter thing: You can try and make nonviolent encounters still run off of combat mechanics in some way.

author=Sated

author=Gretgor
I'm constantly thinking about how I'll design my game's world for it to feel expansive and inviting for exploration (said game still doesn't have a project page since I still didn't start turning it into a game).

I've been thinking about this for my RTP game. The key concepts that I've boiled it down to are these:

• The world has to go on around the heroes, they can't be the only ones going around and swinging swords at things.
• Any quest that isn't part of the main storyline still needs to have a tangible impact on the game world.
• Not all random encounters need to be battles (this is super important and how I am going to achieve this is going to take soooo much work but would be awesome if I could pull it off.
• Finally, quests don't necessarily need to be linear. If your heroes happen to drop in on some smuggling going down, they can still go tell the guard about it, and get a complete quest as if they'd been asked to go and do it. Or maybe without being told about it, the quest plays out differently as if you got there "too early" or something like that. The world has to be fluid.

It's a lot of work to do these things though, and a hell of a lot of playtesting once you get enough of them into a game. That's what I've been thinking about anyway...

Those are nice ideas. My game is not exactly an RPG, but I'm going to think about ideas #1, #2, and #4, which are interesting ways to keep things engaging and give the player control over the game's flow even in non-combat adventure games.

I'm currently thinking about how to make test playing with loved ones work in an unbiased form (close to impossible, unfortunately :( ).