WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

Posts

Gretgor
Having gotten my first 4/5, I must now work hard to obtain... my second 4/5.
3420
Wondering if I should make the big move to something like Game Maker, IG Maker, LOVE2D or Godot, since my game's battle system is real time instead of turn-based, and bulding an ABS in RPG Maker 2003 is like trying to build a nuclear reactor out of Legos. Impressive, sure, but not efficient or appropriate, being the kind of thing we only do to prove it's possible.

I love RM2K3, it is the one thing that prevented my teenage years from being a complete waste. I wanted this game to be sort of a love letter to that simpler time in my life, when I had copious amounts of free time to make simple, crappy, but earnest short RM2K3 projects to express myself, and occasionally make one or two complex custom systems in it for kicks and Internet credit. However, it's just not suited for the needs of my current project, and that makes me so sad.

Everything comes to an end. Even the forum I used to hang out in the most is dead now, and I have to accept that my teenage years are not coming back. RPG Maker 2003 will always hold a dear place in my heart, and I don't regret having paid the developers for the new version, but maybe it's time to let go.

I may need a hug. Anyone?
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
Go ahead and try to make the move. You can always return to 2k3. I would only say that building a simple ABS isn't difficult. You just need to have realistic expectations from it. Expect it to be little clunky.
adopt gamemaker and witness true power
author=Gretgor
I love RM2K3, it is the one thing that prevented my teenage years from being a complete waste. I wanted this game to be sort of a love letter to that simpler time in my life, when I had copious amounts of free time to make simple, crappy, but earnest short RM2K3 projects to express myself, and occasionally make one or two complex custom systems in it for kicks and Internet credit. However, it's just not suited for the needs of my current project, and that makes me so sad.

Everything comes to an end. Even the forum I used to hang out in the most is dead now, and I have to accept that my teenage years are not coming back. RPG Maker 2003 will always hold a dear place in my heart


Wow change a few words here and there and I could have spoken those words myself. Its sad that things change.
Gretgor
Having gotten my first 4/5, I must now work hard to obtain... my second 4/5.
3420
Thank you all for the replies :)

author=Cap_H
Go ahead and try to make the move. You can always return to 2k3. I would only say that building a simple ABS isn't difficult. You just need to have realistic expectations from it. Expect it to be little clunky.

The problem is not so much that it's hard to make an ABS, the problem is that it's probably gonna be kinda bad regardless of how much effort I put into it :(

The few RPG Maker 2000/2003 ABSes I'd call good simply don't work with my current ideas :(
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
I've given a few thoughts on how Baclyae Revolution might start. Floating between two ideas, though, one might have the benefit of getting the player into action sooner. Possible endings and how, exactly, all these people band together, is a really big question mark.

Gretgor
I may need a hug. Anyone?




Gretgor
Having gotten my first 4/5, I must now work hard to obtain... my second 4/5.
3420
I always, always, always wanted to create a Disneyesque video game musical. Could even be as daft as a FPS with the occasional musical number coming to life in a cinematic.

Was seriously contemplating the thought of having the villain do the whole "Poor unfortunate souls" thing in one of my games but the logistics and reality squashed my dreams... for now :D
Thinking about implementing a rewind function into a battlesystem I am working on.
Though it wouldn't really be rewinding, but recording player input and then restarting the battle from the beginning up to the point the player choose. (Without the animation, just the battle logic) (The damage/healing/etc is completly deterministic and only affected by stats/base power/resistance/weaknesses)

Its kind of semi realtime and only has one tick/turn every 0.25 seconds, so 4 ticks/turns per second, if a battle would take 10-20 minutes at most that'd be an array with length 4800. Could work.
AtiyaTheSeeker
In all fairness, bird shrapnel isn't as deadly as wood shrapnel
5424
author=StarSkipp
I always, always, always wanted to create a Disneyesque video game musical. Could even be as daft as a FPS with the occasional musical number coming to life in a cinematic.

Was seriously contemplating the thought of having the villain do the whole "Poor unfortunate souls" thing in one of my games but the logistics and reality squashed my dreams... for now :D


That... sounds awesome. Back when, years ago, I'd wanted to do a Lion King retelling as a RPG Maker project, so this idea is up my alley. :D
Hi, I posted on here a couple times last fall then got busy with life, so I might as well be new.

Getting back into swing of designing my game, I find myself experiencing a creative block reconsidering my earlier ideas for battles and skillsets. I've become really concerned about a concept I've heard called lock and key design where you advance past an obstacle by interacting with it through the only way you can interact it. It makes the advancement feel like a formality dancing through a series of forgone conclusions. The antithesis of this design would be Breath of the Wild where advancement through the environment can happen through a variety of ways in which you can interact with the game's physics allowing for creative expression on the part of the player.

In terms of RPG battles, I feel elemental weakness systems exhibit this lazy lock-and-key design. I've always hated elemental matchmaking in RPGs and it's something I wanted to steer far away from in my own game. But, what's giving me this creative block is that I'm starting to feel a lot of the ways we interact with enemies in menu-based battles fall into this series of forgone conclusions, not just elemental weaknesses.

For instance, I was wanting to have a Paper Mario style thing where you have a separation of ground and aerial attacks. However, is "hit enemies in the air with aerial attacks" meaningfully different than "hit ice enemies with fire"? So, my question: is it worth having mechanics like aerial enemies that you hit with aerial attacks, evasive enemies that you hit with accurate attacks, multi-hit attacks are strong vs. zero defense enemies, strong single-hit attacks are strong vs. high defense enemies if the result is ultimately the same thing as elemental matchmaking? Are these things actually fun?

I feel a lot RPGs get around this by just having other systems to compete with the player's attention. Sure you need to hit that flying enemy with an aerial attack, but the character with an aerial attack is out of the active party and you need to take a turn to swap them in, and you need to make sure you have enough of your skill-using resource to deal double damage in one hit to the heavy armor knight, stuff like this. It works, but is it good enough? Is there a more fundamental way we can avoid the problem of forgone conclusions in the first place?

Other RPGs usually make the learning process itself the challenge. I would say the NES versions of Dragon Quest 3 and 4 are some of the most tightly balanced RPGs I know and 3 in particular is an personal favorite game for me, but after playing it enough I've noticed something I don't love. What's good about 3, is that I actually use crowd control and status effects in normal battles which is more than I could ever say for Final Fantasy's balance. The pilgrim class is given two strong cc moves early: sleep and blind (actually called surround or dazzle, but let's call it blind for easy-understanding). Both of these are useful against different enemies. What's great is that why blinding an enemy may be better than casting sleep is often based on the way the enemy behaves instead of arbitrary resistances (don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of that, it's just not exclusive to that like FF games). Like some enemies get two turns per round giving them another chance per round to wake up, so even though they have little to no resistance to sleep it's still better to blind them. However, this places all interesting gameplay on the trial and error phase of learning what's good on enemies. Once you've figured it out, it all goes back to the formality of cast surround on putrid pups, cast sleep on crabs, all forgone conclusions.

Even stuff like buffs and debuffs are worrying me. How do you make these useful without making them so useful that you begin to see having them as your expected normal damage and it begins to feel like a chore to cast them every battle?

I got fired up about this game last year but now I'm almost paralyzed with indecision. The main thing I'm looking for an answer to is this: is it actually fun and interesting to have things like aerial attack to hit flying enemies, accurate attacks to hit evasive enemies, and enemies that interact differently with high damage over multiple hits vs. high damage in one hit based on their defense? Are these things fun enough and can work by just having the player's attention competing with resource management or should I keep searching for a more fundamental way to change how I'm approaching combat design that could allow for creative expression on the part of the player?
I think that's where team building and gearing can be a factor. You got your set of keys, the boss has a set of locks, but you can't bring all your best keys for all the locks. Do you ignore a key? Do you bring somebody with two half baked keys to improve lock coverage or do you focus on pounding on one lock while ignoring another?

Consider you're going to the fire cave to punch the fire dragon and you are picking your damage character for your party:

Frosty the Snow Sorcerer has great burst ice damage DPS, frying trash mobs quickly to reduce attrition damage. However has poor sustainability due to poor MP / cooldowns.

Saint Rick has less burst DPS but doesn't have any sustain issues, the damage will keep flowing over the course of the battle. Also has an emergency barrier once per battle in case something goes south on the boss.

DOOM WIZARD has wide elemental coverage but no focus, they do a bit less damage than Saint Rick to ice-weak enemies. However the boss has two beefy Dragon Knight adds that are weak to electricity instead of ice and DW can hit those weaknesses, dropping the adds faster and making the fight safer.


Obviously not the best designed characters or game, but hopefully it shows that while it is still keys & locks you can create options in what keys the player takes to address what locks.
Tau
RMN sex symbol
3293
Why haven't I come back & made a commercial game in Rm2k3 after years of doing that shit for free haha
Thanks for the response, I agree with what you're saying. It fits in line with what I viewed as fuzzying things up with competing systems, I didn't just mean resource management, but things like party composition or anything else going on to make it harder to fulfill the obvious purpose of a skill. So in response to my worry that having lock-and-key skill design is fine enough if there's other systems to consider, you would say yes.

This is probably the direction I'm going to go with. I think I needed some reassurance that it's workable. I just keeping asking myself, even with party/character building and resource management and enemy interrupts, is the idea of "hit enemies in the air with aerial attacks" really a meaningful interaction in itself. But if I keep obsessing over it, I'll never get anything done.

Again, thanks for the response!
FF10 combat sucked because it was the key/lock system but you had all your keys at any time since changing characters was a free action. Hell the game wanted you to do it so everybody got some EXP. The template enemy design certainly didn't help either.

There's certainly more you can do than the key and lock system. Tactics games have a spatial component to them for example. Make your game, do the best you can, and use what you learned to try and expand on your next one to make an even better game. Hopefully as you make a game you'll get the ideas you need to make the combat system you want. Basically, as you said:

But if I keep obsessing over it, I'll never get anything done.

I thought FFX's combat was fine just because a lot of RPGs before-hand expect you to scan shit or have a weapon already equipped rendering the elemental system useless at times. Sometimes it's kind of just enough to refine or put small twists on the formula because I think there's a large subsection of players that are content just knowing what exactly to do and feel like they're making the right choices or at the very least make them feel smart. It's definitely not the PINNACLE, but for once in the FF series it wasn't about abusing the brokenness of its systems (which is a fun thing in its own right).

fuck the sphere grid though.
10's combat was a step up from previous games but FF combat has always been kinda empty. Most of the neat stuff you see is from challenge runs where the minutiae matters but the backbone of "hit weakness / use strongest attack, use cure everybody spell when HP is low" was always there.

10's problem is while it worked to expand things so characters were effective against certain types of enemies the game never evolved much from Besaid Island. Bring in Tidus to hit dogs, Wakka for birds, Lulu for slimes, Auron for armored enemies and when you need to break an enemy, and Yuna to turbofuck bosses. There's a few occasional enemies that need more but they're second to the usual enemy templates until... the interior of Mount Gagazet? The endgame starts to get more interesting, then the postgame takes the game's math and throws it down a flight of stairs.

It had potential but it spent too much time splashing in a puddle before trying to swim. It was still an upgrade over previous FF games though. The ATB was dead, turn order wasn't rigid and you could see who'd be coming up when and could plan around that. It was free to change characters which didn't help the trash template mobs but added strategy to bosses: You could hide your healer so after the boss' big attack you could swap anybody out for Rikku/Yuna and heal the party instead of waiting for their turn to come up if you left them in the party.

There's good bits, there's bad bits, and really I wish the combat spent more time in the oven. I've heard other games use a similar combat system like Megaman X Command Mission and Trails of Cold Steel(?) but I haven't played either so I can't comment much if they did and if they took FF10's combat another step further.



also yea fuck the sphere grid


e: expanding on sphere grid bits because I can't shut up atm, I liked bring able to have more control over the growth of the characters (aka Expert Grid only). It was a tedious slog to work with though and needing spheres to unlock stat gains just added to the busywork.


e2: also my post kinda just went off about ff10 without talking about the rest of your points and I do agree there's nothing wrong with taking what works and adding your own spins and twists to it. You don't have to redefine RPG combat with every game, hell I'm pretty much like that. My brain just doesn't get some of these games that do their own things and idk if that's become I'm some geriatric or the game. Familiarity can be a huge boon!
The sphere grid does make me wonder how you can make character growth an interact-able space. Cause I guess the intention was to forgo something simple like JUST CLICK ON THE STAT YOU WANT TO UPGRADE in something favor of exploring the inner development of a character and having interesting overlap, sorta like Terranigma's weird menu. But the issue is that there's just too much noise for 1 single stat boost, but if you have too few things the space moving feels a bit meaningless. FF12's board system cuts down on a lot of the tedium, but then it just feels like an interface. Speaking of which, FF12 would make for a good switch bus game...
Yeah, I think one middle ground would be to have Roles/Jobs that you could level up. Level up the Blitzball Ace job and you'd go down Tidus' path, Black Mage for Lulu, Racist for Wakka, Summoner for Yuna, Guardian for Auron, etc. . Or even condense the sphere grid so instead of lots of tiny +1 stats just make it a cluster. Advance to next node and get HP+200, STR+3, Accuracy+2, DEF+1. Make each step more costly but worth more instead of tiny upgrades over the course of a dungeon.
I'm thinking, holy crap, Toby Fox is insane.

This week I was working on some way to have a boss-only (but not true pacifist) run.

I did a sort of offering items instead of the choice based interface, and it was with 40 or so types of monster group. That took almost a week of solid work, except for one day when I had to go somewhere. I had to add code like 300 times to monster parties, then I had to make a big common event with 40 groups and about anywhere from 1-12 items for each, and then redo a couple times because testing didn't work.

Meanwhile, he did individual codes for each enemy, and codes for how enemies interact together (like how making a joke helps spare Jerry, and can only be done with a certain party).