To Arms!

Hmm... Let's see...

1) I think improving the maps (not in terms of graphics but in terms of playability) would help a good deal. I like that the game is focused on battles, but some amount of exploring might be nice. If the maps do absolutely nothing except serve as backdrop, it makes you wonder why they're there - it's clearly not like you spent a lot of time making them exceedingly pretty. They're passable at best. I would try to at least give the maps some purpose in the game. I thought the second mission was much better balanced in that respect. I would have preferred it if the first was the same way.

2) Real save points. The system you use in the first mission doesn't really work. The fact that I can't even access the menu after saving right before the first boss kept me stuck there for a while because I had a lot of points built up and hadn't bought skills yet

3) Give more jp/reduce cost for skills and/or the ability to 'resell' your skills. While you're probably right that every skill has a use, they don't all have a use for everybody. There were several skills that, for my playstyle & party combo, I found to be lackluster. I really wished I hadn't spent all that jp on it. I saved up a lot for skills I used once and promptly forgot about. I guess if the game had been longer, I wouldn't have been so disappointed because I would have eventually had the jp for all of them, but it was still frustrating.

4) Make skill and item effects clearer. The battles are all a bit too hard (or at least too close) to be wasting turns trying to figure out the exact effect of a skill. If the battles are gonna require strategy, I need to know exactly what my skills do, and I don't really have to play around to find out.

5) Even out enemy damage potential. As it stands, enemies can do between 100-400 dmg per turn or something like that. If they all happen to choose the 400 dmg per turn attacks, you can destroyed really quickly in a way that feels really cheap. I would reduce the range of damage the enemies can deal to avoid making the player feel like they died cheaply. If enemies dealt 200-300 instead, for example, it wouldn't feel as cheap if the enemies all randomly spammed their more powerful attacks at the same time.

6) Change the first fight. First real battle is on the world map? It's not a great battle. It feels like a random encounter, and it's not a particularly interesting fight. Frankly, there's not a whole lot of ways that first fight could have been any less engrossing. You almost lost me right off the bat. I think a better "first taste" for the battles could do wonders for my (and other's) perception of the overall game

Anyway, hope these suggestions help

Okay, let's see here.

1. Just kill enemy evasion. Normal enemies shouldn't be evading at all. I am not sure where you pulled this 9-10% number from but it felt like way, way more than that. If I miss it should be because I'm blind, or the enemy did something to make me miss, not because the game just decided I missed. (Are you sure the algorithm is working the way you think it does?) Even the enemy archers shouldn't have high evasion; the point of being an archer is to sacrifice heavy armor/HP of the front line classes for higher damage. If they dodge a lot on top of that then their weakness is nullified. Cutjack can have some, but a lot less than what he had. Rhea shouldn't have any since Engineers are supposed to be slow and vulnerable, from my understanding. A savvy player will conclude she is the biggest threat and focus on her, and should be rewarded for this behavior by being able to quickly eliminate a threatening foe. Right now you're lucky if half your hits land on her.

You can add enemies with some evasion later in the game, once the party has a wider range of skills and is more adaptable to deal with it.

2. Magic spells should never miss at all, ever. Not only are mages giving up the HP/combat bonuses of other classes but their spells cost PP and sometimes a lot of them. To have a spell miss can be a huge loss. Mages need to be able to do damage. It is what they are for.

3. Kill enemy crit rate in the castle, a critical on Horace probably means death, and most enemies are faster than you.

3. Why does the war priest's heal inflict a stun? This seems unnecessary.

4. Make Janos' heal just work 100% of the time. If he's healing himself it means something has gone wrong and having it not work could be catastrophic.

5. Some moves should have higher priority. Heals should happen first. If the party is going to take twenty hits in the upcoming round, I need to be able to heal. Similarly, Janos' Battle Orders could be good ideas to give high priority so they happen first thing in a round, in case something happens that he needs to react to, and he can shift the whole party to adjust for whatever he needs them to be doing at the time..

6. Limit enemy bosses to one potion per battle, or otherwise limit their healing capability (not sure if there's already anything in place that does this.)

That is all I can think of for now regarding the combat.

I have played pen and paper-based RPGs before and was very, very bothered by the missing in to Arms. No one likes missing, in CRPGs or tabletops or otherwise. D&D players have long been annoyed that the miss rate is so high, especially among low level parties that lack the capability to significantly modify their stats. D&D lowers the miss rate in every addition, and many players use modified rules that allow for both the attacker and defender to roll out of frustration for the unduly high dodge rate. There's also a factor to this that probably doesn't seem important at first glance, but is actually crucial to this kind of game. Players make attack rolls themselves. They are directly interacting with the game. If a player rolls badly, they might be annoyed, but at least they know why their attack failed. A good GM might even let them know by about how much they missed and nudge the player in the direction of using a particular ability or tool that would help them score a hit. To Arms has none of this. Everything happens behind the scenes and the player feels divorced from anything happening in front of him.

You seem to be pretty committed to what a lot of people are telling you is a really bad design choice. Why? Because this is your "vision?" I shall tell you something that I think a lot of RM developers don't understand and really need to learn: your "vision" doesn't mean squat if the resulting game is unplayable. So you made a game according to your grand design, and the game is a horribly frustrating experience. In the above post you also are complaining about the lukewarm reception (though 200 downloads in less than two weeks doesn't sound too bad to me.). If only people were more open-minded and accepted your "vision!"

Sorry, but as a player this isn't acceptable to me. If you want this game to be successful, and especially if you expect to take this game commercial eventually, you need to find a compromise between what you want and what your players think is fair. So you decided to make a game based on D&D mechanics. I think that's a great idea that has a lot of merit. But you have to be willing to accept when something like a 25% hit rate doesn't translate well from a tabletop to a CRPG experience. When so many people are telling you that the evasion rate is horrible, it makes them want to break things, that it makes the game frustrating and terrible and unplayable, you need to be willing to say "maybe this evasion thing isn't working out and I should explore alternatives." The answer isn't "well they just don't understaaaaand." Accept that this might mean rebuilding the entire game from the ground up. That is a possibility, definitely not the only one but still possible and as a developer, you probably understood that going in. When something in your game isn't working, if people hate something, even if it is the whole reason you made the game to begin with, you have to be willing to change or adapt it, or at least not complain if the game doesn't do well.

Right now you have a game with frustrating mechanics, and you want a larger audience, and these things aren't reconcilable. If you want a larger audience, you have to be willing to make the game more accessible. If you create something and your intended audience rejects or misinterprets your work, this is not your audience's fault, it is yours. Someone with your writing experience must have heard this before. It applies in game design as well as writing. If people don't like your game, maybe you did something wrong? I think I did a pretty good job telling you what I thought those things were. I hope you will try to apply some of this instead of write it off as narrow-mindedness or me just being unwilling or unable to enjoy your games. I wanted to enjoy this and with more work I think it could be great. But sometimes a game just needs more work.

And Episode 2 (lol like I'll make Episode 2 with reception being it is)

This really irritated me, because it is indicative of a pattern you've been showing lately. You release a work and then refuse to ever work on it again if it does not receive some quota of praise and adulation? You are essentially holding your own work hostage, demanding that people praise you if they want to see more. This behavior is, frankly, disgusting, because it suggests you don't even have appreciation for your own craft, and its an especially a crappy thing to do in this case because you'd be throwing your teammates under the bus. You don't seem to have any interest in improving, only in being told your work is already great and wonderful. You don't create new works as artistic expression or out of a desire to get better, you do it under the presumption, nay, the expectation, that you will be praised for it. This is a self-defeating attitude because you are hobbling your own ability to improve yourself. That's unfair to both yourself and your fans who have enjoyed your work in the past.

Don't create a work for praise. Create it to improve yourself. Praise will come on its own.

i hope legion listens to the solid advice of someone who has made nothing.

comment=37449

i hope legion listens to the solid advice of someone who has made nothing.

Your makerscore isn't high enough to have an opinion...

yeah just keep being proud of all that makerscore you got as the esteemed creator of 'riot grrl' and a rpgmaker frogger port lmao

I think, Solitayre, that a lot of the problem extends from the fact that you want To Arms! to be balanced like a traditional Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest style RPG in which both sides always hit if they're not blind. In reality, it's balanced more like Dungeons & Dragons (4E, which has the LEAST missing of all D&D editions) in which case "making contact" with an attack is equally as important as the damage you do.

That's not good at all. A game is supposed to be a player interacting with a specified set of mechanics to overcome a challenge. When you press attack and a random number generator determines the outcome it's not a person interacting with the game because the success or failure of the choice is completely out of the player's hands. That's why people instinctively don't like it. They are following the rules and mechanics provided by the game and utilizing them as suggested, but HEY SOMETIMES IT WORKS AND SOMETIMES IT DOESNT AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT LOL. Yeah that is great game design! Like j*sus I can see how this may have helped pen and paper games thirty years ago but it is archaic and silly now.

If you want making contact to be important then devise a way for the player's skill and intelligence to be the determining factors for whether or not that happens, not totally random chance. It removes the frustration of failing despite having done nothing wrong as a player and adds another element 'woah i pulled that off like a pro i am so good at vodeo game! :feelincool: Also it is easier to balance your game when you know that the abilities will always do X damage and always hit oh mannnn why does random chance garbage still exist in game designer minds across the modern world

god save the games

I have already made some suggestions to you known, but definitely the one that might improve the game the most is if you somehow implemented a CTB system. If you did so, you wouldn't have any argument about whether your battles are tactical from a player's perspective, in spite of a lack of enemy AI.

Posted this on the main page. Most are opinions on my experiences, but may serve as suggestions.

http://rpgmaker.net/games/1895/?comment=37539#comment37539