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The Long Long Road.

So I am back from vacation and the first thing I did was PLOW through a mountain of let's plays of my game. ( I put it up privately on another site for lets players to beta test for me).

Now before I go on I need to state this. Alter Legend is my very first full length project and I only made it to practice and learn rpg maker.

I made it in VX and with the release of ACE my engine has become obsolete. Not to mention when I started the project, I had NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING, so this game is built on a really shitty frame work that would be far too much work to fix, so there are a lot of non game breaking kwirks that I never plan on fixing.

why will I not fix these bugs? Because I have learned all I wanted to learn from Alter Legend, it has served it's purpose. I want so badly to start on a fresh project with nice neat, clean ground work, where I can apply all my new good habits from the start.


there is a general consensus that the game is too hard. It's painful to watch as most people struggle because of terrible decision making... whether it's from not taking the time to look for the chests i scattered EVERYWHERE, or if its from not bothering to read the dialogue and then getting lost. Or some people that spam the chain attacks and never use spells at all. I do not blame the players though, How can I? A game is fun, or it isn't I need to investigate how to overcome different players and their different skill sets.

SO, that being said, I will be nurfing monster HP and the damage from certain spells. I will be making it so certain monsters don't respawn, especially monsters in puzzle areas.

I will be increasing the money dropped from killed creatures, and will make edits to certain quests to make things more obvious.

Eventually I will add more content to Mekana city. I will add more side quests, and will drastically expand the relationship system which in the current build is basically unused.

After these changes the game will go into hiatus while I work on a Commercial project with Galv. Alter Legend will be revisited from time to time to not only add to the story and provide more hours of gameplay, but will also slowly polish the game over time.

I want to thank everyone for your interest in the past year and a half of development. I want to thank all my lets players for putting themselves through hell playing my terribly inbalanced game in it's current build lmfao... those videos were hard to watch! And I want to thank Galv and my girlfriend for putting up with me for all this time :D I'm not an easy guy to deal with ^^

Sit tight, the final build of Alter Legend will be up in the next few days :)

Posts

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I can't wait to try it out. Subscribed~!
I know how it feels man. The game I'm making right now(CO3) was just supposed to be a simple project I could make and quickly release as my first game. Now, when I'm about to make the final epicness in the game, I decided to go back and fix literally EVEYTHING. It might take "some" extra time, but I'm stubborn! Congratulations on finnishing your game though, man! Remember that we're supposed to learn from our first game, so we can continue and develop better games in the future! :)
author=shiningriver
I can't wait to try it out. Subscribed~!


Thanks! I appreciate that!
author=luiishu535
I know how it feels man. The game I'm making right now(CO3) was just supposed to be a simple project I could make and quickly release as my first game. Now, when I'm about to make the final epicness in the game, I decided to go back and fix literally EVEYTHING. It might take "some" extra time, but I'm stubborn! Congratulations on finnishing your game though, man! Remember that we're supposed to learn from our first game, so we can continue and develop better games in the future! :)


It's true. Alter Legend was never going to be GREAT, because it was broken right when i started... not having a clue what my players wanted... never making a game before. I'm looking forward to accepting defeat, putting it down, and starting fresh with everything i've learned in hand.
author=Incarnate
there is a general consensus that the game is too hard. It's painful to watch as most people struggle because of terrible decision making... whether it's from not taking the time to look for the chests i scattered EVERYWHERE, or if its from not bothering to read the dialogue and then getting lost. Or some people that spam the chain attacks and never use spells at all. I do not blame the players though, How can I? A game is fun, or it isn't I need to investigate how to overcome different players and their different skill sets.

Now you definitely have my interest. Whenever something like this happens, it's a question of whether the players are really making terrible decisions or if it's a case where making the right decisions practically requires you to be the one who made the game. Seeing as you're nerfing the monsters, it may be to late to find out though.

I wonder if people will instead complain about the game being to easy.
author=Crystalgate
Now you definitely have my interest. Whenever something like this happens, it's a question of whether the players are really making terrible decisions or if it's a case where making the right decisions practically requires you to be the one who made the game. Seeing as you're nerfing the monsters, it may be to late to find out though.

I wonder if people will instead complain about the game being to easy.

Well, to give you an idea, one of my players who felt the game was too hard, cast a spell that sacrifice life each turn in order to boost his attack stat... he then proceeded to block for like 5 turns straight... draining his health and not getting the benifate of the attack boost...

Don't get me wrong, the game WAS too hard. But people are making it EVEN WORSE for themselves than it needed to be :P there is a let's player right now who is doing quite well actually. making smart decisions with both spells AND items. hes given the game a 8.5 out of ten so far. So I don't know what to tell you.
author=Crystalgate
I wonder if people will instead complain about the game being to easy.
It's the better of two evils. That, or reward the player with easier ways to grind money and exp.
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Like I said in the pm, your difficulty is fine after the first couple of chapters. It's a simple fix making the beginning of the game the easiest part of the game. Also consider adding optional bosses that really challenge the player. No one's going to complain if there's an option to fight harder bosses for extra rewards.

You don't really need to nerf the bosses too much. You need to, however, make the trash mobs a tad face roll. You could give them extreme attack power every once and awhile, but honestly, most of the fights were pretty much boss battles until mid-game. I shouldn't have to put so much time and effort into trash mobs.

I feel as though trash mobs is the best way to give the player a break and feel mildly powerful. If the player feels weak throughout 70% of the project, there's a problem.

I should also mention that every boss must have multiple ways to kill him/her, or the single weakness must be fairly obvious. You also have to build up the difficulty. Don't give bosses a whole bunch of STR and call it a hard fight. All that does is screw over unprepared players in the first few turns, which makes them automatically think that the boss is OP.
author=Clareain_Christopher
Don't give bosses a whole bunch of STR and call it a hard fight. All that does is screw over unprepared players in the first few turns, which makes them automatically think that the boss is OP.


While I agree with this statement, I don't think most people think that just because they failed, it is flawed... that is a very poor personality trait if that is how someone is. that being said, there is a market place for hard games. just look at how well dark souls has done. I'm not saying my game is that good, and YES my game was difficult in the wrong way, but once again, people struggled in my game mostly because they rushed through it, didnt read anything, and don't use the tools that are very obviously given :( haha

like i said, I'm totally responding to my players, It's important to give them what they want, I'm mostly mentioning these things outloud in a post so other dev's can learn from my situation. It's heart wrenching to have to gut your own game, but a neccessary evil sometimes none the less. Thanks again for your help CC, sometimes your criticism is hard to swallow, but its a necessary evil in the development process.
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