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Would it bother you guys, and girls if I make it so you can't enter houses in towns, but can enter shops?

I been wondering. Would it bother you guys, and girls if I make it so that you cannot go in houses in the towns, villages, and cities, but still allow you to go in Item Shops? I am not lazy. I just don't want the file to be too big. The reason I don't want to make it so you can go in houses in towns, villages, and cities is because of file size.

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Shouldn´t affect size too much, if at all. But adding the ability to walk into random houses, no matter how mundane, is one of the little charms to adventure RPGs.
Yeah, I always enjoy walking in houses. I think you may be able to add all of the houses to one map and spread them out, but I don't think they actually save space in the long run.

On the other hand, one of the things I do, that I got from playing Luiishu's games, is to only make the first floor accessible, and have the stairs not lead anywhere. For example, in my game Dungeon Crawl, the inn has a second floor the player can't access. You know there's rooms up there, but it leaves the design to the imagination, as the stairs don't take you anywhere.
Map file size is a tiny, tiny portion of the final project size for a tile-based game. Especially if you put multiple houses in a map, as Gredge suggested. If you're only worried about filesize, there are almost certainly much bigger factors.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
It's nice, sure. If there is chances for small unique interactions or finding a potion or some zenny or something then it's cool. Not necessary though, if that's what you choose. Depends on length of the game or its goal. Getting from point A to point B you probably don't need them enterable.
Thank you everyone. I'll do my best to make the maps accessible, in and out of house.
I mostly only have shops/inns open for my games and have atleast 1 or 2 accessible homes, so I think it works too! :)

But if you're looking to put some interesting stuff at random people's houses, then that would be great too! :D
You could always do the menu-based town thing instead.
Zeigfried_McBacon
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
3820
author=Liberty
You could always do the menu-based town thing instead.

This. Simple,. but high effective AND saves you a lot of trouble.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
author=Liberty
You could always do the menu-based town thing instead.

I kinda like this option, as I loathe mapping it saves time for both you, and the player. Saying that, if mapping is a thing you enjoy, by all means, map your towns!

*Edit: To answer the question at hand, I don't think the inability to enter houses would bother me too much. I just think you have to make it clear which buildings players can go into. Such as, say, using an open door (or archway, or whatever) for the places players can explore, and a closed door for places players can't?
That sounds good. However I decide to put the inside, and outside on the same map already, like you see in the screen shots. I already saved myself a lot of trouble, and got a lot done. I do not know how menu based towns work, or even what that is.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Menu-based towns are essentially a SHOW CHOICE command. The best example of one, off the top of my head, would be this. Though, in fairness, the implementation I actually did was outlined in this blog.

The first example is easier to pull off, so going by that, you could replace "Repair" with "Inn" (or "Tavern", or whatever), replace "Ship Outfitter" with "Blacksmith", and "Marketplace" with "General Store".
That's not a good set up for my game, because you get side quests, and in my new version I didn't put up, and won't until it's complete you need to find npcs with a arrow above their head, and talk to them to get the optional quests, because I switched the quest system to a different one. I don't like that set up for my game.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
Just stick to a classic town! For the OP not having houses that you can enter isn't a big deal. :) I say you can have a bunch of houses you can't enter because really you shouldn't be going into other people's houses anyways. As long the NPCs who give quests are outside in the town then it should be fine!
Thank you InfectionFiles. I always stick to classic towns, because I like to give the player a little bit of exploration. :)
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I will go against the flow and say that I have always hated talking to random idiots about nothing in RPGs. From a gameplay standpoint, it doesn't add much because they never actually say anything useful. And why would they? You've never met them before and will never meet them again, and they have nothing to do with any events in the game. And from an logical standpoint, why would people even let you in their houses in the first place? And from an aesthetic standpoint, this random dude's living room and kitchen are unlikely to help reinforce your game's themes or complement the parts of your artistic style that catch people's eyes, unless something very weird is going on. (If something very weird is going on, though, then go wild.)

I do like having some downtime to do things other than fight. Shopping and upgrading my characters makes for a nice break. Looking around a small area with no danger can sometimes be nice. I just hate the traditional Dragon Warrior town with three shops, four houses, an inn and a church. Make your downtime area be, like, a single building, maybe including the grounds outside it, so that it's large enough to explore a bit and there are a few relevant people to talk to. Make it be a boat that the player has to spend some time riding. Make it just be a bar with a secret hideout underneath the jukebox. Make it be a single person's house out in the wilderness, or a tiny military camp near the front lines, or a sealed gateway that the player needs to find a way through. Anything but Kalm.
My 2 cents...

If you can't explore it, it doesn't need to be there.

This is just my design philosophy and others may disagree.

If you want to give your town the illusion of being large, but only some of it is actually accessible to the player then just use the backdrop of a large town while making the actual playable area small. Lots of commercial games do this.

Having doors that lead nowhere or don't open is unnecessary.


I look for some pretty different things in games from LockeZ, but I'm going to broadly echo his advice here. I personally think that you should never allow the player party to enter NPC houses unless you have some particularly interesting content to justify it. Personally, I love wandering around talking to people and examining things for interesting dialogue and text, but not only does letting player characters randomly walk into strangers' house not make a lot of sense, most games just don't fill them with interesting enough content to reward the completionist impulse to explore them. I'd especially advise against letting the player explore NPCs' houses for the sake of finding random items hidden around them. Yes, it can be nice finding some extra loot to reward your exploration, but when the "exploration" consists of wandering around clicking random objects to see if items come out, you're rewarding activities which are intrinsically not very fun. You don't want to motivate your players to engage in drudgery.

If you have some particularly interesting content in mind to include in NPCs' houses, I think that by all means it's worth keeping in the game, but I think that if you're in the position of already having interesting ideas for the content, you're probably not at the point of contemplating whether to cut it out entirely.
Linkis
Don't hate me cause I'm Cute :)
1025
WRONG !!!! :)

I love going into NPC homes. Talking to them for clues but even more FINDING GOLD and POTIONS.
Finding a town with a bunch of houses, then constantly getting the "no ones home"
is very frustrating.

Also, that is where you find potions and other items to help you through a game.

Sorry Desertopa but other than being called a thief, I love searching for things.
If you feel that way, then you also don't like finding chests in caves.

I remember finding a chest in a house. After taking what was in it, I was told "hay, that's mine, put it back and get out of my house".
I had a good laugh from that, so please don't try and ruin my thieving fun :)

@LockeZ, how can you say that??
Many of the NPCs I've come across have been able to direct me to a location or someone in the pub or a cave who tells me where to go....so I finish a task that is :)
author=Linkis
WRONG !!!! :)

Sorry Desertopa but other than being called a thief, I love searching for things.
If you feel that way, then you also don't like finding chests in caves.


That clearly doesn't follow. Treasure chests in caves are a visually distinct marker of something that you can search for an item. If you see one, you know there's an item there, even if you can't get to the chest as soon as you see it it's an obvious target.

If you hide items in random boxes and barrels and such, there's no such distinct marker, so instead if the player wants to seek out the available treasure, they have to wander around clicking on random objects most of which do nothing. It's one thing to "explore" a map by wandering around and seeing all the content the designer saw fit to include, it's another to "explore" the map by scouring the perimeter clicking on every object, when most of them aren't even interactive. Still worse when you get some kind of message like "there's nothing inside the barrel" most of the time.

If you want the player to enjoy a game, it's better not to incentivize them to engage in activities they would find unfun if they weren't doing it for a reward. If NPCs in your game are interesting and fun to talk to, rewarding the player for interacting with them occasionally gives them positive feedback for something they would have liked doing anyway. If they're boring and tedious, rewarding the player for interacting with them gives them an incentive to engage in activity which would normally be a slog.

If your environments are full of interactive objects which offer interesting feedback for players who examine them, then by all means give the player the occasional material reward for engaging in an activity that's designed to be fun anyway. But scouring maps clicking on nondescript, mostly non-interactive items is not something anyone would normally do for fun without a reward.
When it´s all said and done, it´s an intuitive feature that most games have and many people enjoy. Is it needed? No. Does it help? More often than not.
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