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Suggestion Box

Okay, so MoE is not off of Hiatus, but i'm hoping that I can fix that within the next few months if i can just kick myself into gear.

So I had the idea to ask for a bit of suggestions from the fans who I haven't lost yet.

What do you think I could do to make MoE more FUN?

I hear a lot of you mention how much you like my characters and are intrigued by the story, but I know for a fact the gameplay is pretty generic. I'm not a scripter or anything, so there's only so much I can do. I'm also not a really a game designer so I don't know much of the fundamentals (which is why there's constant balancing issues). But I thought that while I'm at it, fixing bugs, typos and trying to continue my story... maybe I could add some things to make the experience better?

Leave any suggestions in the comments and thanks in advance.

Posts

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Be careful about the adding things idea. Imagine a pool and that the amount of water in it is fun. If you widen the pool, it will not add that much water as long as the pool is shallow. You need to make it deep as well. Likewise, as long as you have the balancing issues, anything you add to the gameplay is going to be affected by said balancing issue and thereby add less fun. Heck, the wider a pool is, the more effort it takes to deepen it and the more features you add, the harder it is to balance the game.

It was a while since I played this game, so I don't remember the details. This makes it hard to give good suggestions. If there is a videoplaytrough of this game somewhere, that would help.
Feature Creep is a big killer for RM projects. People adding intricate fishing and blackjack minigames that really add nothing of value, but consume a lot of time that could be better spent fine tuning dungeon design, gameplay, cutscenes or just releasing the damn thing. If you're talking about adding stuff for the sake of stuff, don't. If anything, add more cute art :3

If you're worried about generic RPG gameplay (ie. MV's default battle system), then you have two options.
A) Don't worry about it. Work instead on adding more cute art because that's your selling point. People will tolerate a cockneyed DBS if the story is well-told and right up their alley.
B) You could ask around for someone with lots of MV/scripting experience to come up with a simple battle system for you. I wouldn't get too ambitious though. Stick to what you're good at.
I will add that since the goal is making the gameplay more fun, there's no rule saying you can't make it more fun while sticking to the generic gameplay. Actually doing it will be tricky, but so will making the gameplay more fun while adding things.
When I said add things, I didn't really mean I would load the game up with features just for the sake of features but to expand what's there.
For instance, I was trying to add more strategy to fights so that it could be more than just spam attack to win. Or adding new side quests for rewards and to make less need for grinding.
That's great!

As far as the grinding goes, the exp curve and the stats of the enemies should be such that the long grinding isn't needed. Sidequests will help though.

Could you add a download with a late game savefile? Ideally one where you have the tribal people in your party. I would like to look at the skills you implemented, but my savefile got lost with my former computer.

The version of the game that I have now completely out dates the one available for download, so I'd need to release a new demo if I were to provide a save.
By the way. When and Why did you switch to RPG Maker MV? Didn't you have to redo almost everything in the new engine, effectively starting over? What was the advantage to changing?
Yes, I had to redo everything, but because of that, many things got fixed, like the art, and the story and just general functionality of the game.

The story got rewritten a bit and I like it way better now.
The art got redone and I like it way better now.
Scripts got replaced with plugins and I like it way better now.

Before I would have to find a lot of workarounds for things especially for incompatibilities in scripts. The Ace version of this game was very broken, you'd be surprised with how much I had to do in the background of scenes to make things appear to work... they didn't. It was frustrating at times.

So basically, I had to redo it, but now it looks better, it works better, it has a better story, better characters, and much more lively world. Worth.
I just started playing, and am only about 2 hours in. So far, the characters, story, and artwork are what is making it fun. The few battles that I've fought so far were okay, and as long as you don't make it too grindy, it should be fine.

If you want to make the battles more interesting, you can check out Yanfly's tips and tricks for ideas on unique skills.

I haven't gotten very far yet, but another suggestion I would make is to have better rewards for the quests on the board instead of just jelly. Maybe equipment or items that are slightly better than what you can buy, or potions to permanently raise your stats.

Overall though, I'm really enjoying it so far!
author=meteomage
If you want to make the battles more interesting, you can check out Yanfly's tips and tricks for ideas on unique skills.

In my opinion, doing that doesn't solve much. It will be fun for a while, but then the player gets used to it and we still have the problem of sameish combat.

Anyway, in order for combat to feel fun, the player has to feel that the options are effective. In general, this means skills have to be good. If the player pulls out the offensive skills, they have to pack a punch. Status skills have to work and not fail 80% of the time against enemies you want them to work on and 20% on enemies that are too weak to be worth using them on anyway. Buffs and debuffs have to make a noticeable difference. Do note that this does not only apply to mechanics, animation and sound effect can also help selling a skill.

On the other hand, the skills will only feel powerful if they aren't used constantly. Black magic that are spammed is for all intent and purposes the same as the attack command (you can have both cheap spamable and expensive situational black magic though). A buff that is used almost every battle no longer boosts your stat, it's a chore the players goes trough to get their stats to the "normal" level. Hard hitting enemies who are always crippled with status effects will be seen as cripples by default.

I can give no specific advice on how to do this though for your game in particular.

Enemies are also more fun if they are different from each other. A JRPG series you can look at is the Dragon Quest series, that series, starting from third title, does make many enemies distinct from each other. Not just distinct as in they use different skills, but also distinct as in you are encouraged to use different tactics. This aspect becomes less noticeable in the newer titles though.
I was replaying Tales of Phantasia recently and I noticed something as I progressed through the game.

I would enter into a new dungeon, encounter the enemies, learn what they do and which of their attacks I could weather vs what I had to prevent them from using, and then devise methods for taking each enemy group out. Before long, I was curbstomping everything I came across with effective, proven strategies. And then, right before it became redundant and boring, the dungeon was over and I was starting a new one with new enemies to square off against.

This is easily applicable to your game, or anybody's game. Each dungeon has a set group of battles, and there are certain strategies for defeating them. So for example, a player could tank the three Ogres battle, but Sleep works well on them, allowing them to be fought one at a time or even without damage. The dungeon lasts just long enough for the player to develop and implement strategies, and then it's off to new challenges.

It requires a little planning on your part for each dungeon, but will be rewarding. Instead of just having Red Rabbits with higher HP than regular Rabbits from three dungeons ago, envision a number of ways in which the group could be handled by players.
Just don't go too far in that direction and make it so that only one strategy works, lest the player burn through items like a house on fire.
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