ANARYU'S PROFILE

author=Max McGee

In the past we had themes of "escape" "Sequels that should never be made" and "Remake a scary movie". What the problem with these is that they were very generalised in nature and you easily work around them to suit your needs. With this train of thought you would be making the same games that you've always been comfortable in developing. Surrealism was to suppose to counteract this, to effectively make you develop games you never thought were possible.

I want to mention that this is really an excellent point.

I'd like to touch on this point, since it factored into what we did so much.

When the contest was announced I joined because I'd been itching to go and do a normal RPG again (it's actually something I haven't done in a LONG TIME, like several years now, I've already been all over the map of engines and genres.)

Crux of the problem is I had my heart set on joining the contest to make sure I stuck to a schedule instead of burning my nights away - so we commit to it, and THEN we got the theme which was basically "Do something weird and new!"

So we came up with a plot that roughly tried to conform, but honestly the genre of game and what I wanted to do with it was already locked in our minds, even if the story, mechanics, etc, were not.

I can't speak for others, but this is pretty common for me, one project I did for a contest, before the contest I had a though about how the "Sim" genre never really had any action, so I wanted to try giving it some. I built the end game around the theme of the contest, but what I wanted to try my hand at was done well before.

As a suggestion for future contests, not a dig against this one at all (we chose to do what we did and I'm happy with the results,) when you expect to have a goal for a contest it'd be good to announce that well ahead of time. I don't think giving people a theme ahead of time is that bad, but if it's not comfortable, warn what the purpose of the contest is, like:

RMN New Contest:
Goal: To get people to try new and interesting ideas outside the normal genres. We're looking originality and trying for a 'games as art' feel!
Theme: The theme will be announced on the 32nd of January.

If that's still not comfortable, at least lock sign-ups until after it's announced or allow people to cleanly quit a contest once the theme is announced (I really didn't want my name up there with no result, even though the theme disinterested me once it was announced!)

Didn't realize it was a new thread - Congrats to the Winners again!

author=Crystalgate
Well, I pointed out that the game isn't so surreal. The surreal elements are there, but they don't feel important.

The surreal elements are far to impersonal IMO. You have creatures who take shapes according to human thoughts, but as far as I know, it could be thoughts of a mailman living on the other side of the world.

Show

There's Ephrian who got twisted by the Raythe. However, it looked more like he had a great amount of power and lost control of it. This is hardly surreal, it is in fact a very recognizable problem.

We also have the maps which while looking unreal, seem rather arbitrary. I think the best way to make something surreal is to start with something recognizable and then twist it so it looks wrong in a way. The monsters work that way, but the maps doesn't.

The game has aggro managing skills, debuffs and the breaking system. However, you can just kill the enemies before they have the chance to be of any trouble. With the right setup, you will kill them so fast you don't need any healing or any form of defensive maneuver. I even managed to kill the first boss before it could use it's boss skill. I noticed a lot of potential tactics in this game, but most of them are obsolete.

I can't say much on the surreal aspect - by the time I really got a grasp of what to do with surrealism in a game, it was weeks into the project (we'd have an amazingly surreal entry if we had to do it again) - I think complex themes like this should be announce a week or two ahead of time, even at the risk of people cheating a bit, to give the creative range it's own time to mature, just like the game itself has time.

Regarding combat you make a lot of great points, and I'm doing a couple things to help with this, here's a few points I was keeping in mind related when I was designing skills, enemies, and balance:

1. Most people will not experiment outside the stable 'healing' paradigm
- So I made a focus on damage an option, along with focusing on speed, etc (these are tactics I often use because I prefer combat to move fast when I play games, and often leave defense and healing behind if I can win fast enough)

2. Enemies should be fairly fast to kill (lower HP) - too much HP will extend the strategy aspect in a fake way, but frustrate and annoy players
- I made this mistake often in my earlier games, by making battles longer strategy and optimization were more useful, but it was dull and after a while all you wanted was each fight to END ALREADY : )

3. I wanted people to be able to win with any combination of skills and strategy
- Want to carefully fight while keeping HP at max, that's viable - want to spend several turns stacking Spirit on someone and using a high-spirit value skill to do damage 3 to 7x their normal max? No problem there either.

4. No rock/paper/scissors or complex stat systems - Fire doesn't do better against Wind, and Water doesn't beat Fire. It's all 'magic' and it's form might affect the end result, but I don't want people to feel limited to choosing their combinations/skills based on any elemental weaknesses and I don't want it to be a lot of stat math. Attack is your attack, Spirit helps magical type skills, Defense reduces damage (of all sources) and Agility is how fast you are.

I think these are great ideas and I plan to keep them well in mind, here are some areas I am focusing on to balance this out:

1. Spirit needs to be reworked, the way it is you can too much too easily and it's effect is too great because it's based on addition instead of simple % increases (spirit is always considered at 100% since they have 0 in the stat by default)

2. Group skills need to be less powerful than their counter-parts and balanced so they cannot or should not (ie. a reason not to) keep them up constantly. Like Glacial Wall being a 25% shield instead of 50%

3. Enemies need to be more interesting and dangerous - if a strategy works against all enemies, then if I make the enemies more variable and identifiable, your strategies can't always work and instead become your 'optimum state' that you develop many little strategies to achieve (destroy this enemy first because he can break shields, break this enemy as much as possible because they strip my Spirit buffs, then with the key enemies gone your strategy still works.)

4. Improvement of the Aggro system - There's a lot of complexity people aren't aware of with this, but aggro systems need to be fast and easy to identify. I'm thinking maybe a way to assign 'initial buffs' at the start of a battle, so one character could start with hate from all enemies (slight, just to give them the first couple rounds of hate) while others might buff their speed or attack level or attack/spirit, etc.


Things that I haven't come up with solution on yet:

1. Speed of combat - if combat can be paused it totally unbalances play with it unpaused, making combat trivial and breaks the 'flow' that I believe helps combat a lot right now. I could slow down the overall turn speed, or just have it freeze when choosing skills and targets, but again I didn't really like the end result with it pausing, I may need some external feedback on this (maybe you'd be willing to provide feedback?)

2. How to balance damage and defense - As you said pure damage and offensive speed can ignore all other possibilities. I included enemies with really high defense that required you buff past their defense or reduce it (or both) but apparently those didn't prove any type of barrier for you! Maybe balancing spirit and making defense have more impact will help.

3. How to make skill effects obvious and easy to digest (especially in battle) - Cast Time: 10 turns - well how long is a turn? half a second? What are "Recovery Turns" and why should I care? How can I show people what skill is ideal for breaking if they don't just remember it? What about the more complex skills like the amazing but underestimated like Crimson Storm? (this one doesn't make it's power obvious at all)

One tactic I've been tossing around that I'd like feedback on is a grading system (kinda like the Tales games now that I think about it) - earning points or rewarding players for adjusting their tactics instead of trying to force it down their throats by limiting the systems.

Please let me know if you have any feedback, I appreciated the skill and tactics notes you PMed me and found it interesting.

I'd like to mention several people have told me a similar thing: "I found a tactic that works too well" - but none of those have actually been identical yet. I think this means I've got a good start here, and I hate to rock the boat too much by changing the system, so I'm leaning more towards some extra statistical balance and rewarding players for being creative by using more unique enemies and some kind of reward system when they adjust their tactics to hit weak points.

One thing I'm basically avoiding is elemental weaknesses. I've thought about having states that can increase your BREAK rating (in addition to the attacks rating) and having one that reduces their defense against elements, but then it's better just to stick to defense reduction anyway, right?

Since I was gone and psy_wombats took the one we wanted, we take: The Hermit

author=Crystalgate
I finished the game. It was short, but good. I'll try an insane mode run next.

Edit: Finished it. It was way easier than I expected, although I may have been over leveled. Level 16 gives you some abilities which completely wrecks the last boss.

Actually, this was a bit of a time constraint - I don't like to just mess with stats for difficulty, so I had two things that change on difficulty settings:
1. How easy it is to break attacks (with less effect on Boss class skills)
2. Different attacks they use, ie. basically changing their strategy and effects of attacks

I didn't get to #2 in time for the contest! (And I didn't want to risk having attacks that were too powerful and made the higher difficulties impossible.)

I imagine some of the stuff you got that made it easy is related to some combat fixes I'm making, but I'm not doing anything too drastic except making some of the potential extremes and getting them to a normal level (like Ray of Frost with a lot of spirit buffs...)

Could you PM or just post what kind of combos you could that were super effective so I can give them a try (if I haven't already)?