ANARYU'S PROFILE

You want to have a fun read-up on tanking: the MMO City of Heroes has one of the and most specialized tanking systems in any game, if you want someone to tank you found a "Tanker" class character.

http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Tanker

The primary Defensive sets are:

Dark Armor: Focuses on lower enemy accuracy or causing status effects to them (Fear so they hit less, etc), healing yourself by sucking life force from nearby enemies, and offers better elemental defense and defense from the rare damage type Psionic.

Fiery Aura: Focuses less on the pure damage reduction to keep a higher aggro rating by causing more damage to surrounding foes and managing how they move by setting them on fire.

Ice Armor: Protection based on defense instead of resist (which equates to dodge instead of damage reduction) - increasing your maximum "healthy" using layers of ice and making foes slower and hurt less by the cold air and icy protection and to mitigate when that 200 HP punch isn't turned into a zero (by being a miss), but instead is an actual 200 HP hit!

Invulnerability: Highest standard damage reduction against the most common damage types, and most skills are more effective by keeping the Invul tanker surrounded by foes (main skills grants extra defense for each foe in melee range, etc) - absolutely no psionic protection!

Stone Armor: All around average - uses a combination of defense and resist to reduce damage from all sources. Grants some advanced generation of health and better status protection, but slows the tank down so it's harder to run around and grab aggro from adds.

Willpower: Better status protection and some advanced regeneration based on how many foes you're fighting, but the defense and resist bonuses are less, this is your typical "tough guy" type of tank.

Due to the structure of the game, tanking was more important in CoH than any other game I've played.

But each Tanker class had at least one major weakness, either a very particular status effect they didn't resist, or a lower status resist (ie. if you get put to sleep 5 times you can only defense against the first 4 until the first wears off) or lacking against one particular damage type (Psionic most often) - or they were good against everything but not great.

Tanks need to have at least one or two mechanisms to make them vulnerable - don't give these to a lot of foes, and make it obvious when they do have them - makes them immediate targets for removal either through another means (debuffs or status effects) or require the player to adopt different strategies to cope with the situation (damage bursts to remove or a stronger character with lesser tanking abilities to keep the hate of that one while the tank handles the rest.)

For Example:

Imagine one character is designed to be a tank and depends on keeping appropriate defensive skills 'active' to protect against damage types (versus just having a crap-ton of HP or defense on armor) and using aggro mechanisms (including limited use "OH SHIT" buttons) - but certain enemies have skills that can turn off those defenses, creating a period of time where your tank is weaker until they've spent a turn or two reactivating them. This makes those enemies more effective for the tank to NOT handle or to synergize with their team and have them taken care of in another way (see: characters-who-are-not-tanks.)

Also imagine there are only a couple ways to directly heal your characters in combat - pure "heal spam" is removed! Another aspect then becomes managing your resources before they run out - and you can't suddenly refill your stats with items - you can't use items! And while you had some healing "OH SHIT" buttons if you chose, those are on a long timer and you needed to span their use out.

The tank suddenly becomes important AND a focal point for combat. Your focus revolves around managing your enemies so each class can do what they specialize in (either by design or by your choice.) What enemies can do becomes more than just "Which one should I spam attack against first?"

Summary:

The point is tanks should be powerful, but need to have natural enemies to neutralize them somehow (and ways for you to counter that neutralization - mix up "best" ways for with a variety of enemies to make varying tactics.)

And do not ignore the aspect of how the tank plays - what's involved managing aggro and defense? Are you an offensive class as well? Is it frustrating because the way you want to play the character is blocked by need (ie. you want to smash faces with all your cool sounding "Smash Face" attacks - but you can't spare a turn from keeping a different game mechanics satisfied?)

Kinda sorry to hear this kentona - don't get discouraged though, make some games and enjoy the production side of the site instead.

This place has people who do things, and people who just talk about doing things (or the even worse subset of people, just talk about how others should do things!) - your ability to act is better spent with the majority of the user-base and bringing fun to 9K players instead of 10-20 people pining for the 2K3 glory days and thinking that making games as a hobby is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Just a tip since you're making the same assumption poor Solitayre made - the vocal part of the community is the worst part to listen to, listen to the people who download your game instead. :)

author=kentona
I was wondering why this had 0 downloads, and then I tried to download it and got a server error. Ankylo fixed it :)

Sweet, thanks! (To Ankylo especially!)

author=UPRC
Well, I've played around with this idea more to make it less Kirby-esque and I think I have some decent ideas.

How much practice is required with GameMaker before one can usually make a "decent" platformer? I've played with it a few times and found out pretty easily how to make a character and add controls to move them, but that's as far as I've ever gone. I always lose interest really quickly, but since platformers are my favourite kind of game... I really do want to stick with the damn thing.

Is there an online tutorial that is good at walking you through the steps to make very basic platformers and such?

How much practice and experience you'll need varies from person to person. If you've never worked with platformer mechanics before you'll probably want to make a few short demos before you start on your real project (not like long ones, but just to learn how to certain things.)

There are some good tutorials you can download right on YoYoGames site:
http://www.yoyogames.com/make/tutorials

author=kentona
I kind of like the one I made the main image - it's eye catching, intriguing (to me at least) and I don't have to do shady things like uploading to and editting someone else's game profile.

The new one up there right now is perfect - so many layers of perfect.