ANARYU'S PROFILE

It's not just pure length and story, what tends to be overlooked is the feeling of accomplishment.

Many times a long game can feel so long because you're really just spending the entire game doing one thing. Take Chrono Trigger as an example, you don't even learn about Lavos until probably 1/5 of the way into the game, and even then it's well set as a long term goal that you can almost forget you're working towards when the story rises to the climax of the various "episodes" like fighting Magus or trying to save Schala.

The sense of accomplishment that doesn't depend only on beating the game is something that I feel really defines how good a game is. If you spend the entire game just working towards the eventual conclusion you start to want it to end; how long can you prolong something with just plot twists instead of honest change?

"Oh no! We almost made this person into what they need to be, but they just got kidnapped! We must save them now!"

"Oh no, we almost got the powerful artifact that would defeat the bad guy, but a crazy plot twist stopped us... again!"

Or my personal "favorite":

"Wow! After 8 idential dungeons with varying puzzles and unlocking all 8 of the <insert various artifact here> a plot twist has forced us to: 1) go and beat one more dungeon and the final foe 2) beat even more repetetive dungeons or 3) start our quest practically over again!"


Concentrating on letting the player's accomplishments drive the story instead of the story drive the player's accomplishments is one of the keys to making a game interesting; when you know you've got to invest 60 hours of random plot twists and the "same old story" to beat a game it feels like what it is... a long grind just to see the ending.

However if you can make each sub-story or section of the plot unique and interesting enough, and provide enough of a conclusion to make the player feel like they've accomplished something, you can set them on the next "game within the game" and make them wish it lasted LONGER instead of them just wanted to see "the end already!"

Enjoyable games are usually memorable, and often you can pin-point different story-lines of the game just from memory if it's good, the games that are less enjoyable tend to "run together" so you can remember that something happened, but not the details or when it happened.

Feedback
The main goal of this project is to practice telling stories and developing characters. While playing and giving feedback, please be sure to think of things that stand out as unnatural or bland and I won't shrug off any tips on how to improve my writing either!

15 Minute Review by Coprophiliac

Story
Welcome to the world of Cast Aside.

You'll play the role of a young girl with a dull future ahead of her. A kitchen assistant and foster-daughter to the island's most powerful Luminary, you wonder if your life is really worth living... How will her life unfold? You'll need to play to find out!

Cast Aside is an episodic game where your Save File will transfer from one episode to the next. Released long ago, Cast Aside has seen a lot of work since then.


Characters

Rayne: The main character, Rayne struggles in her everyday life. Living with the legacy of parents who bailed out of debt and left her behind, she feels she needs to make up for their sins and her foster-parents kindness by being what they want.


Kael: A childhood friend of Rayne, Kael is a spirited youth with a seeming gift for the spear and combat training.


Gameplay
Cast Aside is a story heavy game with a lot of puzzles. Combat is based on an Active Tactical System and will sometimes integrate the terrain and puzzles into combat.

Cast Aside introduces several new features with it's custom ATBS including attribute values on the map that can be used to entirely change the flow of combat, from increasing the range of attacks, to making them hit more targets, to causing an increase in regen or attack to the user.


Releases
Note: Before playing please install the FORTE font from the game folder! (Right click and select "Install")
Each episode contains the one before it, so there's no need to download early episodes!

Episode 1 and 2: http://anamei.net/files/CA-EP2.zip
(New release on 9/14/2008 at 12:14PM EST with most suggestions and all bug fixes listed up to that time.)



Screenshots











Credits

Message script: ccoa
Menu system and cursor: Raziel and Selwyn
Icons: Whitecat

author=Forever An Ill Fate link=topic=5.msg1127#msg1127 date=1182837439
I really like those percent bars! Something doesn't feel right about black color font in the second picture, though.

author=Craze
Try taking the shadow off of names and AP. It looks silly- I think that's what FAIF was trying to say. But yeah, looks good.

With the window-skin in that CMS (Raziel's Chrono Trigger CMS) white text was almost impossible to read, and the shadow helped to make the black more visible until the color changed to yellow/red from getting too low.

When I get time tonight I'll do a quick swap on the colors again (one with white one without shadows) and post that to see what you think.

Thanks for the feedback. :)