BRADY'S PROFILE

author=JustRob
As long as you don't go too overboard and people can recognize that it's your health or your energy, I honestly don't see the problem.

Hey, if you actually read any of the posts I made regarding that discussion, you'd see that I don't disagree with you one bit. I only think there's a problem when the choice of name becomes too obscure or misleading, when it's the same standard mechanic as always used.
Calling it life, health, energy, stamina, hit points, body, strength, wounds etc all work. Calling it Zen Force because you think it sounds cool is when it starts to get confusing because you're not sure whether it's health or something new, but even then that doesn't matter much as long as it's adequetly explained early in.

My problem mainly comes when a lot of things in a game get completely new and (this is the important bit:) weird/misleading names purely for the sake of "standing out" or being unique, when all the mechanics are the standard. It comes off as gimmicky and pointless.

Saying that; if those new and weird names match up with some context in the game's storyline though, then I don't see much of a problem. S'why I was only discussing it hypothetically, and specifically not saying anything about MrDetective's game: because I don't know enough about it.

As much as I do agree with LockeZ that "absence of skill" shouldn't be factored in on the same category since it's an unavoidable issue in every game every made, I'm also with Crystalgate. An absence of skill may be unavoidable, but that doesn't mean the developer should just force the player to deal with it; they can add in other features or possibilities that let the player get around that unavoidable issue.
Although to be fair, that shouldn't apply to all games, either. Games such as I Wanna Be The Guy are just made specifically for one purpose really, so adding in RPG elements to balance it out or some such would just kill the vibe.

RPG games though, I agree, do seem to lack as wide a net as they really should. As much as most of them harp on about the ability to pick and choose what you want, you generally wind up being stuck with the optimum strategy and all others failing to compare. Yahtzee said it in his Deus Ex reviews, that a shitty RPG is one that lets you pick and choose which skills/preferences you excel at, then bottlenecking you to follow the developers idea of how to win. An RPG that not only avoids this shittiness, but also (as Crystalgate says) takes a few steps away from ever being frustrating is one that allows you to tackle every challenge with a variety of methods, and lets the player decide which they can best utilise, or which they prefer using most.

Hard to get frustrated at a game for being too hard when you know that if you just can't do it, you have a couple of other options to test out. Frustration usually breeds from knowing that you're stuck to doing and that if you can't do it, you're screwed.

Have to disagree there, alter. I think the font he's using is fine as it is. It's a soft enough font that reading is easy on the eyes and the size/spacing doesn't require squinting (for me, at least) which is the main factor in my mind.
Although, from the screenies I've seen from Louis' game so far, looks like there'll be a lot of reading in the game, so if one text window makes you want to zone out, wouldn't you just zone out after a lot of reading anyways, regardless of font?

Maybe not; either way, I think the font looks fine. Maybe I'm just too easy to please :D

Have to agree with LockeZ here. If the bars are actually dramatically different from health/mp then I wouldn't complain much if the names were different as well, but if they're even remotely similar to the current system that everyone always uses then there's no reason not to have the same names.

It's like all the MMOs out there that use warrior-mage-rogue class triangles but calls them something stupid just to sound "fresh". All it winds up doing is alienating new players because they have no idea what the classes are and which one's are which.
Then for anyone who's actually excited thinking they might be some unique and unusual class, all they do is get pissed off when they find out that "Moon Dancer" is actually just your bog-standard Rogue.

i've always just went with the notion that the mouth needn't be visible unless it's doing something worth seeing, like laughing. Having it be invisible, then appear when they laugh is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Like the nose really.

In fact, like anything. Sprites have so many restrictions on what can appear due to limited pixel count that something really shouldn't be there unless it needs to be, I find.