CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Unless there's a specific reason for it, you should never have such large empty areas. It looks extremely dull and discourages people from playing this game.

The bridge is illogically placed. Had whoever built it put it a little to the east they could have made the bridge considerable shorter. Nobody would waste time and materials on making a bridge that's 150% as long as it has to be.

post=149499
Are you an connoisseur of romantic novels? Do you have stacks of them in your room? Well, even if you did, you still would lack sufficient evidence to make such a claim.

It's safer to state that being a good writer will allow one to write any kind of a good story.

Well, I have above average knowledge about science and I almost always notices errors when a game or other type of fiction gets more scientific than "this spaceship uses fusion reactors."

If you lack knowledge about science, you can still write a few sentences about it and have a decent chance of not making an error. However, every sentence has a chance of containing an error and the more sentences you write, the greater the chance for an error. Likewise, if you lack experience of romance there's always a chance that anything you write about that subject contains something that doesn't feel right to those who are more experienced. Add more romance and the chance increases.

What you really need to know in order to start using an RPG maker is switches, variables and conditional branches. Once you understand them you have what you need to make something resembling a game. Now you can make it so that your game actually progresses somewhere, e.g. you kill someone and that someone then stays dead.

Not everyone finds them intuitive. It's fairly common that people asks "what does switches do?" Unlike say "Transfer Player," switched doesn't do anything on their own and requires conditional branches to have any effect. I believe that some new RPG maker users searches for a quick and immediate use for switched just like the "Transfer Player" command has and then gets confused when they can't find any. However, once someone understand what switches does he/she is in a good position to start creating something. After that a tutorial acting mostly as a reference to what the various event commands does should suffice for quite a while and let him/her learn the program at his/her own phase.

That said, a tutorial which teaches a newbie the basics is not very useful if the newbie doesn't know the tutorial does exactly that. We know how important switches and variables are. A newbie having trouble with the program could see a tutorial titled "Switches and Variables" and then go "let's first search for something that teaches me the basics".

I have to agree with Darken here. An NPC having one interesting thing to say is IMO far better than the NPC having ten uninteresting things to say.

NPCs can be used to give a place life and flair. For example, imagine you have a town that's relative rich, but a lot of the income comes from shady/illegal businesses. As a consequence, people living there are usually richer than people living in other places, but has to deal with having a lot of shady neighbors as well a shady visitors. A good way to portray this is via the NPCs and ideally not in a blatant way like having them say "This town is fairly rich, but we have a lot of shady people here" or something like that. You can think of what problems (real and imagined) the shady people may bring and have some NPCs talk about those problems. Done right the NPCs can add a lot of flair and immersion, without needing a ton of different things to say.

Mind you, I don't think your idea is bad. However it looks to me more like a specific mechanic that can be of a great use to some games rather than a general tip for giving your game more dept. Meanwhile, I think spending at least a token effort towards giving your NPCs something useful/interesting to say would help just about any game with a sizable amount of NPCs.