CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Kingdom: Got to a condition where I'm unlikely to win. Basically, enemies attack in bigger and bigger waves. You can counter it by hiring more and more archers. You can only get four knights, two on each side, but they are sufficient when you're defending. The problem is if you order them to attack. Each knight will bring three archers, no matter when you attack, but the enemies will have stronger and stronger defenses for each passing day. Eventually, you just won't be able to destroy a monster gate.

It may still be winable. I've heard people taking down gates late game by trying things like placing a wall near the gate and hope an excess of archers just wanders close enough (their behavior is wonky though) to joint the fray. There's no guarantee that the map even allows you to place a wall that's neither too far away not too close though. I decided to reset and put the game away for an undecided amount of time. Maybe the developers will eventually add actual late game features. Or maybe I will just try to rush the gates quicker next time.

Let's see if we can get this topic back on track.

In roughly half of my game ideas, I imagine a female main and I also imagine female characters for roughly half the cast. Now, as it turns out, I'm just as interested in telling the tales of women doing things heroic, villainous, intelligent, foolish, surprising and what have you, as I am telling the tales of men doing the same.

I'm not as good at including non beige people though. Considering what I said earlier, chance is you can guess that I am not so interesting in doing so. However, I have noticed that the more I have been thinking about it, the more interesting the idea seems. Recent ideas tend to include more non beige than my old ideas did. I have also noticed that when looking back on old ideas, including a lot of say black people would not only make sense, but also provide good opportunity for world building. What this means is that I've basically caught myself overly focusing on beige people without actually having a good reason for doing so.

From this I've gathered that the way forward is to question what you are doing. This is fairly obvious though, you cannot be interested in including X in your game unless you have thought about what X can do for your game.

I will also make the following claim, if your ideas rarely feature X, any explanation ultimately boils down to you not being interested in X. It may be so that X doesn't make sense in your current game, but this reasoning breaks down over multiple games. If you're interested in X, you would not think of ten game ideas where X makes sense in neither of them.

I don't think there's a guarantee though that questioning what you're doing will make a certain element interesting. For example, while including people of varying ethnicity became more interesting with time for me, writing non straight people still doesn't seem interesting to me, despite that I've got nothing against non straight people. Even so, questioning what you are doing helps a lot.

author=SnowOwl
A good number seems to think that you have to fill the quota. Of course, they don't state it outright, but that's the gist of what they say.

The is a lot like when Yellow Magic said "many" cares perhaps a bit too much. Now you say that a "good number" seems to think you have to fill a quota. Who those people are and where you can find them nobody save Yellow Magic respective you know, but apparently they do exist within the 7 respective 8 pages that had happened when the respective posts came up.

author=Sated
If homosexuals only make up ~5% of the general population (based on UK government research), and my cast of important named characters is less than 20 people (for most games this is usually true), then it isn't even statistically abnormal that none of those characters would be homosexual. Resultantly, I find it far stranger when games have mostly (or large numbers of) LGBT characters than when games have little-to-no LGBT representation, because the latter is more reasonable statistically.

If homosexual make up about 5% of the general population, shouldn't purely statistically 5% of every main character with a stated sexuality be homosexual?

I think LockeZ was in to something with representation across multiple games instead of in a single game. A game world where everyone or almost everyone is black would make perfect sense. However, having black characters in every game that features humanoids would not make sense. Similar cases can be made with gender and sexuality. Not to say that there isn't a shitload of games where having more none beige, women and/or none heterosexuals than said game actually has would have made more sense.

Of course, if the responsibility lies across multiple games, then it also lies on none at all as well which can be a dilemma.

Most JRPGs don't have difficulty options because they aren't designed to support them. In action games, if enemies hits twice as hard, the player can compensate by getting hit half as often. This option exist for some moves in JRPG and doesn't for others.

Elemental moves can usually be mitigated by the right equipment. If you by normal difficulty don't assume the player equips the right elemental protection, but you do on hard, you can easily double the damage (assume elemental protections halves damage) on an elemental move on the hard difficulty. In the same game however, giving a non elemental move 1,5 times the damage can force even a skilled player to rely on luck or grinding because there simple isn't any good way to mitigate that damage.

It gets more complicated however. If the player is exploring a volcano, an ice cave or some other areas with a very obvious elemental theme, most likely even a less attentive player (one playing on normal that is) will get the respective elemental protection. Also, if there are areas where the player can encounter enemies who together have multiple different elemental types, the player may not be able to get protection for them all.

This is even just elements. There are other factors such as whether or not you can reliable prevent a certain nasty from even happening by killing the right enemy quickly enough or applying a status effect. Attacks that can be reliable prevented or mitigated can get a higher boost than attacks which cannot. On the defensive side, enemies who are designed so they become more dangerous as the battle goes on gains more from a defensive boost than those who aren't.

Of course, you can ignore all that and just give enemies a percentile boost by going by the worst case scenario, their attacks are assumed to lack a reliable counter. I don't think this method makes the harder difficulty very satisfying though.

Another problem is that earlier on, the player usually don't have that many options available, meaning the opportunity to play better is limited or non existing. Handle this wrong and you could make a game where the hard difficulty means the game is at it's hardest early on and then gradually gets easier and easier as you progress.

So, implementing different difficulty levels either takes a lot of work or you make it easy for you, but most likely end up with undesired consequences.

A feature toggle or customize-able difficulty may be fun. I wonder what it would do though in a JRPG though. Maybe you can turn on more accurate status effects for example? Turn it on if you like to use status enemies and keep it off if you don't. Maybe you can make it so that enemies hit harder, but also die faster? You get the same problems, if not even more, as you do with more limited difficulty option, but the player is maybe more likely to accept the responsibility for wacky balance her-/himself.