CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

author=Einander
The way you're phrasing this sets off blaring alarms, because it sounds like it started at "man, I want my game to be tactical" and ended at "'tactical' means the player uses the right approach to solve a problem." That is distinctly the wrong approach to take as a designer.

There's a ton of ways to mitigate damage. You can use status effects or stat downs to weaken enemies. You can use defensive buffs. You can have one character set up as a tank and draw the fire. You can also combine the methods.

Tactics is about making meaningful choices. If you're always going to be one-shot unless you use Buff X, then there's no choice. You use it or you die. It rapidly becomes a tedious chore. "Press X to not die" in turn-based RPG form.

I'm excluding one choice, offensive, offensive, offensive, heal, repeat. That should still leave every other choice intact. Also, very little one-shots you.

Why should simply healing it away not be an option, for example? Sure, it might mandate that you pick tougher party members, or that you wear heavier armor. Sure, it might be harder. That's fine. You can offer secondary choices that are worse for the player. But why should you work to eliminate it entirely as an option? Does it offend you that players might not play the game "the right way"? Because if that's the case, then you need to think very, very carefully about what you're trying to do here. It's a game, not a movie.

Well, you can't choose your party in my game, but you can give all of the members a defensive setup if you wish. However, if you do so, it means your damage output suffers. You take less damage per attack, but enemies get more attacks since they now live longer. In the end you take about as much damage as you would with an offensive setup and will run dry on healing.

Also, how would you go about making it so that just healing is possible, but harder than using another tactic? If you just heal it out, it means you only need to keep track on when you have to heal. If you use any other tactic, you have to keep that other tactic in mind, but you probably also end up having to heal anyway at some point, so you also need to do that. Any other tactic seems more complex than just healing it out.

You can do that with events. Choose "Set Move Route", choose to set the player's move route and then choose "Change Speed" and set it to whatever speed you want.

I don't believe this, and would be surprised if many people here did, honestly. One of the links I gave in the article was to OCRemix.org, as an example. All those amazing compositions were inspired by games. And there have been tons of studies to show that kids are often more receptive to real-life lessons if they are able to interact with the information through games. The entire educational games market wouldn't exist if your statement was true.

I remember playing an educational game where at one page I got the task of choosing the adjectives among a lot of words. This happened before I learned that at school. Fortunately, the game gave me a short description of what an adjective is. However, I ended up paying no heed whatsoever to the fact that the game asked me to pick an adjective and instead focused on the description the game gave me. Every time I got to that page I would skip the headline that said adjective, skip the first sentence that said "On this page you must pick the adjective" and jump straight to the description of what I was supposed to pick. Reason being that the fact these words are adjectives was irrelevant to beating the challenges while the description I was given helped me.

Later when I was learning grammar at school, I didn't made the connection between that educational game and what I was currently learning. The only reason I even know the educational game asked me to pick adjectives on that certain page is, because a few years later, I looked back at the game. Then I went "oh right, I was supposed to learn what an adjective is!"

That said, I admit I was exaggerating when I said that games only inspired me to make games. Still, I don't think I'm wrong when I say that games mainly teach about games. For example, I think soccer teach you more about soccer than it teaches about diligence or whatever else you think the game could teach you that isn't strictly soccer.

Well, how about "focus on your strengths"?

author=calunio
Well, the fact the something's been done before doesn't make it a cliche. I'd say cliches are more like things that have been done many times before, and they're in the game because of some "collective unconscious effect", not out of inspiration.

Right, usually when people say cliché, they mean trope. Sometimes things that aren't even tropes, just conventions, is called cliché.

Anyway, I just assumed that we were talking about tropes and not clichés. If we really are talking about clichés, then change my answer of "I do not concern myself to much if it's a cliché as long as it makes sense" to "If I notice it's a cliché, I will most likely modify my writing and sometimes even completely rewrite it".