DFALCON'S PROFILE

author=GreatRedSpirit
8-bit and indexed image formats like 8-bit BMP and PNG and GIFs use a color index with 256 indexes each index being a 24-bit color (CORRECTION: 8-bit PNGs use 32-bit colors). Each pixel of a picture isn't a color but a number indicating what index the pixel's color should be. RM2k(3) use the first index color as the transparent color by default since BMPs and 8-bit PNGs don't support transparent colors (GIF does though) (CORRECTION: PNG's 32-bit colors support alpha channels).

I'm not sure how to make an image not use the first index so RM2k3 won't have transparencies issues. If you need an image to not have any transparencies I'd just work around it: Expand a dimension of the picture by one pixel, fill it in with a color you aren't using, and set that one pixel wide strip of useless color to be the transparent color.


*edit*
In a way, this post shows that RM2k(3) support PNGs about as well as Paint does. In that "not at fucking all" sense.

This is one of the reasons iDraw is helpful - it's very easy to work with the palette. Use index 0 as the transparent color if you want one, don't use index 0 for anything if you don't want one. You don't need some patch of actual image you're not using to designate as transparent, and you never need bother with the stupid 2k(3) graphics import window again.

(Think you overcorrected a touch, too: well-formed indexed-color PNGs can still be 24-bit RGB without any alpha channel.)

Customizable single characters do pop up in some oldschool CRPGs, if you want to look that way. (I feel like I am making this statement from experience but can't actually remember very well the games I played that did this, other than arguably roguelikes.)

I have some stuff in The Notebook for a two-character RPG, which has similar issues. Instead of making a few characters each with pretty simple options, you need each character to have the opportunity for more complexity. One of the ways I figured I could do that was to give each character multiple actions, with a planning component: a character always gets to choose to do something right now, but sometimes also gets to start working something on the side that will go off in a few turns.

While I'm usually glad to declare the primacy of gameplay, coming chronologically first doesn't mean much. During the last few years I've tended to keep a couple gameplay and story ideas around, pick one out to work on every so often, and at some point later on decide on a pair that I could work together.

OH is this way - technically the kernel of the plot came a couple years before I started on the gameplay, but it basically got tabled until I said "Gee, I could use a throwaway plot for this other gameplay idea I'm working with."

Awesome. I enjoyed 2, I'll be picking this up.

I hadn't heard that about FF13. That's a useful partial solution to a common RPG problem that particularly plagues heal-after-battle systems: once the player knows he's going to win, the rest of the fight is pretty well wasted time. (Even worse if the player is being encouraged to waste time - Steal, FF8 Draw, or somewhat more rarely recovering MP to heal at the end of a battle in something like Chrono Cross or Exit Fate.)



One of the nice things resource management does in a game is provide a range of outcomes for a battle.
If you have to use an Ether and a Phoenix Down to make up for the resources you spent, you've done a lot worse than if you just have to use a Potion (at least according to the usual relative worth of such). If you get healed at the end and get the same rewards no matter how well you did, who cares how well you did?
In the latter case, once the player beats an enemy party once it is an entirely solved, i.e. boring, problem in most RPGs. In the former case, the player might still get something out of correcting their own mistakes the second or third time around, or figuring out a better way later on if they come back with more tools. (Supposing the resource management is done well, at least, which is outside our scope - it's more than possible to not have this be true.)

So the useful thing that TWEWY does? It lets players arbitrarily increase difficulty to increase rewards. In multiple ways, as Craze points out. That way they're much more likely to end up fighting at a difficulty that's interesting for them. In this case, auto-healing even works out well for the game (the player doesn't have to make the calculation of what resources they're willing to spend in a riskier fight), in addition to its other conveniences.

Of course, it helps that there's an action component in TWEWY to keep things interesting in short fights - if your trash fights are "select attack turn 1, select nuke turn 2, win, auto-heal" this is not going to save you without more work. But actually giving the player an incentive to do better in a fight can do so much to broaden the range of powers and players over which a fight is interesting, I'm sometimes amazed it isn't taken more to heart.