DFALCON'S PROFILE

I'll try that. It's no biggie, I was only a couple weeks in.

Bug report! It's possible to generate a hunt where the students are cut off from the rest of the map. I put a screenshot at http://rpgmaker.net/users/DFalcon/locker/valthirian.png (the open-looking corner is of course not passable).

Haven't gotten too far into it other than that, looks neat though.

Yeah, I tend not to be a great fan of battle systems where what you describe in the first paragraph happens, i.e., enemies are only effective when they randomly happen to choose an effective sequence of actions for a few turns.

I think you're being unfair to aggro. It's certainly not a be-all end-all in any incarnation I've heard of, but it is a system that makes sure (a) monsters will go after the squishiest targets by default, but (b) players can manipulate this outcome by their actions within the system. Which are basically the two requirements for targeting systems you've put forward (and which I would agree are pretty good basic criteria).

This is a big reason tactical RPGs can be great - a good one can make the targeting question interesting. Which is in turn a big reason my serious projects tend to be tactics RPGs with meaningful movement mechanics, I guess. I don't expect most people to go quite that far for this, but I have to disagree strongly with calunio. A sensible or innovative way of dealing with targeting can make a big difference to a battle system, and choosing an engine without the capability to make changes like that, or even smaller ones, hurts projects.

post=120522
<Arvis> Ha! Semantic nonsense!

In other news, I'm totally fine with segregating not-downloadable games, demos, and completed games into three distinct categories - oh wait, you can already do that in the Games tab.

You can segregate out completed games, of course, but there's no way to filter out only not-downloadable games.

post=120519
So when we see previews of upcoming games in any media, they aren't actually games at all in that point - and there is no reason we should call them games?

I think I'm missing something.

I would instead say that the things you can find on this site can be classified into two general categories: games and descriptions of games. Being able to distinguish between the two is useful in any case, but particularly so since the vaporware rate is high - unlike most previews you read, many game profiles will never be complemented with anything playable.

Edit: I had this open for a while, didn't mean to gang up on people.

Been there. I've tuned a challenge to be just right, exciting and difficult but far from impossible... and then I sent it out for beta-testing, tester opinions varied considerably, and in short that's why Aurora Wing ended up having easier difficulty levels at all. So, having been there... beta-testing and avoiding ridiculous random death and teaching the player to use the tools at his disposal are all great ideas, but in a certain way they are solutions to other problems.

There are things you can do to make it less likely that a player will get frustrated by repeated failure. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the best are either well-known in theory or not terrifically generalizable. I know I don't have to tell McDohl to avoid having a five-minute unskippable dialogue sequence after the save before the challenging part. And being able to use stuff like checkpoints (some way to not have to play already-mastered segments of the challenge, especially if it's long) or showing the player in a concrete way how much progress he made (to tell the player that even though he failed, he's getting better) may depend on the exact situation.

If you still may reach the point where a player is beating his head against some challenge without making progress, in the game at that point I guess you have three options: A) make it easier; B) make it optional; C) get the player to do something else for a while, so that he might think of a different approach or get a better appreciation of the tools he has.

These aren't mutually exclusive. If I were to point at the Holy Grails of difficulty adjustment, I might pick something like DDR or TIE Fighter where you have very flexible goalposts (in both directions) including optional objectives, and lots of opportunity to switch between tasks. But you can get a lot of mileage out of a simple mechanism. For example, in A Blurred Line, when you're escaping from the city there's a driving minigame. Fail 3-5 times and it will offer you the option to skip the minigame, missing out on its minor reward.

And I think much of how the player will react to the options he has to make something easier or optional comes to presentation. If the main way to make something easier is just to go slower and the game shows and tracks elapsed time on a task, I may auto-adjust. But for a more RPG-like example: if, defeated by the Boojum, I go out and grind a couple levels then come back and beat it, have I wimped out on the challenge by making it easier or triumphed through perseverance? Hard to say from just that, particularly if I don't know what the expected level was. But if I get something that's useful in-game I'm more likely to think the latter, whereas if I get a badge saying "I beat the Boojum at level XX" or even just a badge saying "I beat the Boojum" I'm more likely to think the former.



That was sort of half for McDohl, half for general audiences. This is a problem I concern myself with a fair bit and would enjoy talking about.