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DFalcon
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Software engineer and amateur game developer with a focus on challenging non-twitch gameplay. I set the bar for "challenging" pretty high.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
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SHOW ME YOUR SCREENSHOTS - Fall Edition
Craze's screenshot fails the three-tile rule.
(That is, it's hard to believe it wouldn't be easier to have elements in a structure that allows looping in that middle block.)
(That is, it's hard to believe it wouldn't be easier to have elements in a structure that allows looping in that middle block.)
Favorite Game On a Floppy Disc?
Attack-Spamming
Agreeing with Silv and others, just getting rid of single-command spamming is not sufficient to have an interesting system. My first post in the thread was basically trying to make the point that you may have to worry about it even when it's a mechanically subpar option in an otherwise good system.
ika developments topic
post=102051
I don't see any way of easily implementing overhanging tiles (the "upper level" in RM*). Is there a way that I am just not seeing? Otherwise, it's looking very easy to use.
ika is more flexible on this point than RM*. You can paint multiple layers of tiles and change the layer that an object is on.
Always good to see ika development.
Articles: Why they are neglected and what you can do about it.
post=101440
It's far easier for me to write an article about a specific subject if someone asked me about it, than me spontaneously deciding that 'Hey, I want to write an article about X!'. Sure, I don't mind writing either way, but as someone with a full time job/college and other responsibilities/hobbies/life, it's easier for me to zone in on a request than to randomly spurt them out. I don't mind writing just to write sometimes, though. They're not mutually exclusive.
I tend to agree with this. The key part isn't necessarily somebody asking me, but having a specific thing I think I could helpfully write about better than most people here. It's good both to have something to bite into that's not overly general, and to know somebody thinks they could use help on it (if there's one, there are probably more).
Attack-Spamming
I think you're off on the causes of attack spamming. It comes about because attacking is typically reasonably effective (and free!) and by far the fastest option to select.
Taking the above as a stereotypical menu, what's the cost of selecting a choice?
Attack takes a quick double-tap on one button (a little more if you decide to select a non-default target, but then it's not spamming quite so much).
Whereas magic requires you to go down to magic, hit confirm, navigate through a menu to the spell you want, and then target that spell. Quite often this takes at least an order of magnitude longer than the confirm double-tap.
So: sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit to get a battle done faster by attack spamming, and sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit and overall time penalty to be able to devote their attention largely elsewhere. Either of those will happen regardless of enemy HP. (In fact, though I generally approve of trying to figure out how battles can proceed more quickly, the danger in this paradigm of having an enemy that can be taken out in two or three attacks is that skills, to be still noticeably more powerful, have to be able to take out an enemy in one shot or have some other effect of considerable worth.) More important factors are potential payouts, difficulty, and whether attack is really a viable option.
>Attack
Defend
Magic
Item
Taking the above as a stereotypical menu, what's the cost of selecting a choice?
Attack takes a quick double-tap on one button (a little more if you decide to select a non-default target, but then it's not spamming quite so much).
Whereas magic requires you to go down to magic, hit confirm, navigate through a menu to the spell you want, and then target that spell. Quite often this takes at least an order of magnitude longer than the confirm double-tap.
So: sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit to get a battle done faster by attack spamming, and sometimes the player will accept an efficiency hit and overall time penalty to be able to devote their attention largely elsewhere. Either of those will happen regardless of enemy HP. (In fact, though I generally approve of trying to figure out how battles can proceed more quickly, the danger in this paradigm of having an enemy that can be taken out in two or three attacks is that skills, to be still noticeably more powerful, have to be able to take out an enemy in one shot or have some other effect of considerable worth.) More important factors are potential payouts, difficulty, and whether attack is really a viable option.
RMN's newest member
I believe it's the traditional role of the nosy acquaintance to overwhelm parents with advice, so: Final Fantasy Tactics: Crystal Dragons is clearly the best option here.
Congrats!
Congrats!
SHOW ME YOUR SCREENSHOTS - Fall Edition
I worry that the top one is too crowded but I wonder whether the bottom one looks weird (it uses vertically squashed versions of the top's original 48x32s). Any thoughts?
P.S. The other display details, like how to show a zone or path, are generally still placeholders, though if anyone has a better idea on how to show HP on the field I'd welcome it (right now it's the white circle).
Edit: fixed link.
Participation in the Game Making Community
I think we don't need to stress "my number is bigger than yours" any more than happens from showing the number alone.
If (and that's highly conjectural) we went with a Gamerscore thing, rather than just number of reviews I would want to tie it to user ratings of the reviews somehow. Have a range like "helpful, mostly agree", "helpful, has good points", "has some worthwhile points", "not helpful", "factually inaccurate", "obviously did not play the game" (off the top of my head - the lowest rating or two could even be negative). Then people could sort through the site's top reviewers to decide which of them they especially agreed or disagreed with. Though that presupposes many more reviews than we have...
So, one of the things that really bugs me about reviews for RMN is that they're the sole determiner of a game's rating... yet a game is lucky to get more than one or two reviews. As a sample size that's far beyond "poor".
I don't think telling people to do more reviews is necessarily the answer here. I can go on GameFAQs and find decent professional games where a larger user base has put together less in the way of reviews. The problem is the barrier, real or perceived, is too high - we are expecting too much from a review to get anything useful out of the aggregation of scores. Each one gets its own page, for goodness sake. In particular there's a bad problem when you can say of a game, "I would rate it lower/higher than its current score and wouldn't mind adjusting it towards my view - but X already said most of what I would have to say about it."
If there's a concern that people will flood the scores for just one game, or that crummy games will get artificially inflated from the maker and some friends giving high ratings... these still seem more workable than the problem we have. I like having full-length reviews, but I'd think that if a registered user in some nebulous range of good standing wants to post a paragraph and some sort of score, we can use that - and we'll get more of those than we will full-length reviews.
If (and that's highly conjectural) we went with a Gamerscore thing, rather than just number of reviews I would want to tie it to user ratings of the reviews somehow. Have a range like "helpful, mostly agree", "helpful, has good points", "has some worthwhile points", "not helpful", "factually inaccurate", "obviously did not play the game" (off the top of my head - the lowest rating or two could even be negative). Then people could sort through the site's top reviewers to decide which of them they especially agreed or disagreed with. Though that presupposes many more reviews than we have...
So, one of the things that really bugs me about reviews for RMN is that they're the sole determiner of a game's rating... yet a game is lucky to get more than one or two reviews. As a sample size that's far beyond "poor".
I don't think telling people to do more reviews is necessarily the answer here. I can go on GameFAQs and find decent professional games where a larger user base has put together less in the way of reviews. The problem is the barrier, real or perceived, is too high - we are expecting too much from a review to get anything useful out of the aggregation of scores. Each one gets its own page, for goodness sake. In particular there's a bad problem when you can say of a game, "I would rate it lower/higher than its current score and wouldn't mind adjusting it towards my view - but X already said most of what I would have to say about it."
If there's a concern that people will flood the scores for just one game, or that crummy games will get artificially inflated from the maker and some friends giving high ratings... these still seem more workable than the problem we have. I like having full-length reviews, but I'd think that if a registered user in some nebulous range of good standing wants to post a paragraph and some sort of score, we can use that - and we'll get more of those than we will full-length reviews.
Alternate Elemental Interpretations
post=99233
This sounds too much like "attack type is and should be very strategic." I mean, if the enemy is made out of fire, and you have a water attack, it doesn't take General Schwarzkopf to strategically figure out what to do here. I think the only thing that can be strategic about attack type is when the "wall change" skill is used; it trades a turn to nullify the enemy's knowledge of your weak point, presents the question "do you risk using the wrong elemental which could heal the enemy?", makes you choose between attacking or scanning for new weak point or hazarding a random elemental attack.
I definitely agree that remembering to use Ice on the red-palette rat and Fire on the blue-palette rat does not constitute strategy. There are possibilities, though:
-Individualizing the other effects of elemental skills and restricting each character to an attacking element or two will get you some ways. This works best if either people without an elemental attack advantage aren't next to useless, or you can swap your party around easily to never be stuck at a disadvantage; it just forces the player to approach situations with party members taking up different roles.
-Multiple-target attacks vs. mixed enemy parties. Though this is more fun when there are possibilities beyond "everyone is a target", like in a tactics game or even Chrono Trigger.
-Meta-effects, e.g. Chrono Cross's field effect.
-An elemental weakness need not be strictly negative. Maybe hitting something for more damage with a fire attack will also increase its attack power for a while.
(no doubt non-exhaustive)
Games - Tester
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