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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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Magic and Mana -- To use MP Pot, or not to use MP Pot; which one?
post=91380
Another question for you then:
Plenty of people agree that you should have some way to gain your MP/SP back, be it through Pots ( and no, GameOverGames, not the ones those few guys you know are using either:), an Inn system or just walking around. Lets say it was gained through time, what do you think about that?
Example being, the MP is at 0%, but even if you stand still, you gain 2% back every -- I don't know -- let's say 5 sec. You never gain any more MP the higher up in level you go, you just always regenerate it back...
What do you think...?
Well, let's look at the possible ways this would play out in a common RPG.
1) You give back MP incredibly fast, or the player always has enough anyway. The player never bothers with waiting.
2) You give back MP slowly enough that the player never bothers with waiting. Maybe this adds up to some noticeable total over the length of an entire dungeon, but the point of making it work on time now seems questionable.
3) You give back MP at some medium rate sufficient to get the player to wait for it sometimes. Congratulations! You have managed to get the player to, instead of explore or fight or do something interesting, sit and do nothing every so often.
In short, I wouldn't give resources back for standing around unless there were some opposite incentive to get things done fast. Far better to work it into something they'll already be doing in a way that doesn't encourage intentional time-wasting, if you find yourself needing to give some back at all.
I decline to answer the original question from the OP because it is the sort of decision that simply does not exist in a vacuum. Certainly if you're using MP there must be MP scarcity at some point, but it can fit at any number of times.
The 9 things that I have learned from the RMNCasts
post=91111post=87388I just wanted to ask something real quick... About number 8, if you have a game that ties in to things that occurred in the past, isn't it good to have a fair decent amount of history played at the beginning of the game for the intro?
8. Long intros aren't fun, they're boring. More than a minute of intro is too long. People like to play the game.
I mean, sure there is a very fine line that you need to be VERY careful with when you do things like this, but I like to think of how FFVII the movie did it; they played the intro to show what happened in the past and to explain why their world was so screwed up now and then plopped you right on into the movie and allowed to characters of the movie to explain the rest to you as it went on.
What I guess I'm trying to figure out is what would everyone really constitute as too much time spent at the beginning and too little time spent on the beginning?
I hate to put it like this, but: no, it isn't good. Or at least it depends what you mean by "fair decent".
I actually haven't seen the FF7 movie, but it has two things going for it right from the start:
1) It's largely for people who've played FF7 - they're already interested.
2) It's a movie. It has lower expectations for interactivity and, let's be honest, more impressive non-interactive ways of getting things across than most of us are going to manage.
If your hook is in the history, then by all means lead off with some history - but only so you can get to the hook. Omit details and don't text dump or include a lot of names. If you're having trouble getting it out that way, the initial hook needn't necessarily be very related to the main conflict or setting of the game - maybe it's something to keep the player going until they absorb enough information for the main hook to make sense.
The 9 things that I have learned from the RMNCasts
post=88960
I find that I actually enjoy pauses in dialog. Well, not enjoy, but appreciate. They do create a desired effect in reading. And I know not everyone reads the same speed, yadda yadda, but it can be a useful effect.
What sucks though, is when you die after a long cutscene and have to read through the pauses all over again. It's painful. Horrid. Makes me never want to use pauses again.
So, it's better to not have them. They aren't that essential, and the game changes very little from not having them.
You're missing the point. There are better ways to deal with rereading long cutscenes. Intelligent save point placement and giving the player an option to skip them rank high there.
The problem is that even though we'd like to concede pauses can be a useful effect, they're at most very rarely used in a way that works, and I would not be surprised if creator bias often blinds people to the low points of their own use of pauses. (I include myself in that potential group. Aurora Wing had instantaneous text speed but sometimes pauses between text boxes, and with some distance I'm not at all sure people took that well. I never heard complaints about it, but if people were going to mention things going slow, when it came out the AI was certainly a worse offender...)
What is this file?- RPG2003.GID
Probably a help index. If you've ever gotten one of those "This help file does not have an index. Would you like to generate one now?" messages, Windows creates a .gid file to store the index. I don't know why exactly it might be on your desktop.
Long-form game-specific non-reviews?
Basically I was wondering if there was an intended path for posting walkthroughs and the like for games. For example, I had a pretty long forum post (that was disappeared in the update to RMN3) explaining some of the not immediately intuitive aspects of Visions & Voices.
Best RM Games you've Ever Played
There's often a certain charm (for lack of a better word) in something that was produced early or to a different set of standards. I don't think From the Earth to the Moon would have been a successful story had it been published in 1965 instead of 1865, for example, but even though I encountered it well after I was introduced to science fiction I liked it.
The perception that every facet of a game has to be strong is lamentable, though. Particularly in an amateur game, it's all right to go whole-hog on one or two stand-out areas as long as you make your weak areas as unobtrusive as possible (admittedly far from a given).
The perception that every facet of a game has to be strong is lamentable, though. Particularly in an amateur game, it's all right to go whole-hog on one or two stand-out areas as long as you make your weak areas as unobtrusive as possible (admittedly far from a given).
Aurora Wing
Making it possible for Nash to die on the first turn of the first battle was pretty dumb. In the game's defense, I will point out that (a) it's highly improbable (the chance of it happening is about 1/200 on normal difficulty or 1/40 on hard); (b) you can skip what intro there is with ESC so it costs you very little time; and (c) that is the only time in the game I was dumb about that.
Lost Universe
The title screen background doesn't display properly for me (on plain old XP). Like it needed to be scaled but wasn't, so a big chunk of it is mauve fill instead.
A little bit of shooting/ramming stuff on the screen didn't indicate anything else new would ever happen, so, eh.
A little bit of shooting/ramming stuff on the screen didn't indicate anything else new would ever happen, so, eh.
The 9 things that I have learned from the RMNCasts
So much of it comes down to not wasting the player's time.
I'm a very fast reader and slow text really bugs me. But with all the tools we have you'd think we'd have come up with some non-annoying way to give more impact to dialogue pauses. Having something happen on-screen (e.g., the characters move or look around) during the pause is the best way I can think of, but I'd be curious if anyone has noticed other tricks.
post=87388
2. Text (dialog) speed should always be fast (or adjustable).
3. Dialog should NEVER have pauses.
I'm a very fast reader and slow text really bugs me. But with all the tools we have you'd think we'd have come up with some non-annoying way to give more impact to dialogue pauses. Having something happen on-screen (e.g., the characters move or look around) during the pause is the best way I can think of, but I'd be curious if anyone has noticed other tricks.
The Most Important Aspect of a Game
Focusing on one part of this thread, I think the discussion of whether graphics or story or gameplay or whatever is more important is silly.
There's room for almost any balance of effort in these areas, as long as you're aware of it and plan accordingly. It's a game design choice you make depending on the sort of experience you want to provide. There are constraints on that choice, certainly (e.g., some modicum of graphics can make an interface easier to use), but it's a wide-open possibility space.
There's room for almost any balance of effort in these areas, as long as you're aware of it and plan accordingly. It's a game design choice you make depending on the sort of experience you want to provide. There are constraints on that choice, certainly (e.g., some modicum of graphics can make an interface easier to use), but it's a wide-open possibility space.
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