DFALCON'S PROFILE

author=prexus link=topic=80.msg1180#msg1180 date=1182967457
You really need to tone down the first fight, or skip the escaping of the second fight. It's far too difficult for a complicated system like that. For something like that you need to give the player a chance to learn it.

Also, maybe add it so when you press L and R, it switches through your characters in combat, letting you skip over having to run around the map to find the next character to control? Or even using the number keys to select your party member.

I didn't think the fights were that bad, but more introduction or a "Make sure you save!" message wouldn't hurt.

My problem was that having played only a few RMXP games, I didn't know the keybindings, or that you could hit F1 to change them. At the time I was lucky to work out that Z changes characters.

Morbid randomness:

So today I was messing around, trying to find a decent way to show height with a flat tileset from a strictly top-down perspective - grid squares getting hidden behind raised tiles is more of a pain in a straight perspective than in isometric. (Think strategy game here.)

Didn't work, I think. This is the best-looking version, sadly. There's meant to be a tall platform in the upper left (16h) and the tiles south of there make slopes/stairs of varying steepness. Looking around with a cursor you'd be able to see the exact height of any tile, this is mostly just to give an idea.



Investigation into other possibilities/sets of available graphics will continue. I may be able to use ika's layer offsets well enough. I wouldn't say I need height for anything in the near future, but it'd be handy to have the option.

author=Shadowtext link=topic=58.msg955#msg955 date=1182523287
I have long felt, and your response only reassures me about this belief, that all games should have at the very least a "Suspend Play At Any Point Save," that would let the player stop whenever he needs to and start back at exactly the same place, even if loading it were to immediately delete that save...

It also makes me hesitant of any sort of Game Over system, as well as load times and anything else that makes the experience less streamlined. Plenty of people are going to disagree with me, especially on the "No Gameover" part, but I've often felt like Game Overs are just an easy (read: lazy) way of adding superficial challenge to a game.

But yeah. Make everything quick and streamlined, and easy to start or stop at any time, and people will have much less issue with playing a lot of it. It works better on portable consoles than it does on PC, but there's a bit of carry over even there.

In an RPG, game over is synonymous with "reload from last save", so maybe there's something here I'm missing? Is that part to be taken in combination with, say, scarcity of save points? There's a difference between losing a battle in most games and plain arbitrariness like The Way's Caves of Instant Death.

I agree that being able to save at nearly any time is important, anyway, even for console or PC games. (Anecdotally: earlier versions of AW wouldn't let you save in battle unless you hadn't done anything during your turn that required a roll. This was meant to curtail save-scumming of important rolls. Eventually I got a bit fed up with it and changed it on usability grounds.)

Just out of curiosity, would the list of complete games shorter than what's above but still longer than 30-60 minutes be a lot larger?

Only a few minutes in, I'm having conceptual trouble with this puzzle: the crowbar should be able to work on 90% of these problems.

author=The Real Brickroad link=topic=35.msg364#msg364 date=1181589885
Any resources you use have to come off your hard drive. You aren't allowed to playtest until you're done (or you think you're done).

Most of the onehours I participated in didn't use these rules, and I don't think they help. Everyone should know that spending much time looking for resources tends to be a waste, but let them try it if they want.