DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=Marrend
I kinda think it depends on who your audience is. Like, would Zelda and it's ilk even exist if there wasn't an audience for it? Also, I don't think it's puzzles themselves that players hate, but how the game relays the puzzles, how they are solved, or how much of the game is blocked off by the puzzles.
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I think this is the fundamental issue here. Another facet I'd look at is, does the rest of your game filter for the kind of audience who'd appreciate the puzzles?

The most obvious and most effective way to filter for players who enjoy puzzles, or whatever other content you're using, is to have your game be part of a long-running series with consistent features. Since most of us don't have that option, the best we can probably do is make the games aesthetically cohesive and try to make it clear to players at the outset what kind of game they're getting into.

For myself I guess I tend to favor dungeons which form a logically sensible part of the narrative and are built in a way that makes sense in the context of what they're supposed to be in story terms, compared to dungeons which focus entirely on gameplay-based construction at the expense of making in-world sense.

It felt a bit too shameless to bring it up in the body of the review, but Umbral Soul was probably my biggest source of inspiration to get off my ass and start my current game project. I've been sitting on the ideas for it for a long time, but I've spent most of my time since joining RMN looking for teams to work with because I felt I was missing some of the skills necessary to make a good, complete game by myself. Umbral Soul was the game which convinced me that the publicly available resources are good enough to make a game from which I could be proud of as a solo project.

Everyone always says to start small for your first projects, but my practice was always limited before by the fact that I just really prefer more expansive and ambitious narratives, and it's hard to stick with a project you don't enjoy. But now, I'm having so much fun with what I'm doing, I'm losing sleep over it. So I feel like I owe a huge debt of gratitude to you for this game.

author=Gourd_Clae
On the note of "knowing the plot in advance" though, that could be a fun way to play with themes of disenfranchisement or insignificance of man. Not the most feel-good of themes but then a lot of history isn't.

It might be, but it seems to me like the sort of thing which would be really tricky to do well. Like, Final Fantasy XIII is extremely linear, with much more limited ability for the player to influence the flow of the game than in most RPGs, and it reinforces the themes of predestination and finding meaning in what you do even if you have no choice in the matter. But the fact that it reinforced the narrative's themes didn't stop it from pissing off a lot of players and not being very fun in my opinion.

So it's the sort of thing that seems to me like an interesting idea, but maybe difficult to actually make into something enjoyable.

Okay, so, I intended for the game I'm working on not to rely on any original scripting, but the approach I've been using for weapons has resulted in an unintended problem which might need a scripting-based solution, and as far as I can tell there isn't an existing script to resolve this because it's not a problem that normally comes up in the first place.

In my game, rather than weapons having a numerical attack stat which is added to the user's attack power, weapons all use a parameter multiplier for the attack stat. So instead of a weapon upgrade going from +10 to +20 attack, it might go from *1.5 to *1.65 attack.

The problem is, when you shop for equipment, the system the engine uses for checking how much your stats will change is to check the difference in numerical scores, not the difference in your stats with one equipped versus the other, so the player can't tell how strong any of the weapons actually are without buying them.

Is there a way to change the game's mechanism for checking equipment stats so that stores will accurately reflect them?

That should work, thanks. It'd also be good if I had tiles for trains which aren't currently running (thus, no steam,) so if anyone knows where I can find those as well, it'd also be a big help, but I should be able to work something out with this.