DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Guardian Frontier
An RPG with classic-style gameplay and a non-classic premise, inspired by the history of exploration and colonialism of the 19th century.

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Misao = Fin

I think it'd be good to mix up the conditions of the review events. Review events for unreviewed games helps bring attention to games which haven't gotten much already, but games which are in the running for misaos are likely to have gotten some, so we could also try events like adding a review to a game which has between 1-3, things like that. That way, we might attract more players to games which have earned some attention, and hopefully decrease the chance of situations where one game has so many players than all the others that it takes awards in categories where other games did better.

Misao = Fin

author=kory_toombs
Playlist added to initial post for nominations.

Wow, RMN was pretty quick to turn this over (last year it was several days after the 31st before voting could start.) No official cut off date for voting has been set.

Some personal thoughts:

Umbral Soul getting nominated for Sleeper Hit of the Year and Most RTP Award.
I hope despite the apparent goodness of this game people don't vote for it in categories it shouldn't be in. That's just my opinion.




At least Umbral Soul contains RTP elements, and the criteria for Sleeper Hit are kind of ambiguous. It's the people who nominated it for "Best Fangame" who have me really confused.

Umbral Soul Review

I go by pretty much the same reviewing system. I might describe the various components of the game in their own sections, but I don't break it down into subscores, because as I see it, averaging out or otherwise compositing the subscores of the different components just don't add up to a description of how fun the game was. The "how fun the game was" number is more like a rating of how pleasurable the game's most significant enjoyable elements were, minus however much the weakest elements detracted from the experience. If a game has great story and terrible graphics, that doesn't mean it averages out as a so-so game; if most of the fun comes from the story, and the graphics only slightly detract from that, then you have a slightly flawed but mostly great game.

Guardian Frontier

I'll ask him and see if he gets back to me. Unfortunately, doing original scripting really isn't in my skill set, so I have to rely on solutions other people have come up with, and I haven't found a solution among the resources I've searched so far, probably since it's a problem most games don't encounter in the first place. But if anyone does have a way of fixing that issue, I'd be happy to use it.

Guardian Frontier

author=SoulAuron
isnt there a way to restrict where mosters can go? then you could prevent them from geting too close to those tiles.


Good point. I've made some adjustments which will be effective for the next content release which should prevent monsters from locking the game up by cornering you. It's still possible to be cornered, but it shouldn't freeze the game, and it should be possible to save and load in that situation and thereby reset the locations of the monsters (although it's easier to just avoid being cornered.)



author=GoldenUnicornGaming
I just wanted to pop in and say I LOVE the cover art to your game. Reminds me of Dungeon Explorer on the TurboGrafx. <3


That's Heru Purwanda's work, which I'm happy to recommend. I wish I could afford to commission art for more of the game. Maybe eventually that'll be a possibility.

Guardian Frontier

Making the imps not follow the player would prevent the player from getting trapped, but I'm not fond of it as a solution, because that affects the atmosphere of the sequence which all players are going to be exposed to, whereas only a small fraction of players should risk being trapped unless they place themselves in a situation to cause that deliberately. Also, monsters in general chase you in this game; that's not just a gameplay element, as an element of the setting, aggression towards people is part of what makes people categorize monsters as monsters.

Making the walkways bigger is a possibility, but I'm concerned that as an interior area, I've already way overbuilt the school relative to other areas in the game. For a building, it's already kind of excessively large.

I don't want to get players stuck in unwinnable situations which force them to lose significant amounts of progress by resetting, but it actually wasn't my intention to begin with for the introductory section to be challenge-free. Originally, I actually planned for more significant monster avoidance elements in the beginning which were mostly cut. I'm reluctant to further diminish the tension of that section by making it almost impossible for the player to enter a threatening situation.

Guardian Frontier

Hmm... I might be able to resolve that by adding a skip contingency to the move instruction, but if I did that, then a player who got cornered by a monster might be able to escape and force their way through the event barrier, which would be a problem in itself since there's really nothing in that direction. The map cuts off precipitously after a while because there's no reason for the player to be there.

I can experiment with some fixes for this, but I'll probably wait on the next content release to change it for the download, because it's a situation most players probably shouldn't end up in in the first place.

[RMVX ACE] Tile Passability Bug

It was definitely 6 HP. After multiple occasions of grinding for cookies and bread rolls in Isaac's section in Winter so I could buy the T-Rex bat early, I am probably still going to remember that by the time I'm 70.

I've also run into a whole bunch of variations of this problem (just fixed one a few hours ago,) where every time I accidentally leave passability on a tile that's not supposed to have it indoors, I end up noticing when I accidentally use it to climb up the walls and end up walking around on top of them. It's happened so many times now, I feel like sooner or later I'm going to find an excuse to put it into the game on purpose.

Add a giant cannon to it

author=LockeZ
Worldbuilding always strikes me as another term for masturbating. It's something you do for your own sake, at the player's expense, because you have some idea inside of you that you want to get out. Where as actual game design is the other way around. Its purpose is to depict the gameplay in a meaningful and entertaining way, and to direct the gameplay to the enjoyable parts while preventing people from doing boring lame shit.

My primary goal in towns is to prevent people from doing boring lame shit, which is hard because that's practically synonymous with towns.


If you don't like worldbuilding, it's probably never going to end up a strong element of your games, so you might as well not worry too much about it, but I absolutely disagree that it's purely an exercise in self-satisfaction for the creator. Good worldbuilding is one of my favorite elements in some of my favorite games. And while I can enjoy a game without it, I definitely will notice when a game doesn't put too much thought in on that front. For instance, Final Fantasy VII did a good job with its "stick a cannon on it" approach, but I definitely couldn't help noticing, for instance, that there's no viable land or sea route between Midgar and Junon, the world's two largest cities, both run by Shinra, on the same continent, and air travel isn't accessible to most of the populace, and nobody ever seems to mention this. The path between the two literally involves trekking through a monster-infested abandoned mine with a huge swamp with a deadly giant serpent in it on one side. On the whole, the layout of the world basically doesn't make sense.

I guess one way you can take that is an illustration of how far you can go without bothering a huge proportion of the player population. But when game developers work to make their worlds feel more like actual worlds, I do notice and appreciate it.

But since I think the best approach to making good games (at least if you don't have a full team where you can get a proper division of labor) is to focus on your strengths by paying attention to the elements of games you enjoy the most, I think that if you're someone who should be focusing that level of attention on worldbuilding, you've probably already noticed what kind of worldbuilding elements you do and don't enjoy.

Taking a Break

Personally, I tend to strongly prefer games which use gameplay to enhance and illustrate a story, rather than using the story as a framework to present the gameplay. I feel like, if your game contains an uninterrupted progression of gameplay where you're constantly fighting increasingly stronger enemies, solving puzzles, etc. with the plot always coming in the same measured doses, then either you've come up with a story that lends itself extraordinarily well to that sort of fixed structure, or, much more likely, you're delivering that content at the expense of the story.

I recently re-played Breath of Fire III, and while that game does have plenty of virtues, I spent a lot of the time pissed off at its insistence on constantly shoehorning in doses of gameplay in a way that I thought seriously hampered the delivery of the plot.