DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=Liberty
And yeah, punishing you for something that you need to do to pass a game is just ridiculous. Instead of punishments, why not instead reward people for if they do things under-levelled?

A great example of that was Gades Sword in Lufia II where if you beat Gades, you'd get his sword. It was possible to die in the battle and just continue with the story, but it was a bonus for those who stuck it out and got through the battle alive.

That doesn't sound like a reward for doing things underlevelled. In fact, beating Gades in that battle generally requires you to be very significantly ahead of the level curve.

Personally, I like level grinding. It's a very simple, mindless way to feel like I'm achieving some quantifiable sort of progress. And I like the feeling of exceeding the game's expectations for how powerful you should be at a given point. I also like being challenged, having to strategize or work my reflexes and timing and so forth. So, you might think that having enemies scale according to the characters' levels would be a good way to satisfy both of these impulses. But frankly, I this is one solution that I generally hate. It destroys the feeling of progress, and makes it feel like the amount of effort I put in is irrelevant. It's like going to the gym day after day and lifting the same weight, over and over, every day, and every day someone comes in and paints a different number on the weight. The number might go up, but who cares?

Out of all the video games I've played (which is quite a lot,) I have frankly never encountered one, no matter how sandboxy, which really let me play the main character as myself. Making a set of choices broad enough to cover every outside-the-box thinker who might play your game is impossible, at least as long as the games are still being designed by human beings.

I think that silent protagonists can be handy, not so much for making blank slate characters that the player can project any personality onto, but for making a fill-in-the-blanks style character where the player can make inferences about their personality from context, but can project their own interpretation of what best fits that context. If you want a character who's a cool, suave badass for instance, you might be better off making other characters react to them as if they were a cool, suave badass, and then let the player decide exactly what it is that they're really saying. I think the protagonist of Persona 4 is a particularly good example of this. But far from being a shortcut, I think making a really compelling character this way is probably a lot harder than doing so with characterization that's made explicit.

author=LockeZ
speaking from a very different perspective, it's also weird as hell when a game has all the maps directly connected to each-other, but then has a desert, a snow area, a forest and a volcano all seemingly within walking distance of each-other

This is always a really big deal to me. I can go either way, but for me, it usually boils down to the question, "which makes the world feel bigger and more developed?"

Final Fantasy X, the first Final Fantasy game to do away with the World Map, has a tiny game world. Seriously, the distance from Besaid to Zanarkand is like the distance from lower Brooklyn to the Bronx. The lack of an abstraction to deliver the point that "this interval represents a large distance being traveled" makes the whole environment feel depressingly puny.

On the other hand, Earthbound does away with the World Map in a similar manner, and the world doesn't feel small at all, because there's no implication that the locations that the players travel through represent a significant portion of the entire world, and some of the locations are implied by the means of travel to be much more distant from each other than the characters could feasibly traverse on foot.

I generally prefer overworld maps which aren't actually world maps, like the ones used in the Suikoden series which represent whatever part of the world that installment happens to take place in. It's more realistic, and helps me take the setting more seriously.

I think that a good overworld map design can make the setting seem geographically interesting and realistic, but not many game designers put that level of thought into the layout of their world maps, and absent that level of effort it may be better if they simply don't bother. The "list of destinations" style maps of Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden 3, etc. do a good job of making their settings seem developed and expansive, and if you do want to employ a walkable world map, you should think about what you're going to accomplish with it that a list-of-destinations type wouldn't.

I've seen a few stories that attempted similar things before, actually. Some executions are much better than others. A few thoughts about this:

It may be better not to call the world Terra. The moment they hear that name, most of your players are going to automatically realize that the character is talking about our world from the perspective of her fantastical one. I think this realization will be more interesting if the players piece it together gradually. If the name is totally unfamiliar, the players will be more surprised by the realization that the content is familiar.

It can be tempting to use this as a device to explain the fictional world, by having characters describe our own world as a contrast to what they're familiar with. This isn't a bad idea, but it's easy to fall into infodumping this way. Even when you're giving out information about your own constructed world indirectly, it's important to give it out in measured doses and give the audience the opportunity to process it.

I think it comes off better when it's not implied that the people of the fictional world think of our own world as a place that has even been hypothesized to actually exist. When it's a thought experiment or work of fiction or something, then it makes sense as a narrative device, but if it's something people have actually believed in, it raises uncomfortable "how do they know that?" type questions, and does more to hurt the stability of the fourth wall.

author=Housekeeping

author=CashmereCat
Personally though, I decided to download and play "A Long Rope To The Top Of The Sky" simply because you made the game "God of the Crawling Eyes" and I wanted to see how a great writer would make a 50-hour long RPG.

That's actually part of the reason I made The God of Crawling Eyes. I knew that images were the best way to sell a game, as that's what makes me look at a game page, so I figured I should focus on making as striking of a presentation as I could, and if that game ended up doing well, it would bring more attention to the game I spent more than a month on. So, yeah, images and reputation are going to sell your game more than anything, but you have to work with what you've got; maybe I shouldn't be using A Very Long Rope's description as a positive example, haha.

I'd definitely regard it as one. It encapsulates something of the tone and style of the game, and gives an example of your writing ability, while outlining the basic premise of the story.