DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=Craze
"forest town" "mountain town" "WOW OBSERVATORY CITY HOLY SHIT" "forest town" "snow town" is like. why. why bother. talk to all the NPCs you like, wouldn't you rather visit "the forest town full of elves and humans that are dealing with racism and have split the town into two halves," "the mountain town where a mine recently collapsed and when you arrive there is a mass funeral going on, and if you do a sidequest in that mine you can save some 16yo laborer and brighten the town's hopes," "WOW OBSERVATORY CITY HOLY SHIT," "the forest town where all the buildings are in the trees, because the ground level has random encounters against direwolves unless you ask one of the elf shamans to guide you through a special warded path," and "the snowy town where three separate religions have moderately large places of worship, and the town government works hard to ensure peace among all the various believers... except right now voting is going on and a radical looks like he might be elected to office, threatening the peace"

idk "have dull things to make your special areas cooler" strikes me as dumb and lazy. i want to be engaged in a game not go "ugh time to endure another terrible town.mp3"

A town doesn't have to be dramatically constructed to give something to engage the player. Take the three examples LockeZ gave from Final Fantasy VII which failed to be constructed around an interesting centerpiece, Kalm, Gongaga, and North Corel. Kalm is just a waypoint which the player doesn't need to actually explore, but most of the time you're there is spent in a flashback where Cloud explains his history with Sephiroth. Gongaga (which is an interlude the player can skip entirely,) offers a hook for one of the game's central twists; Tifa is hiding something from Cloud, and it has something to do with his history with SOLDIER. It's also built on the outskirts of an exploded mako reactor which devastated the town, to which Shinra responded by providing no assistance whatsoever, making it a significant figure in the history of the setting, and building up the character of the antagonists. North Corel highlights the devastation caused by Shinra, and reveals Barret's backstory and motivations for starting AVALANCHE. The people there are ground down and dispirited, but they all hate Barret at least as much as they hate Shinra, for his role as an instigator.

There's a difference between "Build your town around an attention-grabbing centerpiece" and "Make your town offer something interesting to give it a life of its own and make it more than a punctuation mark on the heroes' journey."

Even a town which doesn't engage the player characters in adventurous activities can still offer things to explore which help give the setting character. Some examples off the top of my head for what you might include in a "mundane" town.

*Some starcrossed lovers who have a romantic subplot the player can follow (starcrossed lovers might see a lot of use, but it only takes a little creativity to put an original spin on them, and there are countless ways to resolve the plot. I'll be a cynical bastard and say these ones get a resolution where they drop everything to be together, only to end up miserable because their adolescent infatuation quickly sputters out in the face of dire material hardships, and they've burned their bridges too thoroughly to take anything back.)
*A family who believe that their son has died in action in the ongoing war. They're saddened by the loss, but take solace in the knowledge that their son died as a hero to his country. Later on, you can meet the son, living as a deserter, who'll tell you about the horrors his division went through, how their superior officer abused them and treated them as cannon fodder, until he was killed by his own men and the division scattered.
*An elf/human couple who enjoy an idyllic marriage and inadvertently inspire the starcrossed lovers in their decision to elope. The mixed couple is distressed by their own part in the affair, because they would never have advised that course of action, having themselves spent several years winning over the approval of their own families.
*A child who has a penpal in a distant locale. They trade stories about the events of their hometowns back and forth. With a little bit of help, they might be able to finally meet in person.
*A dude with a pet bear. He tries to keep it secret from his neighbors, but how secret can you keep a pet bear, really?
*A man who's hiding his dire financial situation from the rest of his family. While the rest of them are convinced everything is golden, he's plotting to burn their own house down for the insurance money.

Every town can have at least this much stuff going on. If it seems like too much work to put interesting things (and if you don't think these ideas sound interesting, feel free to substitute your own) into a town, then you should probably be aiming for a smaller number of towns. The ground state of human beings is to have a lot of stuff going on in their lives. Whether every location needs a major visual impact is a separate issue.

author=Sooz

author=Desertopa
I'd agree that this works best when applied at the very beginning of a narrative, but when done well, I think it can be a very effective technique for engaging the audience.

When done well, just about any writing guideline can be tossed aside. I just figure that if someone is soliciting writing advice "here's some guidelines" is more useful advice than "if you do it well, you can forget all the rules!"

As a writer gets more skilled, they naturally figure out that they can break a rule or two, once they get why the rule was there in the first place. If you start an unskilled writer on the "no rules needed" stage, they just kind of fall apart and make crap.

I don't think any writer ever really hits a "no rules needed" stage, so much as they start to grasp the more fundamental rules, of which the more surface level guidelines that they're usually taught starting out are simply approximations. Sticking to the more fundamental rules is usually easier when you follow the guidelines (otherwise they wouldn't have been codified as guidelines in the first place,) but I think that it can sometimes be helpful for learning writers to delve into the more fundamental rules a bit so they can get a sense of what they're aiming for.

author=Sooz

author=Crystalgate
Alternatively, the game is set up so that events at first looks like it's the former, but once the player gets access to more information, it turns out that it was the latter that was going on all the time.

I tend to disagree, unless you mean very early on, since otherwise it can make the player feel like the game's really disjointed and quit playing (unless there's really fun gameplay to make up for it). Major events should seem obviously connected in the narrative.

I'd agree that this works best when applied at the very beginning of a narrative, but when done well, I think it can be a very effective technique for engaging the audience. Show some dramatic event to draw in the viewer's interest, and then transition to a different context whose relation to the first scene is unknown to the audience. It focuses the audience's attention, and then gives them a mystery to fixate on; they know that the first scene has relevance to the rest of the narrative, and they have to keep playing to find out what it is. The opening of Xenogears is a good example of this technique (although Xenogears' standing quality-wise is... contentious, I have a big soft spot for it, personally.)

There are other ways you can play around with this sort of technique. One story I'm planning to use in a game project eventually involves a Distant Prologue which appears to have a direct relationship to the conflict which is taking place as of the beginning of the story, but much later on, is revealed not to, and its actual significance lies in how it reframes the moral context of the conflict.

Rather than following a hard rule that Scene A should result in Scene B, which Results in Scene C, etc., I'd suggest that the fundamental form should be that the audience has a reason to care about every scene, both as it happens, and later in retrospect over the course of the narrative. If the scene engages the audience's interest at the time, but later they start asking "what was the point of that then?" then the writer did something wrong, and if the scene foreshadows some clever twist or highlights a major theme or something, but the audience isn't actually engaged when it's happening, then again, the writer did something wrong.

You can count me as another whose introduction to the series was Wanderers from Ys on the SNES. I've been thinking about getting into the rest of the series lately though, given what I've picked up about it on tvtropes.

Wanderers from Ys, by the way, out of all the games I've owned, holds the spot for "easiest game in which to reach max level." I figured this one out when I was still a kid; on the second screen with encounters in the game, there's a spot where flying insects will continually stream out in a straight line. Stand below their line of flight, and either use a turbo controller or simply weight down the buttons for Adol's rapid upwards attack. Turn off the television, go find something else to do. By the next morning, you'll be maximum level.

There are plenty of other opportunities, even early in the game, to hit max level faster than this, but this method is the most effortless.

How long is the demo in its current state? Depending on how much content there is now, I might download it now and write up a review, or wait for the next demo release. It looks like a cool project, and I'd be happy to offer some feedback, but I'm not used to taking games in really little doses.