DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=narcodis
Got to a point in my game development where I need to start really nailing down a narrative. So I wrote fifteen pages of story stuff... back story, an outline of in-game events, and some dialogue sequences. Need to start fleshing out the characters more, too.

I'm curious what point in the game development that is for you. For me, I don't even have much of an idea what the style or mechanics of a game ought to be like until I have a good sense of what the overarching narrative is going to be.

If I'm working with someone else, who already has an idea where they want to go with the mechanics, but not the story, I can do it the other way, but this always feels distinctly like working backwards to me.

I considered getting the Game Character Hub a while back, but I decided I didn't strictly need it at least yet, so I thought it would be better at the time to focus on doing what I could with the resources which were already available to me. If you or anyone else who's already spent the money on it could let me know whether it actually offers those resources, that would probably decide for me whether or not it's actually worth getting.

Strictly speaking, I still don't really need the wider variety of child sprites yet, but at a point not too far off, I'm going to be working on a locale in my game where the native population is neither white nor strictly human, and the population is demographically bottom-heavy (making a game which features these kind of worldbuilding details is my idea of fun) so I feel like logically child NPCs should feature more there than in previous parts of the game, but the default sprites don't give me a lot to work with.

I could maybe commission someone if there are people who do sprite commissions for cheap, but after already commissioning someone to create the title screen for the game, my bank account could use some time to recover.

author=Sooz
To have this post be vaguely on-topic, I've been playing through Tales of Destiny to get some inspo on dungeon puzzles, and mostly the puzzles seem really underwhelming. Like, they're primarily just light thought and brute force, instead of any kind of lateral thinking. There's one puzzle that's a little bit clever, in that you have to arrange some spheres into a particular pattern, which includes pushing one off of a catwalk and making it shatter into the right place. (The necessary clues are scattered around the dungeon.)

A lot of the puzzles just seem to lengthen the dungeon, though, which is annoying because most of the time the dungeon is adequately long and super underpopulated as far as monsters go, so the random battles get real boring, real fast.

I read this, and I was like "Tales of Destiny, I played that one, right? That had puzzles?"

Thinking back, I vaguely remember there being some stuff related to using that ring which fires beams, but mostly I just remember it as being stuff that prevented you from completing dungeons by traveling in straight lines, rather than stuff which actually required any particular lateral thinking. Maybe there were some ice-sliding puzzles in there too? That's usually a thing.

I feel like if you really just want to prevent the player from traversing the dungeon in a straight line, maybe it's better to do that without the pretense of offering puzzles.

ETA: No wait, I remember there was that one puzzle I had to look up, because it was one of those bullshit puzzles based on the order of the zodiac, and I've never paid enough attention to astrology to remember how that goes.

Well, on the plus side, since the font is my own fault and not something I got from the artist I commissioned, I'm not irrevocably stuck with it, but I'm not good with fonts and it took me a lot of fiddling with to get something that seemed not-completely-terrible. If you've got any better alternatives to suggest, I can try them out. But my attempts to get the title-writer function to accept a different font without changing the font for the whole game didn't work for some reason I haven't figured out yet, so I was stuck creating the title in another layer and adding it in manually. I'm not totally happy with the shading, but at least it's better than my first try, which you guys are probably better off not seeing.

author=Sated
Critics can't tell you what you should or should not enjoy, but they should be able to tell you something about what you should expect to enjoy. That's what makes them useful to potential audience members. If I'm thinking of checking out a movie, I'll usually look at the reviews first, not because I'm invested in the opinions of the reviewers as individuals, but because I want some information about how likely it is to be worth my time.

From the linked post that you quoted:

"Any review worth reading will ultimately be a product of how the reviewer's personal tastes clash with the subject at hand. The trick to writing a good review isn't listing what happens in an unbiased manner; the trick to writing a good review is making sure that people understand why you've come to a particular conclusion so that they are able to work out whether or not they agree with you."

I don't think that amounts to the same thing though, and I don't think reviews which are useful to readers necessarily follow from that.

Like, if you're writing a review of a movie, and the movie has Michael Cera in it, and you can't stand Michael Cera, you could write about how you hated it because you can't stand him and he poisons everything he's in in your opinion. It would tell your readers exactly why you felt the way you did about the movie, but if your readers don't share your hate for Michael Cera, it won't be very helpful for them in figuring out whether they're likely to enjoy it. The audience can decide for themselves whether they agree or disagree on the merits of Michael Cera, but you won't have given them enough information to decide how they're likely to feel about the movie as a whole.

I think that a good review will convey to the audience how you felt about the work, but it should also have enough information about the work that it can help readers make a judgment even if they have different priorities.