DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

I can do sprite recolors, and possibly some frankensteining if necessary, but I don't have the art skills to edit portraits to accompany them, so face generators are higher priority than sprite generators. I've done some searching around already, but my results are mostly leading me to broken links, defunct pages, downloads that don't work on current hardware, etc. Does anyone know where I can find resources of this type that are definitely still usable?

This might be a bit of an odd question to raise as a forum topic, but I know that she at least used to be active in the gamemaking scene. She was also a moderator and prolific member of tvtropes, but she hasn't shown up over there for over a year now, and I was wondering if she still has any sort of presence in this community.

Describe some elements (mechanical, story based, etc.) which you've seen in specific games, which you'd like to see used elsewhere. If it's an element that you've seen in numerous games, try to pick a game which you think did it in a particularly interesting way, and what you think was so good about it that you think it deserves imitation.

I'll offer a couple of mine to start.


Private Actions as used in the first and second Star Ocean Games:
Private Actions were a game mechanic which gave the option of splitting up your party when you entered a town, and wandering around with your main character to engage in interactions with NPCs or your own party members which wouldn't occur when visiting the town as a group. These events sometimes offered material rewards, but mostly offered a chance to watch your characters interact with each other and affect the relationships between them. It gave much more depth to the cultivation of relationship values between characters (another mechanic I like a lot when done well,) than the simple choices of "which character will you be nice to and spend time with?" offered by many other games, and made the chance to see the interplay between characters its own reward. Plus, new Private Actions become available over time in towns which have already been visited before as the plot progresses, encouraging a level of nonlinearity in gameplay.

(The paired character scenes in the epilogue of the game if you've built their relationship values high enough, on the other hand, I think are an inadequate payoff for the level of investment that goes into cultivating those relationship values, and I don't consider that to be an element worth copying.)

The character customization system from Suikoden III:
While a single player character with blank slate abilities can make for fun gameplay, giving the player leeway to customize a large cast risks making them boring and interchangeable in combat. Suikoden III, though, managed to offer the players significant leeway for customization while leaving a cast of several dozen combat characters meaningfully distinct in gameplay terms. Each character has a number of skills, which can be leveled up at training locations (martial instructors for fighting skills, rune instructors for magic skills) with skill points gained in battle. Skills enhance in-battle characteristics such as dodge rate, parry rate, running speed, number of times the character swings at the enemy per attack, speed and power with which you cast fire spells, wind spells water spells, etc., level of spell resistance or odds of nullifying spells outright, and so on. Simple and generic enough so far. But characters differ in

*How many skill slots they have available. Some characters may only have two or three skills to develop, while others may have as many as eight.
*Whether their slots are free or fixed. Some characters are stuck with certain skills; you can decide whether or not you want to sink your points into them, but you can't remove them and replace them with other skills. Other spaces will be blank, and can be filled by any skills available at the training center, or have default skills which can be removed and replaced if you so choose.
*How talented they are at various skills. Depending on a character's level of talent at a skill, the amount of skill points they need to level it up, and the maximum level they can attain in it, will differ. A character with the minimum level of talent in a skill will only be able to raise it as high as C class, and character's limits can fall at any of the intervening points on the way to the top, B, B+, A, A+, and S.
*Whether or not they have special skills. Some characters start with, or acquire as they level up, skills which cannot simply be selected at a training center to fill blank spaces. Note that just because a character gets a special skill doesn't necessarily mean that you have to choose to keep it.

All of this is apart from their differences in base stats, equipment types, and how many runes (which allow further customization) they can equip.

Suikoden III was my first game in the series, and I was tremendously disappointed when I found that the others didn't allow me to tweak characters in this way. Suikoden V attempts something like this, with skills affecting a character's stats, but it doesn't offer nearly as much leeway over characters' performance in battle.