DRAKONAIS'S PROFILE

If you do tackle normal battles in another article, consider what I'm trying to implement in my current project: full healing after every battle. Personally, I've always found that buying an arbitrary amount of potions before jumping into a dungeon didn't increase my enjoyment of the game in the slightest, only frustrating me if I overstocked or ended up being a few potions short.

By being at full power at the start of each battle, it's about exploiting weaknesses and utilizing strategy instead of trying to get by (but just barely). Of course, for any real sense of danger in this scenario, the threat of death needs to be ever-present and the consequences of a gameover have to be balanced to that (with frequent checkpoints, carry-over exp, etc).

I would love to play a really short game with just one cool new idea or character that really flourishes. It's great for the gaming public so they don't waste 10 hours waiting for a game to get interesting and it's useful for the developer to get a sense of what people think about it and build interest before making their epic masterpiece.

There's also some sense that if a game doesn't have everything (custom graphics, original soundtrack, 40 hours of gameplay) it'll get passed up. If something advertised itself as a 1-hour trial experiment with RTP, I'd download it just to give feedback.

I've read almost every document related to this controversy (while I've never played To Arms! or read Song of Ice and Fire, this article claims to address plagiarism itself) but have yet to comment on it. I've found the whole thing very interesting. It's a personal issue because I've used ripped graphics, ripped music, and even borrowed a name (Saphira is the name of the central dragon in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance saga). So I have some thoughts and they're all based on my experience, of course.

For an amateur developer, ripping materials becomes almost a necessity. Game making is a hobby: as such, I don't want to spend time doing things I a.) don't enjoy doing and b.) am not very good at doing even if I were to try my hardest. It took me a year to produce a game of modest length, and that was with a slew of resources I didn't have to make myself. I would've loved to have had a crew of artists working under me to create a 100% custom product (as I'm sure would everyone), but in the end it wasn't worth the effort and, more importantly, didn't matter to me.

I don't say "didn't matter" because I have no concern for the original artists. I tried my best to credit where credit was due and quickly rectified situations where a name was absent from the credit roll. I say "didn't matter" because I didn't want anyone to look at my ripped graphics and think they were stunning. I didn't want anyone to be entranced by parts of my game that sported ripped tracks. I wanted these things to be competent means to an end of creating something new and original. A story, a sensation, a dramatic cadence.

Of course, it becomes a whole different animal when we talk about taking a game commercial. But since most of us are hobbyists, as long as we use the resources in an original way with honest credits, this sort of borrowing is forgiven.

Haha Healy, I was going to say the same. 1 extra block would have fixed this though.

I object to the implication that you cannot beat the crap out of fate.