EBETH'S PROFILE

Woahh these are amazing!

Your color palettes and composition are really nice. And your painted skies are especially fantastic.

And your tattoo designs are so intricate!

just woah

author=Link_2112
Join in!
http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/15853/

I did, thanks! :D

author=Gourd_Clae
Oh hey I'm just like you! Welcome to RMN~

High-fives!

author=karins_soulkeeper
Welcome, welcome!

~here's my thought: A game is made to be played, not watched.

Have a nice day :D

I agree with that! Unless of course it's a visual novel in which case it's ment to be read.

Reading all of these I now have a theory that there's probably 4 different ways to motivate players to go forward that each appeal to a different personality type. I think a combination of all four would be necessary for a good game.

1. Some people are mostly motivated by the storyline. But that's not the topic up for discussion here.

2. Some people just like exploration for explorations sake. I wouldn't underestimate the power of a players curiosity, without it games like Yume Nikki would have never appealed to anyone. (granted Yume Nikki still doesn't appeal to everyone.) I think the best way to motivate explorers is to make the game's world intriguing. If you make the NPCs and environment interesting they will want to interact with everything. And then when they do interact with like a bookcase that leads to a secret passage with some treasure or that goes to a new area they will want to continue to interact with everything. If there's a locked door they're gonna want to open it. And if you reward their curiosity with treasure, unique environments, meeting a new character or a rare monster to fight they are going to want to continue exploring.

3. Some people are reward motivated. They're similar to the explorer but the explorer would be more excited about finding the secret passage while the reward motivated person would be more excited about the treasure chest they found on the other side. The best way to appeal to these people is to reward their actions with money, stronger unique weapons, new spells or moves, new monsters that give more exp. and generally more power as a player.

4. The last type appeals to the human need to obsessively collect things. This is why Animal Crossing works, this is why people play Pokemon trying to catch them all even AFTER beating the storyline, it's why badge systems work in games or people play for 100% completion. Having a badge system or a counter in a games menu can motivate to keep playing until they have gotten them all filled. This can also be easily combined with a rewards system like the golden skulltula's in OOT.

I think another way to show not tell is to create anomalies. I'm going to go back to the monster's blood that can be used as a healing elixir thing. Say up until the player fought this certain monster all their enemies simply vanished upon defeat, but this monsters corpse remains after battle. The player will detect this and interact with the monster and acquire the blood. At that point a message could pop up and say "You got this, it does this" ala Zelda OR maybe the player character gets some on his hand and it heals a wound and he's all like "oh this blood has healing properties". Either way whenever a monster corpse stays instead of vanishing from now on the player is going to want to examine it because they now know they are going to get something out of it.