ELDER71'S PROFILE

author=Dragnfly
Could any of the clashing ideas work in a future project instead?

Possibly, possibly. It's not so much a question of them being too good to sacrifice, it's more about working out which one works best for TAD.

I hereby tentatively announce that I have picked one. I'm going to try and flesh it out into a story over the coming days and see what takes shape.

author=Kalin
Also, custom tilesets and overlays shouldn't have much of an effect on your file size; it's the parallax, music, and video that will inflate your game. For comparison, the VX Ace RTP is 195MB when unzipped, and half of that is audio.

I didn't notice this until it was too late with my other project, Omnis. The first few versions were about 250-300mb and it was only a demo. I spent ages frantically trying to strip away every megabyte I could to get the download size down to something sensible. It was all parallax-mapped and a lot of the maps were huge.

Lesson learned, there. I think I'll stick to tilesets for TAD.

author=Liberty
About 500MB+ is when I start wondering if you've accidentally included a video that shouldn't be in there. Or have bad graphics/music weeding practices.
If the game is complete and the screenshots show images that are -heavy-, then I'm a bit more forgiving on that front, but if it's all RTP-based stuff then I'm left wondering what the hell happened. XD

Well I won't be including any videos and I don't plan to use any of the RTP (with the exception of sound effects, maybe) so hopefully I'll be safe on that front.

As things stand, the game folder I have for TAD are stuffed with old sprites and clogged with redundancies, but I'll absolutely be culling the excess fat before release :)

author=karins_soulkeeper
I won't be inclined to download a game worth more than 100mb unless I've been following it closely beforehand and know that it's worth it for sure. ~200mb is my upper limit in general.

I've been encouraged to see that some of the most-played and highest-rated games on here have download sizes of around 20-50mb. I guess that goes to prove what Kalin was saying about tilesets not having anywhere near as much 'weight' as parallaxed maps.

Cheers folks, this was useful.

author=Dragnfly
Sweet! Detail over size. I can think of some games that should've followed this philosophy.

Also, the left-most one looks like a monster of its own. Like if Matt Groening made a horror comic instead of The Simpsons.

That one on the left is the pixel-art equivalent of a stick man doodle ha. Something like him may feature as a little nod to your interest :)

author=Dragnfly
I always tell people that RPG Maker is better for making puzzle adventure games than the adventure game makers LOL.

IMO for a non-contrasting horror like TAD the chibi sprites are out of the question. People manage to offset the chibi sprites with more serious character busts sometimes but the heavier the game, the less that covers it up. IMO it's also a liability to have everyone be one tile tall.

I agree. Even the word 'chibi' seems to undermine the seriousness of psychological horror. And I'm not using busts, so wouldn't even have had that option.

author=Dragnfly
I like them. It reminds me of those really nice character sprites you'd get in some DOS adventure games back in the day.

Cheers! Still a WIP, though. There's a daunting amount of work and effort ahead with this new, reimagined TAD