ENDERX'S PROFILE

There is a way without switches, but it's a bit tricky to work with.

Tag conditions.

Create a pair of 'dummy' status conditions (100% hit rate across the board) - call one 'hit' and one 'countering' or something like that. Have the 'countering' status put on a character who uses the counter skill/ability, and have all counter-triggerable enemy attacks carry the 'hit' condition - and only the 'hit' condition. Modified hits may be needed for attacks that carry status effects normally ('hit/poison', for example). Have any counter-triggerable skill also call a common event.

Inside the event, check for 'is in 'hit' status? If yes, is in 'countering' status? If yes, calculate counter damage, display animation on target(s) and deal damage'. Single-target countering can be done by creating unique 'hit/x' conditions, but that gets to be a major hassle. And this kind of method means that a normal attack has to be replaced by an attack-param skill with 0 cost.

"The best advice I can give is find a reviewer you consistently agree with and see what they say about a game."

Admittedly useful, but this option doesn't always work, if only because there are more games than reviews total, let alone by any one person.

For me, Solitayre, -you- are one such person. I've enjoyed your review style, and have tended to agree with you where I've actually looked for myself at a game you've reviewed. I'm also fortunate that you're the top-ranked reviewer by quantity - thereby giving me a greater number of possible options. And you're not the only reviewer for whom I hold this. However, in response, I've also shied away from some games on the grounds that without a review from one of those in my 'I trust these people' slots it's too big a risk; I don't have that much free time, and I don't really want to gamble that against something, no matter how good it actually is, if there's a chance it might not be worth the investment. I'm sure I've missed some wonderful games because of this, but that's my loss.

And I have to agree with the general point of the original article, as well. You seem to be coming at this from a different tack than the original article's investigation. This article isn't about this community; it's about those on the outside of the community who are looking in to find something to play. So long as we have any kind of ranked measurement whatsoever on the games begin hosted here, those individuals will use that, more than any other option, to pick what they want to look into. Others have made the point that people are lazy - as an explanation to why those who agree with reviews aren't likely to push one of their own up as well. But that laziness also affects those just dropping by to pick up something to waste their time for a while - the 'easy' choice is to go by star-rank, rather than following reviews, because it requires less mental effort.

Going by star rank requires 3 steps. 1)Oh, this has five stars! 2)Head to game download page. 3)Download.

Going with reviews requires several more. At the least, we've got W) Go to review page, X)Hmm, which of these reviews should I look at? Y)Actually reading the review, and Z)Well, do I really trust this guy? Does he like or appreciate the same things I would? And remember, that's -in addition to- steps 1-3 above.

And don't forget, even though it can be very useful in making the decision, time spent reading one or more reviews is time not spent actually playing the game. That's also going to count against looking at them for the kind of player I feel this article was written regarding.

I have no clue where I sit on this one, to be honest.

My own current body of works are largely along the lines of what calunio was just saying don't do - Very few characters have truly individual skills. (Current max is 8 - dropping to 2 if you remove alt-elemental duplicates and go only with the base set - and that's highly unusual). However, I'm planning a much larger variety of skills that are basically designed to be learned elsewhere. Find a mentor/instructor (can be someone else in the party), train in your spare time (earned EXP is burned to purchase these), etc. The exp. cost should help to prevent 'uber-sameness' except for particularly determined grinders, I hope.

Each character does start off with a 'specialty' of sorts; the one their base skills are from, but there's no reason that they couldn't develop along other lines if the player so desired.


And with the replace/tier argument - what would opinions be of a system where the cost of a skill could be bought down? That is, after obtaining Fire, have a branched set of options for the next skill that contained both Fire 2 and a half-MP version of Fire?

Punctuation and proper grammar are tools of the man possessed of common sense and respect for others in web communications. Then, I've seen many on the web who might claim that common sense and respect for others are ways they get oppressed...so you may have a point.

I don't know about liking the multi-party dungeons (I always seemed to get myself stuck in the Phoenix Cave - I'm not sure how I accomplished that), but the section originally under discussion in the thread was kind of nice, yes. Of course, I'm also one of those that enjoyed the 'grind your team from scratch' factor of Dragon Quest IV's chapter setup - make of that what you will.

Does it count if it was never intended to become 'teh epickness'? My first game attempt was a badly-designed maze/tower thing - the backstory was nice, and I might reuse it some day, but the game itself was badly done in almost every area I can think of - the battles were hideous, the storytelling was nonexistent (I had everything in my head; couldn't everyone else see what was obvious to me?), and the only map that wasn't an eyesore was a literal 'crawl along as many squares as possible to get from one corner to the other' no-branches path. I'm ashamed of the gameplay I built in that thing, but hopefully someday the backstory can be resurrected.

My second project was 'ye olde traditional cliche-ridden epickness attempt #34',(That's a description, not a name) with the traditional problems. The biggest is that I apparently wasn't satisfied with puffing my ego up by myself; a full half of the playable characters I intended were the members of my immediate family, names changed to protect the guilty. Happily, that one died aborning.

Hopefully my standards and skill level now are good enough to prevent that from happening again.