ENKER'S PROFILE

I'd love to - but unfortunatly given that the children put themselves into the game in a literal sense, and make comments when spoken to, I'd have to get a lot of parent permission. The education system in the UK has a lot of child-safety clauses.

Interestingly I used RPGMaker 2000 at a Primary School with year 3 (7-8 year olds) to teach them the basics of story writing, with a clearly deffined 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end'. In groups of three they each selected characters from printouts of Charsets I made for them, named and gave them jobs, then told their stories in simple terms. The final thing had seven stories in the game and clearing them all allowed you as the player to walk around the school and talk to staff / pupils avatars. It looked great up on an interactive whiteboard on the wall of the classroom, and when they ended the year I burned 32 copies for the kids and their parents to play at home. Stories ranged from as simple as 'Tim must find all his items at home for his schoolbag before leaving for the day' to an epic quest to 'Rescue the school flag from a neighbouring school'. I don't know if they remember it now (this was 5 years ago) but I sure do.

I've always liked Blue Magic (Enemy Skills) but find that the character should have a reason for being able to use it or some similarly game-related explanation. Quistis in FF8 and Kimari in FF10 are examples of this, they hardly use it except on a limit-break of some description, and when they do it's almost useless. However Quina in FF9 collects from enemies in an interesting manner and the skills he acquires make him a pretty useful member of the party (and a healer for when you need one). FF7 managed to have a great thing with the Enemy Skill materia because it could be swapped between characters and it was the materia you were levelling, leading to a single equipment slot containing a lot of great spells . . . and Goblin Punch . . . Still, games such as the Breath of Fire series make getting skills something of a chore, especially in BoF4, and by the time you've got them they're quickly outdated.

So my summary? Blue Magic is great, but it needs to be something you can't just pick-up in a better form elsewhere without the work, and it needs to feel like it is a part of a game/character rather than a throw-away mechanic for completists. In closing, I did the FF7 Enemy Skill challange - beat the game using only enemy skill materia for fun/challange - and found that some of the spells I thought were rubbish were actually pretty darn useful.

A few people have been asking me, and I wanted to get a general opinion from everyone - what are the best settings when saving a bmp file from photoshop to ensure that your artwork looks clean on RPG MAKER 2000. A friend of mine can't seem to get his graphics to work at all - dispite them being essentialy re-saves of existing ones (so colour palette and scale, etc are perfect) when he imports them however they lose consistancy. At the moment he's using the basic 'save as bmp' setting in photoshop CS4. I'm stumped as to what he's doing wrong - any ideas?

I'm running RPG MAKER 2000 (and have been for a few years now - I love that little program) but lent my laptop to my fiance for her to do some work on, who promptly crashed it. Now whenever I go to run a game made in RPG Maker 2000 or test-run a game from the maker I get the following message:

DirectDraw Error (DDERR_UNSUPPORTED)

Before it dies. Can anybody explain what seems to have happened and how to fix it? I've got a 4 year project that has been going on for ages now, and I'll be damned if I'm giving up on old 2000 before it's complete! I've uninstalled and reinstalled the program but the problem remains.