FEO_TAKAHARI'S PROFILE

@LockeZ: The manual is your fallback for when you screwed up designing the game. For instance, I've played more than one video game in which the tutorial wouldn't proceed until I inputted a specific command, and the in-game instructions were insufficient to input that command properly. In a case where the manual contains an alternate explanation of the command, I can proceed (or, if all else fails, skip the tutorial and learn everything else from the manual--if the mechanic is that hard to do, I probably won't ever need to use it in actual gameplay.)

In addition, the manual is where you store information so that the player can look it up again if they've forgotten it. Strictly speaking, you should design your games such that no information should go unused long enough to be forgotten, but I've had to look up these things more than once, and I don't like to replay the tutorial from the beginning (or, Heaven forbid, play the entire game from the beginning if it's the sort of game that spaces out its tutorial across the entirety of gameplay.)

In addition, the manual is where you store information that has no purpose in the game. For instance, there's no reason to provide the phonetic pronunciation of names in my game, but some players may find that interesting, so I mention the phonetics in the manual.

In addition, the manual is where I'm putting information on what scripts I'm using in the game. If someone else wants to do the same things I'm doing, they can look at the manual and see exactly what scripts they'll require.

Whatever the manual it is, it is not useless. (And besides, I like owning and reading them, and I'm disappointed whenever a game doesn't have one.)

P.S. And one of the first things I learned in programming classes is that there's no way to fix every bug. Sometimes you can't even reproduce the bug, and you have no idea whether it will show up for anyone else. Nonetheless, it's better to document it than to not document it.

It was the "free copy of Ace if you sign up for a deal with our sponsors" that really set me off, since it's virtually identical to that "win a free iPod" scam that made the news a while back. It's not the sort of thing I expect from a company that actually has a business arm, rather than making its money entirely through such "sponsors."

I was initially hesitant to be anything but approving of the company that makes RPG Maker, but they keep trying to get me to send or receive spam in return for "free" extras like music and graphics. (You know, "We'll give you some music if you tell someone on Facebook how much you like Ace," "We'll give you a free copy of VX if you sign up for one of these deals with our sponsors," that sort of stuff.) Do I have reason to regret giving these people my email?

^^ That worked perfectly. Thanks.

I think that every game that has an achievement system in which other people's achievements can be compared to your own should have one achievement for completing the beginning of the game, one for beating it, one for beating the hardest challenge within it, and, if it has more achievements, one for getting every other achievement. (Trine is a game that I think implemented this well--looking at the achievements on Steam lets you know how much or how little you've accomplished at most major junctures. In conjunction with its high replayability, I quite happily tried for and obtained every achievement in it.)