GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

author=Craze
i use far too many index cards and old envelopes to keep track of shit like this. i make charts more than i make actual games

what weapon did you have too much of?? and how does that happen?

It should be weapon type: Simple Daggers that everybody can use, grab bag of melee weapons, ranged weapons, and magic weapons. There is no fundamental difference between them except what characters can equip. I ended up with 20 melee weapons compared to 8 ranged, 8 magic, and 8 simple. It happened because I'm horrible at making games and have no actual idea what I'm doing most of the time. Everything I do is random and scattershot not because of some overarching vision but because it is a basically random and scattershot approach to game design.

author=Fayte
what are we looking at here?

Basically a list of recruited characters. The Tablet of Destiny from Suikoden was a grand list of what characters out of the total 108 recruitable characters you've acquired. It also tracks which ones have died by greying them out. Blanks are characters yet to be recruited.

Go Nashville! Win it at home!

I have good information that game dev guinea pigs actually made the game "Don't Poop Your Pants" because they find it hilarious how humans poop and they wanted to spread that information in an interactive format to other guinea pigs

Tried working on a game again! I had noticed that shops and what equipment they sell is kinda fucked up so to get an idea of how it all came together I made a giant excel spreadsheet of all the towns and what gear they sold. With it I could see all kinds of little issues (the general tier 3 shop is way easier to get to than the tier 2 shop, or gear that just straight up wasn't accessible for example). Spent some time thinking about how I wanted to lay out gear, what towns had too much, what ones didn't have enough, what towns were total flyover territory, and trying to rearrange what they sold to try and deal with it. After way too long I settled on something for now.

Related to above I added map treasure to the above chart to make sure it was all available and I could remember where I put it. I almost had two one of a kind items because I wasn't keeping track of this shit! This is one reason why I'm bad at making video games, I try to keep everything in my head and like an idiot screw everything up.

Also related to the aboves, I reviewed dungeon rewards and redid almost all of them. Dungeons used to reward some EXP but it was boring when you'd level up there because it would just give the boring level up textbox instead of the cooler level up in battle window and I don't want to muck about with it. Plus I decided that dungeons would only have up to three rewards and opening up the EXP slot for something else means I can give out more interesting loot. Also changed out rewards to give out more interesting loot.

Also also related to the above, the final dungeons had shitty rewards. Most of them don't even have notes as hints to where the final dungeon or the macguffins are. The improvement wasn't all great, I didn't have room in the database to add too much without having to reorder everything or yet another script fix. I settled with some super stat up items (you also can't buy stat up items anymore) and using up what space I had (basically accessories since those were at the end).


Also also also not entirely related to the above I looked over some stuff I hadn't finished and decided to keep or drop it. There's some weird stuff that looks like some attempt at adding more story that I'm just gonna drop (see keeping everything in my head issue again), and a really excessive amount of a certain type of weapon that I'm going to chop to reduce analysis paralysis (also on my part).

Fixed a quest bug and some enemy AI issues too where they'd just use the wrong stuff. At this point the early game is probably stupidly easy but I'll save that decision when I can subject a friend to play the game from scratch. At this point 80% of the content is playable in a coherent fashion, if I can bang out the final dungeon enemies out I can probably get 'em to play through all the way to the final boss. If that checks out (lol) it's just adding some wacky final boss death animation and fixing some credits stuff.

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how do you remember that

(iirc my inventory was full, game gave it a material in a craft that I had to do, but I automatically dropped it due to inventory, and I couldn't find out how to / couldn't drop an item in order to pick up the material and do the craft and progress the game. This was a million years ago during the PS2 era though so the details are super fuzzy. After that and hearing about how laggy the game got I binned the game)


To apologize to craze for missing his post for ages I'll try a serious post. Thinking about FF14 crafting (it's basically a minigame that you repeat a million times) pisses me off but it's a lot more detailed and I never got into the expansion crafting so I'll refrain again. Instead I'll talk about a crafting system I didn't hate: Fire Emblem! It's actually pretty simple: You take a base item and throw gold at it to improve the stats of your choosing. Also you can rename the weapon.

It's the basis of what I think I'd like. Instead of just a shop there's some actual player choice and customization which to me is an important part of crafting. I know it isn't easy to balance but making something is all about somebody making something that they want, not just picking what hamburger combo they want at the drive through. Being able to name it what you want is good for this too for similar reasons. Gold as the universal currency is good too, there's no looking up obscure materials or grinding snotmonsters for x30 gooey ichors you need to make the Dingleberry Rod. Basically it has customization and it's streamlined without dumb grindy components to it.


Personally if I was making a crafting system for a game I'd use the above as a starting point. My change would be adding materials again but from a different angle. Crafted gear would start with the type of gear you're making and the base material which affects its base stats. Steel Sword is better than Iron Sword, for example. Base materials are either just a gold offset or quest rewards. The Iron Sword is just 500 GP because you have ∞ Iron, or because you did the Orcs in the Mine sidequest you have 1 Steel you can use + 600 GP to make a Steel Sword. Non-infinite base materials can be reclaimed so you can get your steel back if you find Steel Nunchuks would serve you better. Later story/side quests would simply make earlier base materials infinite so juggling steel isn't necessary when it becomes irrelevant.

Each piece of gear would also have slots in it that you can throw gold or upgrade materials into to further customize and improve them. Gold upgrades would be more basic, putting an upgrade material into gear would be for more unique effects. You can increase the crit chance of the Steel Nunchuks by 10% for +500 GP or add Reduce All Cooldowns by 1 Turn on Basic Attack by adding the Tower Lord's Gem to it. Upgrade materials would be handled almost the same way as base materials: Rewards from side quests or other related content and reclaimable as needed. Just probably no infinite Tower Lord's Gems.

Also naming. Naming is still super important. Just no RNG, no grinding, no time sinks, everything is plain and laid out. Do side quests to get what you need to make your Magic Murder Stick.


e: Also fuck The Way of the Samurai 4 crafting system. See, you can make your kewl samurai swords and spears from three base materials: A blade, hilt, and grip. There's some details about the blade, it's damage and size, but the real crick in the dick about it is when you want to add abilities to a weapon. Each of the three parts of a weapon can have three slots with words in them, like for example. The names are an ability you can add to a weapon, but _only_ if each of the three parts has the ability ordered to make a vertical or diagonal line. Life & Death is super fucking good in that game (stacking HP regen when standing still, eating takes time when you can't defend yourself and there's an inventory limit too) so to get that you need to get a blade, hilt, and grip that has a vertical line of L&D or a diagonal across all three, like:
Now the odds of getting this shit is shit. There's quite a few abilities that are trash or just blank, and you need to get them all to line up. If the L&D on the grip and hilt of those two were swapped you wouldn't get shit.

To make a L&D sword one solution is to collect a shitton of them by killing a ton of dudes and getting their weapons and taking them to the blacksmith to disassemble them into their parts and praying the RNG was kind. It's boring and it takes forever. It doesn't help that L&D is the only ability worth a shit, nobody is going to care when they can make it so when you throw your sword away it does a bit more damage to Samurai#30 when there's another 70 to kill. Fuck RNG.

(but you get to name your swords so +1 there)


e2: i have many strong thoughts about crafting in video games