HESUFO'S PROFILE

Hesufo
I am pretty interested in hooking up sometime. Screw me.
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Realms of Arcanum: Gener...
Uncover the secrets of the realm of Septria in a fantasy role-playing game with an extensive class and battle system and a rich storyline.

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Saving and Save States

author=Sailerius
I would like to know is allowing the player to save at any point in time in the game the same thing as using save states and if so does that break the game? If it does break the game then how often should a player be allowed to save while playing a game?
Being forced to backtrack and rebeat battles you've already conquered is never a good thing.


I already talked about this earlier this year at RM Web. A pure "save anywhere" game will probably be more punishing in this regard than one with well-paced save points, because a player who sits down to play an RM game for a long time, is having fun and is doing well, may forget about saving for 1-2 hours, and if they suddenly get into a risky situation and die because of their own fault, they will lose all that progress and most probably leave the game in frustration and never come back (I know it because I'm guilty for it - it has happened to me with many RM games and I'm sure you might have had some related experiences).

To prevent these cases from showing up, I would recommend implementing an Autosave feature or mixing up save anywhere and save points, even if it ends up a tad redundant.

For the type of projects I work on, I tend to favor limited saving. But there are valid concerns in favor of saving anywhere - for example, the player may suddenly want to stop playing and doesn't want to backtrack / continue 'till the next save point or really has to exit the game. Then I would maybe implement a Quicksave feature.

[Poll] Status effect against bosses

I think the main issue here is the designer will usually want to keep status ailments consistent both when used on party members, on regular enemies and on bosses. While the main issue has been how to keep them relevant both in normal and boss encounters, I think the problem actually lies in trying to utilize the same set of status ailments for both enemies and player characters, which is going to end up being very problematic.

When used on your party, status effects are really nasty because they cripple your ability to dispatch normal encounters quickly. You take more damage and have to spend more to remove some of these ailments and heal the extra damage taken. With the proper balance, however, they can make for more interesting battles and strategies (i.e. paralyze this enemy first in encounters because it can sleep your whole party, etc.)

I believe the optimal way to implement this into a game is to separate status effects into three groups:

1. Status effects used only by enemies, only on allies: I've included in this group: damage-over-time ailments based on a % of Max. HP (Poison) and action-impairing ailments (Blind and Silence). I think action-impairing ailments are detrimental if added to a player's spell roster. They are too useless for regular battles but too good for boss battles if allowed to work.

2. Status effects used both by enemies and by allies: In my opinion, some ailments are consistent enough to be able to be used on both sides. This includes other classic ailments such as Confusion, Stun and Paralysis, and Stat Buffs/Debuffs. They can be very tricky to deal with for the party, but also very useful when used in encounters (i.e. for quickly crippling a high-threat foe before they even deal damage), and they can even be made to work in certain boss battles (i.e. a boss that has multiple parts and some of them may be shut down with Paralysis).

3. Status effects used only by allies, on enemies: Now, this is where stuff gets interesting. Here, I would include Craze's "5th alternative" as a point of reference: he's pretty much spot on in that you have to design your own effects for your RPG. Have the effects of your abilities work together (damage amplification ailments FTW!), and have most of them work in the short-term, especially if you want them to be attractive enough to be used in normal encounters (for example, a MATK-based high damaging poison over 2 turns, or a mark that detonates for damage if the marked target is attacked). There is a lot you can do in this area, really, and in this place you can work without limitations on the ailments you can use.

By controlling what ailments can be actually used on your party you can maintain consistency within your game - and the player doesn't have to memorize 60 different status ailments - but you should have an open mind when it comes to customizing the effects you can add on your own characters' abilities.

Updates and call for Beta Testers.

I'm gonna sign up for testing as well!

RPG Maker VXAce Damage Flow

10/10 would read again


Really good job at clarifying some of the steps of damage calculation. I would add that Critical damage can be quickly modified in line 383 of Game_Battler in the core scripts (as I believe many people will find 300% damage from a crit to be a bit on the strong side, especially when you see your own actors getting crit'd).

Averting level grinding

author=LockeZ
Although it's a simple thing, I do like the idea of getting one-time XP rewards at stages of the main story quest. Giving bosses abnormally high XP has a similar result. The player wants to move forward in the main quests as soon as they can.

In FF games, on the other hand, bosses typically give no experience points at all, which means any level ups you get are necessarily from fighting weak enemies. The problem is that I feel this encourages the player to keep fighting weak enemies instead of going for the bosses. Which is at the very least boring.

I don't really see the problem with this. In your bad case scenario, the player is supposed to grind EXP in order to get stronger for the next boss fight, so it's irrelevant if said boss fight grants EXP or not. You're just trying to alleviate a problem you could mitigate by a lot of other means (by increasing EXP from normal encounters accordingly, for example).

I'm defending this position because I'm having bosses give 0 EXP in my game. The reason for it? Very simple: boss fights should be really hard on players, and more often than not the average player will end up having 1 or maybe 2 dead characters when the boss dies. If the boss gives a large EXP reward, the player is then discouraged from taking more risks when facing it, which can lead to the desire to grind a bit in order to make the battle easier and reap the full reward: it ends up being a counterproductive measure.

Of course you could make characters gain EXP while dead but I like death to be meaningful (something you definitely do not want to happen, for example, in the middle of a dungeon).

As for the SaGa Frontier 2 system, I think noone mentioned a similar system because it starts dealing with characters and this also involves storyline which varies from user to user.

Indefinite Hiatus for FDL

That's a shame. Yet it happens to the best of us. There's nothing you can do if you really lose interest in a project.

Good luck with Doom RPG!

Final Dragon Legacy

This game is very nice and I'm pretty fond of it. However, the random battles drag on for way too long. The battle system (ATB bar mainly) moves extremely slow and since I'm alone from the start and I sometimes have to battle 2 or 3 enemies that take two hits to kill, it gets cumbersome after a while...

Unlockable Shop Items

I have two requests for this script:

1. Can you make it so new items added are ordered within the list according to their Database ID? (so that new items don't get listed by unlock order)

2. If the former request is added, can you highlight newly acquired items for a certain time? (e.g. highlighted for up to 3 subsequent shop visits)