HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

Thanks for stopping in, Zach! Always nice to hear someone enjoyed it! I still need to get on uploading the entire soundtrack to bandcamp or something.

author=GreatRedSpirit
Don't be silly Craze. As long as Legend of Mana's crafting system exists TO will forever be second fiddle in worst crafting systems in single player games.

...I loved that crafting system.

Anyway, yeah, I'd agree that they'd fuck it up. Voice acting, for one, is a guaranteed thing they would do that would probably end up being cringe-worthy. I'd love to see sharper graphics and faster-paced battles/skippable animations, though.

Alright, so most character-centric stories operate on a character being at state A and over the course of the story changing to state B. There's obviously a lot more to it, but generally something happens and the character experiences a change of outlook or begins to question something about themselves or the world. With a short story you just want to distill that progression down as much as possible. So instead of showing someone's entire life experience, you just want to get as close to that climactic moment---that SOMETHING that changes the character--as possible. You might also choose to go with a lift ending, where the character doesn't experience the change yet, but that climactic moment is the last thing we see, so that there are then implications that the character is about to change in a profound way.

Stories don't have to operate that way, but the ones that stick with me tend to have that kind of focus on character progression. It's generally the first thing I consider once I have the ground situation established.

Also, I guess this is just good writing advice in general, but try to compact as much as you can into a little space. If you have your brave knight slay a goblin, that's fine from a gameplay perspective, but if your protagonist's family was killed by goblins, then you have a charged scene. If that goblin was a soldier working for the antagonist wizard, then you have plot progression. If that PARTICULAR goblin has never hurt a fly, you have character development.

I hate all the sentimental shit with Christmas. Every Christmas movie is terrible. The music is even worse.

But I get to hug my dad :_(

@SnowOwl: That sounds like it'd have to be a case-by-case thing. I think a lot of the Resident Evils fall into this category. Like Resident Evil 4 is a pretty fun game, but it's not horrifying. It's fun enough that you don't feel cheated by it not being horrifying. Or, with comedy, Disgaea is more or less a comedy game, but the humor falls flat for me most of the time (definitely a few exceptions). However, that game has some fucking great mechanics.

Conversely, I played an IGMC entry that had a cool mechanic where you had to do a timing event while running from a monster; it got my adrenaline pumping and my timing got worse because of it, which I thought was kind of slick. The only problem was that you had about two seconds to get the timing down, meaning you would often get killed even if you weren't being thrown off by your state of mind, and you would die so many times that death lost its power. The mechanic effectively killed the horror.

I guess I'd say that good mechanics could make you not care if the game doesn't deliver on the promises of its genre, but bad mechanics could spoil a game that does deliver good scares/laughs/whatever. Your games tend to keep the gameplay far enough in the background to where this never happens, Snow Owl, which is part of what makes your horror effective. Don't feel pressured to tack on gameplay when you're still making effective horror. However, if you get ideas to make gameplay work with the horror, then that's a potential home run.