KAEMPFER'S PROFILE

I hate it when preteens tell me to behave

post=102875
I miss Frying Bear and I really miss Toadpole.

Me too. Sorry I am ruining this topic MOG, but I really do miss that place.

I joined RMD (which was my first forum!) because of you, Mr. Abley. Thanks! I have been happily foruming ever since!

I can't remember any of my first games. I used to make pen and paper games and drew map after map when I was a really little kid, and I remember when I read about the upcoming Super Dante in my copy of Nintendo Power in 1994 I was super super excited. Of course, looking back on it now it sucks and I am glad I didn't get a chance to play it and have it ruin my life, but it got me in the mood to RPGMake!

I think I had some RM2k game that used entirely RTP graphics and had nothing novel about it whatsoever. However, despite my early entrance into the field I actually received compliments from people who had never heard of RM2k about my maps, so I was pretty excited. I don't recall if it had a story or not (probably not).

My next game (and first in RM2k3, I think) was actually pretty awesome, considering it was my first real project (that I can remember anything about, anyways). It was about a young Royal guardsman who stumbles into a plot to kill the king when he attempts to arrest a conspirator, who commits suicide rather than go to jail. He is then branded as the man's murderer and tied to the plot, the conspirators using him as a fall guy. Before he can be executed, his army buddy busts him out. They split up to avoid detection, but before they can reconnect he is jumped and knocked unconscious. Another group of conspirators, an offshoot determined on planting their candidate to replace the king, has captured him thinking (mistakenly) that he is part of the other conspiracy. Before they can question him, a raid by other guardsmen on their secret cave hideout gives the swordsman a chance to escape deeper into the caverns, eventually emerging into freedom on the other side. The rest of the game was about the swordsman trying to find allies to forestall the conspiracy and, when he eventually failed, trying to oust the chancellor who had seized power before he could invade all his neighbours.

It was ORIGINALLY based very closely on the Seventh Sword trilogy by Dave Duncan, who's books I had just finished reading. There were various ranks of kilt-wearing swordsman everywhere (using "sweet" custom sprites I had made). As worked on it it changed dramatically to the story I just described. I remember being really impressed by the alleys in NigSek asking SovanJedi if I could use his city graphics from that game. He said, but I always had a feeling it was because he expected I'd never do anything with them. He was sort of right; the chipset I ended up with wasn't great, but it taught me A LOT about map design and chipset drawing. By the end of the project I was creating some really interesting custom graphics and interesting new areas, but I always felt the urge to completely restart it so I could remake the original areas that were... terrible. Eventually, my HDD crashed and my most recent backup wasn't very recent at all, and I had lost all my best work (which I had done very soon before my HDD died).

I used that an excuse to start it over from scratch, with the same character and storyline but much improved coding and graphics, but never got up much steam. Nothing from it has been reused in my current game, except a few much-altered facesets. I can claim that I was one of the first people to use edited Rudra graphics (before Meiscool!) but they were amongst the files that I lost. I was so proud of them that it ended up being a major reason for me to scrap the project.

edit: well that was the longest post! Whoops!

The contrast is a big step up, but the trunks are not good. They need to be wider or more natural looking or something, as right now they look like wooden poles with foliage on top. I'm also not crazy about the ground tile, although the leaves and the wall and the panorama are all very nicely presented.

Liberty
Things about animals acting like animals

This is a really good way to handle encounters, I think, but it becomes a lot of work to keep up throughout the game. Not only in terms of thinking up news ways for those nefarious wild animals to act, but also to keep each encounter working properly.

Having situations change in the gameworld after certain tasks have been accomplished (or even having different monsters altogether start popping up) is another good use of touch encounters. In my old, abandoned project, I had planned that bandits ruled a highway and would harass you if you traveled down it. There was a quest to defeat the bandit leader, though, which would stop bandits attacking you and let you "fast travel" from one city to the next without encounters. After your victory, if you tried walking down the road or exploring around it the area was filled with crummier loner brigands and wild beasts that the organized bandits had kept at bay. The encounters got a little harder to reflect the player's level, but they also tied into the story.

There is so much you can do with controlling encounters in events it is crazy!