KILLER WOLF'S PROFILE

Lucas Stone and the Dastardly Device - A pulp/rpg game with the titular character being a thinly veiled Indiana Jones wannabe. I came up with a story using ley lines to link ancient burial grounds/sites of power, and a globe hopping narrative that mixed post WWI tech with some neater stuff (with Nikola Tesla as one of the equipment crafters). I did a ton of research and actually made all the plot points I wanted to use fit together within an historical framework (more or less). The problem? One was resource generation and the other was that the feat based DBS modifications I thought would work really well turned out to make combat completely boring.

The Hospital - A survival horror game that was one of my earliest ideas for an RM game, based off how a time visiting a relative in ICU late at night, and how creepy that whole wing of the hospital seemed. I had to navigate a serpentine hallway and go down in an elevator to get to the drink machine, and I remember wondering what would happen if when I took the elevator back up, the hallway was different, or just extended infinitely. What if something chased me? Well, suffice to say, despite me writing a bunch of scenarios out for it over the years, it pretty much died on the vine once I actually got around to playing Silent Hill (A late comer to the franchise, I didn't break into it until 2008). Needless to say, between SH1 and 2, and the Movie adaptation, my whole story had already been covered and done better than I could manage at the time. Oh well.

Broken Windows - Similar to the above. It had several different settings, from a warehouse that had been built over the remains of an infamous mental hospital, to an eventual version that featured a non-standard haunted house full of non-euclidean geometrical traps that dumped the player into a black expanse and forced him to escape before his body gave out. Then I read House of Leaves and gave up on the game for good.

Vortex - A weird little game I was working on in MMF2. You had to clear a number of objects from a given space, but you had to follow certain rules or you would lose lives. To clear green pieces, for example, you had to play off of a blue piece, but to play off a blue piece without taking it off the map, you had to first bank off of a certain wall type. You could also charge your projectile so that when it cleared black objects, it would draw other objects nearer to it, or spread them away. It was basically an obscenely complicated 2d sci-fi version of nine ball. I was thinking of re-purposing it to serve as a hacking mini-game in another project, but I somehow managed to corrupt the file.

Failing Paradise - A point and click style detective noir story set in a stylized future that borrows heavily on the 30's aesthetic. I began putting the main character's sprites together, but lost interest in the project once I finished writing out the entire plot and solved the mystery.

Falling Star - Basically an rpg version of a Deep Space Nine/Babylon Five type set up. The player would generate a character and play through an initial posting that would help set their skills and feats, and then they would get promoted and posted onto the crew of a station that was basically the town of Deadwood, complete with a bar owner who was equal parts Quark the Ferengi and Al Swearengen. The "levels" were set up as an episodic arc, each building on the previous experiences of the main character and allowing (if someone were to choose to replay it) the player to examine the same series of events through the eyes of multiple crew members. I wrote the first nine episodes and then just kind of lost interest when I realized how close it was swaying to what I could remember of DS9 and B5. It never even made it to the art phase.

The Wraith - A 2d platformer with black and white graphics featuring a pulp style vigilante. In a city so corrupt that the brutal assassination of the one cop who seemed to be trying to do something about was written up as a suicide, an ex con decides that enough is enough. Claiming to be the murdered cop, back from the grave, he would scare the city straight. The player was to be able to choose from killing enemies, with weapons like pistols, thompsons, and shotguns, or battering them with physical attacks. I envisioned an rpg-lite system that would improve the character over time, including giving him the strength to climb faster, hold ledges longer, rebound off of walls, survive falls, etc. Weapon skill would also improve with practice, so that instead of having to hold the button down long enough for the character to raise his aim for a headshot (with single shot weapons, automatics just start firing), it would happen much faster. Unfortunately, I got obsessed with perfecting the Wraith's running animations and spent the better part of a week tinkering with the way his coat billowed out behind him and completely burned out on it.

Serial Killer 2.0 - A point and click game that was my first projects, but got new life after I discovered PowerMode for RM2K3. I'd just gotten a new computer, and had loaned my old laptop to a friend who fried his system the week before he had a big sociology paper due. When I got my laptop back, I found a folder on the desktop that was full of weird/brutal hentai & porn. After considering submerging the entire device in some form of disinfectant, I eventually gave in to my curiosity and perused the contents of the folder. That prompted the idea of a serial killer who kidnapped women, forced them to commit debasing sexual acts while he photographed them, mutilated their bodies with everything from scalpels to bonesaws, yet ultimately killed them 'humanely' via an overdose. Also, he kept them for a number of days during the work, and always caught the next victim before dumping the body of the last, leaving a photo as a clue to taunt the police. I deleted the folder full of drek, minus a few less explicit pictures I figured on using as references and started writing a story. I set it in the future, where crime has become so formulaic that investigations are often carried out via a network of super-computers called The Wisemen. However, the serial killer seems to have hit on a method that leaves the program confounded, requiring a retired investigator to return to the force on a provisional basis (cribbed from Blade Runner, of course) in order to get to the bottom of the case before the next victim is killed. I used shots from Snatcher and Policenauts as both references and straight up ripped a few to act as some of my backgrounds. There was a chase scene, the ability to get drawn into side-plots, one of which involved a prostitution ring run by an old lech of a mob boss that put the player at odds with the head of the organized crime division. You could beat up suspects during interrogation to get them to spill what you wanted to hear (but not always what was true). It had a working inventory system, as well as an in game way to take pictures of any part of the screen for later reference (used to solve some puzzles.) Basically, the game system was 99% complete, all I had to do was finish out the story. Which was the problem. I realized the conclusion that the story was heading towards was a retread of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, albeit with a gender swap so that it was a disturbed female who was trying to become male by killing/destroying other women who exemplified traits she hated in herself. The main clue to this was that one of the last victims was actually a man who had undergone gender reassignment. This was the final 'female' victim, before the killer transitioned to the clean-up phase, which involved trying to kill the investigator, his ex-wife, his colleagues, and ultimately the killer's own father, who happened to be the police chief and was responsible for destroying his daughter's psyche after the accidental death of his son some twenty years earlier (and had also continually reset the Wisemen system when it generated his daughter's name as the main suspect in the killings, until he ultimately deleted her records from the system after the third killing). Based on the way the player completed his investigation, he could save or sacrifice certain supporting characters on the way towards a number of endings, the worst of which implicated him as something of an accomplice, with him having an affair with the killer during a stay at a psychiatric facility after suffering a mental break down on the job. That was the bad ending though. The best one ended with the player keeping his selected love interest alive, exposing the killer, and rescuing the final victim before he/she could be murdered. I'm considering keeping the actual 'engine' for the game, and just developing a new story with completely original art, but not any time soon.
I'm just barely scratching the surface. I have a bunch of old notebooks packed away someplace with several complete games detailed in them. Unfortunately, I'm a lot better at the "thinking about stuff" phase then I am at the implementation.

The Phoenix Down to Kill a Boss thing actually made sense in the context of the game. Phoenix Downs took players who were dead (and not able to act) and reversed their condition, bringing them to life. It is not that great a leap of (videogame) logic to start wondering if using a Phoenix Down on something that was dead (undead - and able to move) might also reverse its condition! I actually remember thinking it might resurrect it into a living form that I would then be able to kill normally, but the instant kill worked well too.

I don't like games/bosses/whatever that have only one way to really beat them (aside from point&click adventure games, to a degree, where it is kind of a staple), especially if that one way is something that would not occur to me under normal circumstances. Having never played FFXI, I would never have thought "oh hey, poison is going to be my anti-sleep ward."

I've quit and immediately uninstalled/deleted RM2k3 games that threw a status effect at me right off the bat that I could nether defend against nor remedy. If I'm on the very first screen and I get poisoned with something that lasts after a battle and that I have no antidote for (nor apparent access to one), and that game is not called "Deadline - See how far you can get before you are thrust into a random battle with 1 hp left", then I'm going to say "Bad Game Design" as I alt-f4 out of it. Relevant point - I hate poison, so poisoning myself would be very strange.

I think you should try to make a game that does not require your very own set of circumstances/experiences to solve. You should never take for granted what the player does or does not know. If they need to know something obscure, make sure that you teach it to them well beforehand.

Also, I hate having to use a guide. Sometimes when I get stuck and have tried everything that makes sense, and a few things that don't, I'll knuckle under and take a quick look at a guide. Usually it only takes once or twice before I get a grip on the game's internal logic and can parse out future issues on my own. Any more than that, though, and I might as well just look for a lets play of the game on youtube, because I'm not really playing it for myself at that point. You never want something that is going to force a disconnect between your medium and your audience.

I hadn't even heard of Adrift until your game post, so I'm not familiar with it at all, but is there a way to configure it to filter the player inputs any?

I made a little subroutine for my qbasic text games that would sift through the player's input string for recognized commands, targets, and descriptors, while it removed any superfluous text, but without effecting what was displayed on the screen to the player. That way, if "look" was an accepted command, and "door" was an accepted target, the player could have typed in "I want to look at the prettiest damn door in the history of interior decoration" and they would have gotten the same result as if they'd simply entered "look door"

As long as the gameplay is balanced, and by that I mean that the enemies are subject to the same rules as the player, I have no problem with losing a battle because the virtual dice decided against me. As long as enemies can critically fail, I don't mind it happening to my party now and again. It is one of those game mechanics that I've decided to accept, like turn based encounters.

When I first tried rpgs, I hated the idea of just having to wait around and let stuff hit me... especially when my character would miss, and get hit a few mores times before I could try again. That's not really what fighting is like. Then again, if I want to employ stop hits and broken rhythm, I could go play other types of games or shove some large person in a bar.

Game mechanics are subject to evolution and extinction just like anything else. The ones that work well tend to get perpetuated and the others, well, not so much. In most any rpg I've heard of in the last decade or so, you don't have to worry about "memorizing" spells. Your character doesn't have to sit at the campfire and memorize shocking grasp over and over again for each time he'd like to use it in a battle. All he has to do is snag it at a level up, and have the required amount of mana to use it.

Even the mana mechanic has begun to fade now, with the advent of the cooldown system.

There has to be some reason the d20 model has survived this long when other conventions have fallen by the wayside. To me, unless a game involves psychics, there is really no reason to remove random variation from its calculations. It is a good way of making things more 'realistic', because chance does factor into a great many things. It probably isn't good form to use a movie example to illustrate 'realism', but I've had Unforgiven on the brain lately.

The Duke of Death vs Two Gun Corcoran (the version as related by Little Bill - with some d20 interpretations that I kind of have to fake, having never actually sat down at a d&d table myself).

This is a little similar to what I'm doing with one of my projects. In my experience with it, the auto-battle option will completely ignore the fact that skills have mp costs and just use a basic physical attack, even if the normal "Attack" option is not included in the character's battle commands. To keep prospective players from exploiting that, I went ahead and made the hit chance on all weapons 2%. For someone playing the game normally, they'll never suffer because of it, since the attacking skills have their own success probability, but anyone who relies on auto-battle will be screwed.