LDANARKOS'S PROFILE

I've been playing with RM2K since 2000. Been working on my current project since 2006. My approach to game-making involves attempting to do things that I've never seen in other games, and incorporating all of the elements of film making (lighting, music, symbolism, deep structure, plot twists, panning, zooming, cuts, etc.) into game making. The RPG's I've spent the most time playing are FF1 and FF6, followed by Super Mario RPG, FF4, and FF5.
The Sun Is A Star
Fantasy RPG with 6-character party size and mild humor

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P6 Blog #7 Field Abilities, your thoughts?

Sounds good. I have considered a monster-repellent field ability myself, as well as a Clairvoyance field ability. Clairvoyance, when activated, basically allows you to use the D-pad to pan screen repeatedly, and when you're done looking around, you can return the camera to focusing on the hero.

Have you played Final Fantasy I? Why not?

Well, the real experience beacon was near the second town in the game where you could fight ZomBulls, Trolls, FrostWolfs, and Pedes; which rewarded enough exp and gold that you basically leveled-up every single battle.

But the hall of giants was a decent place to grind exp at the Earth Cave. You didn't have to walk like 11 steps to trigger a random encounter, and you were confronted with 4 Giants, so it was a good place to unload your best magic, collect some good exp, and not waste a lot of time wandering around seeking encounters. If you tried to beat the Earth fiend and died, and needed to grind exp, then this is where you would do it while you were ramping-up for the rematch.

Have you played Final Fantasy I? Why not?

I have beaten FF1 about 20 times. My favorite aspect, by far, is the party selection. There is some degree of strategy that goes into choosing a party that will complete the game in the shortest amount of time. I generally think the optimal party for speed is 2 Fighters, 1 Black / Red Mage, and 1 Red / White Mage; but it is rather time consuming to narrow it down any further than that. I would probably make some adjustments to the end game difficulty so that the Black Belt's end game power was relevant enough to make the class a possible consideration, and just make radical changes to the Thief class so that it wasn't complete garbage. I also like the fact that the game contains the Provoka-adjacent experience beacon, whereby when you're still extremely early in the game, you can encounter very high level monsters from the second half of the game and fight nigh-unwinnable battles for massive Exp / Gold rewards. I decided to incorporate similar experience beacons in my game so that the player could speed-up grinding if they were feeling frisky.

Things the game was poor at: really slow message boxes, slow shopping experience, slow grinding experience, all dialogue is uber generic, and numerous other grievances that can be readily excused since it's an NES game. FF1 was honestly extraordinarily great relative to the platform.

author=Luiishu535
There was this cave that triggered a random battle every step (it was ridiculous).
That was just one elbow of the first floor of the Earth Cave, and it's not an area you have to pass through to complete the cave. To get to the second floor, you go in the other direction.

Does it matter that we use the Christian cross in our games?

As far as connections between the real world and a game's semiology, culture, etc., my perspectives are thus:
-Any resemblance is coincidental. You have these Japanese chipsets on some alien world where Japan doesn't exist. So what? This game just so happens to have an alien culture where everything looks shockingly similar to the Japanese style and that's just part of this world that I created, so deal with it.
-Some symbolism is conveniently digestible. You have some church with stained-glass windows and some cross on it and the player immediately understands what they're looking at. If you change the style of the building too much and change the cross to some other symbol, then they may not know on first glance that they're looking at a church. If you have a clinic with a caduceus or a red cross, then it's easily identifiable as a clinic, but if your world has some X or T or w/e as its medical / first aid symbol, then the player is just not going to get it. You might as well take advantage of the fact that players know what certain symbols mean, because players sometimes give up on community games pretty early on and don't want to invest tons of time learning a bunch of new mechanics, memorizing a bunch of lore, learning what a bunch of new symbols are, etc.. They want to be able to have instant, innate understanding of all of the games mechanics and only be challenged by the things that are intended to present a challenge.

LockeZ designs boss battles for you

author=LockeZ
The last person to message me was all like, "Can you also make and plan the placement of all the combat, items, spells, monsters, skills and equipment in the entire game for me? I need the game done in two weeks."

There's a limit to my generosity, guys. Please try to keep your requests sane. I mean, I guess you can request anything you want, but if you request hundreds of hours of work I reserve the right to say no.

Need you to make game for me. Also, you can take credit if you want. Brb, vacationing in Africa.

Resource Museum

This is a recoloring I did of a Cecil charset. I also altered the hair so it would look slightly less like Cecil.

and here's a faceset I made to go with it

Hey could someone help me make some facesets?

I use FaceMaker for starters. Then I save it to the proper file format, which causes loss of color information, since I don't know what I'm doing. Then I fix the lost color in iDraw and edit the fine details while looking at pictures of real people on google images as guidelines. It has worked out fine for me.

Resource Museum

I did a re-color of some RM2K(3) NPC's so that when you need irrelevant filler NPC's for your many towns, you aren't using the exact same sprites for each town. IMO, same sprite = same character following you around from town to town.








I made this face for the charset of Clyde from FF6. In my game, Clyde is similar to Indiana Jones, so it also has elements of Indiana's appearance.

I made this face for the third character in the UPRCset charset. It's also based on the appearance of Top Dollar from The Crow.

If you want Morgan Freeman to be the narrator of your game, I made this faceset...

How to expose higher difficulty to players?

You can put a difficulty setting in your menu system. Then when a monster encounter occurs, depending on which difficulty setting is selected, call the easy, medium, or hard monster party (90% HP, 100%, or 110%).

[Poll] How Much “Planning” Or “Prepping” Do You Do Before Starting Your Game(s)?

This topic seems like something I've seen many times before...

My opinion on planning is that you need to have an extremely organized system of variables before you start your game to make programming your CBS and CMS easier (if you choose to make them). A disorganized database of variables will make programming hell for you later.

I personally think planning anything else can be a big problem. In my experience, thinking of an amazing plot takes a lot of time, so if you try to do that before starting, then you're delaying getting started and wasting a lot of time. More crucially, I find that in anything creative, once you start concretely filling-in some details, the next idea will come. So if you just begin making all of your maps and dropping named NPC's into them, you can start writing some dialogue involving the NPC's, and the dialogue you make-up will evolve into facts and back story. Then you're not writing plot in the vacuum of an empty universe, you're writing it in a world that already exists with characters that already have personalities and stories; that makes it a lot easier to make the next connection or think of the next idea by jumping-off of the previous detail you filled-in. My experience with writing lyrics is the same -- it is harder to abstractly plan the entire song at once than it is to start writing the beginning, and then letting what you've written lead you to the next detail, and just keep writing the next thing as a reaction to the previous thing. Once you have a fairly unremarkable first draft of your RPG, it becomes a lot easier to change details to make them amazing. For instance, once you've established a certain symbolism or motif in the game, you can go back and edit the dialogue in ways to incorporate the motif. When it comes to scripts / stories / rpg's, I find it a lot easier to write mediocrity and edit it into greatness than it is to just pull something perfect right out of a void.