LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

It bothers me that you remade an SNES town in an NES tileset and it looks better instead of worse. Why does it look better? Why are FF4's graphics so bad?

Switching the engine is the same thing as abandoning the project

Holy crap, that is a lot of fanfic.

And... a really convincing portrayal of Hermoine! Bravo, this is the first one that had real effort put into it. At least I hope it was. Not putting in any real effort is fine too, but this was a fun read.

This is terrible and I hate it and it's PERFECT. Thank you very much for your contribution!

I rolled 34, 43 for my first set, and I don't know anything about Luffy beyond what he looks like, so I will be reporting back with either a terrible Cirno X Miku slashfic or a terrible Xena X Miku slashfic shortly.

Edit: I have returned with fanfiction.

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"What!? That should've hit!" yelled Cirno, as her second flurry of icy bullets filled the screen, forming a beautiful snowflake pattern as they flew in every direction.

Virtual idol Hatsune Miku danced expertly between the hail of slow-moving energy bullets, however, singing along with Cirno's theme song Beloved Tomboyish Girl in order to perfectly time her movements. It doesn't actually have lyrics but nobody can understand Miku's singing anyway so it's fine.

Cirno shouted angrily, "Whaddya even doin' here? Get away from my lake already! I'll beat the heck outta you, stupid dancer! What are you even singing!?"

Hatsune Miku danced and spun on the surface of the frozen lake, weaving between bullets until she was at Cirno's side. The bullets brushed up against every inch of Miku's holographic skin, but her hit box was actually really really small because her body was a holographic image, so she was fine. This just made Cirno angrier.

"I'm here for you, little ice fairy," Miku whispered in Cirno's ear as she grabbed Cirno around the waist and lifted her up into the air. "Your music and... your body." Her voice was like music. I mean literally because every single word was autotuned to match the melody of Cirno's theme song which was still inexplicably playing in the background.

Cirno blushed bright red. I mean blue. Maybe it would be blue? I don't know. I've never really thought about this before. Hold on, let me check some fanart, maybe there's an unofficial answer in the Touhou fan-canon somewhere.

OK so she definitely blushes red, but remind me to come back to some of this fanart later.

As Cirno's bullets touched her in sensitive places, Miku started shivering and autotune-moaning. Cirno blasted all of Miku's clothes off with a spray of energy bullets, except for her hair loop things which always stay on. Miku started licking on one of Cirno's icicle wings to see how sensitive it was, but her tongue got stuck like Ralphie from A Christmas Story, and Cirno just burst out laughing and calling her an idiot, and it basically ruined the mood. Once it was obvious that the song was just looping at this point, Miku sighed and left.

"Hahahaha! Once again the strongest fairy wins!" shouted Cirno trimphantly.

In a couple of my games with touch encounters, I made about half of the battles unavoidable. They would trigger upon stepping on a certain tile, or opening a door, or getting close to an enemy that stood in place in the center of a path. And many of the avoidable ones had visible treasure chests behind them, so players were encouraged to fight them anyway. This made the player's XP a lot easier to predict, but more importantly, it made the battles feel like a bigger part of the game. If players want to skip all of my battles, then I've failed at making them fun; if I've made them fun, then I want players to engage with them.

I have another game where enemies are basically touch encounters except they don't move or approach you. They're like neutral MMORPG enemies that don't attack you unless you attack first. This applies to almost every enemy in the game, except during specific mission events. However, there are over a hundred missions, which always have objectives that involve killing monsters. Sometimes it's a simple "Kill 20 goblins in this area and return to the mission NPC" and sometimes it's a more complicated "Take part in an event where an NPC helps you fight a gauntlet of 30 enemies that keep appearing every few rounds" and sometimes it's like "Once you start the mission, you can't leave the area without defeating all enemies."

But even with all that, players are expected to get a lot of their XP from fighting extra enemies that aren't part of any mission. These might be enemies they're trying to collect crafting ingredients from, enemies that have chocobo eggs which sometimes appear at random, enemies in the procedurally generated Deep Dungeon which has aggressive enemies blocking every room but gives extra rewards, enemies fought as part of various other minigames and sidequests, or just things the players fight purely to gain more XP.

So the game is balanced assuming that you not only did almost everything, but also at higher levels it assumes that you did some grinding on top of that. It even tells you what your expected level is for each area and mission. If you're not strong enough, go back and get stronger.

I generally don't like when too many touch encounters are completely avoidable, because skipping gameplay shouldn't be a reward for doing something well. Usually in most other types of games, the reward for doing well at something is unlocking more gameplay.

Of course, if you do expect 90% of your touch encounters to be avoided, you can just make bosses give 50x the XP of normal enemies, and have a steep experience curve where every level takes 50% more XP than the level before it. That will result in a player who skips every fight only being about two levels behind a player who fights every fight. Or you can give XP per dungeon instead of per encounter, which is essentially the same as giving XP for fights that were overcome in any way, whether defeated or avoided. Or you can just make levels do very little, so a max level player is only about 10x stronger than a level 1 player instead of 800x stronger.