LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

I prefer games with main characters, rather than games where I am the main character. But it's not a hard preference. I can enjoy both, I just find that the former usually has better writing.

The theory behind letting the player be the main character is that they will connect with the story better. There's some logic behind this: they are making decisions themselves. They aren't just watching a character on screen choose to save the world, they're choosing to save it themselves. As a result, the game seems a lot more real. The player is invested in the story on a personal level that is unique to video games, and cannot be replicated in books or film.

However, personally, I find that whether or not I can adopt that mentality has nothing at all to do with whether the main character has his own personality or not. Sure, I feel that sense of personal investment in the story when I play Zelda: Twilight Princess or Chrono Trigger, but I also feel it when I play Final Fantasy 6 or Warcraft 3. And I definitely don't feel it when I play Knights of the Old Republic or Dragon Age: Origins, even though those are great games.

What triggers the feeling for me isn't that I feel like the main character represents me. What triggers the feeling for me is that I feel like my actions in the game were important.

In Chrono Trigger, Crono is *barely* a silent protagonist - he makes all sorts of gestures, while Lucca and Marle speak for him and exclaim that the three of them are going to save the world. But over the course of the game, I, as the player, travel through time and bring peace to the middle ages, become deeply attached to Frog's plight, bring a glimmer of hope to the horrible state of affairs in the future, and ensure the survival of the human race in the jurassic age. At the end of that sequence of events, I feel attached to the world. I've built this world - I've travelled through time and undertaken impossible ordeals to ensure its survival - and yet this alien beast is still bursting from the ground, destroying all of civilization, destroying everything I worked for!? Fuck that! I worked too hard for that! I'm going to KICK LAVOS'S GIANT SPIKY ASS.

In Final Fantasy 6, a similar thing happens. But FF6 constantly has you playing as lots of different characters. Terra, ostensibly the main character, isn't even *allowed* to be on your team for half of the game, and is optional for much of the rest. But that doesn't stop me from getting attached to the people and the world. It doesn't matter that Sabin and Cyan were the ones who fought a losing battle in Doma, while Locke was the one who rescued Celes in South Figaro. To me, those are both things that *I* did. And so they matter to me. And when Locke doubts Celes and she leaves the team, I'm heartbroken, and when the people of Doma pass on to the afterlife, it hits home, because that was my family.

However, not every game's events reach me to such an extent. Sometimes the events are very moving and very well done, but I feel no differently than if I'd seen them in a movie. When I play Final Fantasy 13, I adore Lightning as a main character, I love all the characters except for Hope, I think the story and pacing and writing are amazing, but I don't really feel that their plight is my own. Everything important that happens is a cut scene. I'm not given objectives to perform - I'm just given a destination, and the characters do some unexpected thing when I get there. There's something that triggers inside my brain when I'm the one doing the important tasks, and as a result I feel much more involved in the story. FF13 is a fantastic game with a fantastic story that's presented in an extremely innovative and dynamic way, but by and large, it doesn't trigger that personal response.

Typically I make the hardest mode first as the "original" difficulty, and then edit it to make the easier modes. If I do it the other way around, I end up accidentally making some parts of the game nearly impossible.

And yeah, "enemy attacks have a chance to pierce defense" or "enemy attacks pierce 50% of defense" would be better. You want defense to do SOMETHING. Otherwise why does it exist? I'm also not crazy about double HP, since making fights longer doesn't usually make them much harder in most games, but maybe it works well for you. I'd have to play both modes to be sure.

author=ChaosProductions
The problem at hand was that it wasn't really game making that was going on - just map making. No real game was being made. People were just fapping over vaperware.

The idea was to curb that, and make people put their money where their mouth is.

How is the "what are you working on" thread any different? It's exactly the same except for every other part of your game except maps.

And maps, while not exactly the keystone of game design, are still pretty useful to do well. They make a nice first impression and so on and so forth. I too would appreciate such a thread. I would really enjoy reading people giving advice about maps and graphics because mine are kind of atrocious at times. It would be nice to have that all in one place instead of having to check the comments for every screenshot of every game on the site. Is there an actual rule against screenshot threads?

I find Sibyl far more interesting, personally. Having to decide each turn between building points or using them feels more interesting to me than just deciding which characters/skills to bring into battle and just having a preset ratio based on that. Not that deciding what to bring into battle is boring by any means - but I like it when both types of choices are important. I like it when every action in a battle requires a meaningful tradeoff.

If blitzers having non-bp-building-skills doesn't fit into your scheme, then maybe just make some of the stronger skills build BP more slowly. I dunno, I'm just rambling, this sort of thing probably belongs in design/theory.

I like the idea of the party-wide burst gauge, Craze. Is there a stronger version of the Second Wind spell that doesn't increase burst points, or increases them more slowly? It seems like that would create a nice tension - the trade-off would mean the player has to choose a spell intelligently each turn, instead of just always getting a miracle every 10 hits. The player would have to choose which of their two characters to focus on.