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LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
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The Unofficial Squaresoft MUD is a free online game based on the worlds and combat systems of your favorite Squaresoft games. UOSSMUD includes job trees from FFT and FF5, advanced classes from multiple other Square games, and worlds based extremely accurately upon Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasies 5, 6, and 7. Travel through the original worlds and experience events that mirror those of the original games in an online, multiplayer format.
If a large, highly customized MUD, now over 10 years old and still being expanded, with a job system and worlds based on some of the most popular console RPGs seems interesting to you, feel free to log on and check it out. Visit uossmud.sandwich.net for information about logging on.
If a large, highly customized MUD, now over 10 years old and still being expanded, with a job system and worlds based on some of the most popular console RPGs seems interesting to you, feel free to log on and check it out. Visit uossmud.sandwich.net for information about logging on.
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Could anyone throw me a few city mapping pointers?
It looks like a suburb, not a city. Get rid of the grass, replace it with cement. Or with buildings.
Here are two reasonably dense cities from FF6: Nikeah and Zozo. Nikeah has a sizable outdoor marketplace, while Zozo is a slum. You can get a lot of good ideas from both. Note the heavy use of cement and brick ground. Roads are all only two to four tiles wide in Nikeah, though Zozo has a couple of slightly larger areas because it's full of random battles. Both have plenty of buildings you can't get to - in Zozo they all run off the bottom edge of the map, while in Nikeah they just don't have doors.
If you want it to be really urban, here are some blurry maps of Koorong from SaGa Frontier. Note that only the upper left quarter of that image is the town proper. The three screenshots with neon signs are outdoors, while the others in that section are the insides of buildings. The rest of that image is the abandoned slums and sewers that serve as a dungeon. If you want your town to look less modern, just get rid of the neon signs. Once again, about half of the buildings aren't actually enterable. Though in this case I'm not sure why, since there are as many outdoor vendors as unenterable buildings... Maybe street peddlers felt more slummy to the designers?
Here are two reasonably dense cities from FF6: Nikeah and Zozo. Nikeah has a sizable outdoor marketplace, while Zozo is a slum. You can get a lot of good ideas from both. Note the heavy use of cement and brick ground. Roads are all only two to four tiles wide in Nikeah, though Zozo has a couple of slightly larger areas because it's full of random battles. Both have plenty of buildings you can't get to - in Zozo they all run off the bottom edge of the map, while in Nikeah they just don't have doors.
If you want it to be really urban, here are some blurry maps of Koorong from SaGa Frontier. Note that only the upper left quarter of that image is the town proper. The three screenshots with neon signs are outdoors, while the others in that section are the insides of buildings. The rest of that image is the abandoned slums and sewers that serve as a dungeon. If you want your town to look less modern, just get rid of the neon signs. Once again, about half of the buildings aren't actually enterable. Though in this case I'm not sure why, since there are as many outdoor vendors as unenterable buildings... Maybe street peddlers felt more slummy to the designers?
Could anyone throw me a few city mapping pointers?
If you want it to seem more like a city, put the buildings side-by-side without any space in between. Cities are denser than countryside villages.
Not every building has to be enterable, but don't waste space. One method is to make buildings that you can't even get to the front of. Just don't give them doors, or the player might spend all day trying to find a way to get there!
You can make roads, rows of buildings, and anything else run off the edge of the map. This gives the impression that the town continues well beyond what the player can access. If your style of mapmaking includes the general rule "walking to the edge of a map takes you to the next area", then you'll have to get a little bit creative with how you do this.
Multiple heights can help - a brick wall that leads up or down from the main level, and on the other height are buildings you can only see parts of. The fact that they're a different height can work as a visual clue to the player that they're not part of the accessible town. Making them be darkened or washed-out colors can help too.
Not every building has to be enterable, but don't waste space. One method is to make buildings that you can't even get to the front of. Just don't give them doors, or the player might spend all day trying to find a way to get there!
You can make roads, rows of buildings, and anything else run off the edge of the map. This gives the impression that the town continues well beyond what the player can access. If your style of mapmaking includes the general rule "walking to the edge of a map takes you to the next area", then you'll have to get a little bit creative with how you do this.
Multiple heights can help - a brick wall that leads up or down from the main level, and on the other height are buildings you can only see parts of. The fact that they're a different height can work as a visual clue to the player that they're not part of the accessible town. Making them be darkened or washed-out colors can help too.
[Rpgmaker2003] Battler and Char-set request
Are you using the normal RPG Maker 2003 style of sprites that come with the game, or a different style? People would need to know what kind of style to make these characters in. The RTP sprites are a pretty distinctive style, and it would look really weird if they were mixed together with sprites that are in the style of Lufia 2 or Final Fantasy 6 or Chrono Trigger.
LoZ rpg
Stat ups buy using cash instead of leveling system.
The only difference between experience and gold is what they're named.
Usually they're implemented to be different from each-other - for instance, it's rare (though not unheard of) to be able to give up some of your power or abilities and receive XP or AP. And it's rare to be able to spend gold in dungeons, but more often than not, the benefits of XP are gained automatically as soon as you're eligible for them. But at heart, any type of points are just currency. You receive them from doing things and use them to receive things. You can call them whatever you want.
The question you really want to ask is, is it wise to have a game where there is only one type of currency? And that depends on how well you do it. Without knowing more about your game, it's hard to say whether it would fit well. How many different things will it be spent on? How will these be balanced against each-other? I'm definitely all for making the player pick and choose what he will spend his hard-earned points on. This allows for a level of character customization that helps really flesh a game out. But if you make the same type of points be spent on too many things, or if they're not well balanced against each-other, then you will find the player ignoring major aspects of the game.
Also, as a purely semantic point, it sounds like your currency would be better named AP instead of gold.
Usually they're implemented to be different from each-other - for instance, it's rare (though not unheard of) to be able to give up some of your power or abilities and receive XP or AP. And it's rare to be able to spend gold in dungeons, but more often than not, the benefits of XP are gained automatically as soon as you're eligible for them. But at heart, any type of points are just currency. You receive them from doing things and use them to receive things. You can call them whatever you want.
The question you really want to ask is, is it wise to have a game where there is only one type of currency? And that depends on how well you do it. Without knowing more about your game, it's hard to say whether it would fit well. How many different things will it be spent on? How will these be balanced against each-other? I'm definitely all for making the player pick and choose what he will spend his hard-earned points on. This allows for a level of character customization that helps really flesh a game out. But if you make the same type of points be spent on too many things, or if they're not well balanced against each-other, then you will find the player ignoring major aspects of the game.
Also, as a purely semantic point, it sounds like your currency would be better named AP instead of gold.
Help with event issues, please?
Let's try this a different way. I assume these are buttons on the floor or something of that nature.
Make an event in the room. Not on any of the tiles, but up in the corner, invisible, running as a parallel process.
In the parallel process, set variables equal to the hero's X and Y coordinates. Now, right after that, do two conditional branches inside each-other: so that if the variables are both specific numbers (those numbers being the X and Y coordinates of the button on the floor), then does one thing, and if either of the two conditions are false, then it does something else.
The thing it should do if both conditions are true is turn on a switch. We'll call this switch "Switch A". If either of the conditions are false, it calls a second event.
The second event should also be invisible, and must be somewhere the player cannot reach. (If the player can reach every tile on the map, make it a common event.) In this second event, check if Switch A is on. If it is, then turn on a second switch, Switch B. If it's not, then do nothing.
Now, finally, make the actual event for the button on the ground. It should be placed whereever you want the button to be, obviously. Make it be two pages. The first page of the event should be the default if Switch B is turned off, and the second page should only happen if Switch B is turned on. The first page of this event should be passable, and the second page should be impassable. The two pages can have different graphics, if you want.
If you have a bunch of these buttons side-by-side, which I assume to be the case, then this solution is by far the cleanest - since it confines all the work to two events up in the corner of the map, and doesn't require every single tile to do 5 different things. If you only have one button, then this is overkill, and you should just do whatever those guys said above.
Make an event in the room. Not on any of the tiles, but up in the corner, invisible, running as a parallel process.
In the parallel process, set variables equal to the hero's X and Y coordinates. Now, right after that, do two conditional branches inside each-other: so that if the variables are both specific numbers (those numbers being the X and Y coordinates of the button on the floor), then does one thing, and if either of the two conditions are false, then it does something else.
The thing it should do if both conditions are true is turn on a switch. We'll call this switch "Switch A". If either of the conditions are false, it calls a second event.
The second event should also be invisible, and must be somewhere the player cannot reach. (If the player can reach every tile on the map, make it a common event.) In this second event, check if Switch A is on. If it is, then turn on a second switch, Switch B. If it's not, then do nothing.
Now, finally, make the actual event for the button on the ground. It should be placed whereever you want the button to be, obviously. Make it be two pages. The first page of the event should be the default if Switch B is turned off, and the second page should only happen if Switch B is turned on. The first page of this event should be passable, and the second page should be impassable. The two pages can have different graphics, if you want.
If you have a bunch of these buttons side-by-side, which I assume to be the case, then this solution is by far the cleanest - since it confines all the work to two events up in the corner of the map, and doesn't require every single tile to do 5 different things. If you only have one button, then this is overkill, and you should just do whatever those guys said above.
IT'S ALL ABOUT DEM MIND GAMES
Level grinding, maximizing your characters' equipment and stats, etc. can of course make those gimmicks somewhat less useful in the long term - nevertheless, I would still enjoy fighting bosses that require me to think about more than how well-prepared my characters are.
And this is exactly why I hate grinding, right here.
IT'S ALL ABOUT DEM MIND GAMES
A suddenly difficult boss that forces the player to change his strategy and explore his options is blatantly negative?
Difficulty is great. But there's a thing called a difficulty curve. If the boss is difficult, you should be gradually ramping the player up to face that level of difficulty - not jumping from enemies that take away 3% of your HP to ones that take away 75% of your HP. Seriously, it just makes people stop playing the game.
I don't think grinding is an inherently bad thing, either. HAVING to grind, maybe. But the option? Nah.
Encouraging the player to do something is not really better than forcing them to do it. Either way, it results in them doing it. And I don't want them to do it.
I strongly dislike the ability to optionally make yourself retardedly strong via grind. Grind is insanely boring, and the only reason you'd ever do it is to make yourself stronger than your supposed to be. This is a mental compulsion - we want to be stronger, it's how our brain works. There are goals with rewards, so we want to do them, no matter how boring they are. But, the fact is, if you're stronger than you're supposed to be, the game is a lot less fun. All the challenge disappears, replaced by grind. It's lose-lose, and makes the game less fun in every way, but we do it anyway because that's how we're wired.Really? I actually like grinding to make myself a bit stronger. For me the option to do that is almost a requirement. I would probably be really turned off from a game that didn't allow you to grind. First time when I played FFT I thought there weren't any repeatable battles so I ditched it and didn't come back to it for months.
The ability to train to make your characters stronger is fine. It's basically the definition of an RPG (unless you think the definition of an RPG is something else, in which case you can argue in a different topic). What I want to know is why that training needs to be boring and repetitive. Why do the same exact battle 20 times in a row? If you've done it once, shouldn't that be proof that you can beat it? It seems like battles should all present some sort of challenge and should all be fun and engaging. Why make the player repeat non-fun, non-engaging tasks exactly the same way, over and over? There should be a better way. A way to let people build their power, but without any repetition.
IT'S ALL ABOUT DEM MIND GAMES
I dunno, I know more people than not who refuse to ever be at suboptimal power. If the power is available, then we want it, because it's power. We don't consciously do it to make the game unfun - our intuition says that the point of the game is to overcome the challenges, and to overcome challenges we need power, so we should collect power. But the end result is usually - not always, as your example of the SaGa series shows, but almost always - that the battles themselves no longer involve any sort of tactics or challenge once we have obtained all the power possible. They become too easy, and no longer keep us on the edge of our seats.
Part of the reason you don't mind grinding is because we as humans enjoy doing things for a reward. But the other part of the reason you don't mind grinding is, most likely, because you haven't played many RPGs that grant the same type of reward structure but without the grind. The rewards for the work are what you want - that's the mind game that you need to try to utilize. The work being incredibly repetitive is not something that helps your game out.
Most of the other ideas in the OP are equally annoying. Poorly thought out difficulty curves, grinding, and uncompelling gameplay are the three most intolerable ways to kill an RPG. They're not mind games in themselves - they're blatantly negative things, but mind games can make the player look past them.
Part of the reason you don't mind grinding is because we as humans enjoy doing things for a reward. But the other part of the reason you don't mind grinding is, most likely, because you haven't played many RPGs that grant the same type of reward structure but without the grind. The rewards for the work are what you want - that's the mind game that you need to try to utilize. The work being incredibly repetitive is not something that helps your game out.
Most of the other ideas in the OP are equally annoying. Poorly thought out difficulty curves, grinding, and uncompelling gameplay are the three most intolerable ways to kill an RPG. They're not mind games in themselves - they're blatantly negative things, but mind games can make the player look past them.
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