LOUISCYPHRE'S PROFILE

LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
I am also called Rasalhage these days.
Essence Enforcer
An Enforcer's duty is to protect the city and the people. But what, exactly, does that mean?

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GRS, explain yourself!



what is this awesome

sorry you're not getting rid of me that easily

Oh, what sweet pain it was to be without Internet.

Out of content - Time to restart, right?

So I went to boot up a save of a fairly decent game that I had previously enjoyed. I went crawling around, looking for someone to throw down with. And I kept looking... And I kept looking.

...And kept looking.

Turns out, every encounter in the game world was dead. I had these awesome end-game swords, a bunch of kick-ass skills, and a couple of well-trained party members... for nothing. The game had no more content to offer me, not even repeatable content. Couldn't send my loot to a new cycle, find re-spawned enemies to stop, nothing. All of the rewards I had accumulated over the course of the game was wasted.

I was a tad miffed by this at first, but then I got to thinking - what are we doing to prevent this in our games? What's stopping all of those skills and powers from going to waste after the final confrontation?

The way I see it, there's a myriad of ways we can prevent this.

New Game Plus seems like the most obvious solution - allow the player to keep all of their goodies for a fresh playthrough of the game. This works best for games with multiple routes or other forms of non-linearity, obviously. It might be wise to make enemies stronger on a NG+.

Post-game quests are a wholly viable option. Bonus dungeons and tournaments are good ways for end-game characters to apply their abilities and powers. Bonus points if the quests require only the player's skill, by forcing a particular setup or eliminating common crutches, such as the Battle Tower in most Poke games.

Re-spawning enemies, especially of the extremely powerful kind, can give a player something to do every so often. These are especially nice if they take the form of oh shit enemies from earlier in the game, such as FFXIII's Adamantoise.

Seems simple enough to me. Why aren't you giving your player an incentive to stick around after the curtain call, if they so choose?

Why does dying have to suck?


Why is this bad?





Yeah, I questioned it.

Everyone hates dying in an RPG. Go on, admit it. You're not alone - no one likes losing thirty minutes of progress and having to re-watch that ten minute cutscene just to get back to that boss that casts instant death on the party. We see RPGs become easier and easier just to prevent you from having to reload your save file, trod through that loading screen, and watch that scene more than you have to. After all, what fun is a game where you have trouble proceeding, right?

Let's think for a second here: what causes a game over in an RPG? A challenging battle, the kind most RPG fans claim they want.



At least Matador kicks your ass with style. Now to re-crawl that dungeon.


Players want hard battles, but don't want to redo everything between between the save and the fight itself. Seems simple enough. So why don't RPGs deliver that: challenging battles with minimal penalties for dying?

Granted, some do buck this trend. When you're erased in The World Ends With You, you're presented with the option to retry the battle, retry the battle on easy difficulty, escape the battle (which always succeeds), or quit to the title screen. FF13 pulls you out of the battle entirely and lets you open your menu to rethink your strategy. FF6 sent you back to your last save point but allowed you to keep your experience, helping take the sting out of lost progress. The Pokémon games kick you back to the last inn poké-center and takes some of your money, but allows you to keep all of the EXP you earned.



Now, the question at hand - why aren't we minimizing penalties for losing?



It's been said time and again in this community that holding the player's interest is vital when there's no investment in playing our games. If a player loses to one of our bosses, they're not obligated by a $40 or $60 purchase to re-watch whatever pre-battle cutscene; they can just recycle-bin the offending game and move to the next piece of freeware entertainment. Allowing a player free attempts at a boss - or any other fight for that matter - can stop them from dropping your game cold when they hit a patch of bad luck.

What does free retries let you do as a developer? For one, regular enemies can pose a threat without being innately frustrating. You can have marauding horrors that players will actually tackle head-on, instead of mashing Escape to preserve their precious progress. You can get away with being a little bit tougher, a little bit meaner, because you don't have to fear the player ragequitting your game nearly as much. Keeping a player playing is the number one dilemma in amateur game design, after all, and anything that helps keep players in control is too good not to have.



So? What's your excuse for not having retries on your battles?

Why genre descriptions when submitting a new game would be an ace idea.

Wikipedia says an SRPG is:
This sub-genre of role-playing game principally refers to games which incorporate elements from strategy games as an alternative to traditional role-playing game (RPG) systems. Like standard RPGs, the player controls a finite party and battles a similar number of enemies. And like other RPGs, death is usually temporary. But this genre incorporates strategic gameplay such as tactical movement on an isometric grid. Unlike other video game genres, tactical RPGs tend not to feature multiplayer play.

A distinct difference between tactical RPGs and traditional RPGs is the lack of exploration. For instance, Final Fantasy Tactics does away with the typical third-person exploration to towns and dungeons that are typical in a Final Fantasy game. Instead of exploration, there is an emphasis on battle strategy. Players are able to build and train characters to use in battle, utilizing different classes, including warriors and magic users, depending on the game. Characters gain experience points from battle and grow stronger and games like Final Fantasy Tactics award characters secondary experience points which can be used to advance in specific character classes. Battles will have specific winning conditions, such as defeating all the enemies on the map, that the player must accomplish before the next map will become available. In between battles, characters can access their characters to equip them, change classes, train them, depending on the game.


Tropesland says an SRPG is:
Console-style turn based strategy games are also more common on handhelds than on set-tops, and in Japan, where a long-running series is Super Robot Wars, a Massive Multiplayer Crossover game among many of Bandai's series and occasionally those of some other companies as well. In fact, some normally realtime series have been converted to this genre for handheld installments. Turn based strategy stands up especially well to the limited controls and computational muscle of handhelds, not to mention that turns are suitable to spurts of frequently interrupted casual play.


http://rpgmaker.net/games/?genre=srpg

How many are Strategy RPGs, as defined above? This concerns me somewhat, as we might be frustrating a good deal of players who come here looking to scratch that tactical itch that would be very pleased with such offerings as Aurora Wing, Tale of Exile, and Cast Aside. Instead, these players get improper responses such as Pac-Man Adventures and The Fisherman Game - which, while both decent games, aren't Tactical RPGs at all.

Then there's the whole deal of "my gam has stratergy and its and rpg so its and srpg!".

So, I'm basically asking for two things here. First, the short-term solution of changing the "Strategy RPG" label to "Tactical RPG"; and second, descriptions attached to the genre selection to help guide new members into placing their games into the correct genres, such as

Tactical RPGs are a style of role-playing game where the placement of units on the field has a bearing on the gameplay, such as in Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics.
Arcade games harken back to the days of gaming yore with simplistic gaming experiences reminicient of Pac-Man, Frogger, or Galaga.

So, instead of a pulling down a list when you select your game's genre, you pick a radio button out of a set. Nothing drastically different, just a way to help developers help players find their games.



Thoughts?

Louis Cyphre's Gallery



Old topic got a bit big image-wise and the title was pretty outdated (seeing as I've been using a scanner for the last five months or so), so I figured I'd start a fresh one.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

We've been patiently waiting for Atlus to announce the DS game Strange Journey. The next in the line of Shin Megami Tensei games looks...well, strange, and we dig that in Atlus games.

It just came out in Japan last month, so hats off to Atlus for working on this so quickly. For those that missed the earlier talk on the game, it's a sci-fi first-person role-playing game that has you exploring a hole that opened up in from the bottom of our planet. Inside? You guessed it: Weird-ass demons (over 300 now!) you can summon and use against others.

We're thrilled that the release date is set some time in the Spring of 2010. The word from Japan is that this game is awesome.

http://www.atlus.com/strangejourney/home.html

I will be the first to admit I have a raging boner for this game.

What do you think? I like the concept - it's something fresh for sure, even for Atlus. It's basically Shin Megami Tensei IV. As in, the true heir of Nocturne. And yes, that is Shoji Meguro you're hearing. As awesome as ever. Oh, and you can choose what skills are inherited during fusion, like in Devil Survivor.

Quick Thread - Effects for a Gambler skill.

THE IDEA

Basically, I'm making a skill that generates a random positive or negative effect. Positive effects get positive numbers on the list; negative effects, negative numbers. The further from zero the effect is, the less frequently it occurs.

So, run wild. Solitayre already suggest that one of the effects turn the party into wild boars. Just make sure your effect has an influence on gameplay.
========================
THE EFFECTS
10 - Halves all foes' HP.
9 - Restores the party's SP to full.
8 - Enemy's stats are reduced drastically.
7 - Player gets the option to full-restore both sides. If no, result becomes 6 instead.
6 - Restores the party's HP to full.
5 - All ailments restored.
4 - Restores SP to all allies.
3 - Restores half of each party member's damage.
2 - Party's offense increases.
1 - Party's defense increases.
0 - Double re-roll. (oh baby)
-1 - Enemy's defense increases.
-2 - Enemy's offense increases.
-3 - Party berserks the enemy that round.
-4 - Gambler begins to HARDCORE DISCO.
-5 - Gambler dies
-6 - Restores all foes' ailments.
-7 - Halves the party's HP.
========================
Effects Waiting to be placed:

Turning the party into Wild Boars.
Fear to all combatants.
Ailment restoration
Revival
Stat buffs/debuffs
WILD DISCO

What are you jammin' too?

Let's comment, hate on, and praise each other's taste in noise-making.

Lately, for me, it's been all:


in here.



GO.

Script Mod - Mastering Skills via AP.

http://rpgmaker.net/users/ChaosProductions/locker/wololo5.txt

This is the script I attempted to modify. It allows an actor to learn skills by using other skills a given number of times. Skills are learned once a new level is obtained.

I don't want that.

Here's how I think it should work:
- Each enemy felled by the party earns one point towards the skill.
- After battle, if a skill has earned enough AP, it advances.

Added bonus points for:
- Certain enemies carry a "<enemy extra actions X>" tag. They should be worth 1+X AP.
- Using the Shift key in the menu to divert AP to a single skill, FFX2-style. This is probably a giant dick so don't worry about it if it's too much trouble.
- Making AP totals visible in the main menu.

So? Feeling any script coming on?