MAGI'S PROFILE

Well, this thread turned rather quickly!

author=Tyranos
If you can flip out over this you can flip out over the boy too. I demand that if this woman gets justice than that elementary school boy gets exactly the same justice as well.

I am not sure if you are aware, but social justice isn't interested in defending anything but marginalized peoples. There aren't any talking points, no multiple angles, and feels all around. Unfortunately, everybody else can get thrown under a freakin' bus.

In spite of the facts and the story, this isn't really a cause that should exactly be controversial to support. Sign the petition or don't, but if you continue pursuing this you are opening a massive can of worms on sensitive social issues that probably aren't appropriate to tackle here. This is a games making community for (mostly) all ages. Can't we just agree rape is bad and then focus on making/playing good games? I like that a lot more. I hope you do too.

author=Sated
The font in the OP is readable at the size it's being used. I would be careful about making it smaller, though, because the names below the character sprites are getting into hard-to-read territory...

Use a nice serif or sans-serif font

Aren't all fonts are either serif or sans-serif..?

Stuff like script and decorative fonts can have serifs/lack them, but are usually classified as FANCY being their more prominent feature. Fonts identified primarily by serif or sans concern the function before the design. It's not an exact science though!

basically, typography sucks

My personal preference is to limit the total game party members to four. When you're writing a story-driven game, it becomes increasingly difficult to account for more character's reasons to be there as you add more to the roster. In FF6, more than a few members had little reason to be there other than the low-hanging fruit of beating up the guy in clown costume. I wanna feel that my characters are developing beyond their stats, so there are problems when suddenly I have twelve party members I need to write for.

A better solution is to have members swap in and out automatically. This works better in some games than others and some players are the slightest bit averse to being told "PLAY WITH THIS PERSON NOW." Still, if the swap serves the story and supplants the lost character with equal gameplay, I don't believe it causes much harm.

Let's ignore the story-driven stuff for now, because not everybody's going to make a game like that. Maybe you want something open-ended or you have a grand and simple scheme to rally 108 dudes together for and aren't concerned about their evolving personal narrative. Sharing EXP with reserve members is the the morally right choice as a designer, because nobody should feel forced to use characters on a bloated roster they don't enjoy.

Moving beyond that, I like the idea of splitting up the story from time to time and focus on different parties of characters. This not only gives more equal screen time, but adds an additional bit of depth to a larger cast. It's not feasible to always have the option to swap out a roster of 10+ people in the midst of battle, especially if they are breathing, living characters that are doing their own thing in your story. That's where this ideology shines.

Beyond that, there isn't really a 100% always right way to manage your active party. Just don't make them redundant lumps of soulless meat like it's already been stated and you've already solved half of the problem.

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Sal
Incidentally, this is part of why I never got far into FFVI, because of some terrible dungeon that forced me to have a party of moogles.

Wasn't that just a 3 minute segment?

edit: lol

Yo, I downloaded the alpha and checked around for the first time. I think this engine has some really amazingly intuitive options for avoiding the need to script things. In RMVX Ace, it's very, very painful to script in new attributes, but the ability to simply link so many things like that to an event is very powerful.

I got vibes of older Game Maker 7 mixed with RPG Maker 2003 when I was messing around. Not a bad thing.

Are you planning on tackling the program's UI later, or possibly find a UI designer? Maybe you mentioned this already but I just couldn't locate that information.

I've heard rumors there is a new RPG Maker in the pipelines. An old Degica interview stated something should be coming around the end of 2015.

This interview has been lost to the sands of time though