NEOPHYTE'S PROFILE

I believe he talked about treasure allotment in his article. There was a brief part about monsters, but I don't think he covered exactly that.

But I agree 200%, bosses having experience points distributed rather than a good item isn't good design. If somebody dies, you can't gain the levels the other team members received. It is basically a gamble that the player did not ask for, with the potential to hurt them more than reward them. Unless your battle system is designed to give experience points no matter what condition the character is in, it is not a good idea. Awesome stuff, Craze.

I don't care who has done a reward article, make one now. >:(

RM dungeons are the most boring shit I've EVER played. Most of them are walking from one side of the map to the other with slow walking speeds. Most people have no idea how to create good dungeons, it's really bad.

The idea is to create a dungeon with interactions that support the environment you're in. Puzzles are a good way to do that, as long as they're not the most generic thing ever. They also have to fit into the gameplay, and not feel tacked on. Also, there absolutely HAS to be a reward for completing a puzzle, it can't just be there to mix things up. An example of this is having a treasure chest in sight right across the room but isn't accessible until you complete a certain task or figure out the right way to access it. Alundra and Wild Arms are pretty good at this because in Alundra you could obtain extra life points by figuring the dungeon out, and Wild Arms had areas in the dungeon that were not accessible until you gained more Tool abilities. Metroid games also do this very well.

Basically the idea isn't to just put SWITCH PUZZLE in the middle of a dungeon that feels tacked on and offers no reward other than having you progress deeper into a dungeon. Give them some motivation by teasing them with that purple colored treasure chest across the room, or that Heart Piece to boost their health.

You can track damage using the default skill handling. After every action (turn), just set variables to each heros HP and if there is a difference in HP between the current turn and the last one, you would put whatever code you needed in there. The only issue is that status afflictions that decrease your HP every turn would also count. So you can't really track it through actual monster skills (except switch skills), only through battle events.

It probably couldn't work the way Feld would want it though, because battle event pages happen before the damage is actually dealt. So it wouldn't recognize how much damage was dealt until the next player took action. That could be fixed by making custom skills for the monsters, but that's a hassle.

It doesn't matter, the core of those games (Professor Layton, Puzzle Quest) are puzzles. The gameplay is almost completely puzzle based. You could also say that the Adventure games like Tomb Raider are better when they are part of something more (PUZZLES!). Perfectly valid.

But yes, most of those games are interactive puzzles. You can't really compare them to the games I said because they play very differently. So yes, they are in more than just RPGs (oh no, you got me).

I'm done though. I don't feel like continuing this.

-It's the first option when searching for "RPG Maker", so naturally a person will click on the first link.
-Has a slightly higher User Rating on the site
-Has "XP" in the name, VX sounds weird so that is a possible reason.

Most people are not 'in' the community as much as us, so the issues you guys are talking about probably only apply to a very small minority of the people downloading.