NEWBLACK'S PROFILE

I think about this stuff a lot (and am guilty of the issues outlined) and lately I am coming to the point where I think, at least for myself, that if you're thinking "in the manner of the OP" you either have already settled for less and are not doing what you really want to do with your creative endeavors (so you require an external metric of what constitutes successful execution, as you've abandoned your own "intrinsic creative motivations", so to speak) or you haven't figured out what you really want to make yet/don't feel qualified to determine what is "good" by yourself (I guess "learner mode"). Or some combination of the above.

Eventually learner mode becomes tiresome and you either will want to give up or finally do what you want to do. "what you want to do" (if you're not doing it) is probably something that has been mentally written off as stupid or un-doable and so it is forever backshelved, so instead it is replaced by talking until the end of time/seeking a definition of objective merit (from without, of course) in the hope that one day you will finally get to make it when you're "good enough".

That isn't to say there is no such thing as good/bad works, rather that putting the cart before the horse is probably a dead end in the longterm, especially if you never get back to a sense of what you really wanted to do in the first place. If your only motivation is to make something that other people will call good then it probably won't be. Maybe "good by comparison to the average" or "sorta good" but you likely won't be happy with the work itself in the end.

Or maybe that's just me.

edit: Something to consider too I guess - maybe facing up to that sense of not being good enough to make what you want is the rite of passage necessary to become good enough in the first place - Instead of forever beating around the bush blindly hoping that the solution to your artistic woes will come from without by some stroke of luck or good will from others or "that one elusive insight" that probably doesn't exist at all.

I guess the message is "stop trying, then see what happens"

(just for clarification the "you" here is a generic hypothetical "you" and applies to myself as much as anyone else.)

The finished quilt on the OP has gone all broken-link, jes saiyan.

My first question was more concerned with distriution of games to end-users without them needing the editor. I am assuming the "engine file" is not the same thing as the editor .exe Yeah? I like the emulator style way of working, though, very neat.

@Asset handling - very cool :>

@Action RPG elements - my only suggestion would be to have user defined variables for most things that could be er... variable? Such as acceleration, movement when attacking, speeds, momentum etc, hitbox allocation (for both what defines a "damage dealing area" during an attack and what defines a "damage taking area" when attacked) would maybe need some crazy complex implementation on your end in order to make it easy for end users to define >_> (although maybe taking a look at Scirra Construct and the way they handle these sorts of parameters could lead to some ideas for how to handle it?) The best I can come up with in my head is something like the battle animation creator from rm2k/3 but for drawing in which areas of a sprite constitute hitboxes (say for a character's sword) over the top of the sprite animation frames.

@DBS - Sounds neat and interesting but I feel you should *probably* give an option to let it work as a vanilla ATB or even Turn-Based? Because there will always be people who want that classic bare-bones style of play available by default. Obviously it's your call, though.

Easy there, Captain Capitalization.

Yeah don't worry about having to do every pixel one by one (although you can if you want, and for certain things that'll work a lot better).

A simple illustration:



AA is the transparency variation/ "smoothing" effect you can see on the "brush" example, whereas on the "pixels" example there is no AA - you can see the pixels even though it was done in a single stroke.