NEWBLACK'S PROFILE

Okay, caveat.. For now I'm not talking about RPGMAKER users specifically; because that is a WHOLE 'NOTHER BAG O' BEES. So with that said, time for some aimless meandering.

I was thinking about just who "we" (taking the actual or hypothetical stance of "maker of games") make games for but more specifically who those people, or type of people, are exactly - As in: "What they're like"

Okay, backing up a little further...

My train of thought went like this:

author=My mind, a few minutes ago.
"When building games you should probably have 'the player' in mind and try to approach things from a 'player oriented perspective' rather than a 'game developer perspective', sure, that makes sense...

*self satisfaction at arriving at a logically sound and ethically pleasing design philosophy*

After all, I don't want to just make games whose target audience is "other people who make games"... I need to work more on leaning how to appeal to people who don't think about games as makers of them but as players.

(and this is something I would usually unthinkingly agree with because it just makes sense when read alone)

BUT...

WAIT A SECOND!

"The player" is, at least by semantic necessity alone, going to be a gamer.

Have you ever spoke to a gamer?!

You are a gamer, and so are all the professional game developers.
(actually tbqh I'm barely a gamer any more :/)

I mean.. Have you looked at a forum that discusses commercial games? It's pretty much exactly the same, every gamer and his dog is a part-time wannabe game developer at least outside of casual and 'social' gaming.

They talk about, criticize and praise stuff like graphics, music, level design, puzzle design, mechanics and gameplay... In fact that is the CORE of their focus - and they approach it from a "how it should have been done" position which is almost exactly the same as a developer, who would approach from a "how should I go about doing this?" position...

And... With both sides of the fence taking the same position on games, just where is there room for actual content in this equation and just who out there could be said to be viewing it as such, as in, from the positon of the hypothesized "player"? because it's certainly not "gamers"

...and with that it hit me like the giant block of obvious. I have been a fan of the notion: "players don't give a shit about game dev stuff (and in RPGMAKER-specific terms, this is still absolutely true unless you only want to impress other rpgmaker users, this is why I caveat'd that earlier on), so get that stuff out of your mind and focus on what ends up player-side" but when you look at the target audience for games, ie: "gamers" it turns out they erm.. do care about that stuff, probably more than they "should", whatever that means.

See most gamers are nerds and are really into "games" as a whole "thing" (rather than just "enjoying playing games") In the same way that our rpgmaker/game making hobby extends beyond "I use a program called rpgmaker as a hobby sometimes" - as evidenced by the fact this community exists and that people invest a lot of time and energy in their projects, make teams, collabs, forum-based activities, events, friends even.

Gamers are, obviously, very literate in the medium of games and as a result are nothing like the cow-eyed hypothetical cipher "the player" that all of this "intending things for" is intended for. Also, let's face it, if you're an indie developer (of any caliber) your audience is more likely to be nerd gamers than casual gamers (unless you're aiming for the mobile/social gaming market). IE: people who will pick everything apart in ways that sometimes even you may not have imagined. In other words, they are both highly articulate in the language of games (imo: usually positive) and also very conditioned by or involved in the culture of gaming (can be both positive and negative).

So.. Now to bring the RM thing in.

I totally agree with the notion "Nobody outside of the RM community gives a shit about x-thing-that-is-only-impressive-in-the-context-of-rpgmaker" but this is a microcosm of a larger thing because you could just as easily say "non-gamers don't give a shit how impressive/good your game's graphics/sound/music/storyline/characters/anything is" which is an obvious thing to say but it brings to light that making a game, if you audience is "gamers" (and logically speaking, why would you make a game for non-gamers?), is pandering to "gamer expectations".

I mean, like I said, it would be a silly idea to approach game making from a "not making the game for gamers" position... (and it would be a great excuse to devolve into "it's not WRONG! it's just MY STYLE!" attitudes)

But would it really be that silly? ~(+_+ ~)

As was pointed out by the recent topic about gay characters in games, people are multidimensional and not flat characters or cardboard cutouts.. So when you go to play a game, do you really just want the game to be treating you as "a gamer" and to only appeal to that part of your personality? I mean, we're other things than just gamers, right? So howcome most game-design "best practices" focus a lot on appealing to gamers as just that and nothing else? I imagine that, with a few exceptions, trying this in the real industry would be financial suicide but in the amateur sphere we don't have that much to lose... so...

Howcome our standards of what makes an amateur game "good" consist of three things:
1) Emulation of professional (aka: made in large part to make money) games in as many ways as possible, as much as possible.
2) Half-hearted attempts to subvert conventions of professional games to be edgy whilst still holding on to them (Do the opposite for the sake of being different rather than for more relevant or "deeper" reasons).
3) Affirmation of personal biases about how we think games should be. (yeah, kinda hard to avoid that one!)

(this doesn't mean that I'm saying "if your game in any way emulates professional games that is a bad thing!" or *apply to the other two points* but rather that I'm asking why the standard of what are considered VALID design choices or, "GOOD GAM MAK YO" is based on these three things)

yeah. I said a bunch of stuff there that probably didn't make much sense.

Thoughts? :>

(Please press "back" on your browser to avoid reading more aimless mental masturbation about creativity and rpg maker.)

Also I'll say from the outset that "you" is not anyone personally. It refers to all of us to some degree or another at some point in our lives as amateur game developers. It's just easier to say "you" when speaking in the hypothetical. Also I have been inspired by reading Mellytan's writing to talk about... Things.

So... for some reason you've landed yourself in the position of slaving away over a hot event editor and you're working on the 50 hour rpg epic with magic and spikey haired teenage protagonists and a cast of implausibly pretty people of every conceivable gender (or maybe not, but whatever). It's RPG maker right, isn't that what it's for?

I dunno, is it? I'm going to avoid value judgements as much as I can here though. What I was getting at is this:

Did you stumble across rpg maker and think "I'd like a piece of that action" and start planning an rpg because rpg maker is rpg maker or did you think to yourself "wow I'd love to make an rpg, I even already have an idea I'd love to realise" and search for "rpg maker"?

Something doesn't sit right with me when I consider the former option. Essentially in that situation you set out to contrive something that fits the mold of the tool you have at your disposal. If you had an idea for a cool rpg you wanted to make beforehand then more power to you (although I'd probably say that wanting to make a thinly veiled ff6 clone doesn't count). However I somehow don't think most of us come to rm that way. I know I didn't and I think this may be the single biggest root cause of developer burnout and rm vapourware. In order to make a game within that model you have to contrive every single aspect in order to make it work and you soon realise there's not much inherent motivation to even bother continuing to make the game once you get past he novelty factor (waheeey, I'm making a game!). Did you even want to make an rpg before you found rpg maker? Really?

I once read about an article (yes, read about an article) called something along the lines of "the immense relief of quitting golf" which, in a nutshell, was about a dude who quit playing golf as a hobby and how he wished he did it years ago because the hobby did nothing but introduce a set of arbitrary self-imposed concerns, venacular, standards to adhere to and additional pretense into his life and stress him out and how something he was meant to be doing "for fun" caused him nothing but strife his entire golfing life (see also: the things you want most in life are most likely the things that will end up killing you, metaphorically speaking).

Now I'm not saying that everyone should quit :> I'm just trying to stimulate discussion (also I'm stuck with my game right now and needed a distraction and to ramble and irc is dead) and get down to the nature of what makes a good game and what makes a crappy derivative market-stall-quality FF knock-off (people who make full-on FF fangames/remakes/demakes/whatever are excused from that judgement simply by virtue of their sheer honesty) So I'm positing that a good game is a good game before it even exists and that a bad game is a bad game before it even exists (or is inevitably cancelled) due to the motivations, or lack thereof, that underlie its conception and how those motivations will be tangible in the player experience. Making a game for the sake of making a game, although it may be a starting point for bigger and better ideas that actually have some genuine inherent motivating force and vision behind their production, doesn't seem, to me at least, to be a motivation that can be relied upon as a functional imperative if you're concerned with making something that:

a) You actually will be able to give a shit about in a few weeks/months/years time.
b) Is genuinely a rewarding experience in-of-itself to make (not for the imagined or real accolades you will recieve that prompt you to release a demo as soon as you have enough content to pass the project off as worthy of playing. OR just to be like "LOOK HOW COOL I AM!" which is a cheap high that wears off pretty quickly or because you've invested so much time and energy into your game that you just can't bring yourself to let it go, leading to either a seemingly-unending grind of grim determination or stagnation and eventual abandonment of the project and maybe even turning-in your amateur game maker's gun and badge.)
c) Won't be a highly-derivative, transparent and contrived game.
d) You can be genuinely proud of.
e) Is fresh, original and generously gives to the player rather than simply taking away their time and trading it for an experience of little value where the only thing that benefits at all is the game developer's ego. (this one is really subjective and will vary from person to person, obviously. But I'm still listing it because I think that games made with some intrinsic motivation are at least more likely to provide a mentally and emotionally "nourishing" experience than those made on a foundation of contrivance and bare-faced derivation).

I, for one, honestly don't care much about dark elves, iron swords in the item shop, magical villages and elemental crystals which is why I don't make games about those things and I find it hard to believe that every single person who gets into this actually genuinely gives a shit about those tired premises either (feel free to exchange with tropes and cliches from the genre of your choice). They just "want in" on the action.

So, long-ass ramble about nothing much, but what do you guys think? Do you have any similar experiences or insights about it? Do you like turtles? Am I your bro and is this a cool story? Any good image macros lately?

So ever since trying to replace a system set I now get the message "Unsupported PNG type" or "file" (can't remember which). However this is not due to there actually being an unsupported .png file there. Firstly because I got the colour depth right to begin with and that would have snagged upon import. I've tried renaming the file etc. I've made multiple versions.

ALSO I can't even use any of the system sets, including the RTP ones, anymore without it giving the same error message upon startup or test play. The game seems to be buggered basically. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? Or an easy way around it?

This is RM2k3, by the way.

Also somehow this problem reappears when attempting to copy the project over to a new project.

Also have tried using Cherry's RM Ultimate 2009.

This is really shitty, anyone have a clue?

This is an annoying request to make.

But I don't suppose anybody has the FULL collection of Theodore resources for RM2K/3?

Or knows where I could find all of them together like you can with the REFMAP stuff.

Somebody posted a download link somewhere on here before but that link's now expired/been removed.

Would be a great help!

Edit, also, just out of interest.. Were there ever any Theo resources for VX?

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