NIVLACART'S PROFILE

DOES ANYONE HERE LIKE DRAGON QUEST?

I love this series, it was one of the first few RPGs I ever picked up when I was a wee little kid. My first foray into Dragon Warrior VII imbued in me a craving for adventure that would stick with me for the rest of my life.

Admittedly, I have found the games rather hard (because I usually like to conserve my MP fiercely), but they still remain one of my favorite franchises.

Dragon Warrior Monsters is super amazing too.
Slimes are great.

I love this game.

Deep within the panic of IGMC, I came to realize that other than within the throes of gam mak, developing a game, we don't really have ways to practice Game Design and building events. So I thought of this challenge as an idea!

So without further ado, with the pursuit of improvement in mind, each person posts a gameplay function (e.g. a treasure chest that has random loot) to achieve through events, and the next person who posts has to solve it, via explanation or screenshots of Event Pages, and then issues the next challenge for someone else to solve!

RULES:
1. The challenge you issue you must already know how to create.
2. You're encouraged to reach the solution without relying too much on scripts.
3. You're allowed to suggest more efficient methods of approach, but no being mean about it.
4. Your answer to the challenge does not have to be exact, but as long as it hits around close to what is needed to be achieved, it's good.

Although eventually this topic might probably end up as a help topic, I thought that it'd be good for some to not only practice, but also those who're looking for solutions might find their answers browsing through the answered challenges of this thread. Hopefully the difficulty of challenges ramps up over time too.


So the first challenge is:

A 4-digit number passworded door!

If you knew me in real life, I'm a blazingly passionate guy when it comes to game making. I would gush for hours on end about ideas that could be shoved into a game. The idea of creating games excites me to no end. Which is why some recent events really confused me.

School has a mandatory internship module, so I've been interning at an indie game studio for about 2 months now. I thought I would be having a ball of a time, I've been waiting for this moment my whole life. But I've never felt so out of place.

During lunch breaks trying to chat with people I came to realize nobody here really likes making games. So far what I've heard from them is 'It's just a job'. The games they're making doesn't seem to be built on ideas they think are fun, but ideas they think that work out so far and they're tacking it on. No one here really discusses the game or has remotely any hype about it.

I'm in a perpetual state of disbelief. Games are such a fun medium, I didn't think anyone who got into the industry and stayed there would continue thinking 'it's just a job'. But now I know people like this do exist.

I know it's probably unprofessional to gripe about a job I'm being paid for but it's... it's a big culture shock to me. From being around RMN and other sites, I expected the world out there to be 'This game is great!' and 'Let's work together to make this!' I know that probably I wouldn't always meet people who are as passionate, who wouldn't spazz over E3 uncontrollably like I would, but I didn't expect apathy towards it. Maybe my hopes were set wayyy too high.

What do you guys think about the thought of a portion of the game industry just in it for the lucrative market over the enjoyment of making something exciting?
My best friend once warned me 'If you make something you love your job, you will come to hate the thing you love' and I fear that. Do you think out there, it's true?

Man. Jobs are scary.

HEY GUYS! I'd like to post art here every now and then.
I do a fair share of fanart. I don't have as much game asset art as I'd like to admit, apart from my work on Antagonist. Here's to hoping I can add more here as time goes on.

(all the links are broken because I renamed the album which I linked them from, I'll repair them one by one as soon as I am able)

My latest 5 arts!

I was just browsing some MMORPG game videos and sites, and I began to question a certain staple class: The Magician. In most games the magician is regarded as the staple long-range damage dealer, incredibly fragile but incredibly damaging.

But when I tried to line them up against the other classes, some things didn't seem to make sense.

For example, when comparing them to Archers, another long-range damage dealing class, the Magician in most cases seem to do the same thing, but better. And then a lot of games try to play it off by making Archers specialize in debuffing and laying status ailments on the foes (sometimes redundant when a lot of MMOs make status ailments super weak, that it'd be much faster beating it to death than bothering with them in the first place), or just making Archers run around slightly faster; it doesn't seem like a fair tradeoff.

Some games claim that Magicians are able to hit the elemental weaknesses of enemies, making them a superior choice for the pros. Which... was a strange thing to me, because a lot of games don't have a way to tell you what the mob's elemental weakness is, nor do they make it very rewarding like in games, say, Persona. You get a 1.5 damage boost, uh, that's it. It's even worse when most games give a Magician skill tree that eventually branches and focuses on only one elemental type. You're almost guaranteed to be doing normal damage for 2/3s of the game (and sometimes you still do more than Archers).

Some games intentionally make their Magician classes expensive to play with the heavy reliance on expensive MP Pots. A game that did otherwise and got my thinking going was Onigiri Online. They advertise their game really badly by focusing on the wrong bits, because there are some really creative game elements in there. Their mage classes have their Block command replaced with an MP Charge. And I thought it was genius! Allowing mages to fight at the same usability as other classes that would be able to still fight had they no MP.

But then I thought maybe some players really like that, it being an expensive class. They could play with another easier class, get cash, then switch to the Magician for more... Erk, no, it doesn't seem so great that a whole class was singled out just for 'replayability'. Not only does it claim Mages are like a master race, it makes it seem like the point of the game is to ditch your beloved Warrior class for the expensive Mage class because that's what your money's for. Is it justifiable to have a class reliant on spending money on potions just to fight consistently?

I rambled a bit, sorry.

But basically I'm just questioning how Magicians are designed in so many games. I get that people like playing a certain class in most games, no matter how disliked they are (I'm a Sword kinda guy myself), but all classes shouldn't fulfil the same role but just with different armor and skill animations; neither should they be given a clear advantage over another class (Magicians and Archers).

What do you guys think of Magicians in games, MMOs and not?

Are there good examples of well-designed Magician classes out there?