NULLMECH'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ

author=Neophyte

author=harmonic
You can't just plug in generic things and think you've created an interesting environment. The puzzle design of...let's say...Lufia 2, is really ancient and not a good way to showcase good gameplay. There are random colored blocks in dark caves which look ridiculous compared to the environment around them. Signs are posted up giving you hints like "turn the sun stone 90 degrees clockwise to see the other side of this room", which does not stimulate your excitement in any fashion. Laying down some dynamite and seeing an entire room crumble, or just having some neat spells that change the environment around you to create more depth is more dynamic and exciting to look at.

This is at the heart of what I was trying to get at in the original post, I think. It strikes me as notable that you think the puzzle design of Lufia 2 is outdated and bad because it's incredibly visually disjointed. I will admit that a lot of my puzzles are still just like this. And although it's less common than it was five or ten years ago, many commercial games (like the Zelda series) still use this method a lot. Don't get me wrong, Zelda has a lot of puzzles that are integrated well into the environment, especially in the 3D games. But it also has a lot of block puzzles and moving platforms and colored switches, especially in the 2D games. I think it just has so many puzzles that visually integrating all of them would be almost impossible. I think most platformer games are in a similar boat, having a sort of strange mix of visually integrated and visually jarring puzzles. A lot of platformer games also have extremely unrealistic visual styles which are presumably designed primarily to make the stupid puzzles look less out-of-place.

Making visually integrated puzzles is certainly a lot harder than making prototypical block puzzles. It sounds like a lot of people think it's worth the effort though, and that ugly old school puzzles don't really make the cut.

Mm-hmm. But I wasn't randomly restating this, I was just pointing out its application to mazes (and how they're not necessarily trial-and-error "puzzles").

Translucent sprites! Because simple alpha-blending is a $25 feature!

Airships, and how to levitate them by adding a variable amount of negative mass to create a gravitational repulsion that cancels out (or exceeds) the acceleration from gravitational attraction from the positive mass...

Don't just re-submit for another two or three tries. Actually fix your game's problems. Then you'll actually get it accepted.

Ah, I remember your game, it popped up in the IRC discussion yesterday.

Now, these might not be the entire reason it was rejected - I'm not a moderator or whatever, after all - but here's my guesses.

(I'm assuming this is the same Tales of Another World we're talking about. If not, my apologies.)


This looks really half-assed. Your background doesn't fill the entire game window, your options menu overlaps the title text, and three quarters of the screenshot aren't even of your game. Tip: Pressing Alt+Printscreen takes a screenshot of just one window.

All in all, it seems really rushed. I know you said you worked on it for five or six weeks, but for RPGs, a lot of the time that's not enough. But don't decide whether or not to finish your game based on what people think; finish it for yourself and for the experience. You need practice to become good at this stuff - RPG dev isn't easy.

As for your question, your submission paragraph was probably very cliche, and you probably said Tales a lot or something like that. So that response was probably a sarcastic mockery of that. Again, wasn't me, so I can't say for sure. But that would be my guess.

Good luck with your future endeavors, and don't let one little rejection get you down.