OCEAN'S PROFILE

I've heard once or twice that they predicted their own demise, but I can't find it anywhere. Can someone link me to it so that I can see? And no, a phrase like "Mayans predicted their own demise" doesn't count as proof for me, I want to see something with actual dates.

The 2012 thing is a scare thing. I can't guarantee that nothing will happen, but I will say the same for any other year. There are so many apocalyptic dates given that I tend not to believe any of them. It's best to just live out your life without worrying that the world might end at 1999. Or 1960's. Or 6/6/2006. Or 2000. Or any other date.

Even then it doesn't say that it will be an end of the world. It's just the end of their calendar. MAYBE something will happen, maybe not. My feeling is no. My guess is that if something happens, it'll be something like cool pictures of space in an astronomy article the following day.

I tend not to get political in my games. For the most part, since you are generally an average citizen (in their 20's), it doesn't have an impact on them. They won't be seeing kings or whatever, the most they'll do is take pictures of a government building because it looked cool then get yelled at by a guard because they're not supposed to take pictures there.

This Overworld discussion is pretty interesting. If I see a boring overworld with 7 towns, generic forests, open plains, caves and mountains, I'll basically assume that the world is boring and empty. I'm fine with imagining stuff if they at least hint at it. It's true that if they place a physical town on, that people will want to explore it or assume it's relevant. But I don't like worldmaps much anyway, I like connected areas better, like a Secret of Mana type of thing. Plus, it kills the exploration for me to have all these random encounters. I don't feel like exploring until I get something like an airship that prevents encounters. And it's usually still not fun exploring because all you see are the same grass/water/forest/mountain textures/tiles.

I do both a small world map (basically select the areas you want to go to), and a connected world. You mostly travel through the connected world, so you can see the entire Island. It's small, but it's pretty much all explorable. I don't need to hint at any non-existant towns because they don't exist. For other projects, I am thinking about how I am going to restrict access to only certain areas while still having the player really feel like there's a lot more out there, without allowing them to go there. Especially when it's supposed to have a modern feel.

I've always felt there were too many caves in RPGs. First town, cave, second town, cave, third town, cave, tower, lava cave, ice cave, empire, final cave, castle. Besides generally being really dull, I wonder how towns trade between each other, if these caves are dangerous and long. Also, if they have seperate trade routes, why couldn't the player use that instead of the stupid caves? Since a lot of an RPG is about exploration since it's so big (unless it's completely linear like FFX), the exploration and how the world is built should make sense too, not just be like "Cave, Town, I guess they'll need another cave here, Town, Tower, Town, another fight monsters area, Town, Cave, Town, Final dungeon"

I've been to a cave in real life, and unlike an RPG cave, it was actually interesting.

Looks like I must adopt Mikuru now

Yeah, trying it for fun or for practice is good, even if you think you won't win. Besides, $25 isn't all that much anyway. It'd still be good to get critiqued on your piece, and to simply just try one out. Who knows, maybe you'll do a better job than you think you would? So even if you aren't a pixel artist, it'd be at least a good experiment.

This is probably gonna kill me due to my current workload, but I'll give this a shot anyway! At the very least, I can pull off a 100x100 image if I run out of time.