RADNEN'S PROFILE

Jumping back on to blockman, now that I've got ambient light sorted out, and day/night. My next task is to, I guess, make an in-game clock so that I can try to seamlessly switch between night and day.

I need to find a good interval. How many minutes real time should make an hour of in game time? If there are 24 in game hours... 24 minutes for a day may seem good. Solo amateur games can't afford to be so long. I may choose to do 8 hours of night and 16 hours of day. Or more specific: 14 hours day, 2 hours evening, 6 hours night, 2 hours morning.

(Since blockman will be open ended, shops and houses are closed at night). My current plan uses an inn to switch between night and day... But I fear it may be abused or underused. A natural clock can switch time of day out of the players control, and therefore force certain situations. Ex: a house you need to enter is locked at night, and well, it's night. Therefore it forces you to either break in or wait for day.

Look at it this way. In a video game, you reuse tiles and resources. This mean that while your fist 2 hours is 80MB, that doesn't mean when you add hours you add MB's. Look at it this way.

You only worry about adding MB's per hour if every hour adds completely new music, sounds, tiles, animations and whatnot to the game. Most games do not have this, and you should only use what you started with, throughout the game.

This does not mean you should limit your artistic freedom either. But just keep in mind that most songs are reused, and usually only a few songs are ever important to a game, and its specific resources like that which you should pay attention to.

It's really prestigious of a game to have something completely unique whether it be a song or animation once every hour. The unique things should come as treats and rarely: Boss battles, intro and outro, a turning point, or a discovery. These things come rarely and these are the things that add a necessary but high megabyte count to your game. Everything else is usually reused background material to get the hero from point A to point B. For example, you never encounter an enemy only once unless its a boss, and you never listen to a song once unless it's the intro.

Then what happens to the artistic license and literature thread? For example: you can't post topics on your super-awesome game since there are game profiles. This media idea can just as well remove art topics altogether since there'd be a place elsewhere to talk about art.

@Chaos: Wow, I suddenly realized how Pokemon Trainers were drawn!

Stormrider, that's really good for a first attempt. Almost too good compared to some of the stuff I've seen. You're probably really good in art in general, right?