REDMASK'S PROFILE

What part of one of your games have you had to remake, fix, scrap, or tinker with the most?

For me it was my Last Boss. It was one of the earliest things I made It had two stages to it and both were way too hard to predict in order to dodge.
So I completely scraped it.
Next I had an idea that I would make the Last Boss kinda like a bullet hell type thing but that mostly stayed as a concept also got scrapped.
I eventually came up with a 6 stage final boss which later got cut down to 5 stages.
The first four stages tasked the player with using the 4 elemental spells they learned during the game. Then they got a chance to save and the final form let the player use all the spells to their advantage.
So that's the version I went with when I released my game but every time I re-released the game I kept tinkering with this boss to make it easier, largely based on the feedback I got from my play tester, RedNova.
Not sure if I'll tinker with the Last Boss again in the next update. It's pretty good now but who knows I do like to tinker.

So, what thing in your game did you have to constantly work on?

Great stuff

So I recently was given two books about Africa. Which is awesome! Free books about my favorite subject; whats not to love? I been reading one that was specifically about masks and at around page 24 I started noticing something wrong. There were some inconsistency with what I'd learned in college. For example it was trying to say that a Bwa plank mask represented the god Dwo. The plank masks represent the ancestors not Dwo. Dwo is represented by a grassy Rafia costume with a conical mouth and a crest made of bird feathers.
So then I checked the date of the book it was made in 1976.
New things are learned about the world all the time so I guess the lesson is always check the publish date of your history book.
Oh well the books still have some use to me atleast from an art perspective.

Good points Rine.

Dead ends could also be used for a story line purpose. For example you could have an alley way in a town that seemingly leads to just a dead end but a dialog sequence could be triggered there if say one of the characters in the party had something happen to them there or perhaps has something to say regarding the location and etc.

So while working on an update, I recently filled in a dead end with treasure because it always annoyed me that nothing was there. It was a curled peninsula that looked nice but had no function. It was part of an area that had a lot of events so I didn't want to burden the map with more stuff potentially slowing it down. I wound up cutting off the normal point of entry to this area and instead made it accessible from a different map thus allowing me to put in more events without worry of slowdown.

This got me thinking. Is there ever a good way to include a dead end? I remember Final Fantasy II (Japan version of II) had doors that led to empty rooms. The only thing of note is that those rooms had a higher enemy encounter rate. So you could argue that those dead ends served as a punishment but personally I found them to be pointless.
So what are your thought on this? Also how long must a path be to be considered a dead end to you? Obviously a path that is say 10 tiles long with nothing at the end would be a dead end but what about a path that's say 3 tiles long? Is that perhaps just a decorative alcove in your mind?

For me, if there is a direction a player can go I try to have something there for them. But I'm curious to see if anyone can justify a purpose for a dead end.