RINE'S PROFILE

Game designer hopeful. Have designed several tabletop RPGs, and have long wanted to start into the video game space.

My focus when designing is to create challenging experiences that force the player to make difficult choices, and change the paradigm when someone thinks of an RPG.
Binding Wyrds
A modern fantasy game, delving into the shadows of the supernatural.

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Sepia Beach

It honestly reminded me a lot of Betrayer, and I was so tempted to have a similar thing with bright red enemies on the maps, but my spriting skills weren't up to the task of replicating your style unfortunately.

Swap in the Middle with You~

Posted up mine/Pizzas. Unfortunately while Pizza did an amazing job of the mapping, I couldn't really add on to it much without breaking the style. Hopefully the bits of story I did add are enough :P

Sepia Beach

Unfortunately, given I lack Pizza's amazing art talents, all I could really do was to add a short bit of story to it. It could probably have been expanded on even more, but I felt that trying to hackney some more sprites and tiles to what Pizza made would only have made the whole thing worse.

Swap in the Middle with You~

Just noticed, the event page says we can submit it either to the event, or by game page, but when I go to submit it to the event page directly, it doesn't allow me to do it. Is a game page required?

Character development with a large cast

This is a topic near and dear to me, given my current main project already has around thirty characters, with a rather non-linear development, but I am always interested in hearing if people have run into other games or issues with this in mind.

In general, RPGs are known for their story and characters. Obviously this is not unique to them, as we can admit even games like Modern Warfare have had some compelling stories and characters, at least initially. However it is easy to note that how much time and development a character gets is inverse to how many characters there are. Even in games with fairly small casts, it is easy to have certain characters fall by the wayside except for a few moments that are 'their' story. The Final Fantasy games fall victim to this, as 'optional' characters and even required ones can sometimes have one or two parts of a game, and then do nothing else story wise. Rather frustrating if you really liked Vincent, but he got like two parts in the whole story that you had to hunt down.

The worst offender I have noticed is the Suikoden series, given that their main selling point is that they have a massive cast of characters. Too bad that out of the 108 characters, maybe a dozen get any story outside of their recruitment, and sometimes that 'story' is two sentences of 'Oh, you met my requirements, now I join you.' Other than the games gimmick being lost, you could easily trim out 80% of the cast, and not lose an iota of story or development. When an entire characters story can be summed up with "This elf runs really fast, beat him in a race and he'll join you" it feels very superfluous.

I have run into one set of games where this is done amazingly well, and is what I am mostly basing how I develop characters in my game on: Territorial Conquest Simulators. For those (most of you) who have never played a game in this genre, they tend to mix tactics/strategy/RPG natures together with games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms. They tend to tell stories in a visual novel style, but have strategic battles with characters. As a note, my favorite examples are also Eroges, so any google searches for them might be NSFW. My favorite examples of this genre are Sengoku Rance, Big Bang Age, and lately Eiyuu Senki.

These games tend to have a turn based system, and something in the game constantly urging you forward, to conquer more territory and not stop. Usually that is a hard time limit (Big Bang Age limits you to 99 turns before the end game occurs, whether you have everything or not). They also tend to have large casts of characters, some of which you have to play through multiple times to see them all. And yet the characters are well developed. Usually this is helped by them being enemies you end up recruiting, but it also helped by the system itself. In example, in Big Bang Age, they have the star system, where activating a character event gives them a star. These stars have widely varying requirements for activation, from just talking to the character, to stationing them in certain provinces. When an event is activated, you see a scene developing the character, and they get a bonus, either a stat or new ability. This requires you to actually seek out the characters story, sometimes sacrificing valuable game time to do so. You won't be able to get every character event in a single game, but the game encourages you to get as many as you can, as a character you get every event for in future games starts with higher stats. This integrates the story development of characters into the gameplay, and encourages you to seek them out for characters you like so they are better in your next play through.

Have any of you all run into other ways to develop characters in games with a broad cast?

Do you include character customizations?

To be fair, a lot of 'indie' games using 3d graphics tend to use the same engines, and also buy pre-made assets for them. So they get a huge collection of facial assets and such, and its fairly easy to give people a few sliders for them.

Do you include character customizations?

I do think it is important that if you include customization of looks of your character to make sure it is representative of a potential audience. My wife (who is african-american) often gets very frustrated when a game basically says 'this is you', and any options to make a character look like her just looks like a Caucasian person spent way too long in a tanning booth. I know it is really hard in RPGMaker games to do so, so it might be best to temper expectations.

I'm actually wavering on having a player character for Binding Wyrds, instead of just an avatar who doesn't actually fight, but it will likely just be a choice of different pre-made characters with different skillsets.

Discrimination within the narrative

@Aegix: I think you have to mistake her, I did as well, but if you choose the right options when you have to talk to her later you can get the full story out of her. Its definitely tied into the achievement for befriending her, which I snagged. Essentially had a perfect 'good guy' run through my first time, so it'll kill me to do alternate runs where I'm a dick :P

@LL2: Just make sure there are reasons for their prejudices in the game. If no one can tell your affinity it kinda makes it feel silly and arbitrary. Tribalism is a thing, we tend to want to stick close to people who are similar to our own genetics and make sure those propagate, but if affinity is an RNG at birth, there's really no reason for them to hate one group over another.

What Videogames Are You Playing Right Now?

@LL2: Any games that are abjectly terrible go into my null pile. I still feel as a designer you can learn from bad games, but they don't go into my 'need to finish' pile at all. It really doesn't help that I will play practically anything, and enjoy quite a broad variety, even in quality. I've found some good fun in some pretty mediocre games.

...which makes me feel bad that most of my reviews on here are rating them as utter bombs.

Edited Side Note: Eiyuu Senki is subtitled "World Conquest!", could just as easily be subtitled as "Famous people as women without pants, the game"

What Videogames Are You Playing Right Now?

Currently hopping back and forth between Eiyuu Senki (A game with progression and end in sight) and Stardew Valley (farm all the things).

It never helps that my ratio of finished to new games is always in the major negatives. I'm already -30 for this year >.>