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Game Length: The Deciding Factor
I realized I also should reply from a game developer viewpoint:
I don't care. At all. When I make a game it's born from an idea. And that idea is complete in my head (and sometimes pieces of paper) before I even start coding at all. For me the goal is always to get that idea realized, no matter how long or short the result will be. My game ideas are always based around stuff I'd enjoy playing, so length it kind a of non-issue here. Way before I'd even be able to produce a game that is boring for me, I'd have quit development anyway.
Nothing that's relavant for the story, that's for sure.
Even in games where those "game companies" did it, I can usually feel "hmm there seems to be something missing here" or "this part kinda seems added in later" and that's not a very positive feeling in either case.
Only if you think the reworked structure is better game design.
Well I just don't care, or I could say that, but in truth, the number of dungeons is already covered in my very first idea of the game anyway. Like I've 100% sure that one of my game ideas is a story that goes through 5 dungeons, I have complete idea of what these dungeon are and a generally idea how they are structured. That's all before starting to develop. During development, the only thing I add is flavour. I might also add bonus dungeons that come after the game as final challenge for people who finished the game and enjoyed it, but I'd never put anything in between or cut something out.
I don't do that either, but I tend to design quite large dungeons, because I'm a fan of complex dungeon design. The largest one I designed was in itself already 15 hours long, but the players wouldn't be in it all the time because plottwists and you could unlock shortcuts and stuff later on too.
How to determine just how long a game is going to be?
I don't care. At all. When I make a game it's born from an idea. And that idea is complete in my head (and sometimes pieces of paper) before I even start coding at all. For me the goal is always to get that idea realized, no matter how long or short the result will be. My game ideas are always based around stuff I'd enjoy playing, so length it kind a of non-issue here. Way before I'd even be able to produce a game that is boring for me, I'd have quit development anyway.
I know that many game companies do this often, and I can understand why, but just what exactly is best to cut out?
Nothing that's relavant for the story, that's for sure.
Even in games where those "game companies" did it, I can usually feel "hmm there seems to be something missing here" or "this part kinda seems added in later" and that's not a very positive feeling in either case.
Would it be wise to somehow relegate cut content to another part of the game?
Only if you think the reworked structure is better game design.
How do you determine how many dungeons your game has?
Well I just don't care, or I could say that, but in truth, the number of dungeons is already covered in my very first idea of the game anyway. Like I've 100% sure that one of my game ideas is a story that goes through 5 dungeons, I have complete idea of what these dungeon are and a generally idea how they are structured. That's all before starting to develop. During development, the only thing I add is flavour. I might also add bonus dungeons that come after the game as final challenge for people who finished the game and enjoyed it, but I'd never put anything in between or cut something out.
How do you determine just how LONG each dungeon is?
I don't do that either, but I tend to design quite large dungeons, because I'm a fan of complex dungeon design. The largest one I designed was in itself already 15 hours long, but the players wouldn't be in it all the time because plottwists and you could unlock shortcuts and stuff later on too.
Game Length: The Deciding Factor
I'm usually in favour of shorter games, but I think it would be wrong to cut out content you had planned all along just for the sake to not exceed a specific play time.
It's just as bad as trying to stretch a game's length.
Just stick to the originally plan so that everything fits together perfectly, unless that original design already contains plenty of "filler" dungeon you only put in because you thought the game would be too small otherwise.
The bigger concern would be to how make the game stay interesting for the player. Because many RPG maker games already bored me after a few hours, because they always stay the same, just more dungeons and towns. If interesting aspects are continuously added that keep the gameplay fresh, then a game can also fascinate tenth of hours easily.
It's just as bad as trying to stretch a game's length.
Just stick to the originally plan so that everything fits together perfectly, unless that original design already contains plenty of "filler" dungeon you only put in because you thought the game would be too small otherwise.
The bigger concern would be to how make the game stay interesting for the player. Because many RPG maker games already bored me after a few hours, because they always stay the same, just more dungeons and towns. If interesting aspects are continuously added that keep the gameplay fresh, then a game can also fascinate tenth of hours easily.
The Top RM Games Of All Time
author=harmonic
Oh I know. Craze has had an irrational vendetta with me for years so I had to call him out. This poll means very, very little in the grand scheme.
Obviously. But you should still realize that many of the commercial RPG Maker games just aren't (particularly) good and are only popular because they appear on Steam or Humble Store or other popular platforms.
There are many people that don't even know RMN exists and that buy RPG Maker games on Steam/Amazon. You can realize this when looking the reviews on Aldorlea games that say something along the lines of "Finally a game like the old Final Fantasy games again". There are also tons of people that avoid free RPG Maker games because the chance to find a particularly good one between "all the crap" is slim. But they'd buy an RPG Maker game because "If it's sold, the developer must have put some effort into it".
Seriously, I couldn't convince a single person to download and play Alter A.I.L.A Genesis so far, but I could get people to buy The Amber Throne. It's strange, you might think people like free stuff more than stuff that costs money, but apparently for RPG Maker games it's not the case.
Needless to say that I think many commercial RPG Maker games are quite good too, but it seems silly to be all like "That commercial RPG Maker game is more popular than this free RPG Maker game, so it must be better.", because that's just not true.
Out of 3690 games on RMN, I'd probably recommend 10 as "Everyone should have played those". Out of the 50 commercial RPG Maker games I've seen, I'd recommend around 10 as well. Those 20 make the good ones for me, nothing else. Nothing to do with it commercial or not. Nothing to do with how popular they actually are.
How much should one crank up the difficulty before it's too much? (Game difficulty balancing)
Mixing easy and hard encounters is actually pretty good idea. If I think about Phantasy Star II for example, they were some enemies that were significantly harder than others, either because they dealt pretty deadly damage or because they hardly took any damage from normal attacks. When I ran into those I was always "oh shi--- better use my best skills on those". That gave it a nice change from always just using normal attack and conserving MP for healing.
It depends a little bit on style though. I personally don't really like the "resource management" approach too much and rather have each encounter itself be the challenge and put stuff like "Full recovery after every battle" and "Save anywhere" into the game instead. For those games I rather would not see completely easy encounters. But of course you can always do a mix of encounters that require strategies the player already knows and encounters that require to learn a new strategy to win.
Regarding shop prices. I REALLY dislike it when games work like this:
Do dungeon -> Reach new town -> Buy all new equip for each character from gold earned in dungeon -> Do next dungeon
Because you will just buy all the equip when reaching a new town, it becomes completely meaningless. Might as well not put any shops.
What I like a lot more is when each shop has a "personality". A new town shouldn't mean one new weapon of each type for each character. The offers should be more characteristic for the town. Like that town of lumberjacks offers a really good axe, while the town of hunters has a really good bow. That castle of magician sells interesting rods. And when that is set up, the prices should be higher than what the player can afford when reaching the town first.
Doing it like this changes the flow to:
Do dungeon -> Reach new town -> Check what the town has to offers and only buy a few things you can afford yet -> Go to next dungeon -> Explore and realize you get to a point you can't continue yet -> Return to town -> Buy some better equips you can now afford from venturing to the dungeon -> Go to dungeon again -> Feel how the weapon makes you stronger -> Clear dungeon
As for healing items... I generally like the approach to make them cheap but strongly limit their amounts. Like in Secret of Mana where you could only hold 9 healing items of a type at the same time. Beating a dungeon with limited resources feels much more like an accomplishment than grinding gold for hundreds of potions and then clear the dungeon just by using a large amount.
It depends a little bit on style though. I personally don't really like the "resource management" approach too much and rather have each encounter itself be the challenge and put stuff like "Full recovery after every battle" and "Save anywhere" into the game instead. For those games I rather would not see completely easy encounters. But of course you can always do a mix of encounters that require strategies the player already knows and encounters that require to learn a new strategy to win.
Regarding shop prices. I REALLY dislike it when games work like this:
Do dungeon -> Reach new town -> Buy all new equip for each character from gold earned in dungeon -> Do next dungeon
Because you will just buy all the equip when reaching a new town, it becomes completely meaningless. Might as well not put any shops.
What I like a lot more is when each shop has a "personality". A new town shouldn't mean one new weapon of each type for each character. The offers should be more characteristic for the town. Like that town of lumberjacks offers a really good axe, while the town of hunters has a really good bow. That castle of magician sells interesting rods. And when that is set up, the prices should be higher than what the player can afford when reaching the town first.
Doing it like this changes the flow to:
Do dungeon -> Reach new town -> Check what the town has to offers and only buy a few things you can afford yet -> Go to next dungeon -> Explore and realize you get to a point you can't continue yet -> Return to town -> Buy some better equips you can now afford from venturing to the dungeon -> Go to dungeon again -> Feel how the weapon makes you stronger -> Clear dungeon
As for healing items... I generally like the approach to make them cheap but strongly limit their amounts. Like in Secret of Mana where you could only hold 9 healing items of a type at the same time. Beating a dungeon with limited resources feels much more like an accomplishment than grinding gold for hundreds of potions and then clear the dungeon just by using a large amount.
The Top RM Games Of All Time
author=harmonicSell you games DRM-free on Humble Store and I'd appreciate them more.
My least popular game gets listed, my half a million steam codes redeemed game does not. Ha
Edit: I see your website offers PayPal as payment option now so I guess I'll have to take that back.
I really enjoyed Deadly Sin 2, but never played your other games. Skyborn seemed to be lacking combat (I like combat heavy games) and Echoes of Aetheria looks really cool, but seems a bit expensive when buying it directly from your website and I don't like Steam, so...
I mostly get my non-free Indie RPGs from GoG or Humble Store (if DRM-free) during sales these days.
How much should one crank up the difficulty before it's too much? (Game difficulty balancing)
Honestly "the big guys get away with this" is not a good reason not to put some effort into your battle difficulty balance.
I personally criticize many games for the lack of the encounter variance, both AAA titles and RPG Maker games. But when I look at the games that got it right, it's still more AAA titles than RPG Maker games (or I just didn't play the right ones).
The biggest difference however is, that with RPG Maker games I might be able to have some influence. I could convince the dev that his battles are boring and get him to actually put some effort in. On the other hand, writing Square Enix an e-mail on how they should make more than 3 different encounters per area because it's boring otherwise will probably not cause them to reconsider all their future games. Not to mention that AAA titles are often limited by their funding and timelines rather than their lack of game design skills.
As for how a good difficulty growth should be like... I'd say it should be a logarithmic curve.
The game can start easy and not require any skills from the player at first. This is to get him into the story. You might think right away making the first battle challenging is a good idea, but you know what? If I play a game and die at the first few battles, I'll probably rage quit and never look back (happened to me to games I paid for too, I'm looking at you Dragon Quarter). However if I already got a bit into the game and then die at the second boss I'm much more likely to try again.
The game shouldn't stay easy for too long, however. Because what the game really should do is a) challenge my skills and b) prepare me for even harder challenges. If the whole game didn't require any skills ever, I probably have just used normal attacks throughout the game. I never really bothered using skills or even learning which skills are good against what or checked if there are any cool combinations I could exploit, simply because it wasn't necessary. If then you suddenly put a final dungeon that is much harder than all the rest, it hits me completely unprepared and will feel way too unfair. Games often do that lately and you know what I did? I watched the ending on youtube for all these games.
So in short, make the game start easy, make it get challenging fast, then only increase the challenge slightly with each dungeon, so it's hardly noticable (technically the player shouldn't notice it at all because his skills with the game should be growing at the same pace).
But as said earlier. It should be more about the correct strategies and less about giving monsters higher stats.
I personally criticize many games for the lack of the encounter variance, both AAA titles and RPG Maker games. But when I look at the games that got it right, it's still more AAA titles than RPG Maker games (or I just didn't play the right ones).
The biggest difference however is, that with RPG Maker games I might be able to have some influence. I could convince the dev that his battles are boring and get him to actually put some effort in. On the other hand, writing Square Enix an e-mail on how they should make more than 3 different encounters per area because it's boring otherwise will probably not cause them to reconsider all their future games. Not to mention that AAA titles are often limited by their funding and timelines rather than their lack of game design skills.
As for how a good difficulty growth should be like... I'd say it should be a logarithmic curve.
The game can start easy and not require any skills from the player at first. This is to get him into the story. You might think right away making the first battle challenging is a good idea, but you know what? If I play a game and die at the first few battles, I'll probably rage quit and never look back (happened to me to games I paid for too, I'm looking at you Dragon Quarter). However if I already got a bit into the game and then die at the second boss I'm much more likely to try again.
The game shouldn't stay easy for too long, however. Because what the game really should do is a) challenge my skills and b) prepare me for even harder challenges. If the whole game didn't require any skills ever, I probably have just used normal attacks throughout the game. I never really bothered using skills or even learning which skills are good against what or checked if there are any cool combinations I could exploit, simply because it wasn't necessary. If then you suddenly put a final dungeon that is much harder than all the rest, it hits me completely unprepared and will feel way too unfair. Games often do that lately and you know what I did? I watched the ending on youtube for all these games.
So in short, make the game start easy, make it get challenging fast, then only increase the challenge slightly with each dungeon, so it's hardly noticable (technically the player shouldn't notice it at all because his skills with the game should be growing at the same pace).
But as said earlier. It should be more about the correct strategies and less about giving monsters higher stats.
How much should one crank up the difficulty before it's too much? (Game difficulty balancing)
The strategical aspect in combat is much more important than the general difficulty. If you just make the game harder by increasing monster stats, then it's still same boring battles, just you need to grind more.
But if you create battles that are easy with the right strategy, but deadly with the wrong strategy and you create enough diversity so that each encounter formation only appears 2-3 times, they that's more interesting and you can worry less about difficulty balancing too.
I'd actually say more than 98% of the RPGs here just don't get it right. Either I just keep using normal attacks on the mob that's auto-selected and still do quite well. Or the game gives me a huge grind already at the very beginning of the game. Not to mention that most games just put 2-3 different encounters per area. ZzZzZz.
Even games that advertise themselves as having "highly strategic" combat, I never felt that it mattered all that much what kind of skills I used. The penalties for using the wrong attacks and the rewards for using the right attacks are often just too low. In fact, conversing MP for healing spells only and then just using normal attacks proved to be the best strategy in over half the RPG Maker games I've played.
Likewise, games can also feel unfair. Like in some games you get to a point where suddenly the monster difficulty ramps up, but it doesn't seem like the game gives you any means to overcome it other than by grinding or using your rare healing items. Since my playing skills still aren't really challenged I'd even hesitate to call it "too hard".
What's interesting however, is when there's a high variety of encounter formations and each formation has its own small trick to it. Requiring me to select a different target than the default selection one (sometimes of course the default selected one should also be the correct one). Or requiring me to use a specific skill first. Or requiring me to use the Defend command at a certain point (that point needs to be in some way visible to the player).
Finally, in terms of general difficulty, you need to be careful about some other factors. Like if you have a fully linear game, you can predict quite well how hard it is for the player by playing it yourself. But if you put in a lot of secrets of optional stuff, you might end up much stronger or weaker than an actual player that doesn't know the game. For example you shouldn't assume that the player has actually found the secret chest with Flame Sword two dungeons earlier, just because you always get it when testing because you know where it is. But of course you could make a boss that requires a certain item to defeat if you give the players hints that this is the case (like NPCs in town talking about a legendary sword in that one cave, that is said to strike down any plant-type fiend).
tl;dr
Worry less about the difficulty and more about how to make combat interesting.
But if you create battles that are easy with the right strategy, but deadly with the wrong strategy and you create enough diversity so that each encounter formation only appears 2-3 times, they that's more interesting and you can worry less about difficulty balancing too.
I'd actually say more than 98% of the RPGs here just don't get it right. Either I just keep using normal attacks on the mob that's auto-selected and still do quite well. Or the game gives me a huge grind already at the very beginning of the game. Not to mention that most games just put 2-3 different encounters per area. ZzZzZz.
Even games that advertise themselves as having "highly strategic" combat, I never felt that it mattered all that much what kind of skills I used. The penalties for using the wrong attacks and the rewards for using the right attacks are often just too low. In fact, conversing MP for healing spells only and then just using normal attacks proved to be the best strategy in over half the RPG Maker games I've played.
Likewise, games can also feel unfair. Like in some games you get to a point where suddenly the monster difficulty ramps up, but it doesn't seem like the game gives you any means to overcome it other than by grinding or using your rare healing items. Since my playing skills still aren't really challenged I'd even hesitate to call it "too hard".
What's interesting however, is when there's a high variety of encounter formations and each formation has its own small trick to it. Requiring me to select a different target than the default selection one (sometimes of course the default selected one should also be the correct one). Or requiring me to use a specific skill first. Or requiring me to use the Defend command at a certain point (that point needs to be in some way visible to the player).
Finally, in terms of general difficulty, you need to be careful about some other factors. Like if you have a fully linear game, you can predict quite well how hard it is for the player by playing it yourself. But if you put in a lot of secrets of optional stuff, you might end up much stronger or weaker than an actual player that doesn't know the game. For example you shouldn't assume that the player has actually found the secret chest with Flame Sword two dungeons earlier, just because you always get it when testing because you know where it is. But of course you could make a boss that requires a certain item to defeat if you give the players hints that this is the case (like NPCs in town talking about a legendary sword in that one cave, that is said to strike down any plant-type fiend).
tl;dr
Worry less about the difficulty and more about how to make combat interesting.
The Rise of the Complete Heal after Every Battle Game
author=CashmereCat
My question is - what do you think of these games? What are your theories surrounding these games in the future? Is it a good model to follow? Do you like games like this? Do you hate 'em? Why? It'd be nice to hear some opinions.
My favorite game ever is SaGaFrontier and ever since I played it I've been praising on how much better this system is. If there is no resource management and you can save at any time, it allows each battle to be a challenge. This is simply a lot more fun than if you just fight 100 easy battles that slowly drain your resources just to realize you don't have enough left to beat the boss.
I wouldn't go so far and say all games should have this system, but most should.
Resource-management based games require really good game design (especially dungeon design) to be good and hardly any game designer can really pull it off well. Some of the things that should be in these games is:
1. Flat dungeon design instead of deep dungeon design or in other words, many different possible paths but once you know the correct path its short. This makes having to leave the dungeon because you ran out of resources less frustrating as your next trip to the dungeon will be different again.
2. A way to quickly escape. Like a spell that instantly brings you back to the last town you visited or at least to the dungeon entrance. Or a new system just recently designed by the SaGa dev team which I really like - if you run away in combat you are automatically brought to the entrance of the dungeon. Or simply make death without any penalty except that you have to restart the dungeon (but keep exp/gold).
3. Limited items you can carry at once - because grinding and then buying 99 of each potion type is not fun. Better just allow e.g. 15 potions to be taken with you but design the dungeon so that it can be beaten with that many.
Summary - If you suck with dungeon design, better make a full recovery after every battle system and make each battle interesting and challenging instead. However if you are good with dungeon design and maybe not so good in making battles interesting, then a resource-management based game might be better for you.
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