RYAREISENDER'S PROFILE

I'd say doing something creative is always better than doing something not creative. You might die one day, but your creations live on.

I'm pretty good in game design myself, but I don't really like doing most of the stuff required that games after designing the game on paper. Years ago I also always dreamed about getting a team that actually wants to make games out of my game designs, but I kinda stopped hoping that would ever happen now. I found a different way to help out, I just check out new projects and help with advice. It's not really a team but luckily some developers are really open to suggestions and I'm happy when they fix all the bugs that I found and even add 1 or 2 of the suggestions.

Also just finding a team isn't even the hardest thing. If you make a project over a year or so, it's almost impossible to keep the team together. Out of personal experience most will just suddenly disappear from the internet forever or just start to ignore you and everytime you talk to them on skype their status suddenly changes to "away".
Finding a new team isn't really satisfying either, you wouldn't want the game style to change mid-way.

So yeah, conclusion, make it yourself. And the best way to do that is to plan small. Instead of planning to make that epic indie RPG that is 60 hours long and has a better story than Final Fantasy, better plan something that has a small but really clever idea and can be finished without too much effort.

If you actually make some of those smaller projects and they are received well, it will actually become more possible to find team members (though I personally think that finding a good game designer as a good artist is much easier than finding a good artist as game designer).

Also: Do NOT think you can't improve. I thought I can't draw stuff at all for years, then I read several tutorials and got some hints from people I really admired for their art and realized that working on a single 20x20 maptile takes hours and not just a minute and suddenly I was able to draw graphics other people actually admired (though I personally really hate creating graphics, despite being able to do it, so I still cancelled the projects and just left them as proof that I could do it if I wanted).

@kin15225
The saves are put into the same folder as the game (the folder where the executable is). If no saves are created, then try what I suggested above.



Also seems like everyone agrees that the randomness should be reduced. ;-)

I just want to add:

1. Usually I hate minigames. Especially if they are forced onto you. DO NOT FORCE MINIGAMES UPON THE PLAYER.

2. Sometimes I really love minigames more than the actual game and end up only playing them, so having minigames is always nice if they are optional.
I really hate FFX, but I played Blitzball all day sometimes.

3. If you can make good minigames, as indie developers, I'd rather recommend making the minigame a stand alone game. Planning too big usually yields failure. Planning small but make that small thing perfect is the way to go.

Hello everyone. Haven't been on forums because but I'm really into game design and wanted to share some thoughts.

The general goal of your battle balance is that you want ALL your battles to be a challenge and at the same time not make your game so frustratingly hard that nobody will finish it. Many people fail at this even in completely linear games. This is often because battles depend more on character strength rather than tactic.

So the very first thing you should do anyway is - make battles rely a lot on strategy. If you're weaker than the monster and use the perfect tactic, win! If you're much stronger than the monster but use a completely wrong tactic, die!

Make the strategy interesting, different in every encounter, but DO NOT make the mistake to reduce the number of different encounter to a minimum just because you can't thing of good combination and strategies. Try to design the monsters themselves so they give strategy and yet not require other monsters to be around for the strategy to work. This works well by putting monsters into strategic categories. You have the defender, he is hard to kill, but also does not too much damage. Obviously it's a good idea if the player attack him last. You have the attacker, high attack power but easy to be killed. He is the one to go for first. You also have the loner - who only gets really strong when he's alone. Better kill him before the last other monsters but after the attackers. There are more types than those but those are the basic ones. If you make monster for these categories, you can pretty much combine any of them as long as you at least serve two categories in an encounter.
Now make many many different encounters! This is important to the player feels challenge and not like he just uses the same tactic again and again.
The order of selection is also important here. Two encounters with an attacker and defender can be completely different depending on whether the attacker or the defender is selected by default! Create them both! Make full use of the combinations possible to you. Just attacking the default monster is also a tactic, if that's not happening with all encounters.

Alright so now you have your monsters and encounters done and ensured that tactic is the most important aspect regarding the outcome.

What's next?

If you're making an unlinear game you have two basic ways to approach it.

a) Make the character growth very limited. If you think Pen&Paper, you will probably think how your characters starts out with stats between 8 and 18 and even if you fully max out your character it will only have like 5 bonus points extra in those stats. Instead of stat-increase you should however make the player gain more ability / skills. They might not make you stronger, but they add a lot of strategical elements to the combat again. This allows you to raises the complexity of combat. Maybe you can win an encounter 2 seconds faster by using a much more complex tactic now. But you shouldn't just be able to burn through those ice monsters with a single fire spell.

b) Make monsters grow with the characters. Don't just make their stats increase linearly to the stats of your characters, this, despite being done by many RPGs, is really dumb and just frustrates players (they want to "feel" that they become stronger, this makes them happy, you should be aware of this). Instead make different monsters appear after a player reached a certain level (doesn't really need to be level, some games some kind of time mechanic so for example you could make them harder each day, or you base it on the accomplishments the player already reached), yet combine them still with weaker ones too.

How to do this best? You don't know what monster you will require? You want to ensure you have appropriate monsters for each region?
Okay here's an easy way for this - put your monsters into "race" categories. Make sure you have about the same amount in each race category and make sure you cover all different strategy types in each category as well. Now list your monsters by the race/strategy combination in order of their power with the level range they are a good challenge at. Expand that range little.
Example:
Dragon/Attacker - Baby Flamer (1-45), Flame Dragon (30-60), Pulse Dragon (50+)
Dragon/Defender - Baby Scaler (1-30), Scale Dragon (25-50), Gold Dragon (60+)
Now you can also adjust their stats if you see some range isn't covered well yet and stuff like that.
After a lot of work you are now finally done specifying all your monster, you will probably have 200 or more.

Generally I'd probably make the encounters myself here (pure programming), but in RPG Makers I guess you'd probably have to use already premade encounter sets, so just put them somehow together and make encounter with strategy as described above. Now knowing which monsters are in the encounter you can give the encounters themselves an appropriate level range. Also list the races used in the encounter and try to limit the number of different races to 1 or 2.
Now when doing a dungeon, you know which races would fit into the dungeon, so define that also. You are now limited to encounters that only contain monsters of a race that fits into the dungeon, but since you hopefully have designed thousands of different ones, you will still have a good amount available for you. Now just make sure to check the player strength and let different encounters occur depending on how strong the player is. Done!

Now you have your system ready - the player will not only feel that the game keeps staying a challenge to him, no matter which order he uses, he will also feel like he is getting stronger, because easier monsters he remembers will sometimes still be in the encounters and he can now one hit kill them, they come of course a long which stronger monsters now that lets the battles stay challenging. You created the perfect illusion for the player.
Another advantage is that if the player plays your game again and goes a completely different path, he will get encounters he never saw before! Your unlinear RPG with good replay value consequently now has even more replay value.

Woohoo.

Those are just the basic ways, but I'm afraid if I go into more complex game design strategies my post will be so long that nobody will read it anyway.

I just want to add one thing - difficulty setting is a BAD BAD idea to solve an issue of not knowing how hard you will want the game to be because you don't know the order the player will visit places. You really can't expect a player to know what the appropriate difficulty is for him and "oh that boss killed me, let's switch the difficulty to easy" is just dumb. Really it is. The player wants to feel good, he wants to feel that he got better at the game and defeated the boss because of that. Yet the player is also dumb and will make use of a difficulty setting to make it easier for him, just like he is using walkthroughs without realizing that he spoils the game fun for himself like this.
Point is: You, the developer, should decide how hard the game is. If you do a difficulty setting, make it once at the start with GOOD and COMPLETE explanations of what the player can expect from each difficult, that can't be changed later. This doesn't really have much to do with the topic though.

Though I guess I should point out something tricky, which is probably not possible in most RPG Makers either, but is actually a good game design strategy - make monster difficulty scale by player strength as explained above BUT secretly reduce the factor for the player strength if the player dies often. Yes! Die at the boss, restart, die again, restart, how about making it easier here? For god's sake do not tell the player that you do it, but do it anyway. Fool him! Make him think he got better! Force him to have fun!


Note: One game that uses these strategies to some extend (not perfectly) is Visions & Voices by Craze. It has both very very minor character growth (start with 100 HP, end with 160 HP, start with 15 damage end with 40 damage) and also increasing monster strength (new encounters) every few days.