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Random battles: Can they be good?

I wouldn't say it's about making the battle system more complicated.
It's about variety and making choice matter.
And usually, the easier to understand, the better.

Backing up your project

If the SVN server runs locally, it's not a very safe backup, though! It better to save on different storage devices.

Random battles: Can they be good?

author=Crystalgate
I feel that this topic is about two different subjects, how you encounter enemies and how you battle them.

I think they are related at least in such a way that people who do random encounters are often more lazy about making them interesting.

Random battles: Can they be good?

Random encounters are neither good nor bad by default. On touch encounters are not necessarily better than random encounters either.

Not the fact that you walk around and then get into a battle without touching any NPC sprite is the problem. The problem are the two bats in combat. Two times the same monster in the battle, often is pretty boring. Is there any kind of strategy needed for those two bats? Does it matter which bat to kill first? Do they have to be killed at the same time or you'll run into trouble? How often will you actually get into that battle with the two bats? This is what you need to think about rather than "Can I use random encounters?".

The reason so many people hate random encounters and even moreso in an RPG Maker community is because most indie devs simply can't get random encounters right. I'd claim that at least 50% (probably more like 90%) of the RPGs with random encounters uploaded here have only 3-6 different random encounter per area, you often see the same encounter twice or thrice and all those encounters can be won without ever selecting a target that is not selected by default.

Backing up your project

Yeah, though most people first have to experience a loss before they learn it. I lost a 2-year RPG project too once. Started to do backups after that. Happened again, I had a backup, but it was on the same machine and machine completely didn't work anymore. So I started doing frequent backups on the machine and a little bit less frequently I moved all backups on an external HDD. Now I have my external HDD crashing, so I switched to using USB sticks for backups, as they are more stable.

Now my only problem is that I have so many backups that it takes a while to find out where the latest one is. Haha.

I'm glad my gamepage submission got denied!

You really don't neeed to know who denied a request, but it's problematic when you don't know the exact reason it was denied. And "does not comply with the guidelines" simply isn't a very good explanation of the reason and is what makes people angry in the first place.

What do you do for a living?

I develop software. And test it.

Admitting Defeat - When A Videogame Breaks Your Spirit

I don't think so. I finished Phantasy Star II without even having a map years earlier!

Well, I really don't remember the actual numbers anymore, just that after 3 battles I ran out of resources without using healing items and using healing items caused me to not have enough zeny for better equip and that was the reason I didn't finish that game. I didn't finish any Breath of Fire game actually. In BoFII I got to the final dungeon. In BoFIV I managed to reach the final boss but after he was still not dead after 2 hours I just gave up (the dungeon to reach the boss is already like 2 hours without save point, I just couldn't take playing more than 4 hours without a break). And in Dragon Quarter I didn't even manage to get past the second battle.

Admitting Defeat - When A Videogame Breaks Your Spirit

I remembered another game I forgot: Vagrant Story

I really liked the setting of the game and how the combat and exploration played like, but it was ridiculously hard. I don't really care much about crafting to I ignored it, but that quickly caused me to only dealing 1 HP damage to pretty much every single enemy, no matter what epic boss-dropped weapon I used.

I was pretty good at chaining, though. So what I did was to equip the ability that when I chain every hit does 1 HP damage more then the previous, so I did "1-2-3-4-5-6-etc." damage. That worked quite well, except that some monsters started to take over 5 minutes to kill eventually, which made the game pretty boring. But I still endured it.

But then the game put a dungeon with a time limit! Killing just a few enemies already took longer than the time limit. I tried rushing through the dungeon by running from everything, but at the end there was a boss and the time limit still keeps going for the boss and I knew from the previous boss that bosses mean over an hour chaining, so I finally admitted defeat.

Admitting Defeat - When A Videogame Breaks Your Spirit

author=Feldschlacht IV
Healing Herbs cost 40z, and Vitamins cost 100z. I know for a fact you start getting more than 40z per battle at like, the beginning of the game. By the time you get 1/3, you can absolutely afford about 50 Healing Herbs through selling your old equipment alone. Healing items are cheap as dirt in BOF III.

Are you remembering right?
Pretty sure it was the reason I quit. And I probably needed to use more than one to heal up after a battle. It's too long ago though. If it wasn't the gold, it was item limit maybe? But in BoFIII games you could have 99 of each item, couldn't you?

Wasn't it like you needed 2 vitamins per character to fully heal up or something? So it was 600z needed per battle. And I got like 500z per battle? And that's not even healing your MP.

But it's many years ago, so...

Were you not taking advantage of the formations?
Hmm, if I remember correctly, I never changed the formation from default.

I definitely changed all the characters around and tried to level them equally, though.