SEERIC'S PROFILE

If I made a commercial RPG I would sell it on RMN, though I'd almost certainly sell it on other sites as well. My strategy would probably be to do something similar to Cave Story or La Mulana and simply release a freeware RPG and if it proves popular or at least well-received I would focus on a commercial re-release with a few tweaks, some aesthetic improvements (ex: paying an artist and/or musician for custom graphics/music) and probably a bit of bonus content.

I tend to like this model a lot since it means the original game is still out there for people to pick up for free and play and fans have the option of showing support by paying for an overhauled commercial version. Also, it's great from a development perspective since it means you have the chance to gauge reactions and take criticism into account before asking people to pay for something and you're putting money into a product which people already have expressed approval of via the original version so there's less risk of putting hundreds/thousands of dollars into a complete flop.

Realistically though, I'd be very surprised at myself if I ever made a product which I considered commercial-quality, though I certainly want to.

author=Adon237
Whose game will be the next Star Stealing Prince?

Clearly, it all depends on which game has the best dual-wielding skeleton.

Congratulations Ronove, Star Stealing Prince was easily one of my favorite games of 2012, indie or otherwise, and I'm glad to see it win! Congratulations to everyone else who made the lists too; we had a really strong year for games on this site and I enjoyed many of the entries listed here!

These are two of my favorite games and I love games in general with high difficulty as long as it is fair; these games work because it is always your fault if you die, not just the game throwing something unavoidable at you.

I generally like to refer to these games in particular as 'modern games with a NES mindset'. By this I mean that they are obviously 'modern' as far as gameplay goes; graphics aside the core gameplay mechanics are not things you would see in a NES game. However, the way these games present themselves very much feels similar to the way an average NES game does in four crucial ways.

First, there is very little handholding - there's a brief tutorial to teach you the basic controls early on and then absolutely everything else is left up to you as the player to figure out.

Second, enemies are carefully placed to take advantage of the environment - modern games tend to have enemies with a few neat tricks and they get placed just about anywhere, but in these games, like in many NES games, even the weakest enemy can severely injure or outright kill you because it is placed in such a way that it suddenly becomes dangerous (usually by making it able to knock you down a pit like so many NES bats and birds).

Third, memorization and experimentation vital and failure has minimal consequence. While you can technically get through the whole game without dying, this isn't going to happen, at least not on a first run. Careful planning can save your life, but you ultimately need to experiment to see what the best way to deal with each situation and enemy is. Being able to get through a previously nightmarish encounter unscathed due not to any tangible upgrade, but simply because you have understood how to properly approach the situation is fantastic and is very much how many NES games are designed (ex: many people think of Contra as an extremely hard game their first time through, but it's actually not bad at all after a few attempts). Furthermore, the death penalty is very low in order to counterbalance the high rate of death; losing all of your souls sounds terrible, but it usually only takes a few minutes to get them back and any items/gear/shortcuts/etc unlocked will remain with you and any minibosses usually remain dead forever.

Finally, the AI is meant to be abused. Whether it's intentional or not, the enemies in the Souls games are deadly, but not all that bright. Both the games themselves and the playerbase tend to actively encourage taking full advantage of these shortcomings to make it through the day; pattern recognition, an understanding of enemy limitations, and getting creative with the tools one has at one's disposal are the keys to success here.

Now, how all this applies to other games is another matter entirely and depends in large part on just what the game in question is. For example, a traditional turn-based RPG or one with an ATB system is going to need some degree of actual grind unless you make some pretty big changes (no leveling, the ability to dodge attacks like in the Mario & Luigi games, etc) or if you make the difficulty come from something other than normal encounters (ex: the Etrian Odyssey series gets a big chunk of its difficulty from environmental hazards and forcing players to find ways around fights they can't win). On the other hand, this can work well with platformers - both the 8 and 16-bit consoles have dozens upon dozens of great examples of 'hard yet fair' difficulty - though far too many indie games these days take the I Wanna Be The Guy approach of requiring pixel perfect platforming from beginning to end along with many 'joke' deaths the player will have no chance of avoiding the first time through (often to a far greater extent than IWBTG, which was a game which understood the importance of checkpointing and kept the blatantly cheap stuff to a minimum).

So in short, games with a focus on difficulty have the potential to be great, but they need 1) frequent checkpointing or some other form of meaningful progress 2) a minimal death penalty (even many older games and roguelikes with permanent death are usually so short that they can be gone through in about an hour, making even a late-game death not actually all that bad) 3) difficulty which neither comes from raw numbers nor from deaths which players have no chance of avoiding on a first time through other than via pure luck and 4) a sense of discovery and freedom alongside the high difficulty (Etrian Odyssey, the Souls games, IWBTG, roguelikes, and even Super Meat Boy are packed to the brim with secrets to discover and optional content and often give the player a good amount of freedom as to how he/she wants to play and what he/she can do) - creating a game with the mindset of 'I am going to make this thing as masochistically hard as possible' without an understanding of how to make the experience a rewarding, entertaining, and fair one will inevitably lead to a terrible game.

author=LockeZ
I don't think "random chance to instantly kill a boss" is a great plan, period, no matter what secondary effects you attach or what limitations you impose.

Well, an instant death spell should never work on a boss - in the case of a boss fight such a spell would just deal damage and ignore the chance to kill. A 'Death' summon which deals dark damage to bosses (or to normal enemies if it doesn't instant-kill) would be useful against anything light-based or anything which simply has a high resistance to the more common elements.

However, I think how viable instant-death (and other status effects) is really depends upon the overall game. A spell with a high chance to kill and even one which can hit multiple enemies is fine in a game with an average or above-average encounter rate where a player may defeat dozens or even hundreds of normal enemies in a single dungeon. However, If a a game has a low encounter rate, non-random battles, and/or tends towards encounters consisting of 1-3 fairly strong enemies instant death no matter the percentage can really trivialize things; if normal encounters are designed to simply give players something to do while going through a dungeon or as fodder to ensuring players are at a high enough level for a boss fight, instant death is understandable, but I don't think it's a good idea to include it unless with a very small success chance if individual encounters are still designed to be threatening (you could just make miniboss-esque normal enemies immune to instant death, but if it doesn't at least deal damage to enemies when they're strong, then that implies that it's only really useful against foes which both the player and the developer view as little more than wastes of time, which calls into question just what that spell and those enemies are really doing in the game in the first place).

Really, a lot depends upon which status effects are in the game and how they are implemented in the first place. It's entirely fine to have a game where bosses are immune to status effects if you take into account that status effects will not be useful during boss fights during the design phase (ex: perhaps normal enemies are still challenging enough that status effects aren't completely overlooked). However, I do think there are two 'never do this' things which I'll list here:

1) Immunity in a game with a character/class based around status effects - This doesn't come up overly often, but it's always annoying when it does. When a game has a character or a class which revolves largely around tossing out status effects, it is horrible design to make this character/class almost entirely useless during boss fights. This isn't to say that a boss can't be immune to certain effects, but you should never make a player feel like leveling up a character is pointless.

2) Turn skipping effects work on bosses - This is one which pops up in a lot of RPG's by new developers. Any effect which can cause an enemy to completely skip a turn, whether it be a stun or a side effect of an ice spell or something else, should never be usable on bosses. Unless the game has some sort of odd system in place (ex: bosses become immune to stun after being affected by it once), this deprives boss fights of any challenge as they inevitably are reduced to having characters spam whichever skills have a chance to freeze/stunlock the boss. This also applies to any status ailment which also can potentially lock a boss out of doing anything, such as confuse and petrify. Also, PsychoFreaX posed a high mana cost as a solution to this, but I would have to really just disagree; even if you severely limit mana recovery and make stun-like abilities cost an extremely large amount of MP, a battle which consists in part of the party taking a few turns to simply whale on a completely incapacitated boss is simply not fun and deprives the fight of tension, resulting in poor design - stun is a nice little bonus for normal encounters (though I dislike any skill which is purely a stun/sleep/confuse/freeze) as it helps the party conserve a bit more HP/MP for the big fights, but it should never be considered even a potentially viable aid during boss fights.

With that being said, I think status effects can be great for boss fights if implemented properly as they give the party something to do other than raw damage and healing. Giving the boss buffs which can be countered further adds a sense of strategy and some of my favorite fights in RPG's are ones where the player needs to rapidly make use of status effects simply to counter the boss's own buffs (ex: slow to counter haste, attack down to counter attack up, dispel to counter regen, etc).

Lastly, you could always get creative with status effects to make them more about risk vs. reward. Namely, let them have both a downside and an upside. For example, a status effect which cuts an opponent's damage in half for one turn and then doubles it the next turn would be very useful if you desperately need a heal or if a boss is charging up a big attack and you could also have skills which reduce physical attack while increasing magic attack and vice versa and so on.