STORMCROW'S PROFILE

There's actually a stat that I'm really curious about that you didn't/don't report on here.

What, in general, are the busy days/hours of RMN? I'm sure it varies a lot from week to week but I'm equally sure there must be a general trend, even if it varies by season. Then I'll translate them from the site clock to my time zone.

(I'd been wondering this for quite a while but seeing my games which were anything but buzzing listed amongst the buzzing games recently, while a pleasant surprise, prompted this inquiry.)

Also dear lord I need to post less.

Cool, and again, thanks! (Incidentally, unlike 99% of the userbase you have made multiple actually complete games that I'd actually love to play just for fun, if I ever get the chance.)

I will totally admit that cause I have VERY STRONG OPINIONS (tm) on all topics "Game Design And Theory" I went straight to the comments to type out my position, then read through your article to see if it changed it at all.

My Original Position: this mechanic/feature is neither good nor bad in and of itself, and whether it improves a game or detracts from it depends entirely on all of the other factors of the game design. Random off the top of my head examples. If I am playing Borderlands 2 (EVERY game now is kind of sort of an RPG ever since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and certain contemporaries unleashed RPG mechanics into a wide array of genres but that's a topic for another article) and I get a wicked cool Level 23 gun when I'm Level 21 that is really nothing but a minor annoyance. There are like a hundred other factors baked into the design of Borderlands incentivising (sp?) me to grind levels, and enemies scale toward (if not to) your level anyway. Just let me use my fucking gun NOW. My other example is actually FROM the golden era of RPGs, the action-RPG Soul Blazer from circa 1990-1991. That game does have a level req. on equippable swords. In this case, that is a good thing. I can't equip the Psycho Sword until I'm Level 5. Well, I mean I was well over Level 5 before I even found the Psycho Sword, but even if I wasn't, in Soul Blazer you shouldn't be delving the dungeons that require the Psycho Sword before you're Level 5 anyway, so it's not an annoyance, it's a useful guideline (you must be this tall to ride). But Soul Blazer is the kind of game where I'm guessing you only unlock seven swords max over the course of the entire game, maybe just four, so there's also that.

I suspect almost nobody will claim it isn't boring, since it all either happens automatically as a result of stuff that you were going to do anyway, or requires you to spend time grinding with no goal except gaining more experience. The first of those two scenarios is boring because it happens passively without the player's input, and the second one is boring because the player is stopping their actual progress in the game to repeat content they've already completed.

Sure, but to be clear, we're talking about how you GET XP/Levels/Phlebotinum/Whatever, right? Not how it is USED? Because choosing where to invest your whatever points, one way or another, is a feature of most games I like or will design myself.

The most obvious balance issues come from the developer's inability to accurately predict the player's power. /snip

Scaling enemy levels TO the player's level (see: Oblivion) is a terrible (non)-solution to this problem that is worse than the problem itself.

HOWEVER, scaling enemy levels TOWARDS the player's level (see: Skyrim) is actually a reasonable solution to this problem without messing around with difficulty levels.

One of your jobs, as an RPG designer, is to make the parts of the game that are the most fun be the parts that are most optimal for players to do to get stronger.

Agreed, actually, but quite a stretch from the argument in favor of level requirements that we started at. Like I can barely see there from here.

Generally, you don't want grinding to feel rewarding. Because it's not fun.

What??? I'm sorry but that's just...listen, you want to support the playstyle of the people who grind and the playstyle of people who don't grind (and incidentally, most people I imagine fall in between, like me, and grind a little) which means you should make BOTH playstyles fun AND rewarding.

If you aren't any better at determining what's fun than a typical player, you shouldn't be designing games.

This is an obnoxiously elitist statement that is...also totally right. And that goes for games of ALL kinds, not just JRPGs, not just RPGs, not just VIDEOgames.

(Players) generally won't do the things that are most fun to them ... That's how human brains work.

You're not 100% wrong about everything but this statement is just...I can't. Your thinking is idiotic. I'm done. Peace.

(When I did this kind of thing for money I had a colleague (a superior, technically) who also insisted that people don't play games to have fun. I couldn't talk to him either. The end result was a terrible game.)

I will second the demand for the Kentona song to be remixed with instrumental backing (if a very simple bass line is required, I can provide one on bass guitar, but someone else is going to have to do the arrangement most of the work).

I took all your old sprites from what you described as a cancelled project (I think it was Shattered Wings) that you posted to the resource museum thread a few years back. I shouted out a yoink when I took them and said it was awesome you'd donated them to the public, but if you weren't following resource museum, yeah you'd not of noticed that.

If you want me to remove you from the gamepage it's no problem, though. It just seemed like a fairly significant contribution to the game, even if it wasn't specifically for the game. (Also, the 'Other' field wasn't large enough to type in something like "Sprites I Took From A Cancelled Version Of Shattered Wings" IIRC.)

But yeah let me know and it's no problem to remove you from the page, and I can keep you in the credits.

(Oh, "Earthling" means that your sprite style is used for all human beings born on Earth. All characters born on Rhyntparthea, the fantasy world in the game, use the RTP sprite style. On the other half of the gamepage, I'd just give you credit for "sprites" seeing as they're used for most of the game. But again, if you don't want to be on the game page, it is not a problem to remove you.)