STRAK'S PROFILE

Ever heard of Fesliyan Studios? They've got a great library of free and royalty free music for just about any genre or situation, and if you look hard enough you can probably find or edit something to suit your needs. I used them for Bloodstained Hands, and I'm using them for Thrall for now until I decide whether or not I want to commission custom music. Point isn't this one resource, but rather that there are a plethora of resources out there that are high quality, free to use, not typically associated with memes, and most importantly not rips. Personally I don't think there's much reason to use rips unless it's for learning purposes, because there's so much available that can be just as suitable, but that's my perspective. Doesn't mean it's the only one or the right one.

I could be wrong here, but I think most people are willing to forgive overused resources for a free RPG Maker game. If you have the same free music as 101 other games but you have a unique story to tell or unique gameplay, most people won't care. Yeah, a lot of crap games used the same resources, but if yours has the effort put in, most people will re-contextualize that resource with a decent game as opposed to the atrocities out there. And the ones that don't probably aren't your target audience anyway, since they'll judge EVERYTHING about your game, not just the resources, so ignore them. Now, if your game is commercial, different story. Pay for resources in that case. It's the right and ethical thing to do. And if you can't afford to, don't go commercial. Period. You can't afford to. But if it's a free game, don't worry about what other people are using. Find something free and rewrite the brand for that resource.

That's a clever idea, actually, but I think would best be implemented in a game where the focus of the gameplay is around said crafting system.

I will say, one of the worst crafting systems I've seen is from one of my all-time favourite games, ironically. Which goes to show, a great game can have bad systems and still be great if it's not the focus of the game. I'm talking about Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles. In that game, there were dozens of crafting recipes, which were MANDATORY to upgrade your equipment. You couldn't buy equips, only craft them. Problem is, some higher tier items needed monster parts to craft them. Another problem, almost EVERY monster dropped a unique crafting item. And there was no way to know if you'd need it later unless you looked it up (which was also a chore, because you'd need to look up EVERY ingredient and see what crafts correspond to it, whether or not it's applicable to your race, and whether or not there's something better you could make instead). Add to that that the ultimate weapons requires crafting materials that only had a 33% chance at BEST as drops from bosses at the end of dungeons, and you're doing a lot of runs and a lot of grinding just to get a weapon that offers maybe 5 more points of damage. It was an awful system that promoted item hoarding, which is even worse when you consider that the original version had limited inventory. In a nearly perfect game with one of the best co-op systems I've seen (original not remaster), it was the only real glaring flaw. If the rest of the game wasn't amazing, it might have killed it.

Thank you, everyone. I appreciate your condolences. I'm getting through it, but it's gonna take some time. Hopefully I'll be able to get back into game dev by next week, just have a lot to take care of until then.