SVIEL'S PROFILE

author=mellytan
Going with a game: Oathguard was always mostly about the story/characters/world and as I made the RM2k3 game I always felt like I was shoehorning gameplay in, or otherwise twisting the story so that I could fit in another battle just so I could feel justified calling the whole experience a "game".

What about calling it a Visual Novel instead of a game so that you don't have to shoehorn anything in? That way, you could avoid the parts of novel writing that don't translate well from games.

I definitely want to help judge or participate, though, I think I'll wait a while to decide which. I won't be able to to do much RPG Maker wise until mid-august, if then, but I know I'll have full internet access back by the time judging rolls around.

What is Nature? Forgive me if I sound ignorant, but, I've been mostly offline for months so the only Nature I know consists of a very clean lake.

Even if built from the basic building blocks, iterative playtesting would still be time-consuming. I don't think that it'd be perfect(ish) right off.

Though, it sounds like you were not suggesting anything as arcane as what I was thinking. A 'little bit of algebra' is definitely a good investment; I was thinking more along the lines of a 'whole lot of discrete mathmatics.'

But, with how far you've simplified it, what could possibly not be recreated by some other combination? Unless we account for enemy damage and factors affecting the player characters beyond just damage (like, say, threat rate), then we can't really escape from the 'everything is really a bar juggling game' outlook.

That said, can't there be legitimate strategy in a game about juggling enemy/allied bars? At least, provided we observe some rules like not having Fire and Fire 2.

I think, perhaps, you're taking some things for granted that I am not quite wed to. I don't think that having multiple paths to victory means that any of them needs to be easy. Something like Strongest Skill Spam is a definite red flag in any combat system. Any design worthy of the tag 'decent' should not be subject to that.

Even so, I think you're right in that it's more of a projection than the real deal, but that seems fine to me. So long as there is enough strategy to keep the player on their toes throughout the game, there's no need to go all the way. The goal is to make the game fun and engaging, not create a new set of mechanics to last through the ages.

In addition, it's important that the system isn't too arcane. Like Go (or chess), the rules should be simple to pick up. It is a very small subset of players that want to have to study combat for ten minutes before engaging in it with any hope of success. Simply adding complexity is, in essence, like polishing the turd.

Since combat boils down to juggling those bars, it makes sense to trim redundancy in skills. Moving the bars should happen, yes, but there should be some other motivation to use at least 3 skills at any given time, all of which can make an impact in some way, even if it's just additional bar movement. There should never be a skill that does X damage and nothing else alongside a skill that does Y damage and nothing else. Instead, give one skill an incentive in certain situations and the other incentives elsewhere, but make sure that the situations either overlap or conflict, such as where one skill makes the other less useful (but perhaps you want it to be useful later).

To be concise (is it too late for that?!), I think that a turn-based set-up can be strategic. The problems you've mentioned are real and prevalent, but not unavoidable. Much like Othello, where the players are literally fighting over two 'bars' (black chips vs white chips), the method by which the juggling happens can bear sufficient strategy.