THENECROMANCER'S PROFILE

I'm curious, is this a voice chat free for all or is there some kind of control over who talks and listens and all that? It seems hard to imagine a way for this to be tolerable if everybody is talking over each other.

It sounds like you think I'm talking about memorizing everything from battle formulas, to elemental attributes of enemies, and names of towns.

I'm talking about rudimentary understanding of a games mechanics. Like the fact that combo skills exist. A person will read about combo skills and they will see a basic description followed by a full list of skills with numbers. They don't need to remember anything other than the fact that 2 characters can combine skills to make new ones. It doesn't take much brain power to retain that much. You don't need to remember how much skill x costs, or that this one is unlocked by a quest, and that this one ends up being OP because it deals tons of dmg with low skill point usage.

Now let's say you don't want to read about it and you want to play it. It will take X amount of time just to unlock combo skills in the game. Then many more hours to unlock all the skills and use them, which really won't teach you anything new about them beyond the initial "oh that's neat, I'd like to try that in my game" feeling when you first learn about them.

A person reading about CT should come away with something like "A solid RPG that doesn't stray too far from the usual formula. It offers a few unique elements like traveling to the same areas in different time periods, combined skills, and the option to face the last boss early" (I think that's all it really offers)

What else could one possibly learn from CT by playing it all the way through? The answer would be all fluff things, like the experience and good character interactions/storylines and lush maps. Things a person doesn't need to remember about CT to learn from it to become a better dev. The reason being, these things exist in all games, good and bad. Also what one person calls good story, another person might call mundane or average. Experience and enjoyment of story related stuff is so objective that it's not as helpful as raw game mechanic concepts. Those are the things that actually get placed in your own games.

It might be marginally helpful to see a game be so well done and balanced, but every new game comes with it's own elements that need to be balanced. So playing a balanced game won't actually help you balance your own games because all the variables are different.

That's an example of a simple type of game but that's how I see it. It's very easy to read a basic tutorial type thing for any game and understand it's battle mechanics. There's one game, maybe The Last Story?, where you have multiple parties and each battle is like a war between multiple groups. You could read about the nuances of how that works and if it's involved you might not remember every single detail, but you become aware of the concept. Rather than a single party vs enemy party, you have multiple parties on each side. That's all you really need to take away from that game. If you play it for a while you will get a sense for how that plays out in practice, which is why you watch it. A few times if that's what it takes. You might learn how they decided to structure it, but if you are going to try that in your game I would assume you're not just going to flat out copy it. You will put your own spin on it. So knowing all the nuances from how that game did it, are meaningless. And the emotion from the heart wrenching scene before the final battle in that game has no bearing on anything, outside of being a positive memory.

All concepts and ideas learned from these games SHOULD be rudimentary. Because you will be taking them and molding them into something different in your game. So there is no need to memorize all the specific minor details, from reading or playing the game for 100+ hours.

There are plenty of games I've played back in the day and I don't remember anything other than what kind of gameplay it had. Those ideas are with me while nothing specific about the game is.

It almost seems like you are assuming I'm talking about spending hours reading battle formulas and raw data on boring wiki pages with no images or visual references. Compared with leisurely playing a fun game over the course of weeks/months :P Also, there are some games you can play all the way through and then you read about them and there are things you would never even notice in the game because it's not explained or obvious. Exploits may exist that change how the concept is perceived or show a better way to execute it.

When researching you can choose what kinds of data you read. When you are playing a game you are stuck with it's own pacing and slowly learning a bit here and a bit there, and hopefully by the time you finish the game you can remember what happened at the start. Especially if a person has a long list of games to play. They would need that eidetic memory more for playing the games because they have to filter out all the fluff to get to the bedrock concept they can take away and apply to their own games.

Phew. And here I thought I was done discussing this heh

author=Versalia

author=Link_2112
a ton of over-analysis

if you're that worried about the 'main story' crossing the line maybe you should re-think your approach to a gam that is literally about avoiding the main story?? it says you don't even need to include one

Why are you even replying to me? I'm working on something and have questions, not analyzing what I might do. I'm not interested in snarky opinions about changing my plans. Piss off.

author=Liberty
Again, it's an event, not a competition, so we're not going to worry too much about definitions and the like. Just include at least 10 list-inspired sidequests in your game. If you're worried that they're too main-questy, then add more sidequests!

Do keep in mind that you can create your own sidequests that aren't based off the list, just that 10 of your total sidequests have to be.


Full game means that it's completed - I mean, if you want to go back after the event and build more into it, I can't stop you, but we're not allowing demos. It has to have a clear cut ending! No "To Be Continued~" or loose ends to whatever the main story (if you have one) is used.

Ok thanks. I think we'll go with dual endings, or something like that. It will certainly have the 10 sidequests but probably much more in there somewhere heh

Does the game have to consist only of gameplay related to doing the side quests? Where you might see mention of a main story but the game never gets around to that. (The world is doomed and you need to get a sword of death from this town, but you end up running errands for the townspeople until sundown, the end)

Or

Can it present the side quests, finish them for the sake of satisfying the event idea, then continue on to follow a main story to an ending? (We run the errands, then get the sword, then go on to save the world, the end)

author=Liberty
It's so people can remember it exists. Often people tend to resort to being all grumpy back instead of reporting posts that should be reported. Making the report button stand out a little more will hopefully more reports and less fights.

Now you just need to make the ignore function more radioactive.