THEREALDMAC'S PROFILE
TheRealDMac
1393
Finally working on getting my original VX Ace project out while I still can, then maybe I'll move onto an episodic MV project.
I'm just a dude who likes oldschool RPGs and never seems to have the time to finish making one :P.
I'm just a dude who likes oldschool RPGs and never seems to have the time to finish making one :P.
Search
Filter
An RM Venture
Feedback!
So for Alice and Maker Gear, since they apparently don't have game pages, I'm going to review them in this post.
Tale of Alice
Story - It started off looking like it might be a promising joke game; Alice wakes up in her disaster of a house seeming not to remember how it got that way, the creeper stalker-kun NPC is waiting for her outside her door like that's a perfectly normal thing to do, and of course Ralph is in the game. Then nothing happens. Like. Nothing. Have you ever heard the green ping pong ball joke? I won't bore you with it but basically it's a really long buildup with no punch-line, and that's how I felt. I did enjoy the self-aware commentary about map detail and bugged jumping followers. I also chuckled at Ryoma speaking Japanese (no really, he actually spoke Japanese) since I still don't know what "Yoroidoshi" means.
But... Ryoma joins the misadventurers, then I run around and grab some items from frustrating locations, walk up and challenge the Demon King using the regular demon sprite who you referred to as the Demon God, and the game ends akin to the NES Ghostbusters title. ("Congladuration you prove our race is superior" or something like that.) I wanted to at least know why we bothered with all of that. Or get a punchline. It needed the "ba-da, psh!" at the end. Instead I was just frustrated.
Gameplay - Not a bad base concept, really, it had potential as a puzzle game mechanic. Run around, collect various items to gain access to new areas so you can get the items there to clear more obstacles. But I felt that it would have been better implemented in a longer game where you actually had to figure out something more complicated to access some of the items, or you had to stop and think about whether to chuck the apple, etc. The problem is that I just had to run around in the same map as the enemies the items were meant for, for the most part, and the whole thing just felt like it was intentionally there to burn my time. Also the final boss fight. I was sitting there, all ready to use strategery, or for the surprise final boss morph into the actual Demon God boss after I leveled to 99, or... SOMETHING. That didn't even qualify as a boss fight in my book. Also I walked up a ledge at one point, one of your floor tiles somewhere is glitched I think. Underneath the huge mess though I think there is potential for something, at the very least a dungeon mechanic for another game.
Graphics/Sound/Atmosphere:
You were lazy and you know it and you've admitted it... yea. Also if you walk into the forest area and back to castle town at one point the music stays castle town. And at one point you fell into the same classic blunder that I've made in past work where the player wants to walk sideways and ends up going back up to the previous area, I put that under "graphics" because you could have made the map ever so slightly different and prevented that altogether. Like a 1 tile chokepoint.
Final Verdict: The whole game was a giant tease. Two hours of your time for like 90 minutes of everybody else's if they play the game and write a full review. *Super-frustrated*
Maker Gear Rising
Full review...? Do I have to? Fiine. First of all, why must everybody use .rar files and force me to use WinZip?. I am convinced that thing just... BREATHES malicious code.
Story - As the title suggested, a Metal Gear Rising parody. I was excited at first... but the text runs outside the window and I can't even read the whole thing, and for the most part it's just the same lines with "carrot" instead of "blade" and "Ergelbergl" instead of whatever awesome name that dog thing had. Quick beginner advice from a relative beginner - make sure you press "preview" before you move on to the next text section to make sure it all fit, and if you're going to parody something it has to be in the form of either a quick reference or a ridiculous exaggeration of one of the original's flaws. Think the scene in Scary Movie where the girl gets on the treadmill to run away from the killer, and you think "what an idiot, now she's going to die," but then not only does he get on the treadmill too, but he trips and falls. (Making fun of what an idiot Ghostface seemed to be.)
Gameplay - This was your Encounters of the Boss Kind entry, wasn't it :|. I lol'd at demon king with Senator Armstrong's head. I did. But we were able to just attack each other to death. At first I thought there might be some cruel strategy involved; i.e. if I didn't guard every turn and save up TP he'd out-damage me and I'd die. Or maybe there was some secret carrot item I had to use. But that turned out not to be the case. We just clobbered each other and Armstrong went down easy. Gameplay either has to have an inherent addictiveness to it (think Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and those awful Zynga games), or test some sort of skill (reflexes and pattern reading for fighters, creativity and logical reasoning for strategy, some combination for your action RPGs, etc.) If it does neither, it falls flat.
Graphics/Atmosphere - Meh. One map and a boss fight. Nothing much to say. Again, Senator Armstrong's head was funny. The couple of animations were a sign that SOME effort went into this though.
Sound - 10/10 I love that song.
Final Verdict - I probably spent more time writing this review than you spent on your game. I'm guessing you just panicked and threw something at the contest because you ran out of time, but in case that's not true and I'm being really mean, I did try to give actual advice on both writing and the art of gam mak.
So for Alice and Maker Gear, since they apparently don't have game pages, I'm going to review them in this post.
Tale of Alice
Story - It started off looking like it might be a promising joke game; Alice wakes up in her disaster of a house seeming not to remember how it got that way, the creeper stalker-kun NPC is waiting for her outside her door like that's a perfectly normal thing to do, and of course Ralph is in the game. Then nothing happens. Like. Nothing. Have you ever heard the green ping pong ball joke? I won't bore you with it but basically it's a really long buildup with no punch-line, and that's how I felt. I did enjoy the self-aware commentary about map detail and bugged jumping followers. I also chuckled at Ryoma speaking Japanese (no really, he actually spoke Japanese) since I still don't know what "Yoroidoshi" means.
But... Ryoma joins the misadventurers, then I run around and grab some items from frustrating locations, walk up and challenge the Demon King using the regular demon sprite who you referred to as the Demon God, and the game ends akin to the NES Ghostbusters title. ("Congladuration you prove our race is superior" or something like that.) I wanted to at least know why we bothered with all of that. Or get a punchline. It needed the "ba-da, psh!" at the end. Instead I was just frustrated.
Gameplay - Not a bad base concept, really, it had potential as a puzzle game mechanic. Run around, collect various items to gain access to new areas so you can get the items there to clear more obstacles. But I felt that it would have been better implemented in a longer game where you actually had to figure out something more complicated to access some of the items, or you had to stop and think about whether to chuck the apple, etc. The problem is that I just had to run around in the same map as the enemies the items were meant for, for the most part, and the whole thing just felt like it was intentionally there to burn my time. Also the final boss fight. I was sitting there, all ready to use strategery, or for the surprise final boss morph into the actual Demon God boss after I leveled to 99, or... SOMETHING. That didn't even qualify as a boss fight in my book. Also I walked up a ledge at one point, one of your floor tiles somewhere is glitched I think. Underneath the huge mess though I think there is potential for something, at the very least a dungeon mechanic for another game.
Graphics/Sound/Atmosphere:
You were lazy and you know it and you've admitted it... yea. Also if you walk into the forest area and back to castle town at one point the music stays castle town. And at one point you fell into the same classic blunder that I've made in past work where the player wants to walk sideways and ends up going back up to the previous area, I put that under "graphics" because you could have made the map ever so slightly different and prevented that altogether. Like a 1 tile chokepoint.
Final Verdict: The whole game was a giant tease. Two hours of your time for like 90 minutes of everybody else's if they play the game and write a full review. *Super-frustrated*
Maker Gear Rising
Full review...? Do I have to? Fiine. First of all, why must everybody use .rar files and force me to use WinZip?. I am convinced that thing just... BREATHES malicious code.
Story - As the title suggested, a Metal Gear Rising parody. I was excited at first... but the text runs outside the window and I can't even read the whole thing, and for the most part it's just the same lines with "carrot" instead of "blade" and "Ergelbergl" instead of whatever awesome name that dog thing had. Quick beginner advice from a relative beginner - make sure you press "preview" before you move on to the next text section to make sure it all fit, and if you're going to parody something it has to be in the form of either a quick reference or a ridiculous exaggeration of one of the original's flaws. Think the scene in Scary Movie where the girl gets on the treadmill to run away from the killer, and you think "what an idiot, now she's going to die," but then not only does he get on the treadmill too, but he trips and falls. (Making fun of what an idiot Ghostface seemed to be.)
Gameplay - This was your Encounters of the Boss Kind entry, wasn't it :|. I lol'd at demon king with Senator Armstrong's head. I did. But we were able to just attack each other to death. At first I thought there might be some cruel strategy involved; i.e. if I didn't guard every turn and save up TP he'd out-damage me and I'd die. Or maybe there was some secret carrot item I had to use. But that turned out not to be the case. We just clobbered each other and Armstrong went down easy. Gameplay either has to have an inherent addictiveness to it (think Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and those awful Zynga games), or test some sort of skill (reflexes and pattern reading for fighters, creativity and logical reasoning for strategy, some combination for your action RPGs, etc.) If it does neither, it falls flat.
Graphics/Atmosphere - Meh. One map and a boss fight. Nothing much to say. Again, Senator Armstrong's head was funny. The couple of animations were a sign that SOME effort went into this though.
Sound - 10/10 I love that song.
Final Verdict - I probably spent more time writing this review than you spent on your game. I'm guessing you just panicked and threw something at the contest because you ran out of time, but in case that's not true and I'm being really mean, I did try to give actual advice on both writing and the art of gam mak.
An RM Venture
Awww catastrophic mission failure. Oh well. Back to reviews!
...All 22. Does that mean we have to review our own game to get the devotion badge?
...All 22. Does that mean we have to review our own game to get the devotion badge?
Feedback/Partial Review
I'll admit that a) the super-obvious text prompting was to prevent my over-exposition from getting people lost, and that b) I forgot to put one after Noah's house due to rushing for the RMN contest. However, I also need to admit that I found the video of you being completely lost in the airship rather hilarious.
On a more serious note, part of the plan was that everything had been made with default resources, which originally seemed to be a great idea for a contest restricted to the database characters. (Hence the story gymnastics to get the characters to actually fit their ridiculously random profile descriptions in the database.) I did make some balance-related database changes; the exp curve is altered such that only a few random encounters at each point will be difficult, and the endgame bosses were given specific patterns.
I'd always wondered if there was a playable game hiding in the defaults and samples, but it was way too ambitious for a game with a few days to develop and an hour long time limit.
Thanks for the feedback though! I'm leaving the game in its default setup for now so that my fellow contestants can compare it to their own week-constricted efforts, but I'll definitely consider polishing up the mess a bit someday.
On a more serious note, part of the plan was that everything had been made with default resources, which originally seemed to be a great idea for a contest restricted to the database characters. (Hence the story gymnastics to get the characters to actually fit their ridiculously random profile descriptions in the database.) I did make some balance-related database changes; the exp curve is altered such that only a few random encounters at each point will be difficult, and the endgame bosses were given specific patterns.
I'd always wondered if there was a playable game hiding in the defaults and samples, but it was way too ambitious for a game with a few days to develop and an hour long time limit.
Thanks for the feedback though! I'm leaving the game in its default setup for now so that my fellow contestants can compare it to their own week-constricted efforts, but I'll definitely consider polishing up the mess a bit someday.
Ace Heroes
author=Liberty
You can now upload the download to this page by hovering over your name on the black bar at the top of the page, picking Manage Games and choosing this one.
THANK YOU. Uploaded.
Also Ratty, not sure what happened, but hopefully you weren't ensnared in some popup window about how you need to improve your computer performance, etc. (I've noticed those are everywhere on fileshare sites. And WinZip, which makes it frustrating when things are in .rar format. And Google's right, they're probably malware.)
Eric's Day Off Review
An RM Venture
I made a game page now to simplify things. At least I think I did it right.
http://rpgmaker.net/games/6054/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/6054/
Making my first RPG
I'd advise you to have some paper notes and to periodically run playtests if it's entirely story focused. That way you can go back and reference where you were originally going with the plot if it starts to run away from you, and notice if you forgot any important characters or exposition, etc.
I only say this because I had an absentminded event test run away from me and become my main project, and still reference the paper storyboard. And in one of my contest entries I forgot to include a character I wanted because I cut out the dungeon I put her in :P.
I only say this because I had an absentminded event test run away from me and become my main project, and still reference the paper storyboard. And in one of my contest entries I forgot to include a character I wanted because I cut out the dungeon I put her in :P.
An RM Venture
If people just play each other's games and share their thoughts I think we can get a general idea of how we all did outside of the top few. Maybe we could make a separate topic for discussing that or something.
The judges only have to decide the winners and give a general idea of what set them apart. They don't have to explain why each individual entry was worse, no judges in any contest do that. *Scratches head* it seems like I managed to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and I'm sorry for that.
And Yellow Magic, being judged for her "tone" just because she's a notable member of the community is the entire reason Liberty doesn't want to share her notes.
The judges only have to decide the winners and give a general idea of what set them apart. They don't have to explain why each individual entry was worse, no judges in any contest do that. *Scratches head* it seems like I managed to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and I'm sorry for that.
And Yellow Magic, being judged for her "tone" just because she's a notable member of the community is the entire reason Liberty doesn't want to share her notes.
An RM Venture
author=Liberty
:|
;)
(I didn't mean to be critical of you though. Also I never actually asked you to share your judging process. I was reflecting on why you might not want to.)













