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Crafting equipment vs buying it
You could always go the Princess Princess route and have the synthesiser/alchemist be one of your party members. That way the following you around part is sort of built-in.
Dragon Quest 8 did it quite well as well, with the explanation that synthesis is done in a big pot that travels around in your cart with you.
Dragon Quest 8 did it quite well as well, with the explanation that synthesis is done in a big pot that travels around in your cart with you.
Crafting equipment vs buying it
Interesting conversation, and I'll definitely take a look at Soul Shepherd.
I'd actually played with the idea of having an Etrian Odyssey style shop for items and weapons (and in fact did a script commission for RMVX that facilitates that very thing, though it wasn't done for me so technically I can't use it) but that only really works if you have a single central shop, otherwise there's suspension of disbelief when the shopkeeper in town C is able to sell you the Wyrmslayer made by town A after you sold all the materials required to make it.
I suppose you could have unlocked equipment only buyable from the shopkeeper who made it, but that would get pretty tedious especially when it comes to remembering what you unlocked and where.
I'd actually played with the idea of having an Etrian Odyssey style shop for items and weapons (and in fact did a script commission for RMVX that facilitates that very thing, though it wasn't done for me so technically I can't use it) but that only really works if you have a single central shop, otherwise there's suspension of disbelief when the shopkeeper in town C is able to sell you the Wyrmslayer made by town A after you sold all the materials required to make it.
I suppose you could have unlocked equipment only buyable from the shopkeeper who made it, but that would get pretty tedious especially when it comes to remembering what you unlocked and where.
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Game Balance: The Difficulty of Balancing A Game
You mean like Last Scenario when you get to Marid King and suddenly realise HOLY SHIT BOSSES ARE ACTUALLY KIND OF A BIG DEAL or Exit Fate when you get to the mine prison and get raped by random tigers? :P
Crafting equipment vs buying it
I think for the purposes of moving away from having better equipment in the next town over for no reason other than to make it easier to fight the monsters there, Killer Wolf's idea is probably the best: having a static set of equipment that can be improved using materials. That way the basic stuff is available everywhere and your progression is limited by what you pick up.
I suppose the next inevitable stop on my logic train then becomes "well why are the enemies more powerful in the next area over?" which I think I have a solution for but I'd like to mull over that one in a bit more detail before I discuss it in depth.
I suppose the next inevitable stop on my logic train then becomes "well why are the enemies more powerful in the next area over?" which I think I have a solution for but I'd like to mull over that one in a bit more detail before I discuss it in depth.
Logic in games - where do you draw the line?
I must confess that the main reason I'm so eager to go down that route with the inn thing is to A) subvert a trope that nearly no RM developer has ever played with, and B) hang a lampshade on it in-game when you first rest at an inn while you have a companion, with Giya mentioning that a rest at the inn is just what he needs to see to his injuries, and his companion telling him not to be stupid because bedrest doesn't cure everything.
Logic in games - where do you draw the line?
Sauce: It's funny you should cite the inn example, because I had been considering the exact same thing with the intention that sleeping at an inn would not in fact fully heal your party. This actually plays in nicely with the concept for my battle system since the ABBS (as I've coined it) will support party members sustaining injuries to their individual limbs which affect their abilities in battle, which resting will lessen but not fully heal. It would probably take a combination of time and medical attention to fully remove them, but since this is a recent idea I haven't yet had time to explore how the systems will fully interact with each other if I do go with that.
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It probably isn't worth a download right now to be honest; as part of the "joke" there isn't any actual game. The characters reference the quest and how awesome it was, and there's a line about there being hours of quality gameplay that you really should have been there for.
I do eventually plan on expanding it into a proper game though.
I do eventually plan on expanding it into a proper game though.
A Rather Important Question: To Switch or not To Switch?
Well since we're sharing...
Tundra arguably had its beginnings in 1999. I had been playing around with QBASIC for a while, but I hadn't yet progressed to doing actual graphics so I tended to represent things with ASCII. My friend David and I decided to try making an RPG like those Final Fantasies we loved so much because that would be SUPER COOL YOU GUYS
So we started making this game. I did the coding and David was the ideas guy. He drew some pretty neat little sketches of things like monsters and the protagonist and came up with a concept but I honestly forget what it originally was. I made little ASCII shops and constructed primitive arrays to hold all the item data and made a text-based game that used an internal grid system that was never really described to the player; they just decided which direction to go in and then whichever square they ended up on had its "description" data output so you could explore.
And I coded a little primitive combat engine which used really simple algorithms and more or less did exactly what it needed to and nothing more.
Fast forward to 2001 and Dark Legend: the Path of Death (yeah, we were so original when I was 14) was really taking shape. It was, for all intents and purposes, a finished game in that all of the underlying functionality was done. All that remained was to finish off the map and code in quests and the like.
And then we discovered rm2k.
It was like Christmas, my Birthday and all the world's holidays rolled into one that day, for 16-year-old me. Never in my life had I imagined that such a magical tool might actually exist that was accessible to nobodies like us! Immediately QBASIC was abandoned and I downloaded the holy grail of games creation software.
In those early days, I was a total demon. I was churning out maps like my life depended on it, whizzing through the database work within a few days of the download. It was about this time that we decided our original concept just wasn't RPGish enough and sat down to work through our story.
I can't remember which of us came up with the idea, but regardless the game was now about a world that was turning to ice. We came up with the name Tundra pretty much at the same time as the concept. David named the main protagonist, Giya Vantana. To be honest given later events that occurred with David which I won't go into here I would rather rename him, but he's been named that for so long I feel it would be doing the concept a disservice if I did, so Giya Vantana he'll stay.
At the time, we had this idea that the game would start with Giya hopping down an icy mountain and introducing himself to the player, then going into a flashback detailing exactly how the world was frozen. An evil sorcerer named Morgana had freed an imprisoned ice sorceress, who subjugated mankind and ruled over them with an iron fist. The game would basically be a quest to destroy or re-imprison the sorceress, thus restoring the world to its former state.
...yeah, not exactly going to win any originality awards, but at the time we thought we were the hottest shit. We called our "company" Game Wizards UK. I made a shitty Angelfire website and everything. After Giya's monologue and the hackneyed exposition we had one of the RTP parallaxes scrolling down and to the right as that sad theme from Casper played. I'm really embarrassed to say that when I initially playtested this I got a tear in my eye.
This post has already gotten rather long, so I'll stop there for now. Let me know if you want to hear more of my backstory as there's still a long way to go and I'd rather only tell it if it's not going to result in a TL;DR situation. :P
Tundra arguably had its beginnings in 1999. I had been playing around with QBASIC for a while, but I hadn't yet progressed to doing actual graphics so I tended to represent things with ASCII. My friend David and I decided to try making an RPG like those Final Fantasies we loved so much because that would be SUPER COOL YOU GUYS
So we started making this game. I did the coding and David was the ideas guy. He drew some pretty neat little sketches of things like monsters and the protagonist and came up with a concept but I honestly forget what it originally was. I made little ASCII shops and constructed primitive arrays to hold all the item data and made a text-based game that used an internal grid system that was never really described to the player; they just decided which direction to go in and then whichever square they ended up on had its "description" data output so you could explore.
And I coded a little primitive combat engine which used really simple algorithms and more or less did exactly what it needed to and nothing more.
Fast forward to 2001 and Dark Legend: the Path of Death (yeah, we were so original when I was 14) was really taking shape. It was, for all intents and purposes, a finished game in that all of the underlying functionality was done. All that remained was to finish off the map and code in quests and the like.
And then we discovered rm2k.
It was like Christmas, my Birthday and all the world's holidays rolled into one that day, for 16-year-old me. Never in my life had I imagined that such a magical tool might actually exist that was accessible to nobodies like us! Immediately QBASIC was abandoned and I downloaded the holy grail of games creation software.
In those early days, I was a total demon. I was churning out maps like my life depended on it, whizzing through the database work within a few days of the download. It was about this time that we decided our original concept just wasn't RPGish enough and sat down to work through our story.
I can't remember which of us came up with the idea, but regardless the game was now about a world that was turning to ice. We came up with the name Tundra pretty much at the same time as the concept. David named the main protagonist, Giya Vantana. To be honest given later events that occurred with David which I won't go into here I would rather rename him, but he's been named that for so long I feel it would be doing the concept a disservice if I did, so Giya Vantana he'll stay.
At the time, we had this idea that the game would start with Giya hopping down an icy mountain and introducing himself to the player, then going into a flashback detailing exactly how the world was frozen. An evil sorcerer named Morgana had freed an imprisoned ice sorceress, who subjugated mankind and ruled over them with an iron fist. The game would basically be a quest to destroy or re-imprison the sorceress, thus restoring the world to its former state.
...yeah, not exactly going to win any originality awards, but at the time we thought we were the hottest shit. We called our "company" Game Wizards UK. I made a shitty Angelfire website and everything. After Giya's monologue and the hackneyed exposition we had one of the RTP parallaxes scrolling down and to the right as that sad theme from Casper played. I'm really embarrassed to say that when I initially playtested this I got a tear in my eye.
This post has already gotten rather long, so I'll stop there for now. Let me know if you want to hear more of my backstory as there's still a long way to go and I'd rather only tell it if it's not going to result in a TL;DR situation. :P
Logic in games - where do you draw the line?
Glad you like the idea, Neverm0re.
I agree with you RE: random loot, Killer Wolf. I never said I wouldn't have other stuff dotted around, just that I think the concept of treasure chests in the middle of nowhere is fundamentally silly but it's such a staple of the genre that nobody ever really pushes the envelope there.
I want to make Tundra as realistic as possible in terms of character interaction/encumbrance/what you can find while travelling, without making the game less fun as a casualty. I recognise that sometimes the fun has to come first but I'm determined to break away from the standards that people tend to use simply because that's how it's always been done.
I agree with you RE: random loot, Killer Wolf. I never said I wouldn't have other stuff dotted around, just that I think the concept of treasure chests in the middle of nowhere is fundamentally silly but it's such a staple of the genre that nobody ever really pushes the envelope there.
I want to make Tundra as realistic as possible in terms of character interaction/encumbrance/what you can find while travelling, without making the game less fun as a casualty. I recognise that sometimes the fun has to come first but I'm determined to break away from the standards that people tend to use simply because that's how it's always been done.
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