AMERK'S PROFILE

And as I said, I appreciated your review, and I agree with a lot of what you wrote. It gives me a lot to consider for future projects. I never once argued or got upset or felt disappointed because the game was not praised, and if you bothered reading through my post that you deemed a novel, you would have realized that I was merely acknowledging why some parts of the game failed.

However, what I do take objection of is:

If you are a grown man over the age of 18, you should not find this humorous.

What I choose to write about or find humorous is my choice, nobody else.

Thanks for the review, and I'm not surprised to see a low score. After all, it's my first game, and having recently gone back to play it myself, there are a few areas where I find myself cringing. Comedy and parody games are hard to do, since they typically will attract only select people, and not the same people each time.

To address some of the points:

1. The game was originally going to be an exclusive for RPG RPG Revolution (rpgrevolution.com), otherwise know as Triple R or RRR. A lot of the characters in the game as well as the personalities and the goings-on come from that site. Then the site sort of went belly-up, no thanks to the site owners, and I was left with deciding whether or not I should release it on other sites as well. People who are familiar with RM and RM sites (RRR in particular) probably won't have a problem understand most of the references, but others probably will. This is why I feel comedy/parody/joke games are hard to do, since they most likely are made for a small group.

2. If you've been around any RM sites over the past few years, you'll understand that the noob culture is very much alive, and often referenced in other joke comedy games. The difference of a lot of these games is that many of them were only released on their specific sites, and a lot of those games may no longer have an active following, so unless you've been active on some of these sites, you may not be aware.

3. The difficulty was (believe it or not) tailored down considerably since it was first released (following recommendations from my beta testers sbester and Bizarre Monekey). There is minimal grinding to be had (in most cases fighting everything you see), but a lot of these fights (especially boss fights) do require a bit of strategy and understanding of the enemy weaknesses. Boss fights (and special optional boss fights especially) are much harder and more difficult, and do require things to be equipped (such as coats to prevent being frozen, or crosses to prevent being possessed) in order to succeed. Still, I do agree that in the later areas, the spike level does increase quite a bit. In my own recent playthrough, the mini boss (the trio of sentries) blocking the way in the final dungeon had my ass handed to me a couple of times before I managed to destroy it. I can only imagine others less familiar with the game or the strategy having a more difficult time. Completing the optional quests does help tremendously, of course, but perhaps not enough.

4. VX is blocky by nature in their visuals, but there are definitely a lot of things I'll think twice before using again. For one, I'm not a big fan of the autotile black-space-filled trees from Mack. Also, the shadows are automatic in VX, another problem, since they appear so blocky, and it would be best not to have them at all. In the newest maker, Ace, you can erase the shadows you don't want, which works out a tad bit better.

Finally, I really enjoyed the review. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the score, since there were a lot of things you seemed to like about the game, and I get the feeling the final verdict came more from frustration on certain game mechanics (such as areas of difficulty) or confusing bits of the story, but that's just my own opinion, and I still appreciate the time you took to go through and review the game in the detail you did.

Also, my favorite quote from your review:

This game beats you, takes a piss on you, and then taunts you (no seriously, it does that on the game over screen!).

In any case, my comedy routine is over. I've taken a much needed break from game design, and only now starting to get back into RPG Maker. So my next one will hopefully be much more fleshed out, less of a gimmick, and appeal to a wider audience.

What about changing to RM2K Value, which supports MP3?

author=Archeia_Nessiah
Also before you assume anything, I only encrypted two games and that's because they contain commercial resources (aka pay to use). So in reality, I'm not allowed to leave them un-encrypted because of legality issues.

By that same token then, using the default encryption method shouldn't be allowed as it could create the same legal issues, considering:

1. It only encrypts up to a certain size before it doesn't work (at least I believe that's how it is for older makers, I haven't tested this with Ace).

2. It doesn't encrypt audio files. So any music you buy from the store becomes readily available for theft when you use the default encryption method.

3. There are tools all over the internet to break the default encryption method.

I'm not arguing about whether or not you should encrypt material you purchased from the store. More than likely, if I were using material I bought from RMW in my own game, I'd also encrypt the game, not because of fear of theft, but because I wouldn't want to be accused of making it easy for people to gain resources they would have to buy otherwise.

However, I won't go out of my way looking for a better encryption than what is already provided, and we all know the default encryption is so flawed that you may as well not encrypt at all.

author=LockeZ
Apparently this is an unpopular opinion though, and most people are just here for the makerscore, and don't care about games other than their own. Sigh. I know I can't do much about it, but I don't like that attitude at all, and I think it's killing the community. Things like Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter make people suddenly able to imagine themselves on stage at a digital rock concert, and they'll do anything to get there.

Sadly, I must agree with this, since I've seen it in almost all the communities. When I first got involved with RM, the only three games I heard being commercial were Eternal Eden, Deadly Sin, and Dawn's Light. I barely heard about the Amaranth website, and so I wasn't aware of some of the other titles.

Most communities were all for shareware, and we all played each others' games and gave feedback.

Not so much anymore. While there are still other smaller communities around, RMN and VXAN feel like the last two great communities with a decent amount of members where the focus is not so much on commercialism, although the support is seldom there anymore.

I won't say whether or not I agree with your stance on the legality of code, but I will say there was once a time when the communities were at their prime, ready to help, assist, and share with everybody, and nobody cared so much out of making a quick buck as they were with just being part of a community doing something they loved.

Back on topic:

To the OP, encryption is almost pointless for freeware games. In the majority of the cases, we probably don't have anything worth stealing anyways.

Most of the people who are likely going to play our games aren't going to be professional developers themselves. That means most of our potential audience are either amateur developers or casual players not interested in game development.

Of those amateur developers who do steal, most of them will never be able to finish anything anyways.

And has been noted, there are tools readily available to easily decrypt, making the effort needed to put into encrypting your material not worthwhile.

There is also one other con, but this is the sort of con you would need to weigh for yourself. The fact is that most non-commercial RM games are buggy and unbalanced. I can't count the times I've quit playing a game because of a glitch, or because it was balanced so poorly. If the game is decrypted, I can easily fix those things myself (assuming I have the required editor).

Sure, I could do the same for the decrypted game by reporting it to the developer so they can fix the issue or issues, but why bother? The time it would take for me to contact them, have them upload a new version and hope they understand what was wrong, and then for me to download it again and playtest it to make sure it was fixed, not to mention remembering to transfer my save file over from the old version and hope that it still works in the new version -- it's not worth the bother for me.