SBESTER'S PROFILE

I've been an active member for quite a few years now. I started my RMN career by releasing the Eden Legacy Trilogy of games (each entry took 4 months of nonstop work) within one year, and I've gradually shifted to creating other games as well. I now have 3 flagship series: Eden Legacy, Fragile Hearts, and Mafiosi (being remade for commercial release as Crime Opera). I'm pretty much solely focused on the Crime Opera series of visual novels right now, as my band and job currently take up most of my free time.

Currently working on
-Crime Opera Trilogy (Mafiosi 1, 2, & 3 edited, with all original resources)
-It's a secret...
Crime Opera II: The Floo...
The kids have grown up, and they're becoming quite dangerous.

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Misaos Nominations and Games of 2012

Thank you, kentona! These are always very helpful for me.

The Featured Game Thread

author=Link_2112
author=Dyhalto
A Halloween game for December? I'd save that for January.

How about a christmas-themed game : Chocobo Panic Xmas.
that looks pretty solid

What must MMORPGs do to reinvent themselves?

For me it's always been about the shit battles. I hate point and click and watch for 2 mins, with the occasional "use item" key tap. It isn't something limited to MMORPGs either, it's the reason I hate Dragon Age Origins more than I hate Dane Cook.

Commercial gams - a philosophical & practicality debate

No one's trying to be hostile here, I just found the overall purpose of this thread to be somewhat misleading and in need of clarification. Dyhalto pointed it out perfectly above though, we were to try and find an absolute dealbreaker here and we failed to do so. And in truth, I can't really think of one. For me, personally, it's just a bunch of little things that I'm worried about.



One of those things that I hadn't even thought of before, and that I'd like to make mention of, is the possibility that people may jump on newbies with commercial projects and harass them to the point where they feel they aren't welcome. That happens here with FREE games. Hell, there's one instance I know of where a group of people were actively trying to get someone to leave by posting bad screens from his game anywhere he posted in the forums to make fun of him (even when he was trying to stick up for fellow newbies). These were longtime members, and they were actually supported by members of the staff at the time (read: NOT the new staff we have now).

If this is going to happen, we may want to think of ways to prevent this kind of behaviour, as dissatisfied customers tend to be quite vocal when they can be. Maybe you could have special additions to the commercial profiles, leading to user reviews from other sites and such? Extra staff to enforce cyber bullying rules? I'm just thinking on the spot now, but I do think it's worth considering preventative measures. Deckiller's been quite amazing at finding trolls and bullies from what I've seen, but it may become hard to handle with twice the amount of profiles incoming and the added element of money being exchanged.

Commercial gams - a philosophical & practicality debate

The commercial checkbox is a pretty good idea to have, and I feel better about the sorting and finding issue now.

However, I kinda always got the feeling this thread wasn't really asking for our opinions, but rather just warning us what was gonna happen anyway. My suspicions have been confirmed.

What does it take for a game to be featured ?

Mr_Detective, I should also point out that some games are featured when they have a high star rating, then get lower ratings after being featured (or in some cases, as a result of the feature, because people can be whiny jackasses). Luckily though, a vast majority of the features are well received all around these days and there haven't been any problems or complaints (that I've noticed).

Commercial gams - a philosophical & practicality debate

author=harmonic
No, this is not the consensus and not a good idea. Separating them only reinforces the idea that they're mere advertisements.


They'd be demos only, so they pretty much are.

Commercial gams - a philosophical & practicality debate

@King Arthur- Well said.

I would also like to bring up something that's been mentioned in the past, perhaps as a compromising solution, since I'm not trying to be a total jackass to the commercial devs here. RMN2? A separate but affiliated site for commercial-only games.

I know, the funding for such a thing is the big problem there, but maybe for a small fee (since it'd already be dealing in money), people would pay to have their project profiles featured on the site, rather than the donation route we currently have for RMN. That may actually attract some more worthy indie developers while weeding out some of the small fries making RTP first-time crap fests. Obviously, it's an even bigger gamble than what we've been talking about in this thread, but I can tell you now that I'd be much more willing to accept and maybe even contribute to such a thing if you could keep the two sites relatively separate.

Just an idea that was thrown around on the latest podcast, credit where it is due :P

Commercial gams - a philosophical & practicality debate

I've said it elsewhere on the site, but I feel like the site will see a greater shift towards featuring Commercial ventures than freeware ones. Banners, banners everywhere.

If you go to the forums, you'll notice we're already experiencing this. And yeah, I have taken issue with it (albeit silently). I have nothing against Sailerius or anyone else who has been lucky enough to get their commercial features advertised on the site, but I do feel like it takes away from the free game advertising. The first time I saw one of these banners, my first thought was "why don't they throw up the banner for the featured game instead? It doesn't get a fixed, non-changing image on the main site anymore, but rather it's just the first of several features to pop up."

Here's my main issue, while I feel that commercial games made in an RM program sometimes have awesome art or at least something worth your buck that other free projects don't (though not all of them do)... most of us are using the same programs to do our work. Free game creators work just as hard (in many cases) to put out a very worthwhile experience for players, and expect nothing in return for their efforts (aside from the occasional download or being seen on the front page from time to time). Commercial developers don't necessarily work harder on their projects, but they want you to give them money for it anyway. It's just my personal opinion, but it feels wrong that we'd be potentially cheating players into buying a less worthwhile game, which could definitely happen ("hmm, this one costs money so it's probably longer/better/more professional than the rest of these free ones").

I mean, to use an example, has anyone ever played Aveyond? You basically tread over the same few maps over and over and over again, making for a longer but cheaper experience than many of the free games you find here. And of course, you wouldn't know it by playing the short demo version of it. This is wrong. And I know that a lot of people will argue that it's a player's own fault for not knowing the difference between a solid, well made commercial project and a cheap, thrown together one, but people who have never seen an RM game before is not going to realize the difference. And, my issue still stands that it's probably going to take away from the advertising of free games that are possibly more deserving of attention.

Here's another issue for you. I'm looking through the list of newly added games, and find a few that I think look pretty cool. Commercial. Commercial. Holy shit, expensive commercial. Commercial... and so on. I don't buy commercial games online. Never have, never will. That's the reason I come to this site, for the FREE games. I don't have to weed through bunches of pages to find free ones, but if commercial games are welcomed into RMN, that will eventually change. Maybe not right away, but somewhere down the line. I know this may not be important to a lot of you, but it is to me.

The thoughts keep coming to me. Everyone sees all the shitty commercial games (like the worst of the worst of them) actually making money, and they decide "hey, mine's better imo, maybe I should make mine commercial too". A bunch of the community shifts towards commercial games, and we have a complete inventory full of average commercial games to compete with. And of course, due to these projects having money to throw around and advertise on other sites, we have even more users attracted to RMN, coming onto the forums and saying they want "shitty, generic, RTP VX game as the enxt featured game". Free games get pushed even further from the spotlight. Free game devs leave RMN.

It's unfair to compare RMN to any oth RM site in existence. It's just better in every way. Allowing commercial games could truly ruin what is so special about it. Maybe I'm wrong, and all these fears are for nothing. But I could be right, and I think most people in my position (a developer {of quite a few games} who knows that they are only in it as a hobbyist and will never EVER be swayed to sell their games) is probably having some of these fears as well.

Hell, I could go on... and I only meant to write a small blurb... so I'll stop here.

What are you jamming to?

Katatonia's new album (Dead End Kings) is seriously the most gorgeous experience ever.

Cannot stop listening to it!