SLASH'S PROFILE

author=kentona
please, everyone. you must read this list.

and I didn't even have to pay him.

author=Ronove
And you know, Finish Your Shit. That also goes hell of a long way.

That was probably my favorite point :P

author=kentona
You meant "tedium" right? Also, I think LockeZ's 4th point is very important, and probably the #1 reason why I love RPGs so much. Prepping for battle is...ummm...half the battle!

I think pre-battle preparation is underdeveloped in a lot of RPGs today, and could evolve into so much more than it is!

Current, Lame-o Battle Prep: The player often knows little about upcoming boss battles or prepping for battle is mind-numbingly simple. In a volcano? Equip your Ice spells! Fighting a bunch of critters? Make sure to switch in your casters with AoE attacks! The decisions are simple and require little thought, value weighing, or sacrifice.

Now imagine this: An army is going to attack the city you're protecting in two days. The leader has challenged you to a battle between your party and his lieutenants, and if you win his army will retreat. You can try and gather information on your opponent: infiltrating his troops, or bribing his past cohorts; or you can try and weaken him beforehand: poisoning one of his lieutenants, or sabotaging their weapons; or you can try and subvert the army as a whole: via diplomacy, an ambush, or some other measure.

Any combination of these could increase your chance of victory in different ways. You only have time to do some of them, and if you fail, you set yourself up for a much harder battle. You also have related skills which can help you.

Maybe this is going too crazy-far in battle preparation, but it sounds like an interesting experiment. You could build a whole game around it. It's a little inspired by AD&D, and if you decided to explore a cave and you didn't bother asking around first to find out if it had ogres in it, your skull would be cracked in half by round two.

Goobers! That's my terrible codename for them right now. After you hit them once, they start to split - which means they take double damage, but you only have 1.5 seconds to finish them before they split into two brand-new goobers.

They die pretty quickly, but they're brutal if you leave them alone or if you fire randomly instead of focusing on a single target. They also take damage from traps, which means that a sawblade or tesla coil mixed with a goober can leave a nasty surprise ;)

EDIT: yea btw this is a 2D sidescroller, not an RPG :P

If I ever make another RPG Maker game, the title is going to be "I Want You Dead".

It seems direct enough.

author=heisenman
Yeah, to sell a videogame you also have to put stuff like music and graphic and shit. Mind boggling I know.

We were talking about games, not video games - which have been played with as little as nothing but the players and rules - since the dawn of man.

Not like you know, they also put actual things like rulebooks, dices and miniatures in the package. They don't sell *ideas* alone.

This isn't even an argument, you're just proving my point - rulebooks are ideas. Every game's "rulebook" is really just a set of ideas designed by the game's creator. All games are based upon rules and limitations.

And not like you'd know, but the original DnD had no minis and only used dice - so a game made of nothing but paper, pencils, dice and dreams. how 'bout that shit

So if you're trying to argue that people need crazy high-end computer tools to design and can't make good games out of nothing but household items, you failed.

Anyway, @chana: Besides To The Moon which I mentioned earlier (made with RPG Maker, nominated for several awards including a Sound Design prize at the IGF) some extremely popular games nowadays were made with simple tools - Spelunky comes to mind as a huge hit. The original Spelunky was made in Game Maker, which is based around a drag-and-drop interface, and now it's enormously successful and soon to be ported to XBLA.