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So you say your game has strategy
Because of the nature of RPGs, assuming you've given the player the tools he needs to actually beat the boss, he is usually capable of switching/adapting his fighting strategy mid-fight, or at least after dying once so he can equip the right ability/equipment/materia for the boss. Since RPGs are typically turn-based, the trick is in the discovery of a boss-defeating strategy, not the actual implementation of said strategy. Once you know a boss is weak to Fire, you use Fire.
Summary: Difficult RPG fights typically have two parts, learning and implementation.
Now, if you're looking for ways to make the implementation more difficult, well, you'd probably be better off switching to a non-turn-based genre, but let's throw around the old idea ball:
1) Characters have to use abilities that require a couple turns to charge, so the player has to think ahead and predict the bosses' attacks, heal/shield as necessary, etc.
2) Characters are pressured by a turn limit/timer, and thus have a hard limit on how many turns they can waste.
3) Maybe switching your strategy involves switching character stances, which takes a turn. Maybe they have to switch back and forth repeatedly, while healing, attacking, and the like.
Hell, I mean, there's no time limit on how much your player is allowed to think in a turn-based system. So assuming they play the boss enough and his pattern is at least a little bit predictable, they can memorize his pattern and implement it flawlessly. The skill comes in how long it takes for the player to pull that off - not unlike how if a player throws enough lives at a level in Super Meat Boy, eventually he'll get to Bandage Girl, through sheer luck/memorization.
Summary: Difficult RPG fights typically have two parts, learning and implementation.
Now, if you're looking for ways to make the implementation more difficult, well, you'd probably be better off switching to a non-turn-based genre, but let's throw around the old idea ball:
1) Characters have to use abilities that require a couple turns to charge, so the player has to think ahead and predict the bosses' attacks, heal/shield as necessary, etc.
2) Characters are pressured by a turn limit/timer, and thus have a hard limit on how many turns they can waste.
3) Maybe switching your strategy involves switching character stances, which takes a turn. Maybe they have to switch back and forth repeatedly, while healing, attacking, and the like.
Hell, I mean, there's no time limit on how much your player is allowed to think in a turn-based system. So assuming they play the boss enough and his pattern is at least a little bit predictable, they can memorize his pattern and implement it flawlessly. The skill comes in how long it takes for the player to pull that off - not unlike how if a player throws enough lives at a level in Super Meat Boy, eventually he'll get to Bandage Girl, through sheer luck/memorization.
So you say your game has strategy
A pattern is actually a great way to make your players use their wits; for example, Mario games start with a simple slow, waddling goomba, maybe a floating Koopa, and top it off with a Hammer Bro. The difficulty ramps up later when players are faced with many enemies at once, and forced to use what they learned (really, you made them practice it) all at once, and quickly.
Similarly, a pattern in an RPG boss fight uses patterns: Once your player realizes your bosses have exploitable weaknesses in their patterns, they'll enter boss fights carefully, analyzing what the boss does, how he attacks, until they spot the turn they can bash him for 20,000 damage. You can make the player use their wits by hiding this weak spot very carefully - maybe their character has to use a specific ability at the right time to open up the gap, so to speak, or maybe you need three characters to perform certain actions in the right unbroken order to deal massive damage.
The pattern does have to be identifiable, however, or it's not a challenging fight - it's just a dick move. You make it identifiable by teaching it to your players slowly over time - like in Mario - maybe they have to use a few special abilities on minibosses or enemies, and the final boss requires a concert of everything they've learned so far. If you want to make the game more challenging, you can always increase the pace the player is forced to learn, or be less forgiving about mistakes.
Similarly, a pattern in an RPG boss fight uses patterns: Once your player realizes your bosses have exploitable weaknesses in their patterns, they'll enter boss fights carefully, analyzing what the boss does, how he attacks, until they spot the turn they can bash him for 20,000 damage. You can make the player use their wits by hiding this weak spot very carefully - maybe their character has to use a specific ability at the right time to open up the gap, so to speak, or maybe you need three characters to perform certain actions in the right unbroken order to deal massive damage.
The pattern does have to be identifiable, however, or it's not a challenging fight - it's just a dick move. You make it identifiable by teaching it to your players slowly over time - like in Mario - maybe they have to use a few special abilities on minibosses or enemies, and the final boss requires a concert of everything they've learned so far. If you want to make the game more challenging, you can always increase the pace the player is forced to learn, or be less forgiving about mistakes.
So you say your game has strategy
author=Crystalgate
However, the problem is doing all that while not making the patterns to easily adaptable.
A wide variety of character skills and talents, mixed with bosses & enemies that require effective use of particular skills, or combinations of skills, to win - that's what it boils down to. You could probably break it into a mathematical equation, with the longer your "combination" creating different tiers of difficulty:
1) Boss casts Haste, you must cast Slow on him or Haste on yourself to keep up.
2) Boss is weak to Fire and deals AoE damage, so you must cast Fire spells and use Cure-All. But then he casts Fire Resistance, so you have to use Resistance Breaker or switch to Ice Spells.
3) Boss is Immune to Elemental Damage, has high physical evade, and slowly respawning minions who have low HP but deal massive damage. You have to kill the minions, cast 100% Accuracy on the Knight, who hits with Fire Shatter, making the boss weak to fire, and then blast him with Fire spells while his shield is down.
But those are specific counters. The even more interesting boss fights have multiple ways to take them down. Maybe you take down Boss 3 by Ice Shielding yourself against the minions (who do Ice damage) instead of killing them every few turns. Or maybe you have an attack on the Knight that always hits for low damage, and you turn it into a fight of attrition. Leaving those kinds of choices up to the player can make the game more interesting.
P.S. I mentally imagine Craze making his avatar's face whenever he posts.
Edifice - A Slightly Less Decrepit Version
This sounds like an impressively solid idea. I've been wondering about RPG grinds and pondering a game where every fight matters - where you're actually tempted to use strategy on a normal minion fight, rather than mash A - because every little bit of HP you save counts.
I look forward to playing it, Craze.
I look forward to playing it, Craze.
Character Introductions - Short and sweet or explanatory?
author=kitten2021
In the end, all 5 heroes end up meeting up in one place and this is how they all end up plopped together to form your 5-man/woman party you keep through-out the game.
That's actually a pretty solid plan and it sounds like a lot of fun - and it clears up what you meant earlier.
My take is that when you switch focus from your first set of characters to your next, you should make it very clear, maybe with a black screen saying "Meanwhile, in Citysburg..." or "One Week Earlier..." if possible.
From there, you could do one of many things:
1) The easiest way to introduce a new hero to the player would be through a dialogue cutscene between the new hero and someone else he knows. This allows you to drop the hero's name, establish some of his personality, his profession, mission, etc.
2) You could drop the player right into the control of someone else, maybe with a small transition, or the quote you mentioned above, without even explaining it to the player. They'd have to figure out what's going on themselves. I have seen this done wrong, but when it's done right, it's very cool and effective. For example, you could put them in control of the assassin in the middle of a mission, and they'd figure out that the hero was an assassin pretty quick (when they themselves murder someone). Very fun.
No save marathon game. Good or bad idea?
Final Fantasy games may be 50 hours, but they also allow saving. You gotta realize the cost of the decisions you're making.
If you really want to make a game with no saving/retries/extra lives:
1) DO allow soft-saving, so the player can put down the controller and come back later.
2) DO try and make it at least a little shorter, so that the player doesn't get to the final boss after 40 hours and then never finish because he died. Honestly, making it longer than 5 hours is probably not fair or fun.
3) DON'T be a dick and pull dick moves, including but not limited to: surprise instant-kill fights, massive loss of gold, easy-to-access areas with high-level monsters, severe limits on restoring HP/MP, etc. This kind of game requires the player to learn from his surroundings before they kill him, so surprises must be balanced and must be hinted at or warned or taught to the player, or else he will quit and never come back, and your game will be regarded as unfair and shitty.
As a fair warning, you may want to build up some design experience with simpler games before you go biting off more than you can chew with a game like this one.
EDIT: I just thought about it some more, and in the defense of a true roguelike, you'd make the game a lot more fun if you allowed the player multiple ways to play through the game - for example, Diablo II had multiple classes you could choose from, each with talent trees, and there were many different but equally viable options to choose from for your character's fighting style. That way, if your character died in Hardcore Mode (and was lost forever) you could try again, but this time with a different playstyle, class, focus, whatever. That way, it would prevent the player from repeating the same dungeon 100 times with the exact same skills the exact same way. Just a thought.
If you really want to make a game with no saving/retries/extra lives:
1) DO allow soft-saving, so the player can put down the controller and come back later.
2) DO try and make it at least a little shorter, so that the player doesn't get to the final boss after 40 hours and then never finish because he died. Honestly, making it longer than 5 hours is probably not fair or fun.
3) DON'T be a dick and pull dick moves, including but not limited to: surprise instant-kill fights, massive loss of gold, easy-to-access areas with high-level monsters, severe limits on restoring HP/MP, etc. This kind of game requires the player to learn from his surroundings before they kill him, so surprises must be balanced and must be hinted at or warned or taught to the player, or else he will quit and never come back, and your game will be regarded as unfair and shitty.
As a fair warning, you may want to build up some design experience with simpler games before you go biting off more than you can chew with a game like this one.
EDIT: I just thought about it some more, and in the defense of a true roguelike, you'd make the game a lot more fun if you allowed the player multiple ways to play through the game - for example, Diablo II had multiple classes you could choose from, each with talent trees, and there were many different but equally viable options to choose from for your character's fighting style. That way, if your character died in Hardcore Mode (and was lost forever) you could try again, but this time with a different playstyle, class, focus, whatever. That way, it would prevent the player from repeating the same dungeon 100 times with the exact same skills the exact same way. Just a thought.
What's the Point?
It's a good way to practice game design without having to learn/master a programming language or high-end art creation (or without needing a team to do it for you). It allows you to jump right into designing games with the lowest learning curve (without being limiting - RM can still make great games).
For someone like me, who is trying to become a game designer professionally, it was a good way to practice before I started learning more advanced tools. Today, I'm using an engine called Unity3D, which is quickly becoming accepted among the professional world, but all of the tips and tricks of game design I learned while using RPG Maker still apply. Plus, despite that fact that RM is 2d and Unity is 3d, you'd be surprised how similar the engine/workflow/feel of design is.
Edit: also it's fun/for the bitches/for the fame
For someone like me, who is trying to become a game designer professionally, it was a good way to practice before I started learning more advanced tools. Today, I'm using an engine called Unity3D, which is quickly becoming accepted among the professional world, but all of the tips and tricks of game design I learned while using RPG Maker still apply. Plus, despite that fact that RM is 2d and Unity is 3d, you'd be surprised how similar the engine/workflow/feel of design is.
Edit: also it's fun/for the bitches/for the fame
Character Introductions - Short and sweet or explanatory?
If we're talking a cutscene where another character joins up with the party, you'd be doing well with a 30-second dialogue between the party and the character. You don't learn much about him at first, but over the course of the game, his actions and speech, his playstyle, and his reasons for sticking around, the player learns everything he wants and needs to know about the character. For example, a lot of SNES RPGs have mere 30-second "introductions" when the character joins, but the character has been mentioned before by other people (Paula, Earthbound), joins "temporarily" because he has a similar goal (Frog, Chrono Trigger) or teams up with the party for reasons that are explained later (Geno, Super Mario RPG). These games stayed away from lengthy backstories until they became relevant, and it worked out very well for them.
I'm curious as to what you mean by intro - can you give me an example of this?
P.S.:As a side note, a 2-5 minute intro would be very long intro for each character joining your party. I can't speak for anybody else but around the second or third time I had to sit through a huge character intro I'd hit the power switch.
I'm curious as to what you mean by intro - can you give me an example of this?
P.S.:As a side note, a 2-5 minute intro would be very long intro for each character joining your party. I can't speak for anybody else but around the second or third time I had to sit through a huge character intro I'd hit the power switch.
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Story vs. Features
Basic Gameplay Features -> Well-Developed Main Story -> Extra Features = Additional Story/Lore
Basic Gameplay: Combat, walking, maps, enemies, item collection, gameplay flow. The basics of a game - enough to make it fun, but without all the extra frills. (EX: Chrono Trigger's Dual-Techs are basic gameplay, but the collection of hidden Triple Techs are frills). This area should be strong enough to make the game fun on its own. Maybe not award-winning, but pretty darn fun.
Main Storyline: Includes the story, writing, characters, as well as the flow - how the player is told the story, when, where, and by who. Certainly important, but it will flounder if the gameplay is not well developed. If the gameplay is awful, people will be discouraged from experiencng the story.
Extra Features: Extras such as minigames, sidequests, hidden items, extra bosses, extra characters, unlockables, or power-ups that aren't necessary to beat the game. These are usually fun. Sometimes they can require a little work, but they should not be the core "fun" part of the game.
Additional Story/Lore: This is essentially the same as Extra Features. Extra lore entices some people as much as finally getting Knights of the Round materia, so treat it the same way. You can make it fun to find, make the player put some work into it, but it shouldn't be the core part of the game, just something extra to add to the experience.
This is my quick opinion. I'm off to work, so sorry if my explanations suck.
Basic Gameplay: Combat, walking, maps, enemies, item collection, gameplay flow. The basics of a game - enough to make it fun, but without all the extra frills. (EX: Chrono Trigger's Dual-Techs are basic gameplay, but the collection of hidden Triple Techs are frills). This area should be strong enough to make the game fun on its own. Maybe not award-winning, but pretty darn fun.
Main Storyline: Includes the story, writing, characters, as well as the flow - how the player is told the story, when, where, and by who. Certainly important, but it will flounder if the gameplay is not well developed. If the gameplay is awful, people will be discouraged from experiencng the story.
Extra Features: Extras such as minigames, sidequests, hidden items, extra bosses, extra characters, unlockables, or power-ups that aren't necessary to beat the game. These are usually fun. Sometimes they can require a little work, but they should not be the core "fun" part of the game.
Additional Story/Lore: This is essentially the same as Extra Features. Extra lore entices some people as much as finally getting Knights of the Round materia, so treat it the same way. You can make it fun to find, make the player put some work into it, but it shouldn't be the core part of the game, just something extra to add to the experience.
This is my quick opinion. I'm off to work, so sorry if my explanations suck.
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