SLASH'S PROFILE

Unity! But mostly because it's the one I have the most experience with. I feel really comfortable with it and can prototype pretty much anything I want fairly easily :D

Ahh, all the VR stuff there looks like a blast! Have a good time \o/

I have a bunch of old names from projects on eternal hiatus, and if I really liked 'em and I think it fits, I'll use one of those, usually!

Ahhh, I'm glad you all liked it! The article's by Aevee Bee - she's written a lot of other good stuff about RPGs & games (my favorite one is Aevee Reviews the Destiny Flavor Text, also highly recommended).

Anywho, I definitely agree - I think the biggest flaw is that there wasn't really anything exciting happening when running around in BD's dungeons. Because of how the combat worked, you could almost certainly take out the average monster party in the first turn (especially if you set up your party for it, which I did ASAP). So now you have all these random encounters which boil down to:

• Battle Transition In
• Brave 16 times, kill everything effortlessly
• Get EXP & Gold & Loot
• Battle Transition Out

And when there's no excitement in the battle, those transitions start to reaaaallllyyyy grind on you! It got to the point where I stopped caring about finding treasure chests and just ran through dungeons as fast as possible, until I saw that you could disable random encounters, at which point I got unnecessarily angry and turned off the 3DS. (I kinda went on a rant about RPG design after I read this article :P )

It's a shame too, because some of the art is so good... I saw the cover of BD 2 and was seduced for a half-second, before my sanity returned.

Well-designed randomness can definitely add a lot to a game. It's a way to make your player have to plan around any possible scenario. It doesn't have to be "Flip a coin, heads: you win, tails: you lose". You can use things like "parallel results" where there are two outcomes that are different but have an equal magnitude of effect on the game. If you know that your enemy has a 50% chance to cast Poison and a 50% chance to cast Sleep, and both are going to cause trouble for the battle, you have to be prepared to handle either.

I find things like critical chance to be a little more boring usually, but anything where the player has some way of interacting with the dice rolls - buffs that increase crit chance, or having the opportunity to re-roll a miss - those things make innate randomness more interesting, because it gives the player more to think about and gives them more credit for their successes (and failures).

I actually wrote an article about this a while back! http://rpgmaker.net/articles/874/