masail's Design thread

I haven't played Earthbound Zero, but FF's encounter rate isn't as high as people tend to make it out to be, and it's very unlikely that a game somebody makes has battles as threatening as FF's. FF's dungeon layouts are extremely good.

EDIT: To clarify, FF's dungeons are the kind that it's not actually that hard to find your goal, and many branching paths lead to treasures. It's that FF's battles themselves are pretty hard, but that can be adjusted through difficulty levels.

Look at DQ2-4, maybe 5 dungeons too though.

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

I'll be back with new information Friday, as I've been pretty building my characters to test the initial dungeon. See you guys in a few.

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When you don't know what to do, be kind.
--Mahayana slogan

Over the past week I've managed to get a fair amount of work done, and even pick up a lesson from some mistakes. One of them I don't really want to talk about as it doesn't directly relate to the topic, but the other one breaks down to this--always back up your data. I'm sure plenty of people have said this, but in my case it could have cost me a lot of work.

I attempted to write a simple plotscript to have the game start with the initial party of adventurers in the sewer dungeon so I could test some of my work. Well, I'll tell ya, for some reason, the Custom Editor did not like it. I only managed to get it to work the way it's supposed to once, which is why I now have a scene on hand with Jantha leading the party. Because I forgot to back up my data before even trying that, I was set back on half my dungeon work. That said, the first level is still intact and I still have the plans for level 2 (Maintenance Level), and I wasn't satisfied with the initial design of level 3 (Myconian Fields). Level 3 is sort of an introduction to an underground world that I can expand upon later when I get this game done. Further exploration of the dungeon becomes less about descending down levels as it is about exploring the underground fields. I intend to put a fortress in there to serve as Level 4, and lead into the final battle of the sewer quest in Level 5.

In case anyone's wondering what I did to break my rpg file in the Custom Editor, this was the last ditch script I ran to try to fix it (in vain):

include, plotscr.hsd
include, dquest0.hsi

plotscript, sewer, begin
add hero (hero: Erasmus)
add hero (hero: Radyn)
add hero (hero: Jantha)
end

I ran the latest nightly version of the Custom Editor when this happened, and I went through several versions of the code before giving up after this one.

Now for the pics I promised the other day:


Our old friends, the Mushroomers, are one of the creatures that can be found in the sewers below the city of Erenul.


Jantha explores the sewers of Erenul.


Hmmm... that awful looking water must be going somewhere, I wonder...

I'll be around to talk more later. I've got to reset and clean up my desktop for a better working environment.

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When you don't know what to do, be kind.
--Mahayana slogan

I'm digging the map layout so far.

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

I am having difficulty imagining how a script could break the game in custom. Did you save a copy of the broken file?

No, I didn't save a copy of that file. And I honestly don't understand how I broke it. I will save a copy of the file if I break it again.

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When you don't know what to do, be kind.
--Mahayana slogan

I think I know what went wrong before. I may have made mistakes while attempting to program, but that didn't crash the rpg file. I'm running a recent version of Ubuntu Linux. Even without touching the programming aspect, files run in Wine eventually give up. In my case, I haven't even touched the programming aspect and I still get the same bug where it won't save. Running the program outside the Wine compatibility environment doesn't seem to produce the same crash, though.

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When you don't know what to do, be kind.
--Mahayana slogan