Back to Basics Collection

Current Comments:
-CHECK THY WALLS! There are plenty of instance of missing walls, whether it's trees in town, or....

-For how dern expensive the equipment is, it's pretty much crap.
-It's too easy to level up, at the start at least.
-inconsistent sprite styles kinda bug me
-Qwerty? Is that you?

-Potion Makin' Don't Work.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

I think that has to do with ripping sprites from multiple sources. I saw sprite shells from Pokemon and Final Fantasy IV, and I'm sure there were others there as well.

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Cornbread Chemist

Maptiles are from the Dragon Warrior series. I know because I used the same rip/stretch technique to make the maptiles for Nintendo Quest.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

I used the same rip/stretch techniques on Stretch Armstrong.

HIS ARMS ARE STILL STRONG

Thank you for your rather constructive feedback Gizmog. Yes, there is much incomplete and I completely agree about releasing an unfinished product. However I did specifically mention it was unfinished, leaving it to the player if they choose to try it or not. I am not forcing anyone to try it, but providing them at least the option to see it in it's infancy. I am very sorry if releasing a game in this specific state has made you restless.

As for the other comments, I believe that wall might have been moved during a recent map edit. I confirmed all the walls after the map was initially built, but good catch. These are the kind of bugs I want to catch, as map editing can sometimes lead to broken walls.

The monsters look rather inconsistent as I drew some of them, and my artistic skills are not yet in the high ranks of most people here. The tileset used is actually from Nintendo Quest, with some small modifications and additions. Yes, Ash is a walkabout character whom is part of a side quest. All the side quests are also completely optional, once I finish it, you can beat the game without doing a single side quest, as side quests were an afterthought to add some additional content to the game.

The monster encounters and stats are also not final, which explains the game game being too easy after a specific level(and secretly why the weapons are also crap, but lets just keep that between us). As duely noted and incredibly stressed in my description(which someone failed to read), it is not a finished product, and it technically shouldn't be treated as such. I am merely looking for feedback and bugs to fix. I'm sure people don't yell at you for posting an unfinished game, which can't yet be beat. There is in fact a rather large number of games on here in a similar state, and they oddly don't receive the same beating... I do thank you for the current feedback however, and I will see about appeasing every single gamer in existence including you, no... especially you.

With all that being said, the game is essentially open source, so feel free and fork it to make it into a much better game(honestly, all that's stopping you, is well.. you). I'm rather curious what anyone would do with it, since the world map is basically there. NPCs and such can be swapped out, and there's lots of free maps, dialog, and tags to use. So rather than complaining, do something. I'm still going to complete it sometime soon regardless what anyone says.

It's not making me restless I just... don't really understand what kind of feedback you expected from something in this state. It seems like this is still an area where there's a lot of stuff that should be obvious to you to fix, where right now a tester can't be sure if something is working as intended or not because they have very little indication of what exactly the game is trying to do.

Some of the things like the maptiles should be relatively obvious if you'd played your own game. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you can't stand to play your own game just for testing purposes, nobody else is going to want to either. And look at how so many of the things people have reported have been met with "Yeah, it's unfinished, it's on the list of things to do.". You don't have alpha/beta testers look for the bugs you know about, you have them look for the ones you weren't able to find, when you've exhausted your own ability to search.

Like... you already point out so much wrong with the game. Why not fix that stuff before asking for advice on what little of the game is finished? And it's weirder still to me that you mention, a few times now, the idea that people could add things to the game, or "fork it", which to me sounds like "PLEASE FINISH MY GAME, GUYS". And that would be okay, if you came out and said it, you know, make it some kind of a community effort. But then again, if you can't stand to finish your own game, why would anyone else want to finish it for you? Perhaps there is a fundamental flaw and you should go with something simpler, shorter, with a basic concept that excites you.

I don't mean to be overly-judgemental, there shouldn't be any kind of restrictions to putting stuff on the gamelist, and I certainly shouldn't be the gatekeeper if there was. I would love for you to succeed in what you're trying to do... I just don't understand what that is, yet. I'm sorry.

Not bad really! I rather enjoyed the nostalgic feel it gave me when I saw the Dragon Warrior tiles.

I'm not sure I like how they were stretched though, considering the odd bits would be pretty easy to fix in order to make it feel more polished, but I'm just nitpicking here... ^^;

I look forward to seeing more of this game's development! Keep at it!

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"One can never improve enough nor should one stop trying to improve."

This might be the thread to ask, just because it's come up, but how many times does everyone else here tend to play their games before putting them up?

The two "releases" I have, which are basically no better than proofs of concept, still had me playing them dozens - maybe even over a hundred - times before I put them up. And I still had tons of errors that I didn't catch!

ABSOLUTELY YES, I play my games before I put them up. And if I change anything, even the tiniest little thing, I have to play it again, start to finish, before I'll let myself release it. Sometimes, by the time I'm done I hate the game so bad I don't even want to release it.

And you ARE gonna miss stuff. No matter how hard you try, the best you can ever do is play a game they way *you* would play it. You're not gonna try the shit you can't think of any reason to try, because you're you! Someone else is always gonna come from a different perspective and try stuff you wouldn't expect a monkey to try that's gonna fuck everything up, and that's okay. That's why it's always good to get a second opinion, or a couple of testers or whatever. It's just tough in a community this size, where every tester you have is one less guy in the audience to enjoy it.

Continually.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

I always do. Play-testing is ideal for catching flaws and fixing them!

Sadly, I wasn't as good at flaw-finding back when my older games were released. But I digress.

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"One can never improve enough nor should one stop trying to improve."

I suppose I was more interesting in the numerical amount. Playing it once is obvious. Even playing it ten times.

But as gizmog said:



How much is too much, too little? I do this too, but that can really add up...

Well, it can be harder for things like RPGs or especially big games, and obviously I only mean after the game is more or less "finished" and you're in the fixing-things phase. You don't need to test the game because you finally drew a new set of walkabouts, but graphics can cause unexpected consequences if you're not careful with your default passability stuff.

Take a look at Chronoboy, for instance. Presumably he changed his water tile at some point, went back and redid it, and accidentally fucked up his wallmaps. That's something you probably could've found with testing, BUT, it's also an example of something where you wouldn't need to shake through the whole game and could just check the area where you changed things.

A lot like the moral of the shit-fest that was the "How do I be a bad writer?" thread, there is no right or wrong answer here. I'm of the opinion that if you can look at your game without wanting to throw up then you haven't tested it enough. Others would possibly disagree. What's important is finding the system that works for you and where you feel like you've found all of the important bugs.

To further hijack this thread, let me share some of my experiences with testing:

When we tested Chapter 2 of Motrya, we had to play through the game multiple times on each difficulty level to make sure things were working as expected. For sanity's sake, I did most of my runs on Casual. And then right before release, we tried it on the hardest difficulty level with real time battles and stumbled into an engine bug with stun that somewhat permanently got characters "stuck". Had we not tested on that higher difficulty level, the level most of our target audience would be playing on, we would've had a really big problem on our hands.

It was onlt thanks to James working his ass off to find and fix the problem and upload a nightly that we were able to release the way we wanted, without having to revert the hardest difficulty to turn based battles. That's one of the coolest things about a community of this size, is the way the "Big names" can get involved and help you out. I can't imagine that happening over in RPG Maker land.

A month or two after release, someone asked JSH for advice on beating a boss and JSH suggested the "Toxic" spell. Turns out, the guy asking hadn't ever learned the Toxic spell because of a bug! I wasn't able to find that bug in testing because I didn't know you were supposed to learn Toxic, and had JSH, who did know, not been talking to this guy about strategy nobody ever would've found it. I think that's a good example of how you're never gonna find everything and the strengths and weaknesses of outside help.

When Hachi and I made King of Gourmet, we were entering the 48 Hours contest and it was like... hour 47 and we'd just started testing when we realized we'd never finished our argument about what the third special attack was going to do... and so we'd never implemented it. Weird how you can forget a big thing like an entire technique in the midst of battle, and we were pretty convinced the game was "finished" before that final, seemingly redundant test.

Another Hour 47 disaster was Virtual School 2, where I figured out that under certain conditions one of my sloppy scripts was deleting NPC 0 on every step you took. It was a hard problem to notice because mostly I was using NPC 0 for stuff that iddn't really do anything, just sat and looked pretty... except for the one map where NPC 0 was a huge part of the story and you take one step towards it and then it fuckin vanishes. And again, at that point I had already zipped the game and ready to upload. I was *SO* sure I was done but just to be an obsessive asshole I made one more run and hooked a marlin.

This kind of thing happens in professional titles all the time. The recent Sim City and Grand Theft Auto V both had terrible launches of their online components because it's practically impossible to "simulate" the server load of millions of people trying to connect at once. The best they could do was lie back and think of England and hope in the morning there was enough of a server left to fix.

If you're a fan of Dwarf Fortress, Toady's dev blog has a million examples of hilarious bugs that he was able to squash in testing. Stuff still gets through, as anyone who ever watched an entire fortress drown trying to wrestle a carp to death can testify to, but that's half the fun.

Or that time the Minecraft guys forgot to take out a debug function, so's everytime you hit the jump button you gained a level up. Or how they forgot that when you died, you'd drop every single point of EXP you had earned as its own item entity, and just how badly say... 10 levels worth of 1 exps would lag a server. Or when they implemented the ability to right click on sheep to harvest wool... and didn't check what would happen if you right clicked on anything else and perma-froze that save until they could get a patch out. Those guys suck at testing, is what I'm telling you here.

Hell, you see multi-million dollar games get thrown out the door with 0 testing because they had an arbitrary deadline to meet to please the shareholders and it wouldn't be cost effective to pay the testers and delay the game a month. There is no universal answer to bug testing. It's all about what's right for you at that particular moment, what response you expect from your audience, and how much you or your audience can be expected to give two shits about it.

I think you should play the game at least once, and try to make sure that all of the super-obvious stuff is brushed under the rug. Let people think they're smart for finding an obscure bug, don't let them think you're an idiot for NOT finding an obvious one.

Oh boy. Giz's captivating stories remind me of a couple of playtesting disasters I've had as well. My answer to the question is: I've never actually realised anything except contest games, so they are always rushed.

The most extreme case was the sidescroller Fall be Kind which I made with Blue Train for a 48 hour Thanksgiving contest. Now I didn't even join the team until the 24 hour mark, when I found Blue Train in IRC desperate for help with the scripting; he'd decided to make a sidescroller even though he didn't know what he was doing! It was crazy enough to be wild fun, so I jumped in and started rewriting the scripts (which started out as Moogle's Sidescroller 101); we both worked like mad. I think I stayed awake for the rest of the contest while Blue Train eventually had to get some sleep. Two minutes before the deadline, the boss, which was really the only content in the game, still did not work, and at no point had it worked; I had never fought it. There was some show-stopper bug. Completely out of time, I guessed at the cause of the bug, made some small edit, and uploaded the game without ever having played it. Then I played the game for the first time. By some miracle it actually worked, although the boss was misplaced on the screen, making it incredibly hard. Still, I was awfully pleased.

Most of my other contest games ended in disaster, but Ortega Colonies was the odd one out and got lots of testing, mostly because Hawk spent a lot of time trying to balance it. It was really nice that we were each responsible for about half the scripts, and thus theoretically half the debugging (well actually nearly everything was my fault). But the problem was that most of the game didn't exist until the last few days because I largely wasted the first 3 (it was a 7 day contest) and Hawk was stuck waiting for my half, trying to balance an unplayable game. For a game with thousands of lines of scripts and thus dozens of bugs, you're probably going to encounter more bugs than you can fix even if you only playtest a half finished game. In fact I never actually played through it during the contest, because playthroughs were always interrupted by bugs. Hawk hadn't either, because I added the ending in the last couple of hours. Still, he's pleased with the final balance. The contest release did have a number of bugs, but they were almost all cosmetic, and were easy to catch with a few extra hours; I was annoyed that we just fell short of having no significant bugs.

EDIT: I could talk about testing the OHRRPGCE too. I would say that somewhere over half of the edits we make to the engine are well tested before they go into nightlies, and the other half have minimal testing, usually because it's too much bother to exhaustively test apparently-trivial-but-sometimes-buggy changes. Loads of bugs get introduced, several of them very obvious and James or I typically notice them within a few days (or minutes) while working on something else, others eventually get reported by people using nightlies or testing a release candidate (very important). I think that 90% of bugs get fixed before appearing in a stable release, and most of the rest are too minor to get mentioned in whatsnew.txt. But even with plenty of people trying release candidates, there's always something seemingly obvious that's missed.

Sorry to continue the derail but I wanted to weigh in on the play-testing discussion, too. I think it will be cathartic.

I'm in the same boat as Gizmog in that I play-test my games until I can't stand the sight of them anymore. It's actually probably the number one reason I haven't ever publicly released anything. At some point I just hate my own games so much that I stop working on them...

My method when play-testing is to have a text file open in the background and to then take notes anytime I come across a bug. After a complete playthrough I go back and fix everything I found. If I find something game-breaking (or oftentimes something that just really annoys me) I will generally quit out, fix that one bug, and then start over from the beginning. This is why, after slices, the "Test Game" function in Custom.exe has been my very favorite addition to the OHRRPGCE.

I've never finished a game so I don't know what my "perfect state" would be but I think it would be something like playing it through three or so times, beginning-to-end, without encountering a single bug. And then I would release it to play-testers (in my case friends and family with varying levels of video game literacy). And then after fixing all the bugs they found I would release it to the gameslist.

I've found that there is a costly downside to such copious play-testing, though. Outside of the fact that it can really turn you off your own game after a while, you also eventually lose the ability to tell if your game is in any way fun to play.

Like, I can be sure that all the plot scripts work, that everything is spelled right and that all the graphics are complete and look like what they're supposed to. But I have no way of knowing if anyone would actually want to play it. By the time I've finished about 20% of the thing I certainly don't want to play it anymore...

Of note is that I generally write long games and this phenomenon might have more to do with that than the play-testing. Or maybe it's a combination of the two.