HamsterSpeak 62 Online

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 3:32 am

Now suppose I want to get artsy with an article, you know, setting up small pictures here and there to add flair and emphasis on subjects within the article, usually having these pictures directly correlate with the nearest texts.
How would you like this sent to you?
HTML document? Microsoft publisher? Word? Or would you just like the pictures and I can throw brackets saying [picture one here] into a txt document?

And also regarding your suggesting something "educational" from earlier, I could do some monthly tidbit about some game making tips. Like a subject could be conveyance of story, or keeping people interested. Would you like a small article like that? Cuz I could write one up for this up coming month real quick.

The Wobbler · Post by **The Wobbler** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:10 am

Or would you just like the pictures and I can throw brackets saying [picture one here] into a txt document?

This one's best.

And also regarding your suggesting something "educational" from earlier, I could do some monthly tidbit about some game making tips. Like a subject could be conveyance of story, or keeping people interested. Would you like a small article like that? Cuz I could write one up for this up coming month real quick.

Yeah, something like this is always good.

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:23 am

This is rather interesting actually. How's about an article in pixel art? I believe I could write one.

The Wobbler · Post by **The Wobbler** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:27 am

BMR wrote:This is rather interesting actually. How's about an article in pixel art? I believe I could write one.

Everyone likes these.

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:40 am

Alright, I'll try to think up a good first subject to give a bit of advice on, unless you have ideas or requests. I'm needing to head off to sleep now, but I'll try to get ya something tomorrow maybe.

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 9:03 pm

Hamsterspeak greatly unifies this community. I really hope that Hamsterspeak actually comes back off hiatus at some point. Too often hiatus becomes permanent. For example, look at all the unfinished games around here.

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 1:16 am

My unfinished game is unfinished because I can't won't and don't devote 100% of my life to it. Been working on it for about 2 years straight now.

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 1:51 am

Wouldn't it be neat if we could devote all the time we wanted on all the projects we want to finish, hehe. I know I want to get Legacy to a playable state within the year at least, but I seriously doubt I'll be 100% finished with it any time within the foreseeable future. And there are so many other projects I want to finish, my supernatural noir stories, my roguelike, etc... And that's not even including all the projects I need to finish for my job, gah =p

Baconlabs · Post by **Baconlabs** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:05 am

Meowskivich wrote:My unfinished game is unfinished because I can't won't and don't devote 100% of my life to it. Been working on it for about 2 years straight now.

This is a false explanation. None of us are devoting our entire lives to our games. Not even people in the gaming industry do this unless they're crazy and self-destructive.
Your game is probably unfinished because your ideas and goals aren't in sync with your abilities. Which is to say, you dream big, but don't have much practical experience to support those dreams. (And believe me, lots of people from the OHRRPGCE community experience this.) Somewhere in the HamsterSpeak archives is an article that talks about this (by Pepsi Ranger, I think?), about how game developers (especially new ones) need to be realistic with their goals. If you intend to make a professional-level, full-length RPG, then it's going to take a very, very long time to establish. Even more so if you're working alone. If you aren't a crazy-hard worker with talent in all the right fields (and almost none of us are either of these), then your game will never be finished. And that's bad (again, doubly so if you're working solo), since you'll forever be working in the shadows, with no one knowing what you're capable of, and no one being able to offer constructive criticism to help you grow as a designer and developer.

Start small. Start humble. Demos are a decent way to go about this, but they're so common and unsatisfying that you probably won't be noticed by the majority of the community. I'd much rather see a first product from an early game developer that is small, brief, simple, and complete. That is such a rare occurrence here that I cannot think of an example off the top of my head.
Another way to go about this is to impose limits on yourself from a design perspective. Limits that match what you, as a developer, are capable of. I think the first release of Okedoke is hands-down the best example of what I'm talking about. Okedoke is exactly what it looks and sounds like from the very first look at the title screen - 8-bit, simple, light-hearted, comedic in tone, and vaguely hispanic. With these simple parameters on his game's overall design, the author Fnnrf took us all on a delightful and humorous adventure through a few simple locations (town, desert, mountain, mine) and brought us to an exciting conclusion when its heroes successfully crossed the international border.
FnnrfYgmSchnish did not attempt to add anything into his game that he wasn't capable of. The graphics were deliberately cartoonish and simple, because that's just how Fnnrf drew his art. The music was ripped from other games, which is a heinous crime called plagiarism, but I'll let it slide because he placed them in settings where they felt appropriate, and not just because he liked the soundtracks of Ocarina of Time and Mother 3. He didn't compose an original soundtrack because it wasn't something he had much experience in, and also because he simply didn't have time for it considering it was for the 8-bit Games Contest. The story is silly, has some overdone tropes, throws a few things in for arguably no reason at all, and while it isn't going to be winning any awards, we all loved it because it stayed within itself and kept the game rolling. Fnnrf is not a dramatic writer, and never tries to pull any cheap dramatic effects like killing the lead character's father at some arbitrary point in the story.

(By the way, a little side note for those who don't know: Okedoke is not FnnrfYgmSchnish's main project; it's not what he spends his nights creating new story and gameplay ideas for. That's "FnnrfYgmSchnish", an unreleased project of his. Okedoke has just been a played-down side project for him that I'm assuming he ran with because it turned out surprisingly popular. Sometimes the things you don't pour your heart and soul into end up becoming the most-liked by other people.)

So what I'm getting at is, what are you capable of right now, and how can you make a good RPG with your current skills? It's very acceptable to start poorly and improve as you go.
Now, maybe you're saying to yourself, "I don't have any decent skills right now!" Well, don't worry, upload something sub-par anyway, and ask for help profusely. I guarantee that someone will come along to criticize you, pick apart exactly what you did wrong, and give you some good advice on how to improve on what you've started with.
The ability to design a good game comes naturally to no one, it's a constant give-and-receive between the developer and his audience, whoever that might be. This would probably be a good subject for a different article, but I've been rambling for much longer than I'd intended. I'll conclude with this: [s]upload something![/s] Wait a minute, I just noticed a download link at the bottom of your game's thread. Why didn't you upload it to Slime Salad? This whole time, it could have potentially been noticed by one of the site's premier reviewers! Maybe. If nothing else, it would have been subject to the five-star rating system, which would allow everyone to anonymously let you know about what quality your game is to them.
Someone get in there and try this guy's game and leave a comment on his thread. You know what, scratch that, I'm downloading it right now and I'm going to give it a whirl tomorrow.

(This post has been running off of cursory assumptions made on part of Meowskivich's person and his game, and are to be taken with a grain of salt in relation to Meowskivich himself. I also put a lot of words in FnnrfYgmSchnish's mouth, I hope I'm accurate)

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:48 am

I'm afraid my point didn't really come across well.

I'm sayin' that I've spent literally countless hours for the past few years workin' on my RPG, and it's still no where near done.

Lack of skill and unrealistic dreams are not really the problem, as I'm working on my skills and abilities as I'm working on this project to try and achieve my hopes and dreams for it eventually.
As things go, I'm pretty realistic about the way I go about this, as I know a great RPG doesn't happen overnight, and I'm not really rushing this in the least (as my most current version has been pushed back for about a year now, though I'm trying my hardest to get it out for the contest (thing pushing it back was really just lack of original musics)). I know not what the OHRRPGCE is truely fully capable of, but I do suspect that either this game will be pretty massive and perhaps one of the longest for the engine, or the engine will simply not be able to handle so much data in the end.

I'm not really trying too hard to start any other projects, and I don't plan on ending this one anytime soon, as I have a good system going here. Ummmmmm, my metal choo-choo kinda has been derailed and I'll have to try to finish this some other time, but I suppose I can throw a list to answer some of thy ...questions?

Reason game not finished: time, I suppose. the project is always planned some steps out in advance, but it's just needing to be put into the game.

False-explanation?: no idea what that's supposed to mean, and Iknow nobody really devotes 100% of their lives to the game making. I was saying that if I devoted 100% of my life it MIGHT be done, or at least close to it.

Demos: I've still got an archive of them from when they were pretty private. AKA, Alpha demos. I can give demos up to version 1.2beta, as that's the most current version, though it's far in the dust compared to the upcoming 1.3beta (if you have a beef with me using beta in the name, I'll have to describe my version naming system in PM when I'm less tired). Also, the version 0.9alpha and up are public releases, and thus should be fully playable.

Limits: you appear to mean design from what I understand, if you didn't limit yourself to a general style of anything then the whole game can turn out messy. And trying to do something outside one's own abilities is pointless as they can't do it as it's outside their abilities.
I'm done fer nows.

P.S. I'm half-asleep, as I tend to ramble on when I am, and also I didn't read all your post. Tooooooo many much text to hold my sleepy attention. I'll try to get back to ya on this later dude, though you do sound like you've got some sound advice. Like I said, I'm tired and I need to sleep before I continue on - meow

Fenrir-Lunaris · Post by **Fenrir-Lunaris** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:25 am

Something I'd LOVE to see is an article on how to create balanced battles.

Post by **Mogri** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:08 am

Fenrir-Lunaris wrote:Something I'd LOVE to see is an article on how to create balanced battles.

This really depends on the context of your game, though. How long is a dungeon? How much access does the player have to healing? How easy is it to restore MP?

A decent way to start thinking about this, though, is to estimate what percent of a party's HP you want a random encounter to be able to drill through. In a game where resources are especially tight, this might be as low as 5%. In a more generous game, like Final Fantasy 1, you can bump that up to 25%. In an especially generous game, like Final Fantasy 6, you can approach 100%. (FF6 doesn't do this, naturally; in the harder areas of the game, it might get as high as 75%.)

One-off battles, such as boss battles that allow the player to save and heal beforehand, can take the gloves off. In boss battles that don't give you a full heal, it's often a good idea to make the boss's standard attacks weaker than a full random encounter; the decrease in power is offset by the boss's larger health pool.

Baconlabs · Post by **Baconlabs** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:05 pm

I like that idea, and hadn't considered it before. Thanks, Mogri!

Oh, but wait, you said random encounters. How much would be changed if encounters were mostly triggered by interaction with map NPCs, creating a number of situations where battles can be avoided entirely? I'm thinking of something like Earthbound and Mother 3 or, in a dumbed-down "enemies block your paths on the map" sense, Final Fantasy USA or Mystic Quest or whatever it's called.

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:27 pm

One alternative I'm considering for Legacy, though I haven't quite figured out how to implement it yet, is to have a script make sure that the enemies faced in certain areas will always be within a few levels of the player.

Because I use a spreadsheet to calculate the stats of my enemies, I have a basic idea of what their stats will be at a certain level. If I know the levels of all my enemies, I could theoretically script it so that only enemies within x levels of the party will be randomly encountered.

A major problem of this is that all battles will be of roughly the same difficulty, with few areas feeling extremely easy or extremely hard.

Baconlabs wrote:How much would be changed if encounters were mostly triggered by interaction with map NPCs, creating a number of situations where battles can be avoided entirely?

Just my opinion, but I think this system would work rather well in a more open-ended game like Ultima. It could work well for the relatively more linear (as opposed to say, U4 or U5) games of the OHR because with free wandering enemies, you would always have areas that seem easier, and areas the seem harder. With a linear game, if you need to get to point A, and the monsters are too hard, you have to go grind. In a game like U5, the option to down one of the dungeons is always open to you, but it'll prolly be suicide. Of course, there are other paths open to you, so you can take those instead and come back later when your level is more appropriate. With an open world, it doesn't feel like you're grinding, but rather more like you're exploring the world, and only come back to the more difficult places once it's appropriate.

I have absobalutely not the slightest idea if I am making any semblance of sense as my sleep-deprived eyes are slowly sauntering off to the silken realms of slumber...

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:28 pm

Fenrir-Lunaris wrote:Something I'd LOVE to see is an article on how to create balanced battles.

I can write on this, but Mogri has kinda put it pretty well there already.

HamsterSpeak 62 Online

Jesus, did I ever get carried away with this one