How do you organise your games?

Make games! Discuss those games here.

Moderators: Bob the Hamster, marionline, SDHawk

Post Reply
User avatar
guo
Metal Slime
Posts: 749
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:12 pm

How do you organise your games?

Post by guo »

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice and ideas on how to arrange things in custom. I'm talking about attacks, heroes, items enemies, etc. Basically anything that can be ordered. In lieu of rearranging these things in custom, is it worth planning it out so that they are ordered in any significant way?

I can think of some reasons: Eg using random (x, y) for reward or encounter tables, ease of use.

How do you organise things in your game, especially when starting on a new project?

Cheers.
vvight.wordpress.com
User avatar
Spoonweaver
Liquid Metal King Slime
Posts: 6462
Joined: Mon Dec 08, 2008 7:07 am
Contact:

Post by Spoonweaver »

I have an excel spread sheet for tim-tim 2, as well as a physical notebook.
I use a variety of npc id's across multiple maps for specific purposes so i have to keep track of which ones are which.
However, I don't really plan everything in advanced in anything.
If you're planning to have a random item reward system then create the whole span and make a note of it. Say items 15-23. Then if you don't know what you want there yet, just type in, placeholder A or encRwrd(A-H) or something to that affect.

That said, I mainly worry about scripting organization on projects and less about custom.exe organization.
User avatar
guo
Metal Slime
Posts: 749
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:12 pm

Post by guo »

Thanks Spoon, solid advice. I normally use Asana for planning but a spreadsheet is a great idea in this case.
vvight.wordpress.com
User avatar
Nathan Karr
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1215
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2008 3:51 am
Contact:

Post by Nathan Karr »

In most of my games

ITEMS
I designate some of the early slots (0-9, say) as common consumables like herbs and potions, then I either make sets of tens for all weapons of a single tier or for all tiers of a single weapon type, and just go through every iteration of weapon types I intend to include, then move on and do the same for armor. If spells are going to be item-learnable, these usually come right after consumables and right before weapons. If there are going to be dedicated vendor trash or crafting component items, these come before spell-teaching items. This is also where arrows/bullets go if making weapons require ammo.

Now that the browser has changed for items, I sort by groups of threes instead of sorting by tens. Rather than trying to organize by ID number I organize by in-editor rows (and then grumble when I go to select them as textbox or monster rewards and everything's off by one).

ATTACKS
Usually I make the first ten or so attacks be the basic default physical attack and any common variants on it, like the different types of slashing animations between an axe, straight sword, and scimitar or the like. Recently, three of them are usually the attacks I expect to put on enemies most often (like 0 being "basic attack, prefer first enemy" second being the same for a random target, third being for whoever has the highest Ctr) and after that ones for heroes' weapons. If I'm using an attack definition instead of the Escape key to flee, that and other system-level options like a Defend command, monsters' killing themselves and erasing rewards (with a caption saying they flee), and so on get done. I usually then try to define all or at least most of the spells - if not all at once, at least in batches of three for when I type them into heroes' spell lists. Chained effects come after the lump of definitions rather than immediately after the attack they chain from - if Fireball explodes but wizards get Flash and Sleep on the same tier, fireball2 is going to be defined after Sleep rather than between Fireball and Flash. Items usually go between basic attacks and spells somewhere if I have a very clear idea of what I want all my consumable items to do, otherwise they have to wait for later. After basic spells, consumable items, regular attacks, etc. are all defined I just add on new attacks one at a time for weapons that need special rules (silver daggers, say) or monsters' signature moves if simply casting a spell doesn't seem fitting for them.

ENEMIES
Usually I try to do all the weakest, most common enemies first and define them in ascending threat level. If there's a system-wide transmogrification I have planned like trapping monsters in bubbles, shrinking them, or converting them to fight on your side, I try to make each of those altered beasts come right after the base form (and in a specific order if I have more than one such transformation). I often have specific ID numbers I want to give specific bosses, and make a bunch of placeholders until I can get to said ID.

GRAPHICS
I always try to leave spriteset 0 blank - no telling how often you'll want something invisible. When re-using an existing graphics set like Vikings or Fnrrf's 8-bit, I try to import every such graphic in order so my heroes have consistent relative walkabout, hero, and portrait graphics (like if the main hero's walkabout is 11, his hero sprite being 10, and every other hero's walkabout comes after it in the same order as their hero sprites) and have common NPC types like treasure chests, signposts, and everyday men and women of the town take up all the single-digit walkabouts if I can.

For tilesets that I make myself, I either have the upper left corner be completely black or be the default floor type (grass, dirt, whatever), the tile immediately to the right of that be the default wall. If making a game with multiple tilesets, I usually try to make them all as modular as I can - the treasure chest being in the same spot, corner and edge pieces of a 3x3 grid being in the same places, all the animated sprites across the three bottom rows, etc.

MUSIC
I used to do this when we had a max of 100 songs - make the first ten be the common town/overworld musics, 10-19 be dungeon musics or random battles, some other set be dungeon music, and song 99 was always the victory music. I used to enter the songs in A Newbie's Quest in particular by typing the ID number I knew to associate with a specific type of place of battle - now? Not worth the hassle of sorting music _at all_, and the games where I did sort them got un-sorted by the new format.

USUALLY
I get so hung up on trying to organize things that I forget to make a game to go with all these systems. In fact, I'd say defining the items and attacks systems are my favorite part of making an RPG and the maps, enemies, and any story that exists is at best an excuse to show them off. This is why I have so many beginnings of games compared to the number of finished products - that the fun part of making the game is mostly front-loaded into front-loading the system definitions.

In fact, I have several Notepad documents lying around on this computer and even more on machines that have died on me that are just charts of numbers for items and spell systems, but no monsters to use them against.

IN GAMES I ACTUALLY FINISHED AND RELEASED
I ignored some or most of this and just made each one new thing as I came up with it.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
User avatar
Bird
Slime Knight
Posts: 227
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2012 2:19 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Bird »

How different our approaches are! I didn't organise anything at the beginning. Ideas came to the game and some ideas left the game. The opening holes, for example deleted graphics and text boxes, were fastly filled by new incoming ideas. That meant, that the text search tool for the text boxes must be used a lot to find the right text box. So a bit of chaos here and there, but nothing harmful.

For the music I prefer MIDI, because it sounds cheesy and the filesize is small. Computers with their operating systems that don't support it well are not even worthy to be looked at.

As Nathan said, I would leave the very first walkabout graphics set blank, because quite often you need an empty NPC that is placed over some maptile just to tell you something or as a step-on-activator.

For optimisation organising the 16-color palettes makes sense. Like reserve two or three colors for the skin color of a living, and two or three for the hair... then you could use the same NPC graphics with different palettes more often and it still looks good.
User avatar
Bob the Hamster
Lord of the Slimes
Posts: 7658
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:34 pm
Location: Hamster Republic (Ontario Enclave)
Contact:

Post by Bob the Hamster »

+1 for Asana! I haven't actually used it for games yet, I was only introduced to it recently, but it seems perfect for planning games and tracking to-do lists. If I start using it for Wandering Hamster, I will let you know how it goes

EDIT: Oops! I didn't realize Asana wasn't free! I was spoiled by being able to use it at work, and I didn't even realize that somebody was apparently paying for it :P
Last edited by Bob the Hamster on Fri Jan 25, 2019 2:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
RMZ
King Slime
Posts: 1695
Joined: Tue Oct 16, 2007 12:39 am
Contact:

Post by RMZ »

I've personally been using Google Docs since Surfasaurus. Surlaw showed this to me when he and I were doing the cooking mini-game in Mr. Triangle's Adventure.

I like Google Docs a lot because yes, it's just an online spreadsheet, but I can update it and share it with people working on the project so we all know what needs to be done and what has been done. It's also a great place for me to keep organizing ideas and never really losing track of what ideas I had months/years ago.
Post Reply