Features Feedback

Lots of different aspects, and they would all need to work harmoniously together, and some may be mutually exclusive.

What is the story of the game (does it have one?)  How does it explain/require no towns, only a few battles and lots of crafting?  Without knowing the point of the game it is difficult to make sensible comments on your ideas.

Crafting - I'm seeing an increasing number of posts saying people are getting fed up with crafting.  Just something to bear in mind.

No towns and no chests - where do your healing items come from?  Please don't say crafting - you're likely to need some before you've had the chance to gather all the items you need to create the potions.  And if people have to knuckle down and craft every single item, then make a straightforward crafting game, with no battles.

No towns and no chests with equipment - I think some (many?) players would miss having better gear; it's part of the sensation of your character growing and becoming more powerful.

What would be the point of exploring?  You haven't really said.

Purely on a personal note, I would not play this game with the explanation so far.  Wandering around, getting in the odd fight, finding ingredients to turn into something else, rinse and repeat doesn't attract me.  Maybe if we had more details it would seem more interesting.

Putting my mod hat on now - I'm not sure this is in the correct forum.  Game Mechanics Design is meant to be far broader than one specific project.  Unless this discussion turns into something else, I think it would be better in Features Feedback.

So you basically want to include large material-farming areas? If crafting is an important part in the game, why not. It's certainly a great idea to make farming materials easy by having areas where you do just that, and efficiently. I wouldn't make these mandatory, though, since it does actually sound a little boring to get materials JUST that way. You should give the player material in the main story, but when they find themselves short at some of them, they have the option to go collecting stuff.

If there are "aesthetic" rewards for exploration - just really cool places to check out like you'll find in every corner of WoW - it could work.  Otherwise, I think these large, empty areas are going to go mostly unvisited in your game.

Well, what is the motivation to explore? I mean, if I am a player, I need a reason to go and find something to go and explore the territory. So you say - ingredients are on the map, but how they are on the map, if they are not in a chests (and what's the difference)?

Btw, about gathering ingredients for crafting. You should somehow make a balance in gaining them, so a player wouldn't appear in situation, when there are a lot of worthless ingredients, which can not be spent to make something useful, because there are other ingredients needed.

Because it's there.

For completists like me, if there is a rare bush whose berries can be picked just once per bush (no respawn if I return later), then you can bet I'll hunt down every single one of those bushes, even if I never use the items crafted from the berries.

And how is it different from loot chests?

Perhaps it was better for features feedback. I wanted to get a feel as to how people like exploring in general, with little instigation in the way of free gear for finding this waterfall, no reason why it'd be there.

The project in mind is going to be very narrative driven, there will be opportunities to trade, just not in towns.

Equipment upgrades and modifications would be found on the main lines of progression, with possibly some rarer things to find, as well as crafting.

The main idea behind crafting in a town bereft narrative was to balance it out, and make it more immersive. Ideally the application wouldn't require you to explore to survive, ingredients on the main story path ought to be enough and we'll thought out, it would be available for those who make mistakes, like to be over prepared, or just like exploring.

@Wavelength - Aesthetics are usually why I like exploring in game myself, I couldn't agree more. I like areas that look of rich history and maybe even tell it through the looks.

@LootHunter - the difference to me is that I could see chest plain as day, but picking herbs or what-have-you isn't such a sore thumb, and tbh I always thought chests didn't make sense.

@Kalin - For some reason something like this hadn't popped up in my head. Thanks for the idea.

Okay, moving it to Features feedback now.

Have you seen/played "The Secret World"? It's an MMO, but very narrative driven and with a lot of exploration. In this game there are lot of motivators for exploring. For example, Lore - you can simply find a "lore piece" somewhere, which explain something, or you can find a character who can tell you something or give you a quest. You also can find quest themselves, like corpse or a blood trail which leads you to some monster or important site (or even other quest or character or lore).

I recall playing a demo of it shortly before it was released, seems like ages ago now, wasn't much to explore at the time.

Sounds like one to give a go, maybe get some inspiration from it.

So for my game, I've been playing around with 2 different mechanics, and would like some feedback on which you prefer. For both I should point out I wrote a script to do to hit - evade = chance to hit the opponent, so the engine only does one roll to decide on if you hit or not.

Idea 1: Attack has a base 75% chance to hit, spells are guaranteed hit (with very rare exceptions). This way you can take a chance on the attack, or if you must do damage now, use a spell. Under this system spells would be about same damage as a regular attack, as the MP spent is for the guarantee hit.

Idea 2: Attack has a base 95% chance to hit, spells same base chance, and spells are more powerful than regular attacks (usually 2X or more powerful, depending on the MP spent). This would result in use a spell to hit harder, and use attack when the HP damage from it is enough.

Preference?

I prefer idea 2 - 75% chance to hit in idea one would, imo, lead to frustration and irritation. The way that RM seems to handle that random calculation is a bit brutal and off, resulting in several misses in a row being perfectly possible.  Unless your MP restoring items were fairly cheap and easily available, I could see players being in something of a lose-lose situation where precious MP would have to be spent just to guarantee a hit.

@ksjp17: Yeah, I've wondered about the random generator for a while in the game, especially as it seems to be stuck on some numbers, which shows up more the lower you make the to hit. I agree about the keep mana plentiful, and I am worried about late game balancing too with option 1, hence why I posted it now so I can figure this out sooner rather than later.

I wonder, are there popular RPGMaker games without random in battles? So you have 100% knowledge of attack result.

It's better to use battlers on the map, as it is less a pain to explore areas, or you are in a dangerous position.

Hello, I am at the beginning of the development of a game focused on exploration through usage of specific items, but I have a question about the graphic/gameplay approach: on one hand, I would like to make it a first person game, with quite realistic 2D locations; on the other hand, I think it would also be interesting use some 2D images for cutscenes and make the game a third person adventure with a mix of tilesets and parallax backgrounds. The former idea would allow me to make a game with an unique and homogeneous, also visually appreciable, graphic, but it would require more work. The latter would decrease the graphic quality and appealing, but would make it all more fast.
Which approach should I choose? I like both of them, and I think they would both work well.

Thank you in advance :)

Go for the faster approach. I think the biggest hurdle most RPG Maker games have is the danger of not being finished. As long as you can make the game look good using the second approach (you don't have to be awesome) the benefit of being less work is worth the potential impact on graphical quality. Its better to have a decent looking game being finished than an awesome looking game, that never gets finished because its just too much work.

Now i currently also have a problem, that is related to map-scaling. My small game i'm currently making, will not feature a world-map. I don't like the break of scaling between normal maps and world-maps. However i did create a basic world-map in the editor, just for planning purposes so i know where everything in the world is supposed to be.

I've attached the current map, so you can take a look.

Now the basic idea is that each square of this world-map will be a visitable normal map in the game. Because these are going to be a lot of maps (221 to be exact, not counting all the underground- and indoor-maps the game will feature) and because my main focus of this game is to finish it, i planned to make each of these maps only 17x13 tiles big (the minimal amount).

The big problem here is the village. It currently occupies two world-tiles but if use the same scaling (1 world-tile = 17x13 map) i just haven't enough room on the village-map(s) to place every building i need. I see several solutions to this dilemma:

• Let the village be an exception of the scaling and make the village map bigger. This will however means that the player has to travel 100 map-tiles from the south-end to the north-end of the village when walking inside the village, or just 17 tiles when on a map outside of the village.
• Increase the general scaling (1 world-tile = XXxXX map). But this would greatly increase the amount of work required for all the maps, something i would rather avoid.
• Ditch the idea of making every world-square visitable and increase the size of the world-map so the scaling fits.

Currently i'm rather in favor of the first approach, but i'm not sure if this scaling-problem is only a problem for me or if it would be one for the player also.

@MagicMagor: coud not you just make the village three world-tiles big in the world map to find the space for all the buildings?

P.S.: thank you for your advice about my project :)

Nope. To fit all the buildings and have it somewhat ok-looking i would need to have the village 8 (4x2) world-tiles, which is a bit too much for my taste.

Edit: Ok took another look at my current village-map. Currently it is 2x2 world-tiles and if i ditch some flavor-buildings i can get all important buildings on the map - might go with this approach. 2x2 is still a bit big for my taste but a size i can life with.

Have to say, I think the whole plan is a bad idea. 221 maps is a lot of work, and a lot for the player to explore. How many of those areas will be relevant to your story? (Every single square in the mountains, for instance?) Sure, the player can just ignore the non-relevant areas and they won't hurt him.... except then it's easier to get lost, harder to find the place you're looking for, and tedious to travel between relevant areas.

You don't have to have a world map in your project if you don't want. I don't have one in mine. I have maps for the story-relevant locations, and road maps connecting them. The scale does change between town maps and road maps, but you don't have the "character as big as a city" disconnect you get with world maps.

Ditching the "tile" idea would allow you to make villages any size you want. Flavour buildings are important. A village should look like people live there, not just sell game-mechanical items to any heroes who wander through and then sunbathe on the other 364 days of the year.