Making Your Project Feel Alive

Many projects built with the RM line of engines often feel and play very similarly to one another. Nevermind that they may be using the same tilesets or spritesheets, or if they're using the same CBS and CMS with a few tweaks here and there. I'm talking about the world as you see it when you're exploring.

A lot of devs here prefer to make their world as graphically pleasing as possible. It's amazing what a little bit of photoshopping(or GIMPing?) can do to a map. Though they may look pretty and wonderful, it still doesn't necessarily feel 'alive' unless you've got a little bit of movement going on.

Dynamic light and shadow systems are great and give more visual depth to every game, but it takes a fairly skilled person to use them properly. Even very impressive scripts like "Khas Awesome Light Effects" have their own particular downsides. It won't look good in a game that uses rounded walls, and it may limit your mapping to a significant degree. Not to mention, once somebody sees it in action in one game, they'll immediately notice it in others using the same script.

So my question is, what do you do to make your game feel alive?

For me, I like to make the maps feel alive with custom animations, subtle weather effects and BGS (background sounds). I love making custom dynamic crowd control systems that give life to the NPCs in a world.

Below I'm showing two instances of what I do to make the world feel a little bit more alive. The second portion starts around 1:14. Please disregard the lack of polish. I haven't started parallaxing these maps, I'm using MACK sprites as placeholders and there are no lighting systems in place. Also pardon the lag, it's from having the recorder and various browser tabs open ;x

1. For the first portion, I just made a few NPCs have some repeating autonomous movements that make them feel more alive. There's generous wait times for them to really ponder what they're looking at. Other NPCs are entering and leaving town, entering buildings and looking at things randomly.
2. For the second portion, I kind of went all out. This is the Nasbeth Legal Hall, one of the merchant license wings. In here I've made a dynamic system where NPCs wait in a waiting area for their turn to go talk to one of the dwarves working. There are also NPCs that are passing through, going back and forth from the east and north entrances. Almost nothing in this map is in a repeating rotation or static. All movements are controlled dynamically via two parallel processes.
   One of them changes their graphic as they enter the room. At the moment, it only switches between two sprite sheets. Adding more will vary the NPCs to a greater extent.
   The other one designates wait times for the dwarven stations, tells the NPCs when to leave (and which exit to leave through) and tells the NPCs in the waiting area that one of the dwarves are ready to take them.
   The NPCs themselves randomly choose whether they want to get in line or just pass through to the next room. You can stay here and just watch the NPCs go up and talk to the dwarves all day, and no single moment will be the same.

wow that certainly looks awesome :o

I really like this idea. The only concern I have is lag. Does it slow down the game to have so many events moving around like that?

On a larger map with this NPC density it may lag, but I worked pretty hard to eliminate the lag by minimizing the amount of active events at any given time. So in short, nah not really.