Good evening RPG Maker Forums!
First, allow me to apologize for the unannounced delay. This has been a brutal week for a variety of reasons and I barely had time to sleep. Fortunately, now that the week is over, I expect for things to return to normal.
Next, I would like to present to you the results of the survey as of today. I was able to get a staggering 120
completed responses, which was much more than what I could have hoped for, so a huge thanks to the community. I will continue to leave the survey open and you are more than welcome to fill it out. I will still be checking for new results regularly, though I doubt that the numbers will shift drastically at this point.
So, without further ado. Let me open up with a snapshot of some demographic information:
Not surprisingly, the majority of the community sample were between the ages 18 - 25, and if we were to also add those under 17, they would make up for just about two-thirds of the sample. Whether or not this is reflective of the entire community, I don't know, but given that battle animation assets should be pretty non age-discriminant, holding all else equal, I think its a pretty close portrayal of the population.
On the upper right, in terms of RPG Maker experience (cumulative and inclusive of all versions starting from RM95 to RMMV) we are looking at nearly 3/4 (72%) of the community sample having more than 1 year of experience, which is quite impressive. In retrospect, I probably should have made more options beyond just "Longer than 3 years", since even I personally have played around with RPG Maker on-and-off for more than a decade at this point.
Finally, in the lower left, we have a snapshot of the varying levels of experience for users in dealing with animation assets. I've put up the definition for each category on the right for reference.
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I love data, and I think that was really interesting, but for people who aren't data junkies like myself, you're probably more concerned about the rest of the survey. Here's the results from what sort of preferences people have in the types of animations I create. Recall that this question asked you to allocated a total of 100 points to each of the categories below. Here, I've simply taken the average of all the responses:
I'm not at all surprised about Elemental Attacks having the highest vote, with Physical Attacks coming in second, and Monster/Creature Skills coming in third. I was a little surprised by Item effects in the last place, which would seem to suggest that the majority of the community doesn't really see a need for animations made specifically for items. In other words, this would actually be a place to differentiate your game.
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Next up, for the Preferences for Types of Elements question, I've also taken the average of the responses. This question asked you to rate your level of interest in each specific element on a 5-point scale, with 5 being "very interested", and 1 being "not interested". I've taken out the "Others" category because there's no shared definition of that category. Note that the Y-axis starts at 2.5:
Again, I am not at all surprised that Dark has taken the lead, followed by Light, and then the big 3 (Fire, Ice, Electricity), with Dimensional squeezed in between for 5th place. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that the popularity of the big 3 is due to their prominence in the most popular titles like Final Fantasy. While its great that they are so popular, I would again say that the other elements all represent opportunities for your games to stand out because they are not as overdone.
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Finally, I've compiled a list of all the "Other" elemental type suggestions that I've received in the comments sections. I can't promise that I will do any or all of these suggestions, but they are definitely now in the back of my mind, and when the occasion arises where I'm out of ideas, this would be the first area I look.
And yeah... I can't really help if you gave "Other" a high rating but didn't tell me what that meant. Sorry.
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With that, I hope that you all found this as valuable as I do. I'm doing a lot of correlation analysis on the side, but I don't want to drown everyone in data, so I'll stop here. As I've stated in the opening, I do apologize again for the unannounced delay. As far as I can see, we should be going back to the regular release schedule starting Saturday.
