Holts

Wow! This is fantastic!

I love the style of the RTP, and I don't have time to draw sprites and tiles from scratch. I'm also not very good at it. I gave it a go a while back, and while my results were passable, maintaining aesthetic consistency from tileset to tileset and sprite to sprite was extremely difficult for me. And that is what counts the most: consistency! The RTP art all looks like it belongs together. That said, I opted to edit the RTP so that my work could still have a chance at standing out a little bit. Here's a few things I did, maybe one of these ideas will help you : ) 1. Frankensprite. All of my actors and major NPCs are either pieced together from RTP sources in GIMP or generated from parts on the famitsu generator. That way they all match the RTP style, but I won't see my protagonist's sprite lurking around in two dozen other games. You can do this with tilesets as well to really customize your maps. 2. No Faces. Instead of faces, I place the character's sprite in the dialogue box with emoticons in word bubbles to display temperament if necessary. Plenty of classic RPGs were wildly successful without facesets. They're a nice addition, but being dissatisfied with the face resources at my disposal, I opted to just avoid this feature entirely. 3. Maps as Battlebacks. You can do this with scripts, or you can just create some maps in the editor that would be used as your battlebacks for various terrains, printscreen it, and edit in GIMP. This is particularly useful for games featuring a sideview battle system. There's tons of other things you can do. Just remember, it's all about consistency!

There are plenty of great ways to include romance in an adventure setting. Love is a great way to motivate a protagonist to do things that he wouldn't ordinarily do. A good example of romance that would be compatible with an RPG is forbidden love. Forbidden love is a really common theme in fiction. Remember the one where the lower class protagonist and the upper class woman fall in love, but her father forbids their relationship because she's already been given away to be wed to Duke Douchebag for the sake of family politics? Yeah, I do too. It's a common plot, and an excellent starting point for a man vs society conflict. And that plot works in virtually any setting; fantasy, scifi, steampunk, modern, however you want to play it. But it only works if the audience cares about your characters. And, if you go that direction, don't worry about the fact that your plot has been done before. Most plots have. It's on you to distinguish your story with incredible characters and a great setting. Good luck : )

Yeah, each episode would fall in chronological order. Each installment would feature a monster-of-the-week style plot with a clear resolution while building on a series wide story arch which would be resolved in the final episode. Straight up TV formula.

I'll just be using a mix of edited RTP and Macks tiles, so the visuals should be aesthetically consistent. I have three stories plotted out using a standard 8-sequence screenplay method, and I'm working on the fourth now. Hopefully it'll turn out decent! I'm having a ton of fun putting everything together. It'll probably be a while though : ( My job is pretty demanding, so I only get a few hours a week to hobby it up! Thanks again for the feedback and advice, you folks are terrific!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm working on an episodic series for funsies. Originally, I had plotted a full length feature that just felt too damned big. Every draft, I'd find something wrong and feel the urge to start fresh. So, I decided to break it down. Instead of having a huge world with political upheavals, wars, and social change, the player can experience the world in a piecemeal fashion, watching smaller groups of characters affect change in more localized settings. I originally titled my project "Shaelenoa," which was the name of the endgame setting for the feature. I was always on the fence about that though; I like short names, one word if possible, but I also like names that are catchy and easy to pronounce, and I'm not so sure if "Shaelenoa" fits either of the latter criteria. However, since I've decided to take the episodic approach, naming them "Shaelenoa Part 1," "Shaelenoa Part 2," and so forth seems, well, horrible. Just straight up bad. My next idea was to name it after the protagonist. My protagonist is Abe Wenmer. Abe and his friend Henry Dale are contractors who find (or steal) objects for their clients. Abe and Henry have a Mulder and Scully type of relationship. Abe is more idealistic and hard headed, while Henry is more skeptical and often serves as Abe's voice of reason. Both Abe and Henry have reasons for being in the line of work that they're in, and they both have larger goals as characters, but a more detailed plot synopsis is outside of the scope of this post. So, if I named it after Abe, I could have titles like "Abe Wenmer and the Ghosts of Canamy," or, "Abe Wenmer and the City Beyond The Wake." Or perhaps I could name it after both Abe and Henry: "Wenmer and Dale in: The Ghosts of Canamy," or "Wenmer and Dale in: The City Beyond The Wake." Yeah, it sounds pretty Harry Potter-ish, but at least each title would be easily recognized as part of a series. Like I said, I tend to shy away from long titles, but I haven't been able to think of a better way to sensibly name each game. I really don't want to take the "Tales of X" approach or the "VERB/NOUN of VERB/NOUN" approach, but I'm pretty much at a loss here. Give me some feedback! How did you come up with your title?

Thanks for the feedback, guys : ) There's a few things there that I never thought of! I was pretty much leaning towards a complete reset each episode, and Amerk pushed me over the edge. It may even be a good way to break the fourth wall and add some humor.

Hey all : ) After doodling around with setting and characters for a couple of years in my limited spare time, I think I've developed a solid enough world and a healthy bank of resources to complete a project. I've definitely encountered some roadblocks though. It seems like one of the biggest problems folks face when working on a game, especially their first game, is that they try to do too much; too many characters, too big of a world, too big of a story. I had a light bulb moment when I was hanging out with a few friends a little while back. We were having some drinks with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom playing on the TV. Yeah, "Kali Maaaaaaaaaaaaa." Anyways, I thought about my RPG and had an idea: instead of trying to cram a huge world and an epic story into a single game, why not have an episodic title? Each game would stand alone; same world, same characters, but each game portrays these characters solving a different problem in a different part of the world. Just like Indie! : ) I really like the idea, and I think I'm going to roll with it. I can think of a few problems though, and that's why I'm posting here. The foremost problem that comes to mind is the character stat and inventory reset between games. Should I just leave this up to suspension of disbelief? I think it might feel superfluous to write in some kind of plot device that would explain why the characters start at level 1 with a fresh inventory between titles. Hell, Megaman started from scratch every game and nobody seemed to mind. What do you think?

If a world map is used, I prefer the cursor/node style (think Final Fantasy Tactics) where you select a location from the map. The world still seems big, but travel is more convenient for the player. Not using a world map at all can be effective, but may be inappropriate depending on the game. A large scale story spanning an entire continent or world would be difficult to execute without a world map. Obviously, it can (and has) been done, but it's a hell of a lot of mapping, and extra care has to be taken to make sure that things like biome transitions are well played and that the additional maps aren't just fluff that are placed to create a feeling of largeness. At the end of the day, though, as long as your locations are interesting, fun to play through, and well presented, the player probably won't care either way.

I love Reaper so much <3 It's such a fantastic DAW.

If you really want to go in-depth with your setting, I'd advise taking some time to inventory several real world cultures. Slander's checklist is a solid roadmap; religion, subcultures, important figures, and points of conflict play a huge role in a culture's dynamics. Architecture, technology, politics, entertainment, family structure, and gender roles are a few more points that you could explore. I'd like to see more RPG cultures that contrast each other. A lot of the time the cultures that we are presented with are really bland and hard to differentiate. Ex: The Kingdom of blah blah blah has a king, knights, etc and they worship dragons, while the empire of deedledee has an emperor, knights, etc and they worship spirits. Super bland, we can do better! When placing two cultures in juxtaposition, think about real world cultures and how they affect each other. How were the natives of South Africa affected when they came in contact with the Dutch East India Company? How were the Native Americans affected by colonialism? If you're making a game that is intended to be story driven (and you don't want it to be trash), be prepared to do hours of research and draft composition. Good settings are thorough and internally consistent. It's not something that's done in a day.

Even if you were to put Gangnam Style (or any other copyrighted song) in your non-commercial game, you would still be distributing the audio file as a part of your package, which isn't that different from uploading the mp3 to a fileshare. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this would count as unlawful distribution. Now, whether or not they ever found out and spent the resources to prosecute you is a whole other conversation. I'd still stay clear and stick with safe materials.

I use Yanfly's battle engine with the Yami Symphoria script. I grew up on Final Fantasy games, so sideview is more comfortable to me. I like frontview battle systems too, though. The main thing for me is simplicity. A lot of RPGs have way too many abilities and really complex battle systems. Furthermore, these systems are often poorly implemented with little to no effort to explain the features or ease the player into the cacophony of options. For me, this is a turn off. Pun intended. I'll just turn off the game. Find a method that is fun for you. Then let a friend play it. If their eyes glaze over before they shut the game off, you'll know that you overdid it. Fun is accessible and accessibility is fun!

I use ogg files. A lot of the music that I use comes from http://www.hmix.net/ in mp3 format. I'll use Reaper to convert them to reduced quality ogg files to save space. By lowering the bitrate and changing the sample rate from 44100hz (cd quality) to 22050hz, I was able to reduce the size of my audio resource folders by 75%. The loss of sound quality is noticeable to me (I am a professional sound engineer), but I can almost guarantee you that no one playing your game and taking it at face value will say "HEY WTF, this music is sampled at 22050hz /rage /bash /quit." I'd rather have the best sound quality possible, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices. I think folks are more likely to download and play a 50mb game than a 250mb game, so I went with this method.

I loved the music and the tilesets in XP. A lot of the VX Ace music seems a little too poppy for my taste, and I thought the XP tiles had way more variety.