The third podcast is here! This time, Despain, ReynardFrost and Kilim share our thoughts on writing dialogue for your games. We also take a look at a project thread in our Play or Flay segment and give some brutal tips when it comes to mapping.
AuthorDespain
The second podcast is here! This time, Despain, ReynardFrost and Kilim talk about the different ways to drive a story in games. It’s also the debut of the weekly segment Play or Flay, where we review a project from the RPG Maker Web forums. Check it out.
This is the first of our new weekly podcast series. Our three hosts are myself, Despain, and my friends ReynardFrost and Kilim. We talk about game design in general, but with a focus on RPG Maker. Check it out.
This one’s been a long time coming—sorry for the wait, but it’s time to follow up my Using Map Coordinates tutorial with part two.
This tutorial builds on the contents of the first tutorial, so if you haven’t read that one, or if you need a refresher—go back and read it now. In it, we took a look at the grid plane in RPG Maker VX Ace, and how to store an event’s (or the player’s) map coordinates into variables. After that, we created a pressure-switch—as long as the player was standing on it, the door would open. And that’s where we left it. The player isn’t able to reach the door and stand on the switch at the same time, so we’re going to have to create a block that the player can push on top of that switch. Continue reading
Howdy! I’ve been playing and reviewing RPG Maker games for over a decade, and it’s an unfortunate fact that very few of them stand out. It’s rare for an amateur RPG to feel original—and ever rarer to find one that really offers a unique experience. Most games are simply forgettable.
The best way to ensure that your game is memorable is to create a unique identity for it.
This article is a follow-up to my previous article about game design, Fuck Your Features. In that article, I talk about how to recognize and cut down on excessive features that may harm your game—in this article, I’m going to discuss ways to isolate and implement positive features in order to create a unique identity for your game. Continue reading
Today’s topic is a good one (for me—maybe not for you). It’s a line that I’ve found myself repeating over and over again in response to many RPG Maker projects: “tone down the features”. A lot of amateur game designers will crowd their games with as many “features” as they can think of—the end result is often the opposite of what they expect: too many complicated features or systems can kill an RPG.
Before we get started, let’s make sure that we are on the same page. “Features” is a pretty vague word (and it isn’t one that I’m not using arbitrarily—my usage of the word “features” in this article is a response to the overuse of the term among users of RPG Maker). When I’m talking about “features”, I’m talking about nearly any kind of extra gameplay system that a designer can add into his game. This stuff is usually an add-on to one of the core gameplay elements: for example, your battle system by itself isn’t a feature, but that limit break system sure is.
In this article, I’m going to dive deep into the idea of adding features into your RPG: what purpose they serve (if any), when they are important to keep and when they are expendable. This is gonna be a fun one. Continue reading