Need some competent reviews

[IsaacLives]

Hey. I'm about to get RPG Maker 3, and it looks pretty sweet. Up till now I had to code my games myself or make the 2-d ones in Game Maker V6 (actually a pretty good program, especially for beginners.) Anyway, I have an idea for a full scale game, which I hope to develop as I explore the software and make some trial games. But I wanted to come straight to the experts first.

Okay, so heres how it goes. You play as the tree dude (I've seen him in screenshots). You are a member of a tribe (unnamed, as of now) which has been almost hunted to extinction. The Humans, the most populous creatures on the planet, have waged a terrible war upon your people, and you are, to the fullest of knowledge, the only free survivor of your tribe. Humans are hunting your kind because when a tree-man (I'm gonna name them something besides "tree-men" but it works for now.) dies, then the power that causes the wood to be animate and have sentience can be extracted. The practical upshot of this is that you can transfer the energy from one tree-man into a dead human and bring them back to life.

The King of the land (once again, unnamed) has several of your people held hostage in his dungeons, and plans to use them to rule the world forever. However, you obviously do not want this to happen since, well, frankly, he screwed up your life pretty bad. So, our young unnamed tree-man sets out to free his fellows from the castle. In the course of doing so, He learns of rumors of another faction, formed from the remnants of one of the other tree-man tribes, which is waging a secret war against the king. He decides to find and join this group once he gathers the rest of his people from the surrounding areas.

Anyway, you free the prisoners, and are fighting your way out of the castle when you lay eyes on her. The princess. You fall in love instantly.

So, you make your way across the country with your little brigade of trees, and eventually join ranks with the resistance movement. You then have to complete some basic challenges to prove your loyalty to them, including a scouting mission. While scouting, you see a company of horsemen, with the king riding at their head. You then inform your men of this, and they decide that the best coarse of action is to have the main body of the force fight them, while a picked number goes off to the capitol to free all of the tree-men that the common people have locked up, and then to use the gathered force to capture the city. You are sent with this group.

From there, I have very little idea what happens. I have a vague idea of you sacrificing yourself to save the princess, but even that is uncertain.

Other then that, I have a few side ideas, the biggest being a series of temples, with each one based around a different element of the "soul" that keeps you alive. All I have so far is that when you finally fight/solve your way through each temple, you will temporarily sacrifice one facet of your "soul". The facets of the soul are basically the senses, but the only two I can think of that could work are sound and sight.

In the sound temple, you must carefully watch the path through the temple, and listen to all of the clues given by NPC's, because once you lose your hearing you have to navigate it again, without their helpful instructions (since you can't hear them.) Also, in the sight temple, once you sacrifice your sight, then your eyes will, literally, play tricks on you. Door will appear and open up to a normal cave wall. Invisible walls, If the game supports it. things along those lines.

I also hope to have a system that allows for any other tree members of your party to sacrifice themselves to revive a downed party member. Hopefully, this system would help players to only play with their favorite of the characters, instead of being forced to use characters they hate. (FFX Kihmari, Anyone?)

Anyway, I just wanted to run that by you all. I need as much advice/honest reviews as I can get. Also, I have a few questions.

Does all of this seem remotely possible, with a supposedly endless amount of time and effort?

Are their horses in the game, or is it possible to import them (RPG maker 3)?

Are their ways to create temples for the other senses?

Any general questions/comments?

Anyway, thanks for reading that massive text block.

[Red Dragon]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Wow a new user whov doesn't spam emotes.

Awsome.

Does all of this seem remotely possible, with a supposedly endless amount of time and effort?

Very possible.

Are their horses in the game, or is it possible to import them (RPG maker 3)?

Nope.

Are their ways to create temples for the other senses?

Dunno what you mean. You can't really make yourself blind or unable to taste or feel.

[MagusMartovich]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Look, if you've already got experience coding your own games then RM3 is a step in the exact wrong direction. I went from RM1 to RM3 and I hate every minute of it (going on about 3 years now) and regret not getting on board with RM2 at the ground floor.

My ONLY advice to you (and everyone else) is to avoid RM3 and go right for the "creme de la creme" of RM2. Just check out a few of the games/samples people have made with RM2 and you'll be sold. Sure, the graphics aren't pretty (ew.) but aside from that, RM2 will be like your RPGMaker God!

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Eh, yeah, I thought about 2 for a while, but my experience is...well...Literally the most complicated thing I ever coded was on my friends graphing/coding calculator, which I "borrowed" for several months. It was EXTREMELY basic, where you basically had to intelligently direct your player (a "0") through a field of "1's without touching them. Anyway, all that I am really after here is the graphics. After having some of my "friends" literally make it a tradition to use "Wow, that looks as bad as Isaac's games!" To describe morbidly obese passerby's, I decided to look into engines that do the coding/texturing for you.

And dragon, I thought you may be able to do some sort of...tasting...thing... where esentially your main character could not eat any of the recovery food items during your escape, so you have to be really careful to avoid the damaging traps/event monster battles (if possible, I would like to have the same sprite for the monster appear in the dungeon, and you could choose to fight past it in order to find a shortcut or some healing items that aren't eaten so you can use them.

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Need some competent reviews

If you want speed, RPGM3 is the fastest, no question. It's limited, but if you are willing to compromise you can score big on presentation.
For the temple of the soul - it would be really neat if you picked facets of the mind instead. Like, Courage (dark lights, low ceilings, ghost monsters), Pride (high ceilings, light, easy monsters with super-strong abilities) and stuff. That would be wicked sweet.
I'm digging most of the story but avoid the "to rule the world." That doesn't make sense, at all. Perhaps make it a charlatan who is passing off the ability to extract your essence as evidence of him being a god. And later in the story, you learn he has formed his own relgion.

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Not rule the world necessarily, that was rather poorly worded. He just really, really doesn't want to die, and he wants to keep his position of power, more just cause he likes not having to work (his advisors do most of the minor stuff). And the facets of the mind would be interesting...It seems a little disjointed from the concept of your inner soul, but I'm sure I could spin it with a few careful lines of dialogue......What might be really cool is if each part of your soul is a separate entity in itself, and when you give away each one, your entire appearance/move set/ and personality change, so players could pick which facets of their soul to let flourish and which to let die. OH! what if when you level, you pick which facet the exp. goes to? kinda like the weapons skill system in Dragon Quest 8, where you can either become pretty good at everything or really good at one thing? Is something like that possible in-game? and is their a level cap/hp cap/mp cap?

Crap, no horses. Ah well, Normal foot soldiers have almost the exact same effect on the story.

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Need some competent reviews

That is kind of possible in RPGM3. You'd make each facet a different character with a different class. You could not have random encounters level you and let you pick, but if you can only get levels up in a certain facet with event battles, you can have it raise a certain character by one level. Say when you beat the boss, you get +1 to a certain shared variable (or more if that's your thing.) You have a bunch of different plaques describing the different heroes and it says "Level this hero?" If you say Yes, do an increase level (keep a shared variable to keep track, I don't think you can add levels, just change the value entirely.)
Remember, though, leveling is exponential so you'll always want to pick one and stick with it unless you put in some sort of balancing mechanism. Thats your job.

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Hmm...that could work, but it could be more like after you beat certain bosses (event battles, duh) Then you would learn something new about how to use your "soul" in battle, hence, a new class and skill set, and you could switch between them, A lá class changing. If that possible.

And, with the special skills editor, could I do my kill-yourself-to-revive-your-buddy idea? or maybe in some other program in the game.

And of coarse I have enough common sense to input a level cap, but I don't want to be forced into one. (I have great plans to remove the tedious leveling that stops many seemingly great games in their first steps (Level up ten times before I leave town? What??????))

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Need some competent reviews

I don't mean level cap, I mean exponentially. That is, I'd do much better putting five levels in one aspect than three in one and two in the other, as I'm getting more EXP that way. Sadly, you cannot (to my knowledge) raise just the EXP without doing it in level incriments.

And you could do your spell idea. Just make a full revive skill that costs 9999 life to cast.

Class changing is possible, although not in combat or on the fly. You'd need to make the events in a certain place.

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Oh. That makes so much more sense, in hindsight. And I do see the balance problem, but it could be easily corrected by careful enemy design. (sure you can cut [I]them[I] open like grain, but they can walk all over your butt) so that players would be motivated to spread some exp around.

Having some difficulty phrasing this, but is it possible to have other party members who you can switch out with the ones you have, out of battle, so you can choose who is in your party? or would that give you the ability to switch out your main character? (awkward.)

and you could return to your home forest or something in order to change your outwards connection to your soul (change classes)

Thanks for all the help!

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Rememeber, though, characters would be better in EVERY stat with a focus. Unless you want to impliment a rock-paper-scissors system, I suggest making upgrades like "Novice/Average/Good/Great/Master" with the levels being equal distances (5/10/15/20/25 as an example) but the scale to buy the upgrades being exponential (2/4/8/16/32). This way, you're encouraged to dabble in multiple classes.

Yes, you can change the party leader, so you can change your whole party. Maybe make a "Sprit of Change" that you use in the Home Forest to select your first character? Remember, you can ONLY change at the Home Forest, at least for a choice event. It's easy enough to force a change to one character/class but it's painfully hard to make the choice event multiple times.

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

Yes, the levels will obviously need to be staggered, like in all games.

Rememeber, though, characters would be better in EVERY stat with a focus.

I don't follow. Do you mean that characters who had any ONE stat leveling would be better if that stat was focused? or do you mean that a character with every stat increased would be good?

and does changing party leader include the overworld appearance?

[Pagerron]

Re: Need some competent reviews

I won't speak for Hito regarding the first question, but when you change your party leader that can affect the overworld appearance. The character that you see when you are walking around is the one that has been chosen as "active" in the gameplay menu. The player can modify who the "active" player is if he/she wishes (of the four possible who are currently in the party).

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Need some competent reviews

What I'm saying is, even if you stagger it yourself with the point-buy there still has to be strong variety in the classes, not one just devoted to damage or something. The games levels are staggered, but a point-buy needs to be carefully done or it will bypass this and ruin balance. And even with the different costs, there still needs to be a reason why you'd want levels in multiple classes. Granted there is no interesting "switch on the fly" mechanic, but...why not have four aspects in the party?

[IsaacLives]

Re: Need some competent reviews

ah, yes. It is possible to pick the stats for characters, right? (god, I hope so.) If you can, then I would have, at the end, a total of four classes for your main character.

Sapling-You basic class, with a diverse set of abilities and well-balanced stats.

Heartwood- The second class, specializing in defense and protection of your party members. Has almost no offensive skills, but can boost the attack of your other players to compensate.

Thorn- An offensive class, geared towards damaging enemies at any cost. Is effective in the short run, but low mp/hp and several abilities which consume chunks of both, the quality of the class will deteriorate over time.

Elder tree- The final and most powerful class, based around offering a response to every situation, with everything from healing and affliction-removal to offensive attacks.

Are you able to make attacks based around elements/make characters weak to certain elements?