Progress report

[orius]

For the two of you out there following my project (;)), here's an update on my progress. Yeah I actually am working on it here and there, though largely I've been playing other games and stuff.

Still largely grinding out my dungeons. I fleshed out one of the towns, linked up the maps for a prefab forest dungeon, and fleshed out two custom dungeons a bit. I've been trying to make the area seem more real by adding little details here and there. I also am trying to make sure everything connects properly. Right now, I'm focusing on finishing all the main dungeons and making sure all the links work properly, so it's both design and debugging at the same time. It's not difficult, but I want to make sure the dungeons are designed well instead of looking like crap slapped together any old way.

I was working on the script for the story, but that's been shelved until I finish the dungeons. It was getting to be a pain to test the dungeons while events were going off. It'll also be faster to do write the script if I don't have to stop to make the next dungeon in the story.

Once the story is done, it'll be time to make the monsters and spells, and then the game should be just about ready to be released.

[orius]

Here's what's going on:

The first three dungeons have the important stuff fleshed out. This means the entrances and exits are all finished, and they're hooked up to the world map. The first three towns are about half complete, the buildings are all done, but there's no people or stores. One of them has a a functional inn. All of them require some dressing up, need to add various details and stuff so they don't look bland, though the main concern is to make sure everything connects properly so I can write the script.

Or everything would be connected if I didn't accidentally erase the scenario data I was working on the other day when I was backing up the game to one of my PS2 cards. >:( I loaded a previous backup, but I haven't gone back yet to see how much I have to redo. Most of it should be putting the area transitions back in and making sure all the proper switches go off. If dialogue got erased, that's not a big problem, because I have it all written down. I just have to go through the fun of putting it back in with a Dual Shock.

I have a switch list so I can keep track of how they're used. The first 25 corresponds to each location on the field map. Mostly these get turned on permanently The next 24 set the paths, and they will get turned on and off as the party moves around much like I did in Demonslayers, except this time it's a bit more polished. With them all in a single block of switches, I just tell the game to turn off 26-49 when locations change and then turn on the ones that are needed. The next few switches are there to tell the game what town the party is currently in for some of the events that require it. After that are my story event switches, which are getting assigned sequentially as I prepare the plot. After I'm done with the main plot, there will be sidequest switches, and I'm going to reserve a block of 10-20 switches for local events. This'll be for solving dungeon puzzles that reset, respawning chests, and for an idea I had for randomly generated townspeople (more on these last two below).

Some ideas I'm working on:

One of the towns is the big RPG city. This is the place that has the big assload of stores. This is for two reasons: first, it's a big trading center, so it's meant to be a palce where the player can buy almost anything in the game. Second, I'm going to change shop inventories as the game progresses instead of the silly "you get better stuff in the next town always" crap. I will attempt to justify this in the script.

The big city will have a casino. There's going to be slot machines or some real other basic thing for the player to gamble on. I'm planning two special machines. The first has a decent chance of giving a very generous payout. Bad news? 90% of the time, an old woman will be in front of it feeding it with coins. :p And when you do win, the casino staff will kindly inform you it's closing time, and out you go! The other one is rigged. You'll have to pay an NPC to learn about it and get the chance to use it. It pays out even more ridiculouly generous than the first machine, but there's a catch. 50% of the time the staff catches you and you get beaten up (party reduced to 1 hp & mp each), fined (party loses ALL money), and kicked out of town. :evil There will be a small window of opportunity where the player can use it safely.

There will be a few sidequests. The big one at the end will have a crashed spaceship with some damn powerful aliens. If you beat the really hard alien boss, the final boss gets tougher. There will be more than just a token reward. How hard is hard? I'm planning on the final boss to be balanced for a average party of around level 40-50. The alien be will be balanced as a tough encounter for a level 99 party.

Respawning chests. Going to be like the chests in FFXII, but no Zodiac Spear style crap. Basically, there's a random chance for the chest to appear, and you get a modest amount of money or a useful and usually disposable item.

Random townspeople. I came up with a way to have the graphics for the townspeople to randomly change everytime the town is entered for variety. I'm also going to have some random text strings too so they don't all say the same thing.

[Draygone]

There's going to be slot machines or some real other basic thing for the player to gamble on. I'm planning two special machines. The first has a decent chance of giving a very generous payout. Bad news? 90% of the time, an old woman will be in front of it feeding it with coins. And when you do win, the casino staff will kindly inform you it's closing time, and out you go! The other one is rigged. You'll have to pay an NPC to learn about it and get the chance to use it. It pays out even more ridiculouly generous than the first machine, but there's a catch. 50% of the time the staff catches you and you get beaten up (party reduced to 1 hp & mp each), fined (party loses ALL money), and kicked out of town. There will be a small window of opportunity where the player can use it safely.

Between the two, I'd definately use the old lady's machine. Minor inconvenience, compared to losing all your stuff.

I'm planning on the final boss to be balanced for a average party of around level 40-50. The alien be will be balanced as a tough encounter for a level 99 party.

This is for RPG Maker 1, right? You may be surprised what your final levels actually might be. I had also figured on being around L40 by the end of my game. At this point, it's looking more like mid-twenties. If the same thing happened to you, 70 levels may be a bit much for finding an ultra boss. And actually, being RPG Maker 1, which has been played to death by almost everyone who owns it, people might not want to experience farm even 50 levels. So before you decide to have that L99 boss, see if you yourself have the patience to train for that many levels. If it's not fun for you, it might not be fun for other people.

[orius]

This is for RPG Maker 1, right? You may be surprised what your final levels actually might be. I had also figured on being around L40 by the end of my game. At this point, it's looking more like mid-twenties. If the same thing happened to you, 70 levels may be a bit much for finding an ultra boss. And actually, being RPG Maker 1, which has been played to death by almost everyone who owns it, people might not want to experience farm even 50 levels. So before you decide to have that L99 boss, see if you yourself have the patience to train for that many levels. If it's not fun for you, it might not be fun for other people.

Yeah there's that, but I do plan to have buyable stat-boosting items near the very end of the game, so it may not need grinding. I'm not even award experience normally, rather experience will also be bought as one of the "food" items, which will may need tweaking as I develop the game. See, I know the exp tables start to plateau around level 20 (I have the table printed out with my RPG Maker notes). I don't want that to be the upper effective level limit, because level 20 is kind of short. However, I know that monster exp will result in three situations:

First, the teen levels will probably be grindy if I keep the EXP low enough to compensate, while having better rewards into the 20s. Boring. Second, I can keep increasing EXP rewards and making monsters tougher, but I've played games like that and it gets to the point where you're gaining a level every two or three battles. When that happens, you have to accelerate the rate at which monsters get stronger, or they get quickly outclassed. Third, I can plateau the exp rewards and keep them flat at a certain point, but when players realize what's going on, they'll level on the weakest possible monsters and try to avoid the tougher ones where necessary.

So it's not like I haven't thought about these things at all. I noticed these things with the first game I made, so I'm trying to experiement with the EXP system here to see if I can get more satisfactory results.

It all depends on how much money the party seem to get and how much items need to cost as a matter of balance as well. The whole reason I have the stat boosting items near the end is to give the player something useful to spend money on during the end game. I'm trying to avoid the typical RPG scenario where you get heaps of money at the end because there's nothing siginificant left to buy. I also want to avoid monster gold drops without geting too cheap wither, because that usually feel illogical and artificial. But that also requires some thought behind it so that player doesn't have too little money if the RNG doesn't cooperate.

This will be one of the later aspects of the game I do. I've probably mentioned this before, but I'm saving the monsters until the areas are finished, or at least functional, and the main plot is finished. This way I can test the areas without messing around with turning random encounters on and off. If there's nothing to turn on and off, it makes things easier. And creating monsters and setting up encounters doesn't take as much work as designing an areas and making sure the game script runs properly.

And when I say that a monster is designed for level 99, I'm thinking of a character that has average stats, that is 5 in everything, with no skills and equipment with base values. That's my baseline for balancing monsters Naturally, the effect of skills will change stats around and equipment will affect how well a character preforms in battle.

So because I don't have the monsters statted out at all yet, these are my preliminary plans. Stuff will probably get adjusted as I see how things work.

And speaking of stats, I adjusted all the M Def scores by a factor of ten. I can't entirely predict how that will turn out, but it looks like it should balance things out adequately in the game.

[Draygone]

First, the teen levels will probably be grindy if I keep the EXP low enough to compensate, while having better rewards into the 20s. Boring. Second, I can keep increasing EXP rewards and making monsters tougher, but I've played games like that and it gets to the point where you're gaining a level every two or three battles. When that happens, you have to accelerate the rate at which monsters get stronger, or they get quickly outclassed. Third, I can plateau the exp rewards and keep them flat at a certain point, but when players realize what's going on, they'll level on the weakest possible monsters and try to avoid the tougher ones where necessary.

Those are the exact same scenarios I looked at. The third is what I'm going for, and to keep the player from noticing this plateau too easily, I'm giving the illusion that newer monsters are giving more experience.

Here's the scenario. Player reaches the 20s. Experience plateaus at (to make this simple) 500 Exp per enemy, on average. And enemy 1 might give 450, enemy 2 gives 475, enemy 3 gives 500, enemy 4 gives 525, and enemy 5 gives 550.

If it's like that in every place, yeah, the player will notice. So what I'm doing is increasing that experience range (say, from 450-550 to 475-575), but still keeping the average at 500, either by having more enemies give less than 500 Exp than there are giving more, or having the enemies that give more than 500 Exp less common. So for example, it could be either...

Enemy 1: 475, Enemy 2: 479, Enemy 3: 483, Enemy 4: 488, Enemy 5: 575 (averages out to 500 each, and enemy 5 might have to be a toughie to make up for the bigger Exp)
or
Enemy 1: 475, Enemy 2: 500, Enemy 3: 525, Enemy 4: 550, Enemy 5: 575 (enemies 1 and 2 would be more common than enemies 3, 4, and 5).

The player will see that enemies are giving up to 575 and no longer seeing any give below 475, and be under the impression that the rates are still going up, even though they're still basically giving the same amount as usual.

It would definately take a lot of tweaking, plenty of foreknowledge of when the player reaches L22 and how much of the game is left, and ample usage of a calculator. But I think it's the best way of handling it.

[Karr Lord of Chaos]

im trying to battle this problem with my game as well.

ive played many rpg maker 1 games and ive found only a few to hit the level 20's. the battles became very boring once i did hit them, with levels coming few and far between. having a static exp amount after only 22 levels was a very poor idea (though i really dont think the game was at first designed for the epics that we like to make).

i like drays idea but id take it a step further. have battles that are harder, ones that reward higher experience amounts but are worth it if they beat them. even try to make the battles more epic, perhaps rarer, even add more strategy.

near the end if you can give boons like exp food and add places where quick leveling is possible but at a cost (arena), then you can let the player decide if they want to gain the games extras.

exp balancing is yet another challenge in the road to making a magnum opus.

[orius]

having a static exp amount after only 22 levels was a very poor idea (though i really dont think the game was at first designed for the epics that we like to make).

Exactly. I don't know what the designers were thinking when they plateaued the EXP in the low 20s and then had that character go all the way up to 99. Maybe they just went with the old 99 tradition, but the max level shouldn't have been more than 50 or even something like 36 with the plateau. I also think they expected users to make something like Gobli, while the Western players all started drooling over the thought of making their own Final Fantasy or something.

i like drays idea but id take it a step further. have battles that are harder, ones that reward higher experience amounts but are worth it if they beat them. even try to make the battles more epic, perhaps rarer, even add more strategy.

Yeah, but you also don't want the battle to get to the point where they take too long to finish and feel even more grindy.

near the end if you can give boons like exp food and add places where quick leveling is possible but at a cost (arena), then you can let the player decide if they want to gain the games extras.

EXP food is the norm for the game I'm woring on. It's my attempt to balance out the too quick leveling at low levels with the very low EXP plateau. Otherwise, I would have tried to go with a system where the player doesn't actually level at all, and spends the whole game at level one, and the game rewards the player with stat food rather than experience. I decided not to got that way, because it's harder to balance than having level gains, and also the skill system becomes more difficult to use.

[orius]

Or everything would be connected if I didn't accidentally erase the scenario data I was working on the other day when I was backing up the game to one of my PS2 cards. >:( I loaded a previous backup, but I haven't gone back yet to see how much I have to redo. Most of it should be putting the area transitions back in and making sure all the proper switches go off. If dialogue got erased, that's not a big problem, because I have it all written down. I just have to go through the fun of putting it back in with a Dual Shock.

Ok, I finally went back to check up on what got screwed. Fortunately, it was mostly the transitions for that forest dungeon and the last two cutscenes from the beginning that I had coded in. As I said, the dialogue was written down, so it wasn't too much of a problem to reinsert it and do up the cutscene actions. The area transitions were only partially restored for the forest, only doing the areas I need right now at the beginning, the other stuff with be fixed later as needed. There were a few other transitions messed up, but they were easy enough to redo as well, even when I have them a bit overcomplicated.

I had to redo the inn I had set up as well, but that was no problem, and I also started putting in some of the basic work for shops in that town, so there was some new stuff added in.

[orius]

I've been working on the game a little bit here and there. Right now, what I've been doing is concentrating on setting the minimum of what I need for each are so I can start setting up events and making the story. Later I'll flesh out the areas and polish them up.

So for example, one (custom) dungeon in the game is a mine that links two towns. All I did was setup the main path, and then create the events needed to link it to the world map. Also made sure the world map connected back to it and that the switches connecting everything were working. It's just a bunch of walls and floors ATM, no dungeon dressing or anything like that. But it gives me enough to work with when setting up the story, and I actually don't have anything major planned for the story for that dungeon, maybe just some brief dialogue at the beginning. I'll do this with all the main dungeons in the game so I can setup the story.