RPG Maker XP – First Area
March 7th, 2012
Posted in This
5 months since my last post… o.o I’m not the best at consistency with blog posts. Heh.
To summarise quick, I bought RPG Maker XP. It’s fast, it’s quick, it lets me do loads of design and making things without having to worry about the backend programming. It’s beautiful. I can always script if I want to, that option is there, but for now I want to see what I can make using just the default settings.
I am admittedly less interested in its technical power and more interested in expanding my design knowledge, this is a prime opportunity for learning.
So I’m going to try and make a small series on the design decisions I make in the game, why I did things a certain way.
Ventrilo and MMOs
As it stands I’ve now been heavily involved in WoW raiding in two separate guilds.
One of them did not use any voice communication software and relied upon text commands and macroes.
One of them uses voice communication as the main way to communicate.
I’ve noticed an enormous difference between the two and how raids work under each. Which is what I want to talk about.
Game Design Short: Teddies
Problem with me and writing blogs is that I tend to sink many hours into a single one. Which is a bit contrary to the ‘posting often’ habit required. So, quick game design short posts it is.
Teddies!
Inspired by this!
I looked at this and thought, oh my goodness, that would make an amazing game. Playing the teddies in children’s rooms, fighting against the monsters under their beds or in their closets. Each level is a different bedroom. You don’t have health, instead the child has a fear meter, and the more injured you get and the more they attack the child, the more scared they become. If the fear hits full? The child wakes up screaming and you lose.
I think a 3rd person action game like that would be cool.
D&D 3.5 versus D&D 4.0 (part 1)
Since D&D version 4.0 has been released, it has gotten a lot of flak, I know players who love one, and I know players who love the other. I like to consider myself fairly unbiased, being a designer I kinda need to be, if my design sucks I can’t force it through development just because it’s my baby. So I looked at both, played both, read up on both and found 4.0 to be superior in ways it’s not given credit for.
It’s not perfect, it has its flaws also, but a lot of my gripes with 3.5 were fixed in 4.0
I don’t claim to be an expert by any means, to a lot of D&D Veterans with hundreds of campaigns under their belt I’m still an amateur, so this is mostly going to be things that my group encountered, that I found confusing at some point and why I think 4.0 handles it better.
Read more
A Look at Breath Of Fire 3
I recently finished Breath of Fire 3 on the PSP, there was some things I liked, and a lot of things I didn’t. So I’m going to look at them and explain why I did or did not like whatever mechanic I happen to be currently referencing 
Tutorial – Phantom Brave Item Fusion
Been a couple of months I know, I decided to come back with a slight twist.
I’ve been playing a lot of JRPG’s lately, Nippon Ichi’s to be exact, which are some of the best mathy RPGs I know of.
Good bits – Excellent RPG with a lot of planning and optimising and mathy stuff.
Bad bits – Confusing as heck.
So my slight twist is to dig deeper into the games I love, picking apart individual features and mechanics and explain them. It’s how I play games anyway, dissecting them, so this will be fun to do.
Today I shall be looking at Phantom Brave and fusing items.
World of Warcraft and Buff Food
In World of Warcraft there is a profession called Cooking. Yes it lets you cook food. This food, as well as restoring health and mana, can provide temporary power bonuses called ‘buffs’, y’know, cause they make you buff. Food that does this is called ‘buff food’.
One of the most common sources of these buff foods is the profession ‘Fishing’. Yes, it is what it sounds like. You throwing a line into the water and catching fish.
My main character is a Mage. The food I need is Severed Sagefish Head, it givbes me 90 Intellect, which gives me more damage to all my spells.
The fish I need for this is Deepsea Sagefish.
I have beef with this fish (see what I did thar?), this is it
User Generated Content in World of Warcraft
This is a repost from my old Livejournal blog at: http://skynes.livejournal.com/
I did say I’d repost some of my old ones that I liked and I quite liked this one. I edited it a bit though for clarity.
===================================================
So after I was talking about why I don’t WoW to stay as the top MMO and how User Generated Content (UGC) could be a big factor in beating it. the gears in my mind started turning…
How would it work if it was done well? What if Blizzard managed to implement UGC in WoW? What would that look like?
So I’m going to share some of the thoughts and ideas I had in making this work. Again as WoW is the main MMO I play, I’m going to use a lot of their terms and descriptions in order to describe this system.
Keep in mind this is an ideal ‘in a perfect world’ situation. It’s likely that such a system will be so big and ambitious that’d need to be restricted to just level 80 5 man instances and heroics.
Let’s have a wee gander into the dark recesses of my mind shall we?
Merry Christmas
What happens when you cross a wife, a nerd and an artist?
This.
Merry Christmas to you all.
A look at Metroid: Other M
Newest installment in the Metroid series! Woo. I’ve played every Metroid there is, I haven’t completed all of them (never beat the original), but I’ve played them all. I’ve read the manga also, so I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp as to what makes a good Metroid game.
Other M could’ve been a whole lot better. Let me tell you why I think that.
Spoiler Warning: I’m giving away most of the story and gameplay here.