Sai'Kar Breaks Your Hopes and Dreams

[SaiKar]

Here's some things to consider if you are planning on releasing a demo / full game.

Your game is probably too hard.

Seriously, it very likely is. Most of us, having spent forever and a day programming our RPGs, design the difficulty around challenging ourselves.

Battles, specifically boss battles, may be too difficult if any of the following apply:
1) Certain, strange party setups are required for victory. Requiring a character that can remove poison present when there hasn't been any poison to remove thus far is just a dick move.
2) Requiring tricky, complicated tactics required to win. If you're going to force the player to use a weak skill that sucks in every other situation but is somehow the key to victory, you have to at least hint at some point about it.
3) You need to have found special weapons/armor that are off the beaten path to stand a chance. Making fire resistant gear available in treasure chests before facing a fire boss is okay. Requiring a totally optional, easy to miss subquest to track down the fire gear when nothing implies that this would what you need to do is not okay.
4) The enemies have certain attacks that, if repeated a couple times due to their random AI, can totally decimate the players' chances of winning. If you must give a boss these types of moves, limit how often their AI can use it (such as making it only trigger every X number of turns, or at a lower % of health with a low priority)
5) You feel that the player really should lose 3 or 4 times before they "really figure out what they have to do." Man, if I lose a boss 3 times or so in an amateur RPG, especially because of reasons like #2 on this list, at that point I'm just going to chalk it up to really bad playtesting and balancing instead of being sneaky. It's far more likely that it's just a badly programmed fight. Real video games have test groups of players play through to make sure the difficulty isn't too impossible. Did YOU put anywhere near that much work into balancing?
6) You're being a dick with save points. Nobody wants to have to run through 5 rooms of random enemies and then watch the same 2-minute cutscene before every boss battle that ends in frustrating failure. If you're going to put in save point pressure, you have to make your fights a lot easier. If you provide save points right before major fights, you can safely make them a little harder, but not such that you start to break rule 5 above.
7) The boss challenges you as a programmer. You know every trick possible. You know all of your characters. You know all the weak points. You know how much HP the boss has. You know what items to buy in preparation for how difficult the fight is. You programmed all this stuff, after all! The player knows no such things. If the boss occasionally beats the programmers, imagine how bad it's going to stomp players!

Your first boss fight should be easy. It should be so freaking easy that a trained monkey could win it. Think about it. The players are totally new to your world. They have limited resources, little control over their party setup, only a few skills to use, not many items, and they're fully sure of all the capabilities of their characters. Too many times I've barely beaten a first boss encounter by having to use every healing item available and still having a few people dead at the end. No. NO. Not good start!

I generally use Chrono Trigger as a gage for difficulty. Though some of the bosses are a bit tricky with timing and tactics, few or no parts of Chrono Trigger are bang-head-on-desk frustrating. The battle with Magus is a great example of a complicated battle that's fun, has an element of danger, rewards tactics and paying attention, and is also unlikely to really frustrate players.

If you absolutely must have the really nasty, hard fights that require bizarre tactics and obscure armor from subquests, the best way to handle them is to make them optional and also warn the players of the danger before they jump in. I don't mind losing to an optional fight - in fact, it makes me want to try it again more than a standard boss would because I know that, if I really can't figure it out, I can still continue with the rest of the game. This can let programmers put in the really hard stuff that challenges them without completely destroying the more casual players.

More abuse to come :3

[SaiKar]

Your Plot Isn't Nearly as Memorable as You Think It Is

Most amateur RPGs (and even some of the hokier mainstream ones) start out by throwing a few thousand years of the history of the world at the player. Usually in the form of telling about some ancient war between some countries and some evil force that ends with the evil force being defeated / sealed / banished / something, but lately things have been kinda lousy and there have been troubles and whispers that the evil is coming back. And sometimes it's just text, and sometimes it has still frames of important events while there is text, and sometimes it takes place in the forms of conversations, but it's all pretty much blah.

Now, I'm not here to bash the clichés. I just think this is a really lousy way of introducing the player to your world. You bury them with information that is not immediately interesting to them. Big war, dozen names or so, evil, blah blah when do I get to play? Storyline isn't something you can just club people over the head with. If you want players to get immersed in your storyline, you have to let them discover it by themselves. Small pieces, slowly revealed over time, is tremendously better than these huge megaparagraphs that are better suited for a history lesson classroom.

Think about how Final Fantasy 6 starts. A couple short sentences about a great war and magic disapearing for the world, but it may be coming back. Then you're in command of some kick-*** magitech armor, shooting up civilains. The storyline is there - you're sent from the Empire to find a source of magic, but rather than being told it, you're playing it, and more details of the situation come out as you do.

Final Fantasy 7. You blow up a huge reactor in the middle of a massive, dark city. Barret keeps bitching about ecological impacts of the reactor, so you figure you're some sort of eco-terrorist, but that's all you really have to go on at the very beginning. No history of the world or mention of Sephiroth or JENOVA or any of that crap. Just shooting. The “why”s come a lot later.

What about Chrono Trigger? (get used to this - I love Chrono Trigger) What happens between when you select New Game and when you have control of your character? Almost nothing! Fireworks, a bell ringing, and the hint that Crono is a lazy bastard. No big history lesson. No forced plot hook. You have control of a pretty normal guy on what appears to be a pretty normal day. You can go visit that fair and play a bunch of minigames, or you can wander the town, find another town down south, take a stroll through the woods and head up to the castle, whatever. And talking to people and seeing stuff slowly reveals the nature of the game. A kid at the fair mentions that the fair is in celebration of beating a wizard a few hundred years ago. Is that important? You find out. Not immediately, not all at once, but at a much more natural pace.

The worst part about the "history lesson" type intros is that the writers, having imparted the entire history of the planet and all the names of the heroes and villains of old, assume that the player will remember every detail of this information and never reiterate it but reference the details constantly. This is terrible form. You can get away with that in books because the reader can always flip back. But RPGs are not books – they are stories. There is a reason that storytelling involves repeating the important names and details several times – no matter how cool what you are describing is, the listener is likely to forget the important names or events if overloaded with too much information. If there is something that really is important for your player to remember, you have to keep bringing it up. Make the player a bit sick of hearing about it – at least then they’ll know they’ve heard it before.

YOU know every detail of your plot. You've had a lot of fun coming up with it. There are probably important details in your head that never make into the game at all. Be very careful with assuming that the player will put two and two together or even remember the basics.

[zuhane]

This should be an agreement form before submitting a game for the contest. I wholeheartedly agree
with everything I'm reading. Fortunately for me, I haven't hit a single criteria that you've mentioned
so far

[SaiKar]

For Frick's Sake, Test It!

Our community is small, and the players that play demos of games are even smaller. The last thing you want to do is cheese these people off by making an unplayable game. It seems like every freaking game I download on this site either has a game-breaking bug or a totally ridiculously hard fight (ala "Your game is probably too hard" section above) that turns me off from it for good. Nearly all of these types of things would have been incredibly obvious to the game's creator if they had just played through the demo they were sending me themselves just one time.

When you're testing your game, it can be tempting to run from one plot point to the next, to make sure that they all work. And that's fine, as long as you also test doing exactly the opposite - dallying around stupidly as long as possible. Attempt strongly to get off the beaten path. When you enter a room, immediately try to leave. When a townsfolk tells you to go west, head east. Fight hard fights with inferior gear. Do events out of sequence. Try to walk through trees, over rocks, on water. Press buttons at random in your custom menu and battle systems. The goal is for YOU to break the game so that you know what's broken and can fix it before other people find that it's broken and can't fix it.

If you have the option, have a friend play it. You'll be AMAZED at the types of things that you assume are obvious but are not. I had my father play one of my minigame puzzles a few months ago. He completed the easiest one eventually but took such a long time and tried to do things that, in my mind, made no sense. I realized that I had to make certain visual cues considerably more obvious so that the rules of the game were more clear. Confusion over how to play the game at all is always a bad thing.

And when you've gone through the entire thing, tweaking stuff along the way, guess what. You have to do it again. From the beginning to the end, just to make sure. A full play run without you being able to break anything, and not from a lack of trying, is your best and only defense against a game that nobody will want to play due to bugs.

[Natako]

Storyline isn't something you can just club people over the head with. If you want players to get immersed in your storyline, you have to let them discover it by themselves. Small pieces, slowly revealed over time, is tremendously better than these huge megaparagraphs that are better suited for a history lesson classroom.

This is exactly the reason I give people when they ask me why I didn't like FFXII (this and characterization).

Anyway, great posts and I agree with everything 100%. I'm so glad that I've grown out of the stage where I would put huge chunks of exposition into my games and expect people to remember them. Since my current project is very story-intensive, I always have to be careful not to go overboard. At least I'm not writing history text intros like I used to back when I was a game-making noob.

And yeah...playtesting. I've seen a lot of playtesting errors, even in games that are otherwise very polished. I played an amateur RPG lately where I was able to walk through trees in one place and get to a location I really wasn't supposed to be in. I wasn't even trying to look for mapping errors, but there you go. I also have bad luck with amateur games crashing on me because one object or another wasn't found. More likely than not, it happens when I haven't touched a save point in a while...Murphy's Law and all of that.

The other thing I see a lot is a lack of balance between level difficulty and boss difficulty. This also happens in professional games, but it's especially bad in amateur games. I know that you mentioned bosses that are too hard, but how about bosses that are too easy? I've literally played games where I went through a hair-ripping dungeon and the boss died in under a minute. ...What?

[carmen]

Nice read sai,  brings up a lot of great pointers.

The thing I hate the most, and see in professional and amateur games,is when I get dumped off with no destination. You spend the next 30 minutes figuring out what to do with no explanation.

[Natako]

The thing I hate the most, and see in professional and amateur games,is when I get dumped off with no destination. You spend the next 30 minutes figuring out what to do with no explanation.

Amen to this. It happens surprisingly often in professional games, too...and not just in old NES games where it's All There in the Manual.

[Prpl_Mage]

I didn't like FFXII

I suddenly liked you a lot better.

Sai, this sounds like the advice you keep giving people who promote demos, I like it. And I know that I fall into most of those traps; special skill needed to win, special weapon, enemy's imbalance in skill power, super long history lesson before the game starts and last but not least, being the programmer test playing the game and can't figure out why people are having a hard time.

Good job, you bring them issues to light.

[zuhane]

This should seriously be read by every RPG-making newbie out there. I think that some professional
retail games can get away with this, because you've read a review and you know it has to pass through
certain standards. Even if it starts out bad, it must get better later on because IGN said so, right? We have
little motivation to see a game through from beginning to end, so it has to strike us as brilliant straight away!

If I may add to this thread a little, I'd say that battles requiring grinding repetitive motions lose my interest
very quickly. I don't want to keep selecting 'Attack' and then blindly waiting for my turn again. There's no reason
for me to want to do it. Similarly, you have to remember that most people in an RPG-making community will
have experienced this type of battle so much that they're sick of it. You'd be surprised how adding a few skills,
weaknesses, strategies, etc, can really boost a game's rep and make me enjoy it that much more.

Bland characters... urgggh. Don't even get me started on this one. Too late. I've already started on it. Cliché characters
including an optimistic young swordsman, nervous female healer and mentally scarred strong person just don't
really do it for me. They've been done a thousand times. Make characters argue, have opinions, phobias, favourite foods,
funny stories, jokes and most important of all: personalities!

[SaiKar]

More abuse. Just blazing forward.

Your Characters Are Part of Your World. I Am Not

(Carmen hinted at this one. I’m expanding a lot more)

As players, we are willing to accept that the countries and the events that happened in the games we play are real to the characters in the game. That is to say, that the characters grew up in these fictional countries and its as real to them as Earth is to us. So when they say that they know of town X in the kingdom of Y, we accept that they're familiar with that location and its history. The problem is that we, as newcomers to this world, are not.

Confusion and uncertainty can be very powerful story elements, if used correctly. There are three basic types:

1) Both the player and the characters don't know what's going on. This situation often involves an "everyman" character that is an outsider, has amnesia, lived a very sheltered life, or is otherwise doesn't know WTF is going on. This was heavily used in Final Fantasy X. Tidus has no idea about Spira so he asks all the questions that the player would ask. In the context of the game, the other characters are explaining to Tidus about Sin and summoning and all that, but they're also explaining to the player, who was similarly confused. On the whole, this method of storytelling works really well since it's very easy to associate with the clueless everyman, but care needs to be taken to make sure the method of providing a clueless character isn't too contrived as to be unbelievable, preventing "but he shouldn't be this stupid!" type situations.

2) The players know more than the characters. When you start Chrono Trigger (I have to try to work in at least one CT reference each time) you know it's a game about time travel. Crono doesn't. When you watch Star Wars Episode 3, you know that the story ends with Anakin becoming Darth Vader and the Galactic Republic turning into an Empire. Essentially, by knowing the beginning and the end, the fun of the story becomes wondering how the two meet up in the middle, and good storytelling can make it look impossible until the very end, when all of a sudden things line up and you realize it was all heading that way from the beginning. It's real tricky, but worth it if you can pull it off. This type of storyline can fail hard though if the events that tie the beginning to the end seem to contrived or otherwise not consistent with the rest of the plot.

3) The characters know more than the players. The uncertainty becomes why certain characters are acting like they are - what they know that the player doesn't. Many RPGs contain a mysterious type character with an unknown past, and that's fine, but if the entire party is acting like this it can be a real problem. This is absolutely the hardest one to do right and nearly impossible in a player-controlled medium like a game since the players have to make decisions based on information that they don't know but their characters do. If the characters want to visit town X, we, as players guiding their action, can often be left with no clue on how to get to town X at all since we've never even heard of it. Often times we're just thrown onto a world map with no clue which direction we should head in.

Now, exploration in RPGs is fine. In fact, it can be a lot of fun looking around an unknown world, discovering its secrets. But it can also be a huge chore. Frequent random battles on the overworld can kill the drive for exploration quickly since the player will be spending a lot more time defending themselves than looking around. Skies of Arcadia, I’m looking at you! And if there’s nothing really to find during exploration, no hidden towns or caves or anything, then what’s the point in letting the player take a look around at all? A bunch of dead ends and the path might as well be a straight line.

This also applies to other types of story elements. If the characters decide they want to talk to Bob, and the player doesn’t know anything about Bob, it can be frustrating trying to figure out where Bob is. Is he someone important in this town? Is he hiding in some weird corner in the back? Is he in any entirely different city? The characters may have known Bob their whole life. He may be their brother. But us players, unless we’re told, don’t have a clue, and aimless wandering is rarely fun.

Remember, as the creator of a game, you know everything about it. You know where town X is since you designed it, the player’s starting position, the route between, and all the routes that don’t go to town X. You know who Bob is, where he is, and why the player would want to talk to him. It is your duty to clue the characters in on information that they should know to advance the storyline. At least give them hints in the right direction.

[carmen]

Gah, lump these posts into one and sticky it. kthx

[Shady Ultima]

Damn. Here I was all proud because my game didn't have any of the issues you brought up... but that last one got me.

In my game you're told to go to Ceralia, and that's it (at the time) but it doesn't have a world map, so that probably makes it a bit easier. But just having a character toss in a hint where to go is easy.

Like
"Head East, and when you smell the salt of the sea, you will have arrived in Ceralia" or something like that.

[drenrin2120]

These are awesome. Even 'vets' should read this. I had a lot of these problems without even realizing it. 30 minute intro with no fighting is just not fun.

[zuhane]

Veterinarians should read this?

[SaiKar]

My gaming commentary is extremely relevant to animal care.