Castle Paradox

[Robot]

Sure!

1. Don't bother releasing a crap game on the internet.

2. Don't try to include a bunch of features if you can't implement them. Plenty of games are completely epic and awesome on concept and execution alone. Pac-Man. Robotron. Try to make a game better than one of those, and good luck!

3. Really look and study pixel art if you want to make 4/8/16 bit games. Detail does not always = Good. Look at Link's sprite, the Zelda monsters. Simple, effective. Develop an aesthetic for simple pixel art.

4. Take your time, good games can easily take over a year to develop.

5. Don't even bother releasing a demo for a free game, demos are designed to get people to buy a game. People won't have the patience for a free game demo.

6. Understand that people have very high standards for even indie games. Cave Story, World of Goo, IWBTG, 8Bit Killer, etc. are raising the bar everyday. You've got to make your game interesting and readily accessible.

7. Try not to rip off other game's graphics and music. And if you rip graphics, at LEAST make some changes. This can be okay if the game is aware of its allusions (See: IWBTG).

8. As good as OHRRPGCE is, make other genre games in addition to RPGs.

9. Graphics don't have to be the best, but you can make them individual and iconic. Once again, take Pac-Man and the ghosts. Those graphics are perfect for the game. Now look at Ms. Pac-Man, she looks lame because they overcomplicated the sprite and lost a lot of the artistic design (but gained a female player-base, so this case is a trade off).

10. Play as many video games as possible.
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8bitcity.blogspot.com

[Newbie_Power]

[NeoSpade]

then again unless you release demos how are you to know where the bugs are? You might of overlooked some things that other people may not. I mean in cinama they show flash trialers and depending on the audiances reactions entire scenes in movies are changed, so the same applies for games really.

[Newbie_Power]

That's true, but only one person really cared about the 2nd version of Hedgemaze when I released it. THat was a huge mistake because the next version would be awesome to release if it weren't for the fact that there's not much new content compared to version 2.

With that, I wouldn't get many play testers if the game isn't appealing enough. Not a big deal though. I think the new members that have been arriving deserve more attention on their games anyway, as they've been very good and show a lot of promise, you included.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[The Wobbler]

[Rya.Reisender]

[Robot]

I was suggesting that you don't release a demo on to the internet. I am getting people I know in real life to playtest my game, and that seems like the best option.
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8bitcity.blogspot.com

[The Wobbler]

[msw188]

I can go both ways on #5. For one thing, I AM a person who took a LONG time between updates to my first game, and I DID finish it (roughly six years after starting, I believe). But then again, I DID release demos when I feel I had added enough content.

If you know people in person who can playtest your game fairly, as PLAYTESTERS rather than as friends (like, say, an acquaintance from a Computer Science course), then I would probably agree that that would probably be best. But I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with releasing demos as long as the author maintains the mindset that it is a chance to have some suggestions over a chance to gain the game some popularity.
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Uncommon]

[Robot]

Hmm, people really seem to support the idea of a demo. I guess everyone works best differently :)
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8bitcity.blogspot.com

[LongeBane]

Most people here aren't making the games for money, so demo has a different meaning to them.

[Robot]

Yea, I'm starting to understand why one might want a demo... I'm considering releasing one for my platformer.
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8bitcity.blogspot.com

[Ronin Catholic]

What have I learned from my newbie games?

From Wolfqest/Starrhao

1. Heroes face to the left, not to the camera. (This is "optional" now so long as you don't use Dash-In, Teleport, Strike, or Cast animations, just the Standing Attack/Standing Cast attack animations)

2. Don't make a "finesse weapon" that uses Accuracy as the basis for both its accuracy and damage while also being cheaper than "strength" weapons

3. Don't give mages weapons that scale to Magic Power unless they're significantly weaker than spells and still turn out less damage than the fighters' weapon attacks

From Trytuges v1/Nintendo Quest/abandoned FF1 and Dragon Warrior remakes/fangames:
1. Fan games are a good learning experience.

2. Faithfully recreating a whole game is impossible, or at least so difficult it's not worth it; springboarding yourself off of generic aspects (relative prices of weapons and armor, levels at which certain types of spells are learned and monsters of certain power/special abilities tend to be encountered) is really good for getting a feel as far as pacing and balancing, so long as you're starting from a good game.

3. You absolutely will feel guilty about piggybacking on the hard work of other sprite artists/music composers whose works were not explicitly given permission to be reused or lapsed into the public domain with the onslaught of time. Or if you don't feel guilty, you should.

4. People who loved the original game might hate you for not doing a good enough job recreating their expected experience. People who already hated you for other reasons can now call you a thief and a talentless hack. Or you might get bombarded with undeserved praise for your mediocre game building up your ego until the first sign of criticism brings you tumbling down into a spiral of depression and constantly threatening to quit making games for ever because they were so enamored with your use of brand iconography they are familiar with and enjoy.

5. Satire is a dying art and audiences will mistake intentional, ironic hypocrisy like a stolen videogame sprite telling you not to shoplift as you being a genuine hypocrite.

Wolf's Quest/Densetsu no Okami:
1. Don't change your game's vision (a loving pastiche of Dragon Warrior 1-3, say) to match a different game's branding you're less familiar with and invested in (Final Fantasy 1) just because it's more popular in the community you'll be exposing it to primarily.

2. Filler spells just so there's 24 each black magic and white magic spells aren't fun or cool (or other system filler to make all styles have an equal number of sub-options within them). Maybe it's natural that there are more different types of direct damage than there are of healing and buff spells combined; think about how many weapons there are to kill people non-magically compared to the number of surgical tools or medicines that can be very carefully applied to save a life, and will also kill if used even slightly wrong.

3. Don't get hung up on trying to re-make your newbie game with your better game design experience. In another decade you can look back at that as a newbie game too, and see all the things you didn't do or should have done different, and wonder why the super crappy first version got finished but the remake is a "permanent demo" of the first chapter. Eventually you have to move on and tell new stories that are better from the start, not re-tell your old bad stories in slightly less bad ways.

4. Building a world is fun, but don't dump your setting bible on players as the opening text crawl. Let them gradually learn about the world - optionally, even. Some will actively seek to read every bookshelf in a library!

5. You don't need plotscripts if all you want to make is a basic RPG...but a few quality of life improvements are hidden not very deep into plotscripting, so use a couple of them anyway if you can!

6. RPGs don't need deep plots if the characters are fun to watch have adventures in a simple excuse plot. However, if the plot is bare bones and the heroes are boring, it might as well be a no-text RPG and would probably be more fun for it!

Nintendo Quest/Sample2/Moron Mission/Weegee:
1. Sometimes it's okay to just make something really, really stupid and goof around, accidentally learning about the engine's mechanics by trying combinations of things you normally wouldn't in a "serious" game.

2. In a joke game, it's always better for battles to be fast than for them to be slow. Better for them to be easy than for them to be hard. In games that are meant to be funny but still fun to play, the same balancing factors are at play as in any serious game, just with different aesthetics. Weegee's mistake was that accuracy was too low but the speed was perfect, Moron Mission's that Paul's magic damage wasn't exaggerated enough to roflstomp enemies consistently (monsters too dangerous for pure joke game and too chaotic for serious game), Nintendo Quest was balanced sorta-alright but was still Nintendo Quest and thus had numerous flaws outside its math.

3. You find your own jokes funnier than other people do. You might go back almost 20 years after the fact and still laugh your butt off at your own jokes and there's nothing wrong with this; more likely, you have matured and find some of your older humor banal and cringeworthy.



And in general:

Balance is an art, not a science. You can't just plug some numbers into an algorithm and make the monsters, attacks, available weapons, etc. all balanced in a fun way. Sure you can keep it consistent that the fighter always defeats random enemies in one hit and everyone else in two, that the mage always takes away half the enemies' max HP in his spread attacks so the non-fighters can pick them off faster, that the healer's newest healing spell always refills the beefiest tank's HP to max...but part of the fun of getting a new weapon or a new spell is the temporary change of paradigm, that the balance has just shifted. So is going to a new area and finding those enemies stronger or to be using a new tactic. Getting a feel for how to place and pace these imbalances is what RPG balance is actually about!
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"I didn't start the flame war;
I don't know what you thought here
'Twas that way when I got here"

"I didn't start the flame war;
I can't understand a word you're saying
nor the game you're playing~"