What I was thinking

Moogle1 · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 12:17 pm Post subject: What I was thinking

The Magnus marathon contest was a decent idea. It could've resulted in a lot of great games.

It didn't.

Magnus V started out really good. I honestly think the first ten minutes are pretty entertaining. The dialogue and humor style remind me of Douglas Adams. The cutscenes were amusing and the story that accompanied them was sufficiently captivating.

Deadlines approached and 80% of the game became very rushed. The "Quest for the 37 Crystals" broke down to more of a "Quest to Stick 37 Crystals into 2 Hours of Gameplay." The sidequests and minigames I had planned were scrapped. Very little of the game was tested and you know what that means.

The larger problem, though, is that the entire style and flow of the game collapsed after those first ten or fifteen minutes. Subsequent to the mint and candy quest, you never see that same type of dialogue, the same fast-paced humor. You hardly see any dialogue at all, really.

What you are stuck with, then, is a main character who you used to like and a few supporting characters whose characterization can be wrapped up in the five minutes of questing it takes to get them into your party. (Think Chrono Cross here. It didn't work well there, either, but at least Magnus V doesn't sport fifty of these characters.)

The gameworld is vast. This is a good thing, except maybe insofar as it means that you'll spend a lot of time fighting monsters in an untested and consequently inevitably uninteresting battle system. Probably you'll run out of desire to actually play this game by the time the final encounter comes around, which is a shame because the last battle makes an attempt at wrapping the story up.

Magnus V is a finished RPG and the only one I've ever made, barring SpyJim which doesn't count because it's only a single episode. Maybe a little work would make this a really good and playable game. The graphics are decent, much of the music is original, and the story begins to be interesting. It just doesn't carry through.

There is a lesson here. Maybe if I hadn't hit my deadline, Magnus V would've been fleshed out to be the game I had originally intended. I con't go back and change it now -- I have bigger fish to fry nowadays -- but I will remember on my current projects that Magnus V was rather close to being a good game.
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Uncommon · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 8:57 pm Post subject:

I remember you sent me a demo of the intro one day. I always felt kinda bad because I'd entered the next day or so.
But i suppose we were all at a rush to finish our Magnus games, you especially since your Mission started right around there. I ended up having to hack it to finish Magnus V.

Moogle1 · Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 4:06 am Post subject:

Magnus V was my game. Yours was, uh, XV or something.
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Uncommon · Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 7:34 am Post subject:

17, though 11 in the contest.

I meant, you were so rushed to finish V that when I was playing therough it some nine months later I had to hack into it to access the final boss.
Poor writing comprehension on my part.

Moogle1 · Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 9:15 am Post subject:

Oh, gotcha. It's a good thing that you could find out the password ingame if you were clever enough, though I suspect anyone could've done it in a few guesses.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design