Is that a New Year Resolution?

No, my dear, it is an absolute promise. Our hatred of RPGMaker 1 drives this.

<rant>

And speaking of my hatred of RPGMaker 1, great news! I just lost two hours of editing work! I noticed a few misspellings, some text boxes that could be dressed better, a small plot hole to resolve that probably no one would ever even see in a random townsfolk, and a final all around check of story content in one scenario. Little things that programmers often have an entire team to handle, if not slough it off on mere test players to forego the annoyance completely. And what do I get for this attempt to pay attention to fine detail, for literally the TENTH FREAKING TIME in this and every freaking scenario among the freaking 17 that makes up this freaking game?! (And I'm doing my best not to go full-blown Steve Martin in Plain, Trains, and Automobiles here, I really am.) A UPS that doesn't do what the hell it's supposed to do when the power suddenly lapses. .... And you know what? It isn't the UPS, nor even act of God. It is RPGMaker 1's doing. It knows we hate it, and it is now truly sentient and trying to make us as miserable as possible, trying whatever it can to hold us back from finishing this once and for all.

Yes, I know I sounded self-absorbed and narcissistic with the way I made it sound like my work was some intensely finely-polished piece of historical oriental art known throughout the ages and gasped in astonishment upon by the newest Geishas to the teahouse, but give me a break. It's been ten years for me and Lantis, and we hate RPGMaker 1.

WE. I. MY IMAGINARY FAIRY-WINGED GIRLFRIEND NAEYA. ALL FINE CONSOLE RPG'S EVER CRAFTED BY GREAT MEN OF THE ART. AND MARY THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN. HATE RPGMAKER 1.

WE HATE IT

</rant>

... No. Screw it. And screw you, RM1. You're not beating me tonight. I am not laying down tonight in complaint and regret. I'm getting right back into you and making the exact same changes you just thwarted me from saving and completing.

TLDR:

Got it.

The work goes by much faster when you're typing and pissed off.

My stress with RPGMaker 1 over this weekend has actually caused my face to break out. I was well for a few months, but what happened in the above posts and then another problem and something else stupid about RM1 last night has led me to discover several disgusting red welts on my forehead in the bathroom mirror. No, it's not diet. It isn't sugar and grease. It is this blasted piece of game-making software and the extra mega-dose of stress it gave me this weekend.

Lantis, forget guns. On my own copy of RM1, I am going to destroy it with my bare hands. To hell with the consequences of me possibly breaking bones or getting plastic shards from the case lodged into my hands and having to go to the hospital. This thing is getting futae-no-kiwamied straight into oblivion, Anji-style.

rpg maker was never designed for the kinds of games we have developed. that where where able to break the single memory card limitation is an example of how flexible the system is. of course this comes with many headaches and random insanity that causes brain hemorrhaging and rages.

i understand the need for having to put in monsters and spells and make the game as appealing as possible but i quite honestly would of left it out at this point. i am much more interested in what you are doing with the plot and the game events then i ever would be with the battle system. 15 years ago i might of wanted to fight every single battle and leveled up, but after spending thousands of hours developing and playing others games, the system is now dated and old. i would even balk at long grinding with a professional game, but with rpg makers system and with the long load times of a multimemory card game its better left out. your game is epic because of what it offers, not what monster battles you put in.

any time you do a duplicate sys card you are going to find unintended results. most of the reason i stopped was because the duplicate sys card trick meant i had to have my sys data finalized from the start. any change i made to anything other then dungeons in later sys cards had to be 100% duplicated in every card before it. you have to go in thinking that you can only ever change dungeons without consequence on a sys card. items, characters, spells, skills, monsters - all have to never change from the first time the player loads that first sys card.

my advice to you is to polish the game up and release it without the battles or set the battles to 1hp. balancing the game is dragging you down and isnt worth the energy for what it adds. the content you provide is already pretty lengthy without having to slog though the unpleasantness of battles. even when you go through the entire game, you will have to go through the entire thing again to see if any other ramifications came up from the spell changes you already made. if i want to punish myself with old school battles i am going to play ff1. if i ever decide to pick up my game and finish it, its going to be without battles and just be for the story and what limitations i can break on rpg maker 1. after 15 years, we owe it to ourselves to produce a more relaxing game for our audience.

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ARE YOU F***ING KIDDING?
YOU SUJJEST THEY TAKE OUT ALL THE RPG ELEMENTS OUT OF THE RPG?
WHAT WILL THE GAME BE WITHOUT IT? A sh*tty PUZZLE ADVENTURE?

NO!
WORK ON THE BATTLES, MAKE THEM AS BALANCED AS POSSIBLE, DO WHAT YOU WANT, JUST GET THIS GAME OUT OF THE WAY, AND THEN DESTROY YOUR RM1 DISC!

SK and I have already poured countless ours into making a battle system in Arc Arath. And I can't speak for SK, but I don't think he'd want to undo all that work. As far as being a more relaxing experience, what we DID do is make it so that you can play the game from beginning to end with no grinding at all. The battle should be challenging and fun. But if the player wants to go out of their way to grind to make the game easy, there are welcome to.

On top of that, we included an item that's dirt cheap that will completely negate random encounters just in case those were getting frustrating as well. 99% of the game's random encounter rate is set to the lowest possible setting, meaning the encounter rate down item simply just turns them off for a while.

I hope this will be good even to cover both ends of the spectrum.

You're using random encounters?
Well, i guess for a game this long, it makes sense not to waste countless memory on enemies walking on the map
That would have probably doubled the amount of memory cards

You know what, Lantis? They're right. While I disagree with leaving random encounters out completely (in anything I think many dungeons with much battling is needed to balance out the text-heavy story, but that's just me), I do agree with the general idea Karr - and I think also Alicia? Not positively sure if she was actually being sarcastic or not ^_^ - put forth in that we, or at least I, am trying too hard on battle-balancing by now. I've caught back up on the work i lost last night, and now I am going to just try to focus and not worry about the absolute nit-grit details. We've made darn near the best game we could with what RM1 offers. Let's just do this (except of course if we still find an actual glitch we need to correct it).



... I'm still going to futae-no-kiwami punch this game when we're done, though.

having options for people who dislike battling is fantastic and absolutely critical in any rpg maker game, especially an episodic game like this one. well done.

if you are going to keep with the random battles then i suggest a few things:

put your first sys data in and set up a new scenario. all this would be is a platform and a bump event that triggers a battle, has swaping ect. have this level your characters up a bit and see what spells and abilities you gain. there should be nothing blank, nothing out of place.

then, make absolutely sure that any new sys cards you have, have the exact identical item, magic, character, skills, data that the first does. every spell and item has to be in the same position, every magic level learned at the same level ect. there is only a few parameters you can change between system data. i would suggest doing tests, or do a search of the board here. i remember making a topic on this very subject based on tests i did to find out what can be changed and what cant between sys cards. anything that is set in stone on the first load up of the game will have to be the same for every sys data. once you save the game as a player it will retain this data and only draw the other changing elements from the system file itself.

the above will be a lot of work but it will stop any future problems you have like this from coming up. then you can finish testing out whatever is left of the game. breakdown the problem and you will find the best solution.

At least. SK and I did talk about that several several years ago, but having custom fights like that do, in fact, take up a large quantity of scenario data. And it does suck not having ambush and pre-emptive battles. Not to mention never able to run from fights. So we decided to keep it traditional.




Personally, I hate the multiple system card trick. It's easy to screw things up on both the developer end and the user end. Since multiple system cards would have to have the exact same name, it would be easy for end users to get the two confused, even if the raw .gme files were named properly. So we tried our best to keep everything to one system card... and we succeeded too.


Had SK and I gone with non-random fights and multiple system cards, the game would have been a completely bloated mess. I wouldn't doubt it being around 40 scenario cards and a few system. And nobody wants to deal with that many cards to play a single game.

While some of us would easily manage the multiple sys trick, it is still very annoying and very easy to mess up. I'm glad there's only one.

Actually, I wasn't being sarcastic, just a bit more agresive than i should have been.

I just think that since this in an RPG, it should have battles, and they should be well balanced.
If you deside to abandon the battle balancing, battles could become less enjoyable, or even seem pointless maybe...
And if a game has no battles or 1HP only battles?
Items become useless.
Shops and money becomes useless.
Dungeon exploration becomes useless.
And it just... I don't know...

I like the idea of having RPG Elements, but making it possible to play the RPG without grinding. That will make it appealing to people who don't want to fight.
But i still think the game needs good balancing.

i cant believe you managed to keep the game to one sys card, im actually impressed. continue balancing then, you made life far easier then i thought possible.

rpgs are great with battles but balancing is extremely hard; even for professional developers. with the battle system as horrible as it is, there will only be a couple of diehard fans who play any rpg with battles. if its just one sys card then they should be able to balance it without insurmountable pain. balancing will be painful, but not impossible.

Hey, guys, just wanted to let you know that have read this entire thread, all 22 pages. Unfortunatly, I could not watch some of the old Vidler/Megavideo video updates. But still. I am really impressed just with how much effort you put into this. And despite all you're frustrations, you're not giving up.

You can do it. No matter how much pain RM1 may have caused, you will defeat it in the end.

And even thought I'm losing interest in gaming, and might not play this game myself...
I'm still looking forward to seeing this game finished.
I will at least give it a shot, play it for at least an hour or two, but I probably won't have enought patience or motivation to play throught it.

That's just me thougt. As i sayd, losing interest in gaming

Having been playing Survival on RPGM1, which contains random encounters that I never seem to be able to run away from (unless I get the pre-emptive), will I really be able to successfully flee from battles in Arc Arath? Or am I just going to constantly fail, and as a result take a bunch of unnecessary damage due to the lost turn?