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Mary's Development Blog

How to make useful spells

27/3/2014

 
... or special abilities, skills, techniques... you get it. Basically, I've noticed that there are plenty games out there that have characters with absolutely massive spell lists, yet you'll only ever really use two or three of them throughout, because the remaining ones are 100% throwaway. So I decided to make a blog post about how to create some spells that your players actually wanna use!

Quality over quantity!

This one's very important. As I mentioned above, three pages worth of skills can be rendered completely redundant by having more useful spells.

One thing you should pay attention to is not to create spells are that are too specific to be of any help. Example: a skill that only cures poison. Then a skill that only cures paralysis. Then another skill that only cures silence, ad infinitum. This one is especially bad if you're making a game where all status effects are gone after a battle. Why not have a skill that cures all effects sans death instead? And then a single skill that revives? Much better.

If you have elemental spells it's alright to have multiple varities with different elements, but why not try to give them some secondary effects? For example, fire spells could have a 25%ish chance to inflict a Poison-type of effect, Ice could paralyze etc.

Stay effective!

If you want to maintain a small skill list, another thing you can do is make the individual skills remain strong throughout the game. In RPG Maker, you can do this by setting ATK and/or INT influence all the way to the max. That way, your spells get stronger as your character levels up.

There's also another good way to make healing techs stay effective. Make them restore a set percentage of your max HP. For example, have a Cure spell that restores 25% of your max HP. That way, it will restore 25 HP when the max is 100 and 2500 when the max is 10'000 and so on. Having variants that restore a higher percentage is completely fine. Naturally, you can also do this with items, but that's no the point of this post.

Status effects are your friends

About 75% of the RPGs out there have status effects you won't ever utilize. So, why not make poison status lower your strength as well? Or simply set it to take away a certain percentage of your max HP, like the healing example above.
And don't just make the bosses immune to all of them, that's just boring. One way to work around this is to create two versions of the same status effect, one for regular enemies and one for bosses. Simply make the enemies immune to the boss version and vice versa. Who knows, maybe this can add a whole new layer to the gameplay of your own little creation?


So I hope this post was of at least some use. I really wanted to pass this advice down to fellow game makers, so don't disappoint me!

Change of plans

16/3/2014

 
I'm sorry people, I know I've been both inactive and working on a different project every other time. I've really, really, really decided to only concentrate on one project and one project alone for now.

As for the other games I've talked about... ignore their existence for now. I'll decide what to do with them once I'm done with the current thingy.

A CHANGE OF HEEEART <3

So I've always wanted to create my very tactical RPG. I tried time and time again, almost always using programs that were not designed for that kind of stuff in the first place.

But then I've discovered a program created specifically for this very purpose: Simulation RPG Maker 95.

However... if you've been following my Twitter feed, you might've heard me talking about how much I loathed this abomination of a tool. It has, however, actually gotten better! I discovered a new version (titled SIM RPG Maker 95 Value!), which has a much better translation, more room for custom stuff and a few other improvements here and there to make it more user friendly. After a couple hours of tinkering, here's a very early Alpha video!
I'm having a good run with the program right now, so you can definitely expect a demo in the coming months! In regards to the plot, all I'm sharing right now is that it's about a girl called Mireille who's looking for her brother, and suddenly, things go haywire.

Now let's talk about some of the programs faults, some of which I'm currently in the process of fixing, and a couple others which can't be fixed at all.

- the default graphics are damn ugly, even if for a 90s utility (all of the default graphics are currently being replaced!)

- when using a multi-target spell, the battle animation is shown individually for every target. Gets very annoying when you're healing people. (can't be fixed, unfortunately)

- the default music is cheesy and boring (just like the graphics, it's being replaced. Unlike the borrowed graphics, I'll create an all-new soundtrack! The track from the video is just a placeholder)

- balancing things is a pain, because all characters have both their innate stat growth in addition to their Class stats. Every character MUST have a class assigned to them. This CAN be fixed, but it's tedious and requires playtest after playtest.)

I'll keep updating stuff about this game, so be sure to visit frequently!


    Thanks for reading my blog! 

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