Maarten ter Huurne wrote:
> > Well, you can keep the drive spinning beforewards.
> > Most Japanese games do this.
> They don't do that on Japanese machines. They simply overwrite #FD9F which
> some machines need to spin down the drive.
Ugh! Well, at least worked in my old MSX2 with
a port-based disk interface. :] But I agree with
you: this kind of pause is really very annoying.
> > It could be an option: if you have 256Kbytes, you
> > have character portraits; if not, you don't have.
> Yes, that's a good option.
Even better, you could let the player set this
in the game options. <:)
> > Well, could it be a designer's option?
> Ofcourse it should be. The issue was that an engine that only supports
> invisible enemies would be simpler to make. But I wouldn't like such an
> engine is.
I understand. It would be a tradeoff. We
are trading some simplicity for a greater
flexibility on the engine. Not so easy to
choose as it sounds. <:)
> Actually, you can create invisible enemies easily in an engine that doesn't
> support it directly: use sprites that are all transparant pixels!
I thought on this, but it's fudeba. `:)))))
Anyway, it would work. Maybe the engine could
support some characters *without* sprites as
well. This way we could enable visible and
invisible enemies in the same game. :)
> Boss monsters make sure that players will want to fight some enemies to
> gain experience. And fighting should be fun, so players don't really want
> to avoid monsters. But when you've already killed dozens of a certain kind
> of monster, it is nice if you can avoid them.
You're right. In most RPGs, you can easily
"escape" weaker enemies, but this doesn't
prevent them to appear at all. But sometimes
a stronger character could want to fight some
weak enemies to build up experience easily.
In game design time, we could devise some
magic item (or its counterpart, in case of
some different setting) which allowed the
player to avoid encounters with weak enemies
(say, 10 levels below the player).
> > I always enjoyed "random" battles,
> > like those in Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy,
> > Phantasy Star.
> I don't like the random battle system in FF7. If you come back to an area
> that you first visited early in the game, all the same monsters are still
Yes, it looks like monsters appear by
spontaneus generation. `:))) However,
every Final Fantasy has some "devices"
which use this as a gameplay feature;
when you get a chocobo, for example.
> there. It is odd that enemies that are much too weak will still try to
> attack the characters. There should be a kind of rule "if enemy_level <
> player_level - 10 then no_battle".
Four options:
1. No way; the characters must always fight! (not very good)
2. Characters never fight with weaker enemies
3. Characters don't fight with weaker if in possession of some item
4. Stronger characters are less likely to encounter weaker enemies
I like more the third option, because it's
more similar to the RPGs I like. `:)
In Ultima, for example, you can escape almost
any enemy if you want to, unless it's much
stronger than you.
> Dragon Slayer 6 solved this by clearing all monsters in an area once the
> storyline there was finished.
That's an option; some RPGs, like Phantasy Star 3,
put new (stronger) monsters of the same class in the
"cleared" areas. That's interesting, because some-
times you must go back those areas.
> You are right about this: avoiding enemies on the map is an "action type"
> skill, which is different from what you usually do when playing RPGs.
If the game is good, I can forget this, of
course. I hope the game doesn't need too much
skill, though: I'm really bad in this kind of
games... :)
[]s,
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