Yeah, I think you should make "X and C" do the same thing as "enter" to conform with the original guidelines for the games.

I wouldn't want you to get rid of the original summaries, for posterity's sake, so it would be cool to have an option to choose between "original summary" and "new summary".

Damn, I always thought fragging was just blasting anything into pieces, people or vehicles, but I checked it now and it turns out I was wrong.
Well, maybe it isn't too late to change it, but I have no idea what for. 'Hull crack' or 'Hull breach' don't bring up the right image and don't sound so destructive.

Well, you could go for "Shatterhull". You know, like Shatterhand, but with hulls. Or something more abstract, like "Space Junk".

Walled Garden: 5 votes
Gan Eden: 3 votes
Gates of Eden: 4 votes
Eden's Gate: 3 votes
Dark Eden: 2 votes

I think "Walled Garden" or "The Walled Garden" have an added advantage, since it tells the player about the interesting thing involving your game, that you can break down walls and floors.

That is much improved. What he probably means is an arm shadow, which the white one has but the red one doesn't. It seems like he is raising his arms because there are none on his body.

It looks like he's floating, jellyfish, style. For skipping, I think you should have two alternating poses for when he jumps in the air. I think maybe the legs should bend when they hit the ground to make the impact more obvious.

Looks like one of those stacking dolls, or a Dharma.

I suggest moving over the skull on the hat, and the top of the hat, to be in line with his nose. The belt buckle as well.

Ok, I made an edit.


Added his neck shadow, side of face shadow, fixed his eye perspective, made her eyes smaller and more shifty, gave him an arm and recolored his jacket.

IT LIVES! I think you should be the de facto project manager for now.

But, my god, the default summaries are worse than I thought. It looks like someone failed 4th grade English. I think the new version should have rewritten summaries, at least to make them partially coherent. After all, the games are improved remakes...

Also, the X and C buttons are supposed to be the only ones you use, and when I tried them, nothing happened. Either it has extremely delayed feedback, or I button mashed and pressed something else that worked. What are the controls for this thing?

Also, I went back and read the Cheetahmen summary, and my mind was blown. Fighting off all the bad guys from the remakes? This will be epic.  

I have a game that will "only work" with 3D graphics too. The difference is that I went with another idea that worked with 2D graphics. Now, if only I could find that magical "developer" who I could pitch my multimillion dollar idea to and have them do all the work.  

I really like the idea of a game where the protagonist has his own personality but communicates with you as the player when deciding to make decisions, but I'm having some trouble coming up with an explanation of why you still physically control the character's movement etc.

Technically, that would still be ludo-narrative dissonance since the character is supposedly acting on their own and you are just a "spirit guide" of sorts. No one would literally mirror every move you tell them to, even if you did have some sort of "power of suggestion". It's basically explained away by suspension of disbelief in the same way that game "menus" don't make sense in real life. Even if you did explain it in the context of the universe, it would still not make sense how you can save, pause, reload, etc.

Oh wow, I gotta check that game out!

Great! You should play Baten Kaitos Origins, since it's a lot better in terms of gameplay and voice acting. It's a prequel too, so you shouldn't miss anything if you want to play the first.

And you're free to do whatever you want with his life. If you want you can try to "act like him" and make things work, or be a "evil spirit" and just have fun with his life.
People don't really know about these "spirits", but you're not the only one. So once in a while you'll see that another person is being controlled by a spirit.

This idea would make an excellent (and funny) game. I don't remember playing a game where the main character was literally "possessed" by you. Not only would it be a parody of the gamer's control of characters, but the character themselves could have no interest in doing anything you want them to. I'm thinking, an RPG where you are this guy.

How's HULLFRAG for a 2d multiplayer arena shooter where you fly space fighters?

Maybe you could rename your game to "Hull Breach" since "frag" doesn't make sense in this context. It's a pretty interesting name as-is, though.

My current name choices atm are at.

Walled Garden, Gan Eden, Eden's Gate or Gates of Eden

Rate the name plz. <3

Why not just "Dark Eden"? It conveys the message of the game better than any of those other ones. My favorite out of those, though, is "Walled Garden" since it's appropriately ambiguous and people don't go in with preconcieved notions about biblical references.

I know that the Baten Kaitos series refers to the player as a "spirit" within the game world, and you even play a major role in the story at some points, so it's a perfect demonstration of how that idea is good. I think it definitely works if the player is some kind of "entity" that is guiding the character and can choose what to say to them.

Heh, I think you mis-quoted me in one of those there.

Firstly, smaller battlefields like the first one (and some others later on) wouldn't fill the whole screen, so there'd be lots of empty black space around the outside of them. I know other games of a similar ilk just put up with this, but I don't really like it.

The empty space issue could also be fixed by putting a background there. You can see at the left edge of this screenshot that there is a similar-colored gradient around the edge of the map that makes it more visually pleasing.

Secondly, it would introduce more of a possibility for players to try and click on things 'through' gaps in the UI, and get frustrated when it doesn't work or they do something they didn't intend to do.

It doesn't have to have gaps then, it could just be a tab instead of a ginormous slice of the screen. I just think that putting the battle screen on one side like that makes it visually unbalanced.

It's very funny to make an NPC, I wonder why they don't get too develop, I would love an RPG with only one town in the entire game, but if each NPC is a real character.

You should try Rune Factory 3 out sometime. You stay in the same town the entire game, but every character has their own schedule and unique things to say depending on the time of day and year. They all have their own businesses and other things to worry about. The game is quite funny as well.

Megalonia progress update! We now have self-assembling cube enemies, more graphics for the intro cutscene and voice acting!

We plan to have walls to avoid and parallax graphics. I'm interpreting those mysterious pink arches as the structure of a spacedock that will scroll, R-Type style.

The story has been changed somewhat, and now it's the story of fixing Megalonia rather than destroying it. If you will notice, the original summary says you have to "defend against" the enemies but says nothing about destroying them.

I'm sure that some people would think you were making fun of the situation and even if it was intended to be humorous, it would still be insulting. If you're not going commercial with it then I don't think it would be that much of a deal, but walking around with that name on your business card might be a bit more trouble then it's worth.

[Setting]

This is a pretty funny idea. But, shouldn't there be some kind of changing setting guideline to keep it from becoming a total mish-mash of different worlds? I think it would be more fun to try to make a character within a setting than something completely random.

Anyway,

Setting:

Fantasy

Description:

Dan is a school student who is playing hooky, but unfortunately the school is a magic academy and the truancy officers can find him using their crystal ball. You as the player must foil the truancy officers by covering his tracks.

These two were intentional. The small text box means that the dialogue is divided up into shorter, more-digestible lines, which I liked the idea of; the lack of names is supposed to encourage the player to associate the character graphic instead of their name with the character's dialogue - it also means that a few times later in the story where new characters are introduced and it's not known what their names are, the player isn't given their names either.

That sounds interesting, but my point was more along the lines of the fact that there is not enough whitespace to make it graphically pleasing. Books have margins for a reason - because it's easier to read text when it's not squished into a tiny box.

The name idea is interesting but I don't see why you just put the same name in for the mistaken identity case and then later reveal it wasn't him. That way, the player would be tricked in the exact same way.

The compass-rose is actually pan controls - the window shows you 16x16 squares of the battle, but some of the later maps are much larger - off the top of my head, I think the largest is 48x48. So while most of the time the auto-pan-to-the-current-unit is sufficient, sometimes the player will want to pan around and look at the lie of the land and where the enemy units all are, and that's the controls to do that with.

Ah, I get it now. Personally, I would go about doing it by making the arrow keys/WASD pan the screen, or centering the screen and putting buttons on the top, left, right and bottom to pan it in those directions. Regardless, it seems a bit too large right now (1/4 of the screen). Heck, it could even be transparent and hover near the edge of the screen if the battle screen took up the entire screen.

(As to JRPG-ness; the JRPG inspiration mostly comes in the form of the story and characterisation, and in the way that the battles diverge from Advance Wars' predictable turn-based system in favour of a FF-style activation system.)

What I mainly meant was that the units don't level up as far as I can see, and the plot seems more "western RPG" to me with its attention to period dialect and real nationalities and types of units rather than fantasy. The only jRPG trait that I could see at all was the character portraits, and maybe the activation system you were talking about, but it doesn't really seem like something particular to jRPGs.

I'm trying to make some characters for a new game. It took friggin' forever, but here are a couple of characters to critique. What should be changed? (click to expand)



Note that I'm not a genius artist, so don't suggest changing the art style to super-realism or redoing the entire thing.