Oceans Dream

This is a recent issue we had with Chaingame, so I figured I’d bring it up here. In an RPG battle system, spells are generally a pretty big part of it. Turn based games in particular use them a lot. All you need to do is look at the big spells lists in games such as Final Fantasy to see that. I guess some people enjoy putting in their feature lists “999 spells!!!!” or something like that. But it’s not so much the quantity of spells as it is how useful each of them are.

Now, I bring it up because of Chaingame. We had end game spells which pretty much either did everything, or became obsolete. An example would be the Full Boost, which would make Power Boost, Guard Boost, and every other buff obsolete. At the end game, there is no decision whether you should take the round and see which buff you should cast, you can just pick that one and you’re set. Then Power/Guard/Life Boost just take up space in the menu because no one will be using them anymore.

There are some games I’ve played where the main character starts with just an attack and a sword skill. The sword skill does about the same damage or maybe slightly more damage but costs MP. However, it doesn’t scale in damage in the same way. So your attack could do 40 damage, the skill could do 60 damage, but later in the game the attack could do 132 damage and the skill would do about 70 this time. Now, in what case would you prefer to take the 70 damage skill that costs MP over an attack which is free and more easily accessible in the menu?

So when designing skills, you should think about how useful they are compared to each other, how useful it will be in the future, for how long it will be useful, how useful the player will believe it is, and things like that.

One of the hardest skills for the player to use are the status effect spells. Final Fantasy X had a great idea for them, simply have them as Attack + Status effect so you don’t lose the turn if the status effect doesn’t connect. You don’t have to do that though, but if they are in the game, they should be useful to the player. What use is it if only the weak enemies that you can easily kill are the only ones affected by status effects? Alternatively, if you’re not careful, they can break the game and make it boring for the player. I read a review on a game that had high HP bosses but that all were easily put to sleep, and sleep lasted a long while and wasn’t easily interrupted. The difficulty went down to 0 like that.

You want to have the player think about what they’ll do, and “Attack, Spam Ultima, Spam Cure4, Attack” every turn doesn’t involve players brains very much. Games should have meaningful choices.

OK, that is it from me for now, I am tired. Thanks for reading and feel free to offer suggestions, feedback and comments on this!

About making money in games:

(This is not limited to RPGs though I may use that as a topic, and no I don’t mean making REAL money off of it)

It seems hard to balance doesn’t it? Maybe it’s too easy to make money. Maybe you’re constantly looking for money. Maybe it’s only like that until the end, when you have too much money left over. There may be multiple currencies. You may want to do away with currency and have a barter system, or use “currency” for other things instead of purchasing equipment.

First off, you should consider what to call your currency. Gold is easy to recognize, but maybe you want to vary it up a bit. As long as it’s easy to tell that it’s money, you can call it (or have it) as you want. Fallout has you trading bottle caps (I didn’t know this at first actually), some games have you collecting various items to trade (Feather x 10, Ruby x 10). It depends on the culture you have going on in your game. Do they use salt to trade? Gold coins? Dollars? Do they call them a certain name? (Lucre for example)?

How easy is it to obtain? Pretty easy and you can generally afford what you want to get when you get there, or you’re just scraping to get by, selling even your own equipment because you have nothing else? This, along with the name of the currency, can be very dependent on the setting you wish to create. Something like Fallout or another game where the character is struggling to survive should have currency hard to get. Other games can be easier to obtain it, as they may be a higher status. FF8 had a salary, and some games earn you money from renting out houses. Although this can lead to…

The issue of having too much money at the end game. Some games are more problematic than others at this though. You get some games where you’re like “I bought everything, I have a bunch of money left over and I keep getting more, now what?”. Some have high value end game equipment that is so expensive you feel you’d have to grind for years to get it. It can be hard as you may not really have much else after the player buys everything they wanted to. But it can be something to think about. Maybe the player can spend their gold on something like buying things for a players house, paying rent for more item storage (so the player can carry 200 items instead of 100), or have a rare and expensive items be available that can be bought.

It is possible to manage currency in different ways. Maybe instead of buying equipment, you use points to upgrade your skills and just find the items or have enemies drop them. Maybe you trade in currencies/items for new ones. Maybe you get monster drops and sell them. Maybe you only have a salary and have to use that. Some people like the monster drop because they feel getting gold directly from enemies makes little sense. I personally find it easier to see the gold right there so I don’t have to estimate how much I’ll get, but it’s nice getting a big amount when you sell a lot of items. I also like the drop system when I can get usable and even good equipment from an enemy. You could loot the entire equipment set from an enemy in Oblivion, I liked that. Although the downside was that it made animals/monsters much less desirable to fight.

The amount of money you make on a quest or treasure chest should be proportional to the amount of work it took to get there/achieve it, and where you are in the game. A very simple fetch quest on Level 1 shouldn’t make you rich, nor should a difficult quest on Level 30 give you 5 gold and send you on your way. Same goes for treasure chests. If you make the player go out of their way and have to fight quite a bit of fairly hard monsters to get to it, you should reward the player and not give them a cheap potion for their efforts.

The placement of places to buy can also have an effect on your game world. You might have a shady dealer on the road. Maybe a merchant on the road will charge less because you don’t have the vendor markup. Maybe there’s a used merchandise with reduced prices (but slightly lower quality) goods. Maybe you have a goblin merchant in the lower depths of your dungeon in case you need more potions there. Maybe you can send your dog to go to town and buy stuff for you so you don’t have to leave a dungeon. You don’t need to always have a town -> cave -> town -> dungeon -> town simply because you need a place for the players to rest and trade. Some games only have one town that you can town portal to, or have full restore spots and treasures around so you don’t really need towns.

It is possible to also have item values change depending on the location and needs of the area. Fable plays around with this idea, so you can give some merchants who are low on goods and sell stuff you bought in an area where it was plentiful and make a profit that way. Certain games (tends to be more of the open ended western RPGs) have stats that influence how much you buy/sell for. Bartering or Persuasion or whatever they decide to call the skill. Basically if the merchant likes you more, they’ll charge you less. Maybe you can also give free gifts for a frequent shopper, or one that made a big purchase. “You bought 10,000 Gold worth of items from the store, have a free Armor Polisher to go with it!”. Some towns might charge a higher tax on all goods, or maybe the events going on in the game can effect the economy. If there are goblins in the mines, it might raise up prices for equipment that relies on that ore until you clear out the mines. Then miners can get to work and lower the prices on the equipment. FF5 had an interesting, though short example:

-There was a fire town you arrived in. They had equipment you wouldn’t be able to get until later, at a lower price. But when you buy one, you are arrested.

-After that, due to the plot, you find out the power of fire is weakening. You defeat the boss who is controlling the queen, but the fire crystal breaks.

- Without the power of fire, they can’t use it to make the same equipment for cheap, so the price goes up and you have inferior weapons to buy.

Other story related or area related causes can change or set prices in the world. Wine made in a certain town will be more expensive elsewhere, but cheaper in the town its from.

It’s just something to think about when working on your game. Your game doesn’t always need a deep economy, or things like that, but it’s always good to at least think about your gameplay ideas and see if you find something that fits well.

This is a new game by Anaryu and KKMcK (with a main character sprite by Skie). It’s for a contest that took place in RMN. I’ll get you that link when the site decides to work again, but for now you can use the link here:

http://kkmck.deviantart.com/art/Lux-Licentia-164417295

The deviant art link has a title screen picture and the download for the game and some description. I’ll get up some screenshots later also.

I died a few times but I was rushing through it, and you should take advantage of combos. Interesting and well done game especially for the time frame, try it out!

Collectibles

There are collectibles in the game too. I know where the locations of them are so it wasn’t hard for me to find it, but I dunno if that applied to everyone (all 2 people who played).

List of collectibles:

-Tokens. This is used for playing games at the casino (more on that later). So you don’t need to complete a set, each one is useful. There are about 12 Tokens I believe to find, one in each area.

-Crystals. This is once you get the Casino room for the toy store. You can go find Crystals and each will give you a photo. Unlike tokens there can be more in one area or not present in another. I did put in the guy to give you hints if you can’t find them.

-Power ups. You can actually buy them, but there are plenty to be found around. Makes for a nice enough reward for exploring, and obviously you don’t need to find them all. There are various strengths, normal, strong and ultra. +2 to stats, +7 to stats, and +15 to stats.

Minigames

About the casino. I put a bunch of minigames there for the player to play if they want. There’s always a strong prize for winning, like the next level equipment. Some of the minigames were okay, some were simple, some were bad ideas. I could have included these into the levels instead of making one big area for them. It’s okay though, I’d rather not force the player to play some of them.

-One of them involved a piano. You were played a note, and then you had to find that note and repeat it. Very hard to do, especially finding the initial note. Even harder for people not musically talented.

-One of them involved fighting the Last boss in under 4 minutes. You get cheat rings which up your stats by 255. Nothing will ever give you problems after that. I got a player massively frustrated with this one though. I guess it being directly up will do that too.

-One was a side scroller, and not very well done. Besides RM isn’t very good with this kind of thing.

-One was a fire toss, where you had two characters on the opposite sides, one button for each, and you had to hit a fire to go to the other side before it hit the character, and it went faster. It’s a fair enough idea for a simple minigame.

-One was going through a dark forest and avoiding the ghosts/spikes/goats. I made it too dark and I couldn’t even see the ground, which was bad when there were spikes there. Could have been done as a level just fine though.

-You had an area for buying an enemy encounter modifier. A bit too late unless you planned to do new game+ so you can skip all the enemies or even have more enemies.

-One was a race on boat, with various obstacles and an enemy boat. It’s hard to lose unless you intentionally try to do it, but maybe something can be done with the obstacles. I actually used this sort of idea in Paradise Blue, except instead of racing, it was killing octopus.

-The Gem room had a small square, surrounded by water both inside and outside. You had to go around and collect gems that randomly pop up on the path. If you fell off, you immediately lose. This makes the speed shoes you bought a bad idea if you have them on as you go so fast it’s easy to fall. This required too tight of a control.

-The next room had a room with a gem that appeared in various places, and never left until you touched it. So it’s on how fast you can touch them, while the path between one side and another gets blocked off at various parts. It was pretty random where they appear and where the path is blocked so you can do well one turn and poorly the next simply because of the randomness.

Levelling

-Levelling up let you choose your stats. Some games pull it off well. Here, you can gain so many levels in one battle (especially after one boss, where I went up a ton of levels) that it becomes boring to continue selecting your stats. Also, other than the beginning, you end up pretty much putting all your points in one stat. What I do first, is put all points into class so you can learn the stronger skills. At Level 11, you can have all the best skills, and you do gain some stats per each class advancement (it requires 10 points to level that up, and you gain 2 points per level). After that is done, then I put some points into Hit % so that everyone except Angela has 100%. Then after that, all points go into strength except for Sabrina and Angela who you can put in mind instead, or balance out Sabrina. Other than that, there’s really little thought that goes into levelling so it would have been better to be fixed stats. Or have a change to the levelling system and have different stats effect a character differently. Like maybe giving mind points to James allows for learning new skills, things like that. Later on, stat up items do a better job of giving stats, as I got Sabrina to be stronger than James despite his pure focus on power in levelling, stronger weapons, and higher base attack power.

Extras

There is only one town in the game, but you could shop from anywhere, which was a plus in that game. There were also fun things to play around with, like media player, e-mail and photo album. They just added a modern feel to it. They are extras though, and aren’t part of the core gameplay. Toys were part of the battle system, but you couldn’t use it on bosses. Nor can you refuse to use a toy if you have one, which was bad if all you had was one that didn’t work on the enemies you had. They were some that did damage to a certain type of enemy, some that stunned an enemy or powered up an ally. Fun to play around with but not necessary.

There were a lot of bad puns, and silly dialogues. For some reason I actually like the dialogues of Sabrina, Angela, James and William. Lisa doesn’t talk much at all, but they actually felt like a group of friends going around. Maybe I can do a better job with the comedy and dialogue, but I liked that feeling of having them feel like they interact with each other.

I don’t think I expect anyone to read through this, but I’ll keep this handy in case I need to reference it for the future.

Battles

I had random encounters in this game. The battle system is tactical style. Even though the battles can be pretty short because of the easy difficulty, it still doesn’t seem like it’d fit having random encounters. At least running was 100%. The random encounters did sort of turn me off to exploring it until I got the encounter-none ability. I’m not a big fan of random encounters though. I prefer being able to avoid and fight whatever enemies I want. Not everyone liked it, especially because they wanted to develop their characters, but I did like what I did in Paradise Blue. You have a limited amount of encounters in a map, and once you beat it, they’re gone forever.

Character Roles

For the battle system itself, I had various characters with their own roles, and you can pick 3 of the 5 in battle. Sabrina would do 2x damage against water enemies with her attack, and has healing/attack magic, while Lisa would have buffs, long range attack, and do 2x damage against land animals, and so on. I liked the general idea. You can fight a battle in different ways depending on which party you used to fight it. However, there ended up being one party that would end up being too strong, and there weren’t too many abilities to play around with. For someone like Angela, if you’re not using the limit break ability, she would stick to an elemental spell spam. In the end game, you can have Sabrina, Lisa, and Angela. Courage with Sabrina to raise everyones limit growth, Magic buff with Lisa to double magic power, then limit break with Angela and then cast a spell with her. That should just about handle most battles, if not just have Sabrina/Angela continue casting. No need for any of the characters to even move as the spells were all enemy effect. I liked how each of the characters had their own use at least, James was a great boss killer because of his 2x damage to humans and multi-attack limit. William less so but attacked long range at least and was an anti-aerial attacker.

Enemy AI

The enemy AI I feel brought it down a lot. I didn’t code anything special for the enemies so they just run around until they’re in range of a character and then attack. Few problems here: The player doesn’t know how far the enemy will go (as enemy phase is done based on time rather than enemies taking their turns), no indication on how hard the enemy hits, who will get targeted, and things like that. The game is easy enough that you likely wouldn’t lose a battle, although you just need one character to die to get a game over. Part of the fun of the battle system, other than your characters development, and experimentation, is the enemies AI. In here, the enemy phase was just a blur, they all just attack and you hope that your character remains alive so you can patch up the damage (if any) and continue on. I myself didn’t know how much defense I should have when fighting certain enemies.

I did try to make some sort of variations for how the battles were fought, and even though they didn’t all work, at least they provided some much needed variety for the battles. The one I personally liked most was the fight with Lou Zar (This game has a lot of bad puns). Instead of doing damage to the enemy (although with Angela’s Lumina, that is an alternative way to win the fight), you have to push the enemies to one side while they try to push you to the other side. An attack will then push them one step back, while enemy attacks will push you back. It is amusing when an enemy kills themselves and goes in the light area during their movement phase. I tried personally to make each boss battle fight a little bit differently, which I thought was a good idea. Some don’t have much in the way of customization, some (like the mentioned battle) have a lot more. One other problem is that there’s a list of who the enemy targets, and it’s always the same. If the enemy encounters someone in range, it’ll first check if it’s Sabrina. Then Lisa. Then Angela. Then James, and finally William. It is a good idea to keep everyone armored just in case the enemy finds someone else first, but mainly you just have to focus on keeping Sabrina well armored. Until ironically the final boss when it’s best to have Sabrina unequipped but everyone else equipped. That final boss bases the damage on Sabrinas defense, which is bad if you have her defense very high. It wasn’t a good way to balance it as I thought it would be.

The boss battles and the ideas behind them:

-The first boss has you against 2 animals and Eva Lanche. She occasionally casts Mute when she attacks, so your character is prevented from using skills the next turn. Otherwise it’s a normal battle. This one is probably the most balanced boss so it’s actually possible to die from this boss if you’re not careful. Angela should probably be the only one at the moment with all enemy attacks so you’ll likely be moving around and attacking with Lisa (Animal slayer) and James (Human slayer) and have Sabrina around for healing.

-The second boss is 2 birds and Robin M. Blind. Robin M. Blind is completely invulnerable until you get rid of the 2 birds. After a turn or 2, one bird will be brought back, in which case you must destroy it again before you can hurt Robin M. Blind. Sabrina is good for healing and perhaps if you have it, the all enemy Storm spell, Angela can use storm spell, James is good for taking out Robin when the defenses are down and William is a good anti-bird attacker.

-The third boss is 3 knights (Sir Loin and his guards). The rules for battle are changed, so spells aren’t going to do damage. You need to attack the ball and have the ball pass by the enemy or touch the enemy for them to take damage. So Sabrina (for healing again), James and William are best for this task since Angelas spells won’t work anyway. As we see, we can tell that Sabrina ends up a bit too useful simply because she can heal. You have items that have but they won’t full cure your team and you can only use one per character.

-The fourth boss is a Helicopter and 2 birds. This battle has a forced team of Sabrina, James and William, and I think that was a bug. If you cast Fire on the Helicopter, it does high damage but you get counter-attacked (all ally damage). If you cast Storm, then it’s completely ineffective. So I use Sabrina for casting Ice, Healing, and attacking, while James and William do damage. William is good here because of his 2x damage to all the enemies, but James should have the multi-attack command which will also help when doing damage against the helicopter.

-The fifth boss I’ll list is an optional boss, her name is Anne Teak. She was actually a story boss in the original version but I replaced her. She has 2 birds and will pick an element to defend against. So perhaps one turn, fire will not work. Other than that, it’s a standard battle except she has a lot of HP, which nets a lot of EXP. That’s the other thing I forgot to mention, you can get enough EXP from simply fighting boss battles that you don’t even need to fight a normal battle. I’ve played the game that way, running away from every encounter except the boss ones and still managed to be at a fine level for the end game.

-The sixth boss is in the same area, her name is Constance Noring. Her role in battle is similar to that outside of battle, making the characters fall asleep. The enemies around her (a squid and a shark) will attack you and that will wake you up when you’re hit, but if you slay them you can actually go a while before naturally being awakened. I got annoyed at that. Sabrina, Lisa and Angela should be fine for this, Sabrina for Fire and for 2x water enemy damage, Lisa for magic and power buffs, and Angela for Star limit (reducing enemy HPs by 25-50%) and more Fire.

-The seventh boss is the Lou Zar boss which I mentioned previously. You have to hit him and his 2 crows to one side, while they try to hit you to the other side. You can make good use of the Shield spell here as it prevents you from being moved by an attack. My favorite battle.

-The eighth boss is Stan Dintall and 2 Golems in the crater. The leprechaun (which he denies) is really easy, and it’s the Golems who have high HP and very high attack power, it managed to one hit kill me. Sabrina/Lisa/Angela strategy again, except I have them move as far away as I can.

-The ninth boss is 3 Islanders. I think I put on some elemental weaknesses/resistances to some, but I just Lumina them to death. Nothing special about the battle.

-The tenth boss is Jim Pansey. He comes with 2 animals but they’re nothing but distractions really. Whenever Jim moves, everyone takes damage. So basically you need to have high enough defense and make sure you heal it, or trap Jim so he doesn’t move. Then once he can’t move, you can just attack free of worries.

-The last boss is Leviathan. 3 Forms of course. The first form is Leviathan and 2 sharks. You can avoid the sharks by not going near the water and just casting Fire spells. Sabrinas attack works well here too. The second form I made a bad decision. They take away your items. You have 3 people to attack the Leviathan. You should make it as it just spams one spell. Then for the last form, it has a lot of HP (Every later version of Island Sky has this HP amount lowered). At first, it was 99,999 HP, which makes Angelas Star limit absolutely necessary to remove it. It just stays in the same spot and spams one spell over and over, and you have 5 characters for this battle so everyone just spams their own stuff.

Island Sky

Island Sky is an old RM2k3 game I made, released in 2005, started in 2002. I had made an old version, remade the game, then lost all the RM2k3 projects I had except for that old version of Island Sky. I then decided to remake it again, which is the version I released in 2005. I had little experience with doing custom graphics then, but I did try to compose the soundtrack for it.

I want to point out the flaws in the game, and what I think worked well or could work well with some fixing up. It could be something to consider in a future game. And Azure Ocean is partly an Island Sky remake, so it would be good to think on it.

I’ll start out on the original reason why I made the game. The overworld was the first thing designed and was the main feature at first. You start out with very limited choices of where to go, and as the game progresses, you would have the freedom to go where you want to and do things in the order you want until you get to the last area. Black star means that you haven’t unlocked enough areas to be able to choose that to be unlocked. Red star means that it’s locked but you can unlock it once you complete a stage. Purple star means that you haven’t yet completed the area. And finally, blue star means it’s completed.

Map system

I realized this system was similar to Legend of Manas artifact system. That one is more complex as it involves elemental levels on areas, and proximity to the home and when you place the land down affect the level and items you get there. But otherwise, it’s similar in concept. You need some areas to complete the game, but you can visit some areas and not others, and revisit an area if you have a new quest. In Island Sky, you can alter the order you visit some areas, but since you need all but 1 area unlocked, you’ll do most of the areas anyway. I expect most players to play through all the areas anyway, meaning that it doesn’t affect much except the order which you play some of the middle areas. What could have been done to improve it? Well, perhaps different requirements to unlock areas, and more optional areas. Or that the time you unlock an area affects it somehow. If the game is short enough, you can probably have more choices that the player can’t unlock all of them, so the 2nd playthrough of the game can be different. In a longer game, a player might not necessarily want to replay it that soon, but then it may be better in this case to use it for optional areas. Perhaps talking with NPCs can unlock an area, or doing a short questline can unlock an area.

NPCs

Speaking about NPCs. I put in some townspeople and other people at places, but you can’t talk with any of them. I figured at that time, NPCs don’t really say much useful things anyway and I didn’t have anything to have them say. Plus, in big cities, it’s not like you would go up and talk to random strangers anyway. But being a game, that approach wasn’t quite effective. People are used to talking to NPCs in the game, and I could have put at least something amusing for them to say. I could have made a choice of who would talk to an NPC, to bring out their personality that way. This problem has been remedied a bit in Paradise Blue at least, and I don’t plan to ever repeat this mistake.

Story

On to the story for Island Sky. There isn’t much of one so this should be short. Rather than a full story, it’s basically just short quests. You can go into each area, and have a cutscene and boss to fight there, and that is pretty much the extent of the story. You have a boss who’s a character with a particular quirk (For example, Eva Lanche, who is a young girl with a loud voice that causes earthquakes), and you fight against them. It doesn’t even solve anything really, none of them die. The whole setting is a tropical island vacation sort of feel and it goes along with it as it all ends up lighthearted. I thought some of the dialogue was amusing enough, but of course that depends on the persons taste.

Red faction collectables post

Quote:

Which is already the first question: how many collectibles should there be in a game. I always like to link to this ancient Penny Arcade comic because even back then it was already evident that this mechanic is being abused by many modern games. And it got even worse when achievements and online unlockables arrived. Red Faction: Guerrilla lives up to that cliché… and then some. You collect: ore deposits, radio tags, propaganda billboards and supply crates. The game also keeps track of and rewards you for completing all side-missions, races and demolishon challenges.

I thought this was an interesting read, as I haven’t played the game so it’s nice to see what games do it right and what doesn’t.

I’ll put my own thoughts on it. I find that collectables can help make exploring more fun to do since you’re exploring with a purpose rather than wandering aimlessly. I like to reward a player for either each one they get, or set a small amount of them they need to find so it doesn’t seem like the goal is too far away. Also, rewards don’t necessarily have to be usable things, they can be silly things or give a little more detail about the world you’re in. So if a player is only playing for x reason, they don’t need to feel forced to collect these things if they don’t want to, but the players that do can be rewarded for it as well.

…released 2010.

This Christmas Card is a small community game made by YDS and AznChipmunk. It’s really short, and features many members from RMN. Some didn’t submit their lines so you have a few that say a generic “Merry Christmas”, but otherwise people will have amusing things to say.

I like these community games. I don’t really feel like I participate in much communities anymore, but games like this make for nice, simple and amusing games. I’m in the game, look for the one who’s hungry… for foooooood.

First off, what setting does your game take place in? Simply by having an idea of what setting you’re working in, you will likely have a collection of weapons to use. Not every game is directly inspired by a real world culture, but even then it should give you an idea of what weapons people would generally use. If your game takes a good bit of asian influence, you’ll want to take a look at the types of weapons they used there. If you’re working in a more medieval setting, there’s weapons like Long Swords, Rapiers, Crossbows, even legendary ones like Durendal and Almace (From the Song of Roland). Doing research and you can find more than just the simple “Sword, Axe, Staff”, but also various types of polearms, armor and all that. People who were poor could use simple farming equipment, which is why the “peasants with pitchforks” imagery is common. Your weapons and items can have entirely normal names and descriptions, and it wouldn’t be bad for you to do so. Be careful to keep your weapons all in the same setting however. Putting Katanas in your game when there is no Japanese culture to be found is not a good idea.

Here are various naming methods you can use:

• * You can name a weapon off what weapon it is. Examples: Partisan, Flamberge, Gladius
• *You can name a weapon off of what material it is made of. Examples: Iron Blade, Copper Spear, Baobab Wood Staff. *Look at the paragraph below this list for more on materials.*
• *It can be named off of the weapons quality. Examples: Rusted long sword, Broken long sword, Dull long sword, Sharpened long sword, Melted long sword. This is a pretty good system if weapons get dull/worn out after various uses.
• *It can be named off of who owned, forged it, or made the weapon famous. Examples: Princess Triana’s Scepter, Watts’ forging hammer, Longinus’ Spear
• *It can be named off of the location where they make it. Examples: Lorimar Iron Hammer, Pedan Stone Axe, Wendel Iron Staff.
• *It can be named after any magical effects it may contain. Examples: Obsidian blade of Fire, Voltage Mace, Staff of Hail, Hammer of bunnymaking. The “weapon of effect” format is common for WRPGs and while the “effect weapon” is more common for JRPGs. Such as “Long Sword of Flame” compared to “Flame Blade”. The 1st one allows for more standardization and works well with variations of a same type of weapon, while the 2nd can potentially produce more creative names. You should be consistant with your naming with whatever you decide to use.
• *Rarer or legendary weapons/magic/items can be named by whatever you feel like calling the weapon. Usually their name has some significance, either from the language (It may be their native word for “Strong” and “King” combined for example), or it may have a religious significance. 

*You can use materials unique to your world, in which you may want to explain in game how good it is for materials. Mithril is a common fantasy material. There are materials such as Gold and Diamond which are pretty poor for weapon making. They more describe how ornate it is, or maybe it’s simply not a practical weapon and more for religious/decoration/ritual uses. Realistically, an alloyed Steel sword would be one of the best ones available. There are many factors to take into account when making a sword, and I am no forger or have much knowledge on the subject. Again, independant research here is very useful. Here is a source I was reading while writing this.

Talking about strictly swords for a moment, there isn’t really a “strongest” or “best” sword. You may run into debates such as comparing Katanas to 2 Handed swords or whatever, but many times it’s simply different in their use. Katanas are NOT an “Ultimate weapon”, and effectiveness may be more due to sword style and what it’s being used against rather than a weapon simply being sharp or “indestructable” (which no weapon is). Try using some swords incorrectly and it’ll be bad news for the user. Draw-cutting, what Katanas are best for, aren’t very effective when the opponent is armored. Very deadly if they aren’t though. This quote is amusing:

“Not only are Japanese blades exalted by such folks to the point of sheer absurdity, but European blades are downgraded until they become mere bars of iron, incapable of cutting hot butter.  This just isn’t true.” (source)

You can see in medieval history that the types of swords they use come about due to changes in development in fighting, and due to costs too. If you see a lot of people use “x” type of armor, then maybe their sword (ignoring the various types of weapons right now) will need to focus more on “x” property rather than “y” property. Perhaps all you need to do is hook the enemies shield so you can pull them forward and hit them with a secondary weapon. Maybe slashes are bad against their armor but piercing works good because of how it’s designed. But now, not ignoring other types of weapons, some weapons like ones that bash or longer range weapons work even better. Polearms were used quite often. Swords by the Plate Armor time simply couldn’t penetrate. Axes, Maces and Hammers work far better at this task.

Continuing on, people who make and play RPGs (to simplify, as this is a common issue) tend to usually have a big favoritism for swords than any other weapon, with the except of perhaps guns (or rocket launchers).  What does this mean for the developer? Well, weapon balance needs to be done. It is quite alright to ignore the differences from reality for the sake of balancing and gameplay, in the interest of fun. However, seeing as how people will generally favor the sword, balancing that in your game may mean you may need to lower their effectiveness a little bit. Other weapons should be seen as attractive as well if you want people to at least try them. Usually I see swords as being “The reliable weapon, and the category where most legendary weapons are in”. Axes are “May cause slightly more damage but are unreliable and miss too often”. Maces are generally “Lower tier weapons that clerics use if they want to do a little more damage than a staff”.

I was playing Oblivion, and there are 2 weapon skills (3 including the bow, but I will focus on melee only). Blunt and Blade. Amusingly enough, Axes are Blunt. So you have Maces, Axes, and Hammers in that category (I understand the reasoning at least), and Knives, Katanas 2 handed Swords, and Regular Swords in the other. You increase these skills most by using them. But what do you start the game out with? A Sword. When you loot one of the allies, you find another sword, which is a nice named katana AND has the highest attack power at that time. When you get a blunt weapon such as a hammer, you find it’s very heavy to carry, has a low sell rate, slow to strike, and not much more powerful (and maybe less so) than the swords you were using. Perhaps only an Orc character would see an improvement. When you get to the end game, you have quests were you can get 3 legendary swords, whereas there are only 2 legendary blunt weapons. One of them is bugged and therefore not even very useful, while the swords have great effects and can deal objectively the most damage of a weapon in the game. As you see, in this way, there isn’t much incentive for the player to choose the other weapons unless they REALLY want to use them (some may be tempted but feel stat-wise it’s not worth it). In general, the majority of the weapons you find in that game are bladed weapons.

If you want to make multiple weapon types, you should encourage the players to use them, at least one time where you get a different weapon type that is the best the player can get at the moment so they feel tempted to try it out, and balance it by ways other than “Swords=Reliable, everything else=Unreliable or weak”. Strong but hits 60% of the time is NOT a good way to balance it. And we should stop and remember that there are other weapons out there. There are also other cultures out there, who don’t use the same materials and processes as Medieval Europe did. Some get along fine using materials such as rocks. Properly done, a knife made from a rock (see stone tools) can be very sharp, and fairly quickly made by an expert. I’ve seen an in class demonstration, my teacher was into flintknapping and researching ancient cultures/stone tools. Areas with volcanic activity can provide materials such as Obsidian to be used.

“Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid,
Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade.
Good! Said the baron, while sitting in his hall,
But Iron, Cold Iron, is master of them all.” – Kipling

Sorry, couldn’t resist posting this.

Anyway, this is about the feature lists in games. I think it’s a good thing to write down what features your game will contain when you’re doing initial planning. I like brainstorming in particular. Before you start actually working on the game, just write down every idea that comes to mind. Later you can decide which ideas can work well together and which ones you should take out or save for a new project.

You should think on the features your game will contain. It’s easy to go through the script section in a forum/site and think “Oh this script looks good, I’ll use it!” and download a whole bunch and make a mile long list. However, I think your game should have features that are important to the game. If Good/Evil or morality systems don’t play a big role in your game (or as a theme), then remove it. If all it really effects is what sword you’ll have at the end, then get rid of it. The game should focus on being fun and the player shouldn’t have to memorize thousands of systems. I think this is a relevant quote:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I don’t mean you need to go all to the extreme, have nothing but an attack command, but your games features should be important to the game; not simply tagged on. The feature should add to the game world and to the players enjoyment. The number of features does not make a game better, the use of the features does.

If your main character is a blacksmith, on a quest to forge a great weapon for the king, I would imagine that forging would be a big part of the game. But even then, you have to think about how it’ll work. You can put 999 materials and 999999 combinations of weapons, but not only is that a lot of work for you, but it’ll feel very random to the player since they can’t ever tell what they’ll get. If they find high enough quality weapons/armor or can buy it, then the player may not feel compelled to even try the system. Or if the system takes a lot of time and patience or grinding to get the materials, then it’ll feel like a chore.

At some point, when planning or looking for scripts, you should stop yourself and see if what you have planned or downloaded is really worth the effort of implementing. No, 999 maps isn’t a feature, it’s a chore for both you and the player. What scripts you used isn’t a feature, and tells nothing to those who don’t know what the script does. That your game has something that nearly all RPGs have isn’t a feature, such as “It has an overworld!”. Something like “Alignment system which changes the outcome of the story and which characters follow you” is a feature. But this is less about what your topic has, and more on what the game itself has.

Definition of Feature: a prominent part or characteristic

What do you have in your game that is interesting and unique? Does it fit with your game world? Is it easy for the players to get? Is it fun? Do they work well together?

It’s a good idea if you have various systems, to introduce them one at a time, get the player used to one system first before explaining a new one.  Don’t overload players with information all at once.