The Basic RPG

Author Topic: The Basic RPG  (Read 8849 times)

lol not saying i entirely disagree my dude but i think you're reading into this way more than i meant. blockland and co (engine) comes with crutches i've been frustrated with, especially taken into projects i've worked on for a few years. i could go on for days about the lackluster bot system that doesn't allow for anything neat like stealth mechanics or proper horror entities, combat systems severely restricted unless you start diving into client mods to free up controls/add pretty interface elements which splits up your server base or mess around with clunky workarounds, etc etc. the runescape formula is popular because that's the most logical approach any normal guy can find with what's available like vce and it's been like that for years. all the cool fancy rpg projects completely dropped off the face of the earth and nobody can use their scripts to improve it or work off of it. i was even thinking about trying to make a damn cool giant mech after considering getting into modding again until i remembered how weird and wonky the results would be. the frustration with limitations isn't an excuse but rather a complaint above anything. maybe that's just my vision of breaking the glass ceiling here but i think i've aimed a little too high for what this engine is worth
if you cant build around the limitations then you shouldn't bother making anything. like NES games were loving limited as hell and a lot of great games like castlevania and mario worked around the limitation just fine to make easy to see art and fun design. the games where the developers just said "sorry the limitations hurt so we just made something stuffty" are the very bad games that you see AVGN reviewing from time to time. they shouldn't have been made at all. 99% of all blockland RPGs fall into this category of the devs just saying "well theres no way for me to make anything interesting so ill make it all uninteresting and justify it by saying there were too many limitations" which most people can forgive i guess but it just loving hurts to see anyone try to weasel their way out of creative solutions

Like what makes an RPG fun? Memorable characters. Memorable side quests. Memorable gameplay mechanics. The first one you can do, there are plenty of talented writers on these forums who make up all these quirky stories (charlesspeaking, swololilili or whatever the forget). Second one has the same prerequisites of the first, just think of some crazy scenario and make it happen. GTA has missions where you loving steal a whole ass train with a helicopter, while chrono trigger has a side quest where you kill 5 of the same enemies in a desert as the entire quest. There's a real clear difference between a well thought out quest and a loving boring as stuff pizza delivery.

Last one's tough given the bot limitations and requires a lot of coding but i've seen people work around it before. Like already off the bat i can think of a cliff side area where you navigate a narrow ass ledge and the enemies are all janitors with push brooms who try to push you off. Now you have an interesting environment and boring ass bots that use said environment to make a loving fight with some amount of depth. Compare that to the stuffty rpg where you start off in a castle and basically fight 2000 sword orcs with slightly different stats from each other

Its not really that difficult to make a good server, you just actually need to think about what makes those types of games fun and try to stress and improve upon these points. There are a lot of tdms out there that are mediocre. What makes tdms fun? Shooting people. Teamwork. Make a two team tdm elimination where if you kill someone they become incapacitated and cannot move and use a weak gun to shoot, and you can carry them back to your base and grind them in a meat grinder to revive a dead teammate. Now you have a game with teamwork and shooting thats not just guns and nothing else, and theres actual depth around the way you push into enemy territory, rather than going rambo in the enemy base you might consider that if you die you basically give a free revive to the enemy.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2018, 07:20:35 PM by thegoodperry »

i don't know man, people find a charm to limitations but the folks on the nes worked with what they had because that's only what they had. we've got the luxury of modern engines and maybe i'm just trying to say there's better outlets to using these resources and that's where everyone else went, or i'm too spoiled by the potential of making big meaty systems because we can support it now, but you definitely can't get it here. everyone has their own approach to things but i'm not making an rpg or anything else if it's going to have surface level mechanics because of whatever limitations are given to me as someone that doesn't actively script like a prodigy. i'm just not much for simple mechanics and that's on me, but it's gonna be a tough time for folks trying to break boundaries

not as to say simple is bad but i (personally) find rpgs to have a little more to them like snazzy combat that adds challenge instead of holding mouse click to swing
« Last Edit: August 13, 2018, 07:32:09 PM by Kobewarrior »

Be complex all you guys want but don't expect me to mine and cut trees and open up 20 option screens for 12 hours just to get a wooden sword

Be complex all you guys want but don't expect me to mine and cut trees and open up 20 option screens for 12 hours just to get a wooden sword
That's the wrong kind of complexity.

The problem is the start and the finish. You're mining and cutting to get a sword. When that's all there is to your RPG, it's not good.

imo the problem with rpgs made in a sandbox game is that creating any freeroam aspect of it takes loving forever. when i play an rpg i honestly could care less but if there’s some freedoms for what the player can do or where they can go, you’ve got a good game. doing this takes way more time than it’s ever worth though (see: skill4lifes pirate adventure), and also takes a large variety of specialized abilities in coding, building, modeling, eventing, etc. a rpg in blockland that’s actually good quality would take a large team of people willing to put more blood, sweat, tears, and toil into it than a dying lego rpg game is ever worth

I think the best example of a good world to run around in an rpg setting is that medieval rp that used to be on. The places were just the right size to make an actual rpg with mobs and stuff.

where's the 3rd teaser??????? cmon bro your too  slow

imo the problem with rpgs made in a sandbox game is that creating any freeroam aspect of it takes loving forever. when i play an rpg i honestly could care less but if there’s some freedoms for what the player can do or where they can go, you’ve got a good game. doing this takes way more time than it’s ever worth though (see: skill4lifes pirate adventure), and also takes a large variety of specialized abilities in coding, building, modeling, eventing, etc. a rpg in blockland that’s actually good quality would take a large team of people willing to put more blood, sweat, tears, and toil into it than a dying lego rpg game is ever worth
Shouldn't invest too much into the 'freeroam' aspect. In fact, almost all of them attempted to be like that. It works with single player RPGs because most things scale with you. In an MMO environment, which every Blockland RPG tries to emulate, you need to move about as you get stronger. Take a look at... DRPG, PRPG, and pretty well any other RPG we've seen other than Jorgur's and Gamefandan's. Players could go wherever they wanted. But there was nothing they wanted but more numbers.

It would be completely fine to give players limitation on where they're directed to for sure. There just needs to be a reason.

phanto u dont have to praise it but u dont gotta diss it so hard either. like most people just decline to comment since the problems you have with bl rpgs in general cannot be solved by better devs. sometimes you dont have to have the best mechanics or design to make something fun, too.

Anything can be solved with time, dedication and planning. I'm not saying you have to have all of the best picked mechanics in your game in order for it to be fun, i'm saying that putting the worst mechanics in your game does not make it fun (obviously). Grinding is universally the worst and least fun mechanic in the entire world and goes against the very core definition of fun in video games which is to learn new concepts and apply your knowledge to overcome a challenge. Once you have an 'i get it' moment and overcome your first challenge your brain floods with dopamine and you actually have fun. Mining 100 ore and being able to craft a pickaxe isn't fun, its relieving because you completed the terribly arbitrary task you spent an hour working on and now you dont have to do it anymore. However when the entire game is get x amount of y to complete z with no depth beyond just that then the entire game is a loving pointless mess and there's absolutely no point playing the game because you dont accomplish anything in the end. Making x pickaxe as a prerequisite to y pickaxe so you can then craft z pickaxe is stupid because once you reach z pickaxe you realized you just wasted hours of your life trying to get some dumb intangible object and it wasn't even fun getting it, just tedious.

None of this is impossible to avoid. All you have to do is plan your stuff and find fun ways to keep players engaged. Justifying stuff by saying that you're too limited or whatever other excuses isnt helping anyone its just showing that you didnt care at all about the outcome

phanto u dont have to praise it but u dont gotta diss it so hard either
you dont understand i absolutely need to. people are too desensitized to stuffty rpgs at this point theres an entire loving game maker engine dedicated just to spewing out more and more stuffty rpg games and people still loving use it. normally you can just say oh ignore it and let people do them but blockland has like 60 players online at one time and these loving terrible city rpgs and stuff just destroy their brains and basically rewire their expectations of fun gameplay, also stealing players for some reason because people would rather have some arbitrary gain over another in the form of intangible arbitrary currency rather than have a fun dopamine rush from executing some crazy cool attack formation in a well-designed tdm or maybe getting a hole in one on a minigolf server.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2018, 07:26:32 PM by thegoodperry »

aye but you bring up tdms and guns a lot because blockland makes it work out of the box, anything in the melee department sucks. traditionally the grinding usually compliments systems like combat with a lot of customizable aspects like enchanting, spells, weapon types, movesets, what have you, and that's not easily achievable here let alone worth doing considering the playercount isn't there to make the idea all more appealing - and you'd be cutting whatever portion of that there is by creating custom client mods to support it

Justifying stuff by saying that you're too limited or whatever other excuses isnt helping anyone its just showing that you didnt care at all about the outcome
well then that wraps it all up doesn't it, modders complain about engine limitations wedging a crutch on their progress because they don't care in the end
« Last Edit: August 14, 2018, 08:33:50 PM by Kobewarrior »

Question, is this rpg gonna be lego universe styled where different themes of different worlds are clashing with each other like pirates, medieval, futuristic, or oriental or is it just straight up medieval stuff?
Keaton are you gonna answer?

Keaton are you gonna answer?
it will be but i was taking a break because my arms are tired from pressing numpad

it will be but i was taking a break because my arms are tired from pressing numpad
There's two parts to the question. Which one is it?

captains log, stardate 133769.4. phantos still hasnt said anything of value.