Overkill's Tutorial 2

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" rowspan="2" width=215 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" background="0070ce82egerdp.png"> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Final Fantasy Chronicles News"><U>Home</U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=95 BGCOLOR="#CC99CC" TEXT="#080000" background="006265f1ezuady.png"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman" ><B>Final Fantasy Chronicles News</B></FONT><B>  </B><B> </B><B>|   </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Final Fantasy Chronicles News"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id33.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="ChocoboMonkeys Art"><U>ChocoboMonkey's Art</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id34.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="ChocoboMonkeys Tile Creation"><U>ChocoboMonkey's Tile Creation</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id35.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="CHRs"><U>CHRs</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id36.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="CR2s"><U>CR2's</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id37.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="CHRs 2"><U>CHRs 2</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id38.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Learning to Draw"><U>Learning to Draw</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id39.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Thesis on Tile Art"><U>Thesis on Tile Art</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id40.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Tile Making with Photoshop 5"><U>Tile Making with Photoshop 5</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id41.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="V2 Tutorial"><U>V2 Tutorial</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id42.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Collision Detection"><U>Collision Detection</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id43.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="DMA"><U>DMA</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id44.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Working with Bits"><U>Working with Bits</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id45.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Item DAT Files"><U>Item & DAT Files</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id46.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Menu Making"><U>Menu Making</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id47.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Reading From Files"><U>Reading From Files</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id48.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Savegames"><U>Savegames</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id49.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Entity Talking"><U>Entity Talking</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id57.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Mordred Tutorial 1"><U>Mordred Tutorial 1</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id58.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Mordred Tutorial 2"><U>Mordred Tutorial 2</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id59.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Mordred Tutorial 3"><U>Mordred Tutorial 3</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id63.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Hicolor Fades"><U>Hicolor Fades</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id65.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Tiny Tutorial on Multidimentional Arrays"><U>Tiny Tutorial on Multidimentional Arrays</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id67.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="V2.7 B10 Python Commands"><U>V2.7 B10 Python Commands</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id80.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Overkills Tutorial 1"><U>Overkill's Tutorial 1</U></A>   |   <B>Overkill's Tutorial 2</B></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=385 colspan=2 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>Overkill's Tutorial 2</I></div> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <I>On the Verge of Verging</I></div> <div> <B>Building upon Failure</B></div> <div> The game we made is <I>terrible</I>, let's discuss why and more importantly, how to fix it.</div> <div> <IMG SRC="0ef20010.png" border=0 width="544" height="1" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <div> This time we'll do a little discussion first before getting down to business and fixing things up. Let's list some valid reasons why Pirate Adventure Plus sucks:</div> <div> The game has about ten seconds of gameplay, and zero replay value.</div> <div> The graphics are perhaps the some of the most terrible ever.</div> <div> There's no story.</div> <div> There's no music. I suppose this is better than poorly made music, but at least the ambience of the sea would be nice.</div> <div> Our hero is a sprite borrowed from another game.</div> <div> The captain NPC looks exactly like our hero.</div> <div> The ship is too small, giving you nothing to explore.</div> <div> The ship is contructed completely of square tiles.</div> <div> The water doesn't animate, so you get no feeling of motion.</div> <div> The textbox can only display one line at a time.</div> <div> The nomenclature of the game's title and characters leave much to be desired.</div> <div> We have to address every single one of these faults. Here the some solutions that I came up with:</div> <div> Add more content to the game so that the people who play it will play for longer than it took to download it (unless they're on dialup).</div> <div> Use better graphics utilities, and draw art that is aimed towards the setting, not just random tiles.</div> <div> Write a short summary that quickly skims over everything that will happen throughout the game (keep it realistic, keep it simple). When you finish that, begin to plan out in detail what will happen at the beginning of the game and incorporate it, and plan out some more and throw it in.</div> <div> For ambience, you can simply take sound effects off the Internet and have them loop. Music is preferable though, and if you can't make music don't be afraid to ask musicians to help you out. Just try posting a forum thread describing your game with some detail and politely ask for help. If you ask for a musician, make sure you have at least some minor portion of your game complete and playable so they can get a feel of what to compose for you. This can also be applied to asking for artwork if you're incapable of drawing. (Though this is much harder to find willing people to commit to, it seems.)</div> <div> As much as everyone likes Darin from Sully Chronicles, our games should strive to use new sprite dcontent that we make.</div> <div> NPCs should look different from the main character. People with important roles in the story should have unique looks compared to our regular town-square Joe.</div> <div> Make the ship larger, add multiple floors, people to talk to, items to find!</div> <div> Draw out tiles with a goal of making the proper shape of a ship. If you draw without a goal, all art elements will be lacking. It shows when you just try and reuse the same half-assed tiles for every occasion. I'm not saying you shouldn't reuse tiles though, just don't make it TOO obvious</div> <div> Add some animated frames to the water! Easy enough. Though I'd probably replace the whole water tile first before giving it animation.</div> <div> Make the textbox capable of multiple lines, whether by wrapping long lines of text or by making them pass a string for each line.</div> <div> Give things better names. Names need thought, and shouldn't be rushed. Titles need even more thought and should be related to some important element of the story.</div> <div> <B>Come up with better replacements for these:</B></div> <div> Pirate Adventure Plus - This is an example of a terrible title. Give the title some thought, people might pass your game by solely for the fact it has such a bland name. It only tells you that: there are pirates (a), it will involve adventure (b), and that it's remotely better than most generic pirate adventures (c). It's too general and fails to attract our attention span.</div> <div> Darin - okay, so there's nothing wrong with using Darin as your character's name, but it'd be preferrable that your character bears little resemblance to the one in Sully.</div> <div> Captain - This name definitely needs improvement, I mean. What's the captain's name? If you want to keep his real name a mystery, at least give him some cool nickname. I mean, he <I>is</I> the captain of a pirate ship.</div> <div> The Ship - I didn't even bother giving the ship a name! Giving it the player's vessel some sort of magical name could add some interest.</div> <div> Okay, so there's my summary of things that will need to be enhanced. <B>Next tutorial</B> will focus primarily on an improved text box, slightly better graphics, a bigger ship, and some scripted events.</div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>