http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26577/O...A_Manifesto.php

I was reading this article on Gamesutra. 24 clear do’s and don’ts, which you can read on that site. It’s a simple and easy read, but I agree with it. Now, the one I want to focus on a bit here is point #5.

5. Don’t bite off more then you can chew.
If you’re just starting out, think small, then think smaller. If you start on something big you won’t finish it and if you do you’ll be burnt out and probably won’t make another. A filmmaker never starts his career with a blockbuster movie. One of the easiest mistakes to make starting out is letting ambition drive you down a path you’re not ready to travel. Slow down, take your time and start simple. Prototyping is crucial for all designers.

Here’s the point 5. I think it explains a lot already, but let me apply this to the people on RPG Maker. Honestly, using RPG Maker cuts out a lot of the work required as you don’t have to code the engine or database from ground up. While making the task simpler, RPGs are still a very time consuming thing. I think some people forget that the great commercial RPGs were made by teams of people over the time span of at least a year or more, working 8 hours a day or more. We on the other hand usually have game making as a hobby to do after we get home from school/work or both, working on it by yourself.

Go on an RPG Maker forum, and you’ll usually see a forum board with people recruiting team members to their latest projects. Honestly, I’ve seen plenty of recruiting topics where they ask for just about every type of person to assist them (I need a spriter, a mapper, an artist, a scripter, a writer…), sometimes multiple of the same type. On your first game, this is absolutely the wrong way to go.

Your first game should not be your epic masterpiece. Save it for when you have more experience, so you can really make it as good as you’d like, rather than trying to figure it out as you go along. People have trouble with remaking loops, this is part of the problem. This is when you learn a lot, and the past parts look bad in comparison, so you remake them, learn more from that, then the next part looks bad in comparison… On the other hand, you really shouldn’t underestimate the work that goes into making a game. A game can take months, years even, and not knowing how fast you work on something or not knowing the program well is a good way to take far longer than you planned on a game.


"100+ hours of varied gameplay!" Look, this is NOT an easy goal to reach. RPG Makers will likely put in a whole lot of boring filler. Save your longer games when you can figure out how to make a game fun for that long a time!

Making small games will help you learn. “Let me try a simple project with a fishing system!” Then you can test it out, try different possibilities, and see if it’s even fun or worth making/adding on to a more complete project later. It could even help with trying out new ideas that you aren’t sure if it’ll be any fun or not. You do not have to release any of these, these can be experimental tests, just to see what systems/ideas would work, and what would not.

Many well made games are not the first games that the developer made. We all make mistakes, and we have to learn from them. That you spent a long time making a game is no indicator that it will be any good.

Posted from my blog:
http://dev.oceansdream.net/

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i think i get it now! no wonder i've never completed anything!
Great advice ocean

btw, what game is that pic from?

That is from Rogue Galaxy. I remembered it having something about the gameplay length on the cover so I just googled that.

Completely agree with this. I think the biggest mistake is trying to make the "greatest game ever" or trying to attain the level of a professional game.
We do this as a hobby so we shouldn't be compared to professionals anyway.

Personally, I completed around ten games and they are so bad that I sometimes play them again just for the lulz. But they were great training. There is really no shame in training.

I prefer to divide the games that I develop into Arcs/Scenarios or Chapters. It makes managing a game alot easier, especially if a person is aiming for quality over quantity. And I know all about the time that it takes to develop RM games. Even though I'm working on a fan-game, it still took me the better part of one and a half years to get to it's current state. ( one-woman production, essentially. )

Also, the game that you make will never resemble your first draft that you had back in your head. As your skills in RM improve, so will the overall quality of the game project. From what I read, Sakura_Phoenix redid the mapping for Aquaos at least 3 times as she got better at RMXP. And look at it now. One of the most notable XP games on this site.

But all that aside, it was a nice little tutorial, Ocean. I hope more aspiring developers take the time to read this. I know there have been a few articles about game development in the past, but sadly, judging from most new game threads, most new developers don't take the time
to figure out the basics of making an RPG... If every aspiring game developer could just spend a week breathing and drinking in game design articles... you can only imagine what the overall quality of all projects would be like.

( It's a bit odd for me to be posting so often, but anyhoo... ^^ )

This should be rule #1. At least for me it should have been. I bit off WAAAAY more than I could chew, and I'm still chewing on it after all these years. Trying to make a game where every feature is awesome... no way, it takes forever. I think I wish I'd started with a game that had default this and that, instead of custom everything, or used the default 4-person party, instead of a 6-person party. If I'd settled in a few of these areas, I could've had more complexity in other areas, WAY more items in the database, way more characters, a more non-linear plot, etc.. A lot of awesome little things instead of some awesome really big things. and I could've FINISHED THE GAME.

Great rule! Start on easy, simple games and learn as you go.

I need a team of 10 people, scripters, writers, whatever, to help me with this small tiny project now please

Kthx.

lol I think it's true. We should learn how to do the littlest of things and release them before tackling the ginormous ideas in our heads. Perhaps the best method is figuring out what small projects look like.

We've seen HUGE projects made by professional teams. We want to mimic those. We want to do release a game like that.

None of us really know what a small project looks like. This needs to change. We need to see small games, with low ambitions. We need to know how to develop fast and easy plots that are point A to Point B. But how?

In the past, I bit off more than I could chew, by trying to make a story driven, FF - style game, using the default system. What ended up happening every time was I would get bored of the story and the standard turn based battle system.

My current project actually started out as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could do an ABS, and when I worked out the basics, I started messing with adding in more advanced stuff. Then I decided to come up with a basic story. Once that was done, I started building on the story, then I started mapping. I'm planning maps out individually, and doing each area separately, so that I don't burn myself out. I'm going slow, and it's working out for me. I've been working on the same project (off and on) for the better part of the past year, adding little bits at a time.