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Full Contact (amiga) (1991)

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hardy har

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12/30/2024

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I get a lot of entertainment thinking about how containers are used in video games sometimes.

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these are the funniest one off characters why were they like this

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your fursona’s in the idw comics?!

She sure is! (from issues #33 and #35)

(This is all a reference to my playthrough of Sonic Chronicles I did on Twitch a few years back, in which I learned you could save scum for duplicates of the "unique" Chao Ferox that allows you to skip the obnoxious Elite Beat Agents QTEs for your party members' skills where if you make even one mistake the skill fails. Evan was in the audience for that around the same time she was working on this Chao-themed arc for the comics, so she asked if it would be cool to give a Sonic-ified version of my fursona and a gaggle of Feroxes a small cameo, and of course I said yes.)

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isabell campanella 2

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Throwin' this one out a liiittle early

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I was watching the Adrenaline Dubs version of IDW Sonic #33. Did you get to voice your own cameo?

Yep! That was me. They reached out and asked if I'd like to do my fursona's one (1) line myself, so I did. That was neat.

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hi uh so um do you have any tips for someone who wants to make an rpg (more general game design stuff i'm not planning to make it in rpg maker) (sorry if this is really annoying) (loved slarpg)

So this is a very broad subject since RPGs are a complex genre that can be approached a lot of different ways, but in general I think the most important thing is to look at the games you play analytically.

How do individual design choices contribute to the big picture of the experience the devs are trying to give you? How do they make you feel? If something is annoying, can you think of an intentional reason why it might have been designed that way? How are things paced? How much are you pushed to use the tools at your disposal? How do the enemy behaviors influence your actions? What kind of rewards are you given, and when? What sort of choices is the player given? How open or constricted is the world design? How does the gameplay help convey the story? And what really speaks to you about the games you love, deep down? When you can break things down like this and think about what you'd do the same and what you'd do differently, you can build something new off of the core pillars of the games you love, rather than just copying them on a surface level.

And as everyone will tell you, start small. Don't sit down and decide to make a 60-hour epic right from the jump. You will burn out. Everything takes longer than you think it will. I made what I thought was going to be a 5-8 hour game and it ended up being a 20+ hour game that took me the better part of a decade.

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vent art

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having fun on the computer!!!

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surge generations

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I'm about to start working on my own RPG with RPG maker, but the part that intimidates me isn't any of the graphical stuff or even programming anything. It's math. How did you find a good progression of exp and stat boosts?

Here's my dark secret with SLARPG: I didn't do any proper math to determine the stat stuff. I didn't use any spreadsheets. It's aaaallllllllll vibes-based, baby. I'd just put numbers and basic stat curves into RPG Maker that seemed okay, and then I tweaked them back and forth through playtesting to get everything feeling how I wanted it to.

The party's stat growths have a somewhat convex slope—they're more significant early on and then slow down later. This way you're noticeably stronger against the lowest tier enemies after your first few levels, but the late game bosses won't vary wildly in difficulty if you're only level 27 instead of 30. (I did manually make sure the party's max HP and MP values would always be multiples of 5, though, just to keep the numbers nice and tidy.)

New areas will give the player new gear with noticeable stat boosts over their old stuff, and then enemies are balanced around that. I'd do battle tests and tweak the enemies for each area so that they felt like they were about as tough as I wanted them to be when pitted against a party with average gear for that part of the game. Feels too easy? Then I make the numbers bigger. And vice versa. And I'd keep making further tweaks after having other people playtest the game. But the further I got in development the better my balancing instincts got, so I had to make fewer balance adjustments than you might think.

The EXP curve, on the other hand... I'm pretty sure I just left default? I adjusted the pace of leveling more via enemy EXP than via the party's EXP requirements. There's a noticeable bump in the EXP enemies give in each new area, so if the player is underleveled when they hit a new area they'll catch up quickly. And of course bosses tend to give enough EXP to guarantee a level if you can beat them.

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01/10/2025

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Karaoke Night.

commission for rexiafortuna