The reason why games are fun is because you learn from them. A game is addicting when the challenges are at the precise level that they are not too easy nor too difficult. When a game has that kind of balance, it's considered to have flow(There's a flash game called flow that investigates this concept by allowing the player to indicate the difficulty).

If you're truly interested in game design, try to get your hands on 'A theory of fun' or 'The art of game design: a book of lenses' they're both invaluable. The science investigating what fun is and what games are and their effects on us, is called 'Ludology'.

sincerely,
a gamedesign student.

The house's shadowing. Or maybe it's just me... seeing wrong stuff.

It looks more like Game Maker refusing to do 8-bit alpha on an alpha'd sprite.

anyhow, off to spoiler tags

Well, the problem with gamemaker lite is that you can't use 8-bit alpha channels.
When you use 8-bit alpha channels in GM-pro, you first have a picture, then you have a masking version(like, grayscale). Then you make a little script that uses the masking version to add the varying levels of transparancy to the picture.
While I can type in the same programming in GM-lite, it refuses to work. Because I did want some shading, I made a tile-set version for the grass(hence why is looks so strange).

Now maybe you meant something completely different, in which case I don't know what you did mean...

Some of your shadows appeared flat, Thera.

on the trees? or those on the grass? because those on the grass are due a limit on the light-version of gamemaker(it doesn't support transparantcy, pro-version does)

Ouch, skarik, maybe it's an idea to resize those? or perhaps put them under a spoiler tag?

Anyway, I've been pixeling trees and bushes, to replace the old ones I had:

Old trees:


New trees:

Well, the thing with the dead parents storyline is that it was once very overused.

Many story featuring orphans are pretty popular, because in those stories the author plays up the mystery behind the parent. Who was the parent, why did they do the things they did, why did they die, did they love the orphan?
And ofcourse the obligatory familymembers showing up.

Come to think of it, it you'd want to do a version of the above, you could also have a boyfriend/girlfriend passing away, or perhaps a brother or sister. And then have the main character discover that their beloved had many secrets.

Ofcourse, another subversion would be to have the main character know his parents very well, or be at an age where one's parents dying is not much of a suprise, or at the least, they can handle it.

Also, I like it, but that's because I'm a dork for mystery.

Well, what you mentioned is exactly why I wanted to study battle algorithms in the first place.

Any idiot understands what the effect of elemental atribute modifiers or that you add the strength of the weapon to the strength of the main character.
But while I can follow the defence/4 thing of dragon quest, I have no clue why they did the attack devided by two.

My original plan was to do attack-defence, because even in the players mind that would make sense, after all, the defence should be stopping the offence from hurting the character. But the problem with that is that the attack needs to be high enough to do a decent amount of damage, and you don't want to confront your audience with astronomical attack-numbers.

And then there's things like random modifiers which have no real reason besides hiding the algorithm for the player. But I'm not certain if I would that.
Making battles more varied, my ass, I would rather prefer to know what the general damage I do is, and thus gain a bit of feeling that I understand the game rather than that I'm just trying random stuff and the monster will die anyway. (But that's partially also a design problem in monsters and using weaknesses that I'm trying to conquer. (Having each type of monsters being specifically weak to status effect/magic/weapons, and TELLING this to the player.)) Sure, some people would say 'that's making the game too easy for the player' but I myself find it more important to allow the player to PLAY rather then to obscure everything into what's story and basically a fighting minigame that they would rather avoid. And making the player play also means that whatever is supossed to refrain the player from breaking the game should be something that racks his brain, makes him reconsider his tactics rather then a statistics problem or anything else that's basically fake difficulty.

It's the reason some people think pokémon is a good RPG: The battle mechanics are widely known, and they encourage the player to think during a battle, knowing what attacks to choose, not just based on elemental weakness, but also based on tactics(besides spamming the strongest attack repeatedly).

This is the reason I put up a thread, because I had hoped that those experienced in custom systems would voice their opinions. Hence the 'what were algorithms that you found particulary interesting' question. Perhaps people would mention why they liked the algorithm so much, what of it made sense, what they thought was good game design. Because, as you said, finding any algorithm from a proffesional game is easy.

So, yeah, if you've got ideas on how to design an algorithm, please say so. Because I'm interested.
And I apologise if I sound disconnected, I can't seem to make this sound more coherent.

Also, to the other posters, thank you for the tutorial, I'll look through it

i'm going to take this opportunity to point out how i feel about this (again).  there's something to be said for a game's ability to place the audience into the events unfolding, however superficial these events may be.  i don't think enough people bank on this kind of mentality when they're designing their games, at least on the story front.  story always seems to be this disposable, discardable thing that's better left to literature in favor of gameplay, and i don't really like that attitude when (like i said before) the story becomes an integral part of the entertainment experience. 

something that doesn't really have anything to do with the current subject but it's something i'll voice anyway:  writing credits only get thrown around when you're someone like seanbaby or jay pinkerton or old man murray, and that needs to change.  people need to be recognized and rewarded for writing good games; more often than not it seems like people are rewarded with writing positions on games for writing other stuff instead.

Personally, I think it also doesn't help how the writing is portrayed around here. I mean, I've seen a thousand articles on 'good villains' and 'deep, complicate characters' but not on things like 'theme'(Unless you mean those articles where the author goes like 'these are the most common themes, they're important!!!'), symbolism and how to use it to make the plot more connected.

Instead of that, people are treated to setting, conflict and archetypes, which, to be honest, are more useful in literary analysis rather then constructing a story, resulting in pasted together plots.

While it's very kind of you to point me at algorithmate and the RPGMAKER 2k/3 helpfile... I'm using GAMEMAKER. As in, the 2d engine people only use for platformers and weird arcade type games because nobody can be bothered to try something more complicate ;).

But thanks none the less for posting that, it's interesting to see how RPGmaker deals with the algorithms.

I've tried to look around, and found some other examples:

Dragon quest for an example, roughly uses:
[Attack/2-(defense/4)] = Base damage, before the randomizer.(it seems that RPGmaker is based off this)

Pokémon on the other hand does the following:
((((2*level+10)*attack*basedamage)/(250*defence))+2)*modifier*same type attack bonus*randomnizer = damage

But keep 'em coming, I'm certain there's more types out there...

Woah, I was actually just looking for the same thing. I'm gonna PM a guy who wrote a tutorial on it a long time ago, maybe he still has it.

Oh, if you do manage to get your hands on that tutorial, could you post it here? I myself am intrested in it, and maybe others would like to see it too.

I'm currently trying to program a J-RPG in gamemaker, and while most things are working out quite well, I realised there's one thing I have absolutely no experience in:

Battle algorithms and formulas.

Also known as the mathematical magic that run RPGs.

I'm being very simple with having the following stats: Strength, Defence, Magic, Magic Defence and Speed. Next to that there's elemental attributes, weaknesses(depending on monster type) and stat modification.
My battlesystem is just a simple turn based system where the player chooses attacks before each round and the speed dictates when the character's turn is.

So here's my questions:

* What kind of battle algorithms/formulas have you used?
* What algorithms/formulas have you seen that impressed you, or had a creative thing about them?
* What kind of algorithms/formulas would you advice me to use?