Does anyone remember the joke topic from years ago of a mattress game that had like 400 hours of game play or something? I think it might have been made by Marcus, though I may be mistaken. I'd look for it, but as a non-premium member I'm no longer privy to the archives.

I agree, that would be sweet (in aw  way) - except that it means I have sprite a lot of different battle charsets for one character 

Could you make him take off the hat before each battle? It could be some sort of intro to the battle for him and save you the hassle of making unique character sprites.

So I took a crack at editing this mess.
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Looks nice. I would still remove the words "SG" and flatten the top though now that you have the enemy list short enough. I might also look again at how the enemy LP bars are designed, but yours is the best one so far, I think. I never tried just squashing everything because I didn't think it would work, but the shadow on the enemy names does an excellent job dividing the bar from the letters.

The EN listed in the action menu was for how much EN the action took, I believe. So it wasn't redundant.

turn the white outlines to either a light brown or remove it, that's just my personal opinion.

I was thinking the same thing myself, but at the same time I like how white outlines generally help readability. Usually....

Any thoughts on the shadow for the letters? I wonder if the issue is much more the dark, white, light color order for the letters rather than the fact it has an outline/shadow?

Could you possibly just make the monster's HP appear above them briefly when they lose/gain HP?

The easiest way to code a health bar is to move it as a picture behind a background, like the hud. If you place the health bar above an enemy you'd have to create a different picture for each pixel of LP the enemy loses, which is way more work than it's worth. But it would look nice.

Personally I would cut the faces, they take up way too much unnecessary space.

I've struggled with this since it was first shown. The faces do take up a lot of space. But I really like pictures rather than words in a hud. And yet they're not really necessary since the names are there. But the issue here isn't room left to right but rather top to bottom, so does it even help to remove them? I wonder if the boarder on the pictures were smaller if it would look cleaner? Or would a thinner boarder cause the pictures to no longer separate the player stats and make everything look even more cluttered?

I view the OOBS more like having strong attack magic or something. Not everyone is a mage but that's OK because there are other ways to kill a monster. So there are not simply items that give you the same magic. What you suggested makes me worried the Rouge might end up like the healer in many games: healing items are just as good as the healer's magic and you're rarely ever low on cash, making the healer redundant/worthless. Shouldn't the Rouge basically never fail at his OOBS? That's why he's a good character.

I personally think the gems are what's saving the hud by breaking it up with both a graphic and a color change. But I will admit it looks cluttered.

The biggest problem I see is that there's too much stuff on the left: the menu is the highest there, it has four health bars on top of each other, and all four monsters are squished together. If where the monster names are located could be something simpler, shorter, and not all text (all text I think would make it look heavy to the right), it might help balance everything. I attempted to do this with the screens below.

I also noticed that you have four people in the hud but only two on the battle field. It might be helpful to think about how the hud looks with less people, less enemies, and also how the battle field looks with all four people.

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Two attempts to shrink the right side while keeping four monsters:
   

For gameplay reasons I think you need four enemies, but I couldn't shrink down the left side enough with four so I have only three here. I also relocated the menu into the corner (the menu would need to be slightly reworked if you did this). I think this doesn't look cluttered. You could also move the menu with any of the ones above too. I think it would look better and give you more room on the battlefield. Of course the menu would have to hide when you select a monster so that you see which health bar it has.
   

I like it.

And I disagree with the suggestion to remove the enemy names. They occupy a very logical location on the screen, they help people reference enemies, they can add some interest (like a townsperson speaking of a monster by name), and removing them for the command box doesn't make sense since the command box could always go over the enemy names and use the same space. Speaking of which, I endorse the idea to move the command box out of the center of the map (as in, over the enemy names). I didn't like it when Legend of the Philosopher's Stone did it, and I'm fairly certain it will cause you problems long term as well.

Also, the idea to decrease the width of the health bars is a decent idea. I'm not sure if it would look better or not, but they are a little dominant right now (which could be seen as good, but maybe not that much). I disagree with adding in the maxes for the energy and health in the boxes because there simply isn't enough room without making it too full of numbers and cluttered. Right now it's really easy to see everything and those large HP bars split stuff up nicely so it doesn't look cluttered or confusing.

I just noticed that gap between the enemy names and the character stats looks a bit odd. I'm not sure if widening the enemy name box to fill the gap (don't make it taller though) would look better or worse. It would depend slightly on how the command box fits in there too.

At any rate, good luck with the programming. 

Cray: I'd actually suggest going with the traditional battle view. It's a less buggy method, which is always a plus, and I actually think (given the right system set) that it would look better than the gauge that you are using currently.
Other than that everything looks amazing. I like the bubble effects too.

Bunsen.05: I would agree with oc_gunslinger's suggestion on the faces, with the scan lines like in the selection box and a lighter green. Otherwise it looks good. I like the red used for the unusable items rather than the default gray. I think it looks a lot better that way.

Resources is where the game development content goes.  We don't have anything stupid like RM2K CHIPSETS so this is mostly going to be game dev articles and tutorials.  In the future, we might integrate hosting of graphic/musical resources that would be exclusive or almost exclusive to GW, but this is still in the conception phase and, again, would be a change that would come later on.  It's definitely a possibility, though, and really is just a matter of whether we can muster the resources and means to accomplish this.

Wasn't something already done to allow for submitted resources? Wouldn't it be easy just to toss that into the system since it's already done? Or did you decide not to do that since we didn't get that many resources?

Also, a while back there was an enormous effort to find all of the games we used to store at GW. Where did they end up? I really miss having that games list. Finding games on the forums is hard to do. Currently my best source is rpgmaker.net, which luckily is keeping track of things.

The front page feels a bit too wordy for me, which pushes me off a bit from it. If we're looking to attract new members, what they see first is very important. I'd suggest shortening up the page so that you don't have to scroll at all, and do that by decreasing the amount of text shown (or something). I like the stuff on there, just now how it shows up.

It's hard to find the forums. I don't like having to click an extra button to get there. I'm lazy. (of course, I have it book marked, but still) I'm just complaining now.

I will admit, I was very underwhelmed looking at it. After seeing all the hype, I was expecting more. Though now that we have something, we also have something we can expand.

Despite it's faults, it's still totally sweet. The design is rather different/refreshing compared with the standard fair from other sites. It'll be interesting to see how things work out. Every so glad yet again that we have something. Thank you!

I enjoyed the game. It had it's faults, but on the whole was/is better than most of the games around. Plus it's plenty long. I got stuck trying to talk to the mayor person, though, and eventually gave up. But that's just me.
I wonder if the problem was that the downloads on Three the Hard Way were never very high compared with the other games at the time (The Way Series, ABL, Nafrauger, Devil Hunter, or even FF:EN) making it "unpopular".

Convicts Cliffs n' Criminals: I personally want to apologize to hedge, for the bug he uncovered (this one actually caught me by surprise, I only came across it once during testing, so I played it a few more times just to be sure, but I couldn't find it). Let me know if anyone else uncovers the same problem. Next time I'll be sure to thoroughly test my maps before submitting them.

So is it possible to win, assuming you're not just unlucky and hit a rare bug?

Haven't finished all the maps, but here's what I have done so far:

LordBlueRouge's "DodgeThis"
 > My favorite part of this was how it timed everything with the music. And it timed so perfectly! Especially the initial 3 second countdown and the part where he runs out of ammo. Very excellent. For the actual gameplay, however, I really didn't feel like there was too much in terms of strategy. I just ran in circles. When I actually tried to dodge the bullets, I died.

LordBlueRogue's "Convicts, Cliffs n' Criminals"
 > "I'm tired" is about all I have to say. And that it broke (as in, I pressed the button but nothing fired) with 15 seconds left!!!!!!  I totally gave up.

Skie's "Alex vs. Klaus"
 > I smell a sequel! The sprite work was nice, too.

PKUltimaga's "A Riddle"
 > I walked around the Reaper the first time and didn't even ask the questions. Also, if you choose the third option right away the cutscene happens, despite that not making much sense. But not bad overall - and a good basic Alex(IS) map.

Dragol's "1920"
 > Very nice. Alexis face portraits were neat. Alex's pictures at the beginning were brilliant. In general, I love your sprite work, and this map really show cased your work. Too bad the English is still pretty broken. The silent movie thing was a nice addition.

Psyburn's "Kef Presents: The Temple of Tarantino"
 > Hated it. Couldn't see, and couldn't get out. I actually looked for the "skip map" option that RPG said he was putting in. The quizzes weren't bad, though.

halibabica's "Comic World"
 > Nice idea, but it was too hard (for me) to see what was happening to accurately guess (I thought he/she was sailing away in the umbrella at the end rather than jumping off the roof). And the walking speed could have been faster.

Limon's "Icy Peak"
 > Umm...nice music, decent mapping...there wasn't much there. Congrats for submitting!

elkalo's "Another Forest Map"
 > Nice looking, good mapping, but too dark. The overlay didn't help (although I thought it looked alright for an overlay).

Arcan's "Alex Racing"
 > I was really hoping to be able to race, rather than just bet (and "cheat" to be able to win). Plus I won with the green one and it said I lost. I was sad. The orange one was more lucky, though. Despite being a chicken, I won, and they agreed!

Bobberticus' "Quebec"
 > Quebec? Anyway, since RPG said this was his favorite one (and the screenshot provided was funny enough), I was really expecting a lot more. It wasn't bad, but I was still very disappointed.

Sanosuke's "Dice and Cards"
 > I struggled with the dice game. I got a one three times in a row, and four of five times. Then I tied the guy twice. And somewhere in the middle there the cards from the card game started showing up. I was beginning to think you had programmed it so that I couldn't win. The dealer was pretty dumb in Black Jack, though, which allowed me to see my prize. And I have to say, I agree with Strangluv here that an ad for your game was really not a good idea, nor was it proper to include in an Alex map. Though the rest of the map was pretty nice. It would have been nice to see some other games than the dice and cards, though, since we've already had some very impressive casino maps in the past.

Dyne's "Attack of the Clones"
 > Fun. Easy. No errors to report. A good Alex(IS) map.

Fatty's "Endless Void II: Samurai Wars"
 > ...ummm...No Comment.

Verridian's "Lost Dream"
 > I recognized some of those names.... It wasn't really that bad. At least it wasn't painful to get through like a certain one mentioned above. What was up with the background?

Clucky's "Sky Town"
 > I was really expecting this to be some fancy airship/floating island map with pretty pictures and gorgeous mapping. It was really odd playing it with those expectations, and still getting a half way decent map. I liked the variation on the "shell game", though I could see that becoming extremely difficult had you moved the barrels faster (and crossed them more). Were they just on random move? Overall, pretty nice.

jsnnoa's "RPG Maker Castle"
 > At first I was like "What?" But after having watched it a second time, it's really not that bad. I liked the flag. I couldn't figure out the windows in the middle though, and the water around really should've been placed with the shift key down. But really, for a map not intended for public viewing, not bad.

Strageluv's "Bridging the Gap"
 > Nice space graphics. How does the R.I.P. relate at all?

KoG's "Gentleman's Challenge!"
 > I totally thought it was broken when I tried  to talk to the man and wouldn't speak with me. I didn't expect myself to have to move a few steps away to be "seen." Not a bad battle. Too bad it wasn't real, though. The walk speed was too slow. Good overall.

Hopefully I can get to the others soon.

And thanks all for the positive feedback!
(But I have to ask - what's up with all the music comments? I honestly thought it was just nice music....)