Dev - Gamemaker The Chronos Tome (Read 1153 times)

  • New Hero
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Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 03:39:33 am by Cysma
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Walkthrough

Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 03:52:34 am by Cysma
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how do these advance mathematiques help your game at all?
  • New Hero
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In quite a few ways, actually. It's much more balanced than RPG Maker's default battle system, especially in terms of damage scaling and reduction, and dynamic XP gains.
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fascinating. how do you extract the fun from the number? i have ground the numbers together for years. i crashed the mezzanine twister against the zeta function. i chipped off parts of peano arithmetic with my bare hands looking for tears of joy... but all that came of it was blood and sweat. even my cheese grater could not extract the pure enjoyment from the digits of pi. i found no absolute truth, no justice, no balance or judgement of any kind in the numbers. still i am searching.

please. if you know the location of the fun in assigning arbitrary numbers to happenings, please contact me. my memory address is 0xFF35525A56B773124DD1. i am twelve gigabytes long. i await your response with anticipation.
Last Edit: July 04, 2010, 07:38:55 am by Biggles
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The storyline could be fun--so I guess it's a modern RPG? It won't take place in the past (or at least not much of it). It sounds interesting and at least different than the standard RPG fare.

As far as the battle system goes, the grid system could be fun if you used AoE abilities and things like that. Having different powers that have positional requirements would really be a rewarding system.

You should list some example abilities :D I personally am really into the mechanics of game design. I'm not much of a story writer, and I can't map very well (hence all the games I've released... none) so I generally make up a battle system, program it, then the project just gathers cobwebs on my hard drive.

Also if you have any screenshots or mock-up shots, that'd be great!
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Here is an outline of the battle system:

*MANY NUMBERS*
I totally get why you would post this. You want people to know you're really thinking this through and are willing to put a lot of effort into the systems. But nobody can really understand how you intend for this thing to work just by reading a large list of intricate features. If you want people to be interested you should write a vastly simplified human-readable explanation of the basic concepts.
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If you want people to be interested you should write a vastly simplified human-readable explanation of the basic concepts.

All right, here's an overview of what the numbers mean in a way that the rest of you can understand.

-Strength makes you do more physical damage.
-Dexterity makes you move sooner.
--It also makes you hit more often.
--It ALSO makes you dodge more often.
-Constitution gives you more HP.
--It also makes you take less physical damage.
-Wisdom gives you more MP.
--It also makes your skills stronger.
--It ALSO makes you take less magical damage.
-HP is your life force. You are KO'ed if it drops to 0.
-MP is consumed to use skills. You can't use skills if you don't have enough MP.
-MP may also be called TP (Technique Points) for characters that don't use magic. It functions the same way as MP, except it's called TP.
-Attack is the sum of your Strength and your weapon's power.
-Defense is the sum of your Constitution and your armor's physical power.
--It reduces the amount of physical damage you take by a percentage.
-Resistance is the sum of your Wisdom and your armor's magical power.
--It reduces the amount of magical damage you take by a percentage.
-Your Level is a measure of your overall power.
--Your Level will go up if you can accumulate certain amounts of experience points.
--You earn experience points by winning battles, among other things.
--You get more experience points than usual if you defeat an enemy with a higher Level than yours, and less experience points for defeating an enemy with a lower level than yours.
-You have 60 points distributed amongst your Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom stats plus 7 points for every Level you have, including Level 1.
--Your Level can go as high as 100, so you can have up to 760 stat points shared by your four main stats.
--You cannot have more than 255 points put into a single stat.
-Your Level also affects how much damage you do. It increases your damage output exponentially, and it reduces the percentage amount that an enemy's armor reduces your damage by.

I hope I have made this easier to understand.
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You made a slight advertising error. Should have kept the numbers to yourself untill you had a working system to go with them. At this point it just looks like you pulled them out of your ass, so to speak, for the sake of looking smart. If you had actually relesed a tech demo allong with the system details Im almost certain you would have gotten a much better reaction since it would look a lot more credible.
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This is why I don't visit Game Design.
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When I created the system I had a cap in mind for each stat, with the equations being able to reach the caps. Solve these simple equations to see just how they work. Round your final answer to the nearest whole number.

XP needed for level 100: (100^3.5)-1
Maximum HP: 255^1.6 + 200^1.5055
Maximum MP: (255*100)^0.68 + 7
Physical Damage: (255 + 245)*(100^0.5)
Magical Damage: (255+255+510)^0.53187
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[Reserved]
Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 02:13:30 am by Cysma
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Here's a suggestion: Why don't you just try putting all of your game information into one post using hide tags.


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[Reserved]
Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 02:14:28 am by Cysma
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If you want people to be interested you should write a vastly simplified human-readable explanation of the basic concepts.

All right, here's an overview of what the numbers mean in a way that the rest of you can understand.

-Strength makes you do more physical damage.
-Dexterity makes you move sooner.
--It also makes you hit more often.
--It ALSO makes you dodge more often.

AND SO ON AND SO FORTH

Uh, you pretty much just listed the way every game in the history of time has handled stats, including the default RM* setup. I mean, great jorb with the math or whatever but that isn't what he meant by a human-readable explanation.

Why did you pick certain numbers to be so exact? Why is the balancing setup the way it is? These are things people (sort of) care about.
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I'll take another look tomorrow- this late at night I have little patience for reams of text.
Last Edit: July 05, 2010, 03:05:43 am by Terrorantula
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Why did you pick certain numbers to be so exact? Why is the balancing setup the way it is? These are things people (sort of) care about.

If you'll notice, all of the stats cap at either 255 or a row of 9's. Why? These caps are convenient from a programming standpoint. 255 is the maximum value of an 8-bit unsigned integer, or 2^8-1. These types of number caps are prevalent in many games, especially old ones where memory was limited. I have chosen to use these caps as a sort of tribute to old video games.

Keeping that in mind, I wanted the HP, MP, and damage numbers to scale in a manner not unlike a Final Fantasy game, where you often start off with around 100 HP, doing 20 or so points of damage at first, and increase these numbers exponentially as the character levels up, to the point where he has several thousand HP and is doing thousands of points of damage. These calculations are the result of coming up with a balanced set of equations that create this effect. I even looked up the battle mechanics of several RPGs to see how all those numbers were calculated, and used them as a starting point for my own system.

When I created the monsters and their stats, I used a few formulae to determine what a monster's stats would need to be in order to pose a moderate challenge against a player character of the same level, and used the results as guidelines for setting their stats.
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are you saying that your design process consists entirely of blindly combining japanese roleplaying games into homogeneous goop
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Things people care about:

-Screenshots
-Videos
-Download Link

Things people don't care about:
-Walls of text coming from a programmer/math teacher
-Text
-More Text

basically you don't talk about your design process because that's boring as shit. It's boring making it so it's even more boring discussing it!
Last Edit: July 05, 2010, 08:16:12 am by Neophyte
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basically you don't talk about your design process because that's boring as shit. It's boring making it so it's even more boring discussing it!

Here are two rules of thumb in regard to discussing design process.

1. You show the people something first, and make sure they are excited about it. You always do this before you start talking about any of the game's design.
   1-a. You should be confident enough with your general design to begin making your game without other people's input about your ideas written down. If you don't have this confidence already, it's a red flag for the design itself and you probably shouldn't even spend the time making that game in the first place.

2. If designing the game was boring for the person who designed it, there is little hope of the players getting excited about that game at all.

As for the actual design itself, why don't you just start with why you want to make this game in the first place? That seems like the most logical starting point for any sort of design. You can then follow it up with why you assume other people would actually want to play this game when it is done, which can (or cannot) lead into the more technical minded aspects of the design itself.
Last Edit: July 05, 2010, 05:22:38 pm by EvilDemonCreature
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