Hi, I'm trying to do an almost unwinnable game, designed for masochists gamers hardcore gamers, is a standart rpg and i want advice of the more experienced pros in rpg maker.
1. We all have a troll inside of ours heart, i want to hear your rage inducing suggestions
2. What damage formulas i should use?
3. What were your worst moment over the course of a game?
I'm trying to figure out what you want, is this a joke thing to tick people off or a serious endeavor? A difficult game is fine, games like dark souls, etc... appeal to people in that way. Designing a difficult game and a game that you want to make just to frustrate people are two very different things.
I'd play a difficult game (although it should be winnable/conquerable through proper strategy, etc...) but I would not play a game that was designed to be frustrating and intentionally try and keep the player from winning just for the sake of it.
One style of unconquerable-like games that can work are ones that keep track of high-scores among the individual and other players because even if they can't win there is a goal to accomplish (beating their own score/recorded progress) or obtain bragging rights for the top scores.
I'd say go play some of the old rouge and rouge like games for ideas of nearly unwinnable games, and see how they did it. Those might be the best place for ideas for implementation.
This reminds me of Super Adventure Box. Love the idea and I am actually working on something similar myself.
As for suggestions, to promote longevity minimize downtime for failure. No one likes having to watch a game-over screen, start a new game or load a save file every time they reach a road-block or die in the game, especially if that's every couple seconds.
I played an RPGMaker game by one of my friends from another forum. Don't think it's been posted here.
Early in the game, there was a boss that was a major difficulty spike for two reasons:
(1) It had an attack that hit all the party for massive damage. You could tell from the previous attack that it was about to use its mega-attack, but your slower party members would likely not have time to Defend.
(2) It was invulnerable to physical damage, unless you threw an item called Softening Sand at it. However, its mega-attack would reset this weakness, so you had to keep taking turns out to throw the item again. You were given four before the battle, but there was no way to get any more.
However, although this boss was difficult, it was fair difficulty, and it felt immensely satisfying to finally beat it.
Later in the game, "lite" versions of this boss appeared as normal monsters. They were fixed encounters, so you couldn't just run and hope not to meet them. The "lite" versions may have had different stats and properties, but the two features I highlighted above were the same.
In the dungeon with these monsters as fixed encounters, you no longer had a black mage in the party.
I will say that there is a "niche" for these games.
Unfair Mario would be one example, but even there it is a matter of memorizing the level patterns and progressing. It's hard, but very doable. If you want a game that's truly unwinnable all you need to do is give wandering mobs a low frequency attack (say 1-2%) that just insta-gibs the party. I think at that point though you'll find that niche drying up to a maybe literal handful of players willing to put up with that crap.
I think these are the two main components to keep in mind when making a game that's supposed to troll the hell out of the player and/or be very difficult:
-Random effects are the perfect tool for trolling the player. Skills that have a big variance in results, but are generally skewed against the player. Randomness makes it hard for the player to plan ahead and they'll never feel as if they have control over a situation. Even if the player seems like he's winning, there could still be a chance to lose with some bad RNG rolls.
-Give the player hope. If you get the player into situations that are so bad and completely unwinnable they'll just quit and go play something else. You'll need to keep the player on the edge of despair, but at the same time still give them something that might give them the key to getting out of tough situations. Be merciful from time to time and reward the player with something, they'll be more likely to keep playing if they feel they're getting somewhere.
Never take your trolling too far, or it'll be too easy for the player to say screw it and quit your game. You want to make their suffering as long as possible while avoiding to push them over the edge.
Never be too blatant with your trolling. If it's too obvious you're plain trolling them, the 'fun' is quickly gone. Make them guess whether or not you're trying to troll them or if you're just bad at designing an enjoyable game.
Other general trolling tactics, but be careful with implementation as they can quickly add up and make the player straight up quit before they get far into your game:
-Slow movement speed and long walking distances. Lots of backtracking. Maze-like designed maps. Dead ends with nothing in them.
-Pointless interruptions, such as cutscenes or dialogue that appear out of nowhere and don't really add anything. Unnecessarily long cutscenes or dialogue that can't be skipped. Badly written dialogue (not to be confused with bad spelling and grammar).
-Penalties for doing things the player could not have known about beforehand.
-Long and slow battle animations.
-Battles with a lot of enemies while providing limited or no AoE options at all.
-Player skills with random damage/effects.
-Enemies with high critical hit rates.
-Enemies that spam status effects (poison, burn, stun, paralyse) while providing limited or no options to deal with these at all.
-Enemies that constantly heal themselves, more effective for trolling when they continuously do so whenever they get close to dying.
-Enemies with a lot of HP and high defences.
-Prevent escaping from battles.
-Prevent the player from overlevelling by grinding encounters, or make it painfully slow with a steep EXP curve.
-If grinding encounters is allowed, make everything expensive and require grinding to afford basic gear sold in the shops.
I would strongly suggest to not prevent the player from save scumming, however tempting it may be. Losing progress could be one of the biggest turn offs, especially if your game isn't fun to play in the first place. Save scumming is a way to give hope and power to the player. A tool to make the player feel as if they're in control. Use that to your advantage, to make them suffer even longer.
I forget the title, but one game had a boss battle just before the exit, with a savepoint right before it and no way back out. Saving was a game over unless you had already grinded up an extra 20 levels. It was a sidequest though, not a main one.
I swear this has become a discussion on how to make a game that very few people, if any, will like to play, lol.
I personally like to make near unwinnable games. That doesn't mean that they can't be won. It just means that it is very difficult. You may have to pay attention to subtle clues to find the solution.
As an example: Minecraft.
My server was a trap server. I had one trap that activated when you went to use the bed in the middle of a dungeon/fortress. It set your spawn point in the middle of an obsidian room and then flooded the room with lava and water before activating all the traps in the dungeon.
I had one "safe zone" that was relatively safe on the lower floors, but on the upper floors...
You had some absurd mazes and puzzles.
One puzzle you had to go through a I think 100x100 'cube' teleportation room maze (aka: 10000 rooms). The solution for the maze was outside and every room was exactly the same and you spawned in the middle with four possible choices each time. And while some rooms had a teleport back to the previous room, that was just if it happened to be connected that way. Death from starvation or attempted suicide would put you back in the first room, but the clue for solving the maze was at the start of the maze BEFORE entering.
Similarly, the forest of illusion maze of mine had it so that you would go and have no idea if you are going the right way until a semi-random point past the point where you made a mistake. This meant you had no idea where you made the mistake. Good luck finding the clue...
Then you had the everchanging 3D maze. Every few minutes, the maze would change. If nobody cleared it after X hours after a person had entered, it would wipe the maze clean with a one hour warning (minimum time to get through) (the entrance would seal itself so nobody else could enter). My friend heard about my maze and asked me if I had designed the Cube from the movie Cube (which I watched after it was mentioned).
There was also my railway where choosing the wrong path could lead you to your untimely un-death. Trapped inside a block of stone while taking damage, but also being healed.
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Side note, in a certain game, before they patched it, I did heal the enemies due to my personality of wanting to save everyone-even monsters. People kept me in the parties only because I was a good enough healer to make up for that, lol...
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If you've played one of my games, ilychron: First Fate, and the original form (or a few forms after), one of the bosses had an ability that could swap all of your names around (and the bosses's as well). It could also swap your hp and mp, reverse your hp and mp (so if you were at full health, you now had 1, if you had 1 health, you now had full), reverse the bosses' hp and mp, swap those, make a doppleganger so that you had to kill both the same turn (unless you stopped it from finishing the summon), etc. Essentially, it had a bunch of skills that just messed with you. This is while you are fighting 3 other bosses that were serious, each with some game over ability that had a very specific way to stop it (though there were ways to buy time). To find out how to stop the skills, you had to either lose the game to learn that specific move's counter, or figure it out through clues given via item descriptions.
Another boss had the ability to do a random action with almost any effect if you didn't beat it within 80 turns or figure out how to prevent it (it was preventable, but the only clue given was the boss's class - mage (if you can't guess the solution, you obviously don't play many rpgs)). The skill could delete your saves, crash the game, freeze the game, win the game, kill the bosses (there were two that you had to fight at the same time), kill the party, and more.
I'll show some examples from the first boss battle
spoiler about the game:
The boss with the skill could join your party on a later playthrough).
Images:
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You can also give joke abilities to make it a bit more fun. For example, I had a spell that could only be used on yourself and it only cured silence. Now, the problem was it was a spell and only could be cast on yourself.
There was also the spell that gave you an autores, but could only be used if you were at exactly 4 health and 4 mana and in the fourth character slot on a turn that was a multiple of 4. Usable, but the conditions were essentially impossible.
If essentially impossible, why bother including it? I must admit, I'm finding it very hard to get my head around the psychology of wanting to do all this, of making a game which, by the sound of it, takes a lot of work to make, that basically only a tiny number of people (if anyone) will ever play. A game that is a war of attrition between the dev and the player, with the dev holding all the cards, so it just becomes a way for the dev to mess with the player. To what end? What's the reward here for doing it? I can think of some reasons, but none of them pretty. So enlighten me.
The easiest way to make an unwinnible game is to make a game with no end like tertris or even an open world game with no main quest. I know this isn't exactly what the thread is asking for, but it is a surfire way to make the game unwinnible.
In my opinion, to make an unfair game enjoyable ( if you actually want that ), the player should ideally be able to restart extremely quickly.
The success of unfair platformers come from the fact that you actually respawn extremely quickly and as such, are able to correct the mistakes you have made ( and couldn't avoid to make as those are unfair games ). As such, i believe making the player lose time with boring mechanics ( like having to come back to a faraway town ) would be a bad idea, if you actually want your game to be enjoyable of course.
Making an irritating unfair game is easy, making an irritating unfair game that actually makes the player want to restart ? That's another story. The balance is very delicate.
Frequent checkpoints/savepoints are indeed a necessity in an unfair game. Look at games like VVVVVV, I Wanna Be the Guy, etc. Save points are very frequent.
If essentially impossible, why bother including it? I must admit, I'm finding it very hard to get my head around the psychology of wanting to do all this, of making a game which, by the sound of it, takes a lot of work to make, that basically only a tiny number of people (if anyone) will ever play. A game that is a war of attrition between the dev and the player, with the dev holding all the cards, so it just becomes a way for the dev to mess with the player. To what end? What's the reward here for doing it? I can think of some reasons, but none of them pretty. So enlighten me.
I'd say you need to make sure the game is tough, but fair. In other words, if you want players to actually play the game more than once, make the game tough, but make it so the player has a fighting chance to figure out how to beat it. For instance, maybe there's a boss on level 5 that seems unwinnable...until you figure out it is weak to a certain item that you can find in a secret room in level 4, or an expensive item that you can buy. These are what we call hard but fair games (at least as long as there are hints that the secret room might exist. Just dumping one in the game will fall under a guide dang it).
However, if the game just exists to mess with the player by an unfair RNG, then everyone I know will rage quit after a while and not come back.
Just beat the last of us 2 last night and starting jedi: fallen order right now, both use unreal engine & when I say i knew 80% of jedi's buttons right away because they were the same buttons as TLOU2 its ridiculous, even the same narrow hallway crawl and barely-made-it jump they do. Unreal Engine is just big budget RPG Maker the way they make games nearly identical at its core lol.
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