So, I'm making my first dungeon, and I'm looking to see if anybody knows any ways to create distinctive and unique puzzles. Basically, I'm trying to go for the Zelda/Golden Sun style, with interesting and creative dungeons to make them a little more complicated and time-consuming. Block puzzles, pysnergy, and statue arrangement are examples of such.Any suggestions or mechanics that would help with such a design?
Making dungeons complicated and time-consuming for the sake of prolonging the game's playtime is a game design no-no. Golden Sun's dungeons were an atrocity, a perfect example of exactly what not to do when making a game. Allow me to explain.
1.More often than not, they involved extreme padding. Long corridors containing absolutely nothing of importance, which, when faced with random encounters, only contributes to the travail of actually trying to accomplish anything. Its as though the developers made a concentrated effort to make the dungeons longer than necessary because, without it, the game would last maybe three hours or so.
2.Trial-and-error puzzles are a horrible idea when they mostly involve blind attempts to do something that leave you unable to complete the puzzle smoothly on your first try. Dropping blocks off of ledges you can't see the bottom of, jumping down to places when you don't know where you'll actually end up, pushing pots/pillars/statues into places and being unable to move them again, and environmental traps/effects that you didn't know existed until they pop up all of a sudden can ruin your entire attempt. Often, these puzzles forced you to leave the room and try again numerous times because your goal isn't even remotely obvious. Later in the games, puzzles involve multiple rooms that have to be completed in a specific order, which would be fine if the rooms weren't miles away from one another with no obvious connection. Backtracking a few rooms is not a sin in itself, but when you have to double back half of a dungeon, over multiple floors even, it becomes a tedious slog that is no longer fun. There's a difference between difficulty and just plain bad design. Being constantly railroaded is not any fun, and not knowing which Psynergy spell worked on what(because you were never informed) was a crap idea. The game never bothers to tell you which new object in the dungeon is effected by which new spell, which resulted in you spamming every Psynergy skill in your menu until something happened.At one point, if you don't do the Djinn swap to get a new class with the Growth spell, you literally can't make progress. Does the game ever tell you that? Nope.
3.The dungeons were bland as all hell. Most of the puzzles weren't even interesting, and none of the rooms felt like they served any purpose other than doing X to make progress. What sounds more enjoyable, a fifteen room dungeon with interesting puzzles and entertaining mechanics, or a sixty room dungeon comprised of copy-pasted corridors and then being told you have to solve a Rubik's cube that has been set on fire near a swarm of bees?
4.Mazes are stupid, stupid ways to design levels, and that was the extent of Camelot's ability to make dungeons. When backtracking a hundred times becomes a requirement in order to actually succeed at the game, it infuriates the player and ruins any sense of fun.
Golden Sun stands as a testament to bad game design, with battle mechanics so simple that mashing Djinn Summons and your best Psynergy spells destroyed any sense of meaningful strategy, the story was awful, the characters had zero personality and couldn't even remain consistent in what they said at any given time(often two lines later), and Camelot just couldn't bear to let you play the game for more than ten minutes without 500 lines of useless dialogue.
Spell-based puzzles can be fun. Item-based puzzles are a blast. But not if they're done with zero intelligent thought. Just keep that in mind, and you'll do well. In summation, my suggestion is to take everything you might have learned about game design from Golden Sun and toss it into the nearest available canyon or bonfire, and forget about it forever. This might not have been the answer you were looking for, but I feel that it is valid. Read this LP http://lparchive.org/Golden-Sun/ if you really need the veil lifted from over your head as to why GS was an insipid, unpolished product that was clearly made to make Camelot money. To a degree, what is and is not a good game is subjective, yes, but I refuse to believe some standard of quality game design doesn't exist at all. Golden Sun suffers from a serious case of "not as good as you remember".
Go the Legend of Zelda route. At least those puzzles were fun.
EDIT:If you don't want to read the LP, permit me this one quote from it that essentially shows how pointless and dumb the story(and the entire game) is. Contains spoilers for a game that came out in 2001 that everyone nobody should have played by now.
" Remember what the ultimate plot twist is: lighting these lighthouses would be an amazing thing and you're destroying the world by not helping Saturos light them this second. Notice how blatantly Camelot is cheating here, but also notice how idiotic your characters are forced to become.
Lighting all four of these lighthouses will unleash alchemy. Not three out of four; all four have to be lit. They are lit using the elemental stars. One of the elemental stars is in your possession.
If you do absolutely nothing, you win. If you lock the elemental star up in a safe deposit box, you win. "But what about Kraden and Jenna?", you don't ask because you're reading a thread on Something Awful instead of inquiring into a topic during a conversation. Well, even if you think that rescuing them is worth risking the world (as you've been led to believe will happen), you could always choose to follow S&M around and rescue them while not carrying the star that they need. "
I played all three Golden Sun games. While our opinions on the game are very different, I was merely bringing up the point that I wanted my dungeons to be interactive and entertaining for the player. I am much more familiar with Zelda, but both of these styles would be very hard to achieve because of RPG Maker's limitations. Besides a locked door and key and block puzzles, there really isn't much else that the base maker has to offer. So I was just wondering if anybody knew how to achieve certain zelda-esque mechanics.
I think at this stage, it is better off in General Discussion. If you want directions on how to make specific types of puzzles, then that is a "How do I...?" type of query and needs to be in separate threads (i.e. one thread per puzzle) in the support forum for the engine you are using.
I've moved this thread to General Discussion. Please be sure to post your threads in the correct forum next time. Thank you.
The question that immediately occurred to me was:
Why do you want to make your first dungeon more complicated and time consuming?
As a general principle, a first dungeon is where your player learns your game. If there are essential mechanics, here is where the process of mastering them begins. Slinging in a variety of arbitrary puzzles is not necessarily going to achieve your objective of making it engaging. If your game is not engaging in and of itself from the beginning, with something in your story, your setting or your characters which catches the player's attention, then puzzles won't do it for you - unless you set out to make a puzzle game. That, however, doesn't seem to be what you want to do.
The theme for my first dungeon is, more specifically, mountainous. All of the puzzles and floors are rock of mountain themed, so I was thinking about the dungeon like that. As for the main game mechanics and all of those, I am still figuring that out. But thank you for moving this into the proper section, because as I said I am new and unfamiliar with the forum.
If it's just immersion you want, anything to do with the theme of the dungeon should work. Don't just put in a random block-push puzzle or an ice-sliding puzzle because they're in every RPG that involves puzzles. If your first dungeon is mountain-themed, you could think of something that involves heights. The 2nd dungeon in one of my games has the player climb a volcano, so in one place I have the player climb a tall rock wall while a fire troll continues to throw boulders down at the player that they have to avoid. Once they get to the top, there's a mini-boss fight with the flame troll.
If your game has items or skills that interact with the environment (like Golden Sun has), you should have even more options open to you.
personally, I hate long dungeons and puzzles even more... Final Fantasy series are some of the worst for long dungeons with multiple backtracking that just make me more aggravated than anything... dont get me wrong, I love the FF series, but they drive me nuts... Even worse, with the encounter rates, you never really get anywhere very fast...
I have thought of something similar for climbing, but I have no idea how to event this. And thanks for the tutorials, wolfpak692, but I'm looking for more themes puzzles, and not just random button and block puzzles.
Actually it's possible to do a lot of zelda stuff in rpg maker, at least ones that don't involve accurate collision detection.
I think a good start would be to utilize event custom routes and Erase Event to create trap like entities. For some simple examples you can take a look at the short puzzle game I made for the Learning Game Jam: Shinobi. You can find the download in the jam's subforum.
It looks very interesting...but remember that VX Ace and MV are two very different pieces of software. When it comes to something like a Zelda puzzle, I'm not sure how the creation process would change between Makers. Again, I only use VX Ace, and on that am only really able to manage a locked door and key puzzle. Climbing puzzles, fire puzzles, all of that I have no idea how to event. And I know that this isn't the Script Request page, but I also don't know how to add or create an auto-jumping feature for certain kinds of puzzles. If you guys could help me with this, I'd really appreciate it.
Go to VXAce Tutorials forum. Click Search box. A drop down menu appears on the left of it. Click 'This Forum'. Enter puzzle as your search term. Get 2 pages of results, leading you to a variety of tutorials on how to do these things.
It honestly sounds like you should try and learn how far you can take the eventing system rather than asking about specific (or broad-specific) eventing help. With enough knowledge of the eventing system that is built into your RM program of choice and with enough creativity you can do so many more things than you might think. Part of it theory and part of it is practice but in all you should (not just you but anybody who is still quit new or foriegn to the art of eventing your own systems) aim to learn what the ceiling hight of the program is as early as possible.
If you have access to it, try making a little mess-around project in rm2k3. The limitations will help insite creativity in trying to find a way to do things as 2k3 had no such thing as scripts or plugins and it's eventing system is comparatively to later programs "lesser" in some aspects.
Regardless of how you do it you should just really focus on learning the eventing system and try to push it to the limit.
Oh, and an advice. If you are using random encounter, please don't set random encounters on the region where you want to implement your puzzles. It's annoying as hell...
I've seen all of Yanfly's field scripts, including the slippery tiles. But that is only good for an ice dungeon. For a mountain dungeon, I have ideas, but I don't have very much experience with eventing. And I don't have access to RM2k3, but I DO have access to XP.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and ask a few questions:why are your dungeons themed? How do those themes tie in with your game's story? Are these themes going to be unique and interesting, or will they just be more of the same?
All valid questions. I am challenging the status quo, because I repeatedly see people claiming to be inspired by their favorite games, but generally it turns out that 'inspired' meant 'another game did it so I will too'. I don't have a problem with the idea of themed dungeons, but their reason for being should go beyond "because I felt like it". Dungeons should have a "why", or they feel disconnected from the story. Immersion and intensity go beyond just the puzzles.
Well, I don't want to completely cover the plot, at least not yet if I'm going to release this to the community, but the idea is that my first few dungeons are new but simultaneously make fun of the cliche dungeon setup. My story later changes to be more original, but basically the first dungeon is a mountain theme that fits the story. And the way I've done mine I've never really seen in other rpgs. Honestly @PsychicToaster, the only experience I have with 2D JRPG's is with Golden Sun, Pokemon (which had very, very few dungeons through all generations), sort of Zelda with its dungeons, and Bravely Default/Second. Not really much of an "other games did it" kind of thing, but I see what you mean. The dungeon itself ties in with one of the main antagonists in the game, so it does exist with purpose.
By the time you are going to get better at eventing. Doing those cliché puzzles is a good exercise to understand more how event works.
When you achieve enough knowledge about events, common events and parallel process you will be able to easily make not only your dungeon, but your game itself much much more interesting.
To give you an idea, it's possible to create a torch system for dark places without any scripting. Only by using events.
Right now, I'm trying my own thing. Putting chests in locations with hints on how to get to them, and little areas that need to be accessed to open up the room with the boss. Or at least in my first dungeon. I'm not sure how many cliche mountain puzzles there are, but there is one portion I want at the end of the dungeon that involves climbing, as mentioned earlier in this thread, which I know how to create but want to enhance with events. I don't know how to make the character able to move from side to side, nor how to have something like boulders falling from a higher level. That's just one example.
You can make falling boulders by setting a custom autonomous movement route for the event (that field besides the image).
The effect by contact you can set by choosing the trigger as "event touch". (it will trigger the commands when the event touches the player).
You will also need a parallel event to reset the boulder's position from time to time (when they arrive on the bottom of your map).
That's pretty much how you can make simple falling boulder. It's probably not the only way to make it. Also it doesn't work well if you set diagonal movements for your boulder (sometimes it fails to activate on contact).
I know it's hard to understand only by reading a post. But I hope it gives an idea of how falling boulders can be implemented without the use of script (much harder but more flexible)
"Movement Route", "Event Trigger" and "Parallel Events" are some stuff you should try to learn how they work because you will use a lot to make puzzles. They are not hard to understand.
Thanks for the description. I'm about done with the first dungeon, and will probably be finished with it by the end of today. We'll see how it turns out.
Hello! I would like to know if there are any pluggings or any way to customize how battles look?
I was thinking that when you start the battle for it to appear the eyes of your characters and opponents sorta like Ace Attorney.
Sadly I don't know how that would be possible so I would be needing help! If you can help me in any way I would really apreciate it!
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