Maintaining Quality

[Cinnamon Dev]

Hello, as December approaches I am currently In a bind on my first "major" RPG maker game. However, In past games I have made the quality starts terribly then increases in quality (due to me becoming more familiar to RMXP). What are some tips you can give me about how to maintain good quality on a solo project.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

I have a dummy project laying around that I always use to test and tinker with an idea before I get too deep into implementing it into the actual project and making a hot mess out of it. Often I find a better way to do something later on so taking a little time aside lets it bake a bit longer for me to think things through. For assets, I tend to use placeholders until much later on because I suffer from "changed my mind itis." I also do all my relevant game writing in a word document to really comb it for mistakes and edit it for clarity, flow, etc. Basically, I just do a lot of helpful things off to the side of the physical project so that the actual game file isn't my very first time attempting to work with the concept.

 

[Milennin]

Basically, what I'm doing is make small games out of certain features that I want in my big main game (for example, I want to have a character with a stance switch mechanic, so I'm first building a small game around that feature before I make it in my main project). It's a good way to play around with an idea that I have, but need experience working with, and I also get to finish more games by making small things first. Plus, when making something small, you're less likely to have huge variances in quality, so that could be a good thing to keep in mind, in general.

 

[Kes]

When it is something that is repeated, Common Events are your friends.  It is much easier to edit one common event later on when you discover a better way of doing something than to find and edit 10 or more individual events.

 

[Aweed]

I think one of the most important things in making a game is story, lore, and characters. And how I make all of that is that I look at other sources. Every great story had inspiration, take game of thrones for example George R.R martin took inspiration from the war of the roses a real medieval war between the York's and Lancaster. Btw how do you @ a person

 

[Dr. Delibird]

Consistency. Consistency in your game design, in your writing, in everything. Consistency is key to the creation of anything remotely good.


A lot of practice project helps too. No matter what you do you will always learn how to do things better as you work on your project. You can never achieve perfection, even your own standards of perfection are unobtainable unless your idea of perfection is being content. You have to find a point in your project where you can find content in your work. Don't settle for less but just realise that if you keep scrapping your project or restarting it you will never finish anything. Be content to a certain extent or be lost on the endless cycle that so many of us have been in or at least seen.