The one thing that annoys you the most about the RPG maker engine you use

[amerk]

The thing that annoys me the most about Ace is basically the mapping because it's hard to get a decent looking map. Other than that nothing really annoys me about it.

I don't think it's so much hard as it is time consuming. Then again, any maps will take time and effort. My main gripe would be how layers are handled. It'd be nice if each A# was its own layer (A1, A2, through A5), and then B through E each had their own. But also include a tile generator that lets you grab the tiles you want from each set and paste them into a new set without having to resort to outside software. Extra bonus if the tiles you grab also copy over the passability and directions so you don't have to redo this. And maybe a quick color slider like you have with battlers for quick recoloring.

Anything more advanced, though, is probably best suited for parallax mapping, but these few basics above would all a lot of people would need.

 

[Matseb2611]

Here's another one:

Anyone ever found a 'Redo' button? There were times when I've clicked 'Undo' by accident, and since there isn't a 'Redo' button, I had to do the deleted action again.

 

[Tai_MT]

And I haven't played any of those games, Archeia.  Overly flashy I would consider the summons from most Final Fantasy games (there are some that take upwards of 30 seconds to execute!).  Some of the animations in Chrono Trigger were a bit overly flashy (Luminaire, while completely awesome, starts to take too long to watch and players, including myself, simply start mashing "Attack" instead).

The thing about attack animations (at least from what I've learned here in the forums and from playtester friends) is that they tend to be pretty sweet the first few times.  But, after you've seen them 20+ times, the players just don't really care what it looks like anymore.  They've seen it.  Even the coolest and flashiest animation will be ignored after the 20th use of it.  Why?  Because in most RPGs, players will spend the vast majority of the game time in combat.  It's fairly easy to get burnt out on watching the same things over and over again.  Players just begin to read the text or look at the damage numbers as those are the more engaging part of the battle after a while.

Flashy animations are all well and good...  But, they never hold up over time.  The longer a player spends in your game watching the animations, the less interest they will have in them altogether.  The exception being if they obtain a new skill and they want to see what it looks like.

 

[Archeia]

I found that if the animation is interesting enough even if they're slightly 'long' you won't really get tired of them. FF isn't really a good example of flashy particle effects suitable battle as they tend to overdo things. Like dang Knights of the Round Table, Supernova and Eden. :/


Here's a battle animation that I never get tired of and it's spoilerific I guess for those who want to play Eternal Sonata.

Spoiler

http://youtu.be/hSm7igiH7mg?t=4m55s

And this is one skill I'll never get tired of using, hearing or watching.

 

[amerk]

I don't know, anything more than 10 seconds of animation should be allowed to skip. And if it's a hit all attack, please for the love of god, do it one time for all rather than one time for each. I hate RPG Maker's set up with instant kills, because rather than going down all at once, they all have to disappear one at a time.

 

[Susan]

I am kind of wondering if it is just people who make games here who tend to dislike long battle animations? Or is it specific to those made with the RM? I'm not sure since you started referencing commercial games.

I have quite a few friends who play all sorts of games, RPGs included, and they absolutely love those long flashy battle animations.

If players in general hated long flashy battle animations, I would think that game companies would have stopped or reduced their usage by now. It would certainly save them a lot of time and money since it is neither easy nor cheap to create those animations.

As Galenmereth mentioned, making a 20 frame animation itself would take a lot of work.

 

[Tai_MT]

Okay... the second clip...  I'm sorry, but that would absolutely annoy the crap out of me and I would never ever use it in a million years because of how massively long and drawn out that entire sequence is.  That thing could almost be it's own episode of DBZ at this point.

As for the first one...  I'm not sure what attack animation I was looking for.  The thing started like 5 minutes in and all I really saw was a bunch of basic attacks all clustered together.  Or, maybe it was the thing with the big line of explosions and the purple ball thing?  It seems short enough that I'd probably use it frequently...  But, I can honestly see getting bored of it after the 15th time of the guy calling out his attack and then using it.

 

[Archeia]

The second one is something you don't understand as you haven't played the game. The mechanics aren't your standard RPG fare as you protect the singers on the back and they support you from behind. So it might seem like it dragged on especially since the dude is just testing it out on a random battle. It might 'annoy' you from looking at it but it's different from playing. In Ar Tonelico, the animations actually contribute on the success and failure of your attacks.

And Sterk, from Atelier series, going all manga-nized and slicing the moon into half with cherry petals in the most manliest way and voice possible is never going to get old in my book. Super Robot Wars had overly crazy animations that also contributed to its major success within its fanbase.

Point is, comparing everything to FF as to not put any effort on putting emphasis on your attack animations, especially in a front view battle system like RM, would just make all your battles boring and a rather restrictive viewpoint. Players will get tired of something for the 20th time, when I have seen fellow minded players enjoying all the attacks and animations of Mana Khemia, etc. that some to the point of plagiarizing, is rather ehhh...I won't say that's an accurate observation. Especially since MK can easily reach 60 hrs.

 

[Housekeeping]

That depends though. A 1 second animation can be really flashy and be nicer for it, without it impeding gameplay. The problem with the Animation Editor is that it's functionally limiting in even basic ways: No way to select an object below the most recently placed one if they overlap, for instance. This leads to tons of work if you want to edit your multi-layer animation, even if it's just 20 frames long

Ctrl+click lets you do just that.  Also, alt+click and drag frames to move them two pixels at a time instead of eight.  That TIP'S on the house (I swear to god that's not a pun).

I actually kind of love the animation editor, haha.

 

[Tai_MT]

I get the basics of the mechanics of that attack from looking at it.  You select the move, it goes through what appears to be three phases of "charging" and then it fires for what looks like around 300K total damage to everyone you're fighting.  The phases of charging the attack seem to take about 5 minutes (I'm not sure how many rounds, I didn't count... but a five minute charge for a single attack is quite a bit excessive).  Then, you have a 30 second actual "firing" animation with some fairly extraneous animation that looks like it could have been cut.  Do we need to see that same tower looking thing three times for the animation of bolts of energy from space hitting a target?  I can't say that we do (even if I'd have context for it, I could see arguing that it's a bit excessive and extraneous for what amounts to a bunch of lasers from space satellites hitting the enemy).

Also...  I'm not "comparing everything to final fantasy".  I used Final Fantasy Summon animations as a reference for what I consider "overly flashy".  I even used a Chrono Trigger reference for what I consider "overly flashy".  I honestly have no problem with "flashy" in general.  All I've said is that you can make your animations as "flashy" as you want, but at some point players will get burnt out on them.  Especially if they start to take too long.  By all means, make animations flashy.  Just, don't expect them to hold up after the 20 hour mark or more.

But, if you want a good argument against flash in general...  I present to you "Dwarf Fortress".  There are very few, if any, actual animations of combat in that game (sometimes you can see breath attacks... or enemies get flung and splattered... But you don't see much beyond that).  Yet, the combat system in that game (and combat in general in that game) has a huge draw.  Why?  Because when you read the Battle Log of what happened...  Oh, it's way more interesting (and funny!) than any RPG to date.  Go ahead, lets see you animate some of the random crazy stuff you can read happens in combat in Dwarf Fortress.  Flash?  Who needs flash when you have Dwarves biting armadillos in the leg and then punching through their brain?

Honestly, I would argue it's not really about how flashy your animations are.  I'd argue it's how much fun your combat system is to engage in to begin with.  Graphics are nice and all, but it doesn't take much time for them to become "dated" and "old".  If you must focus on either flashy battle animations or your actual combat mechanics...  I'd vote mechanics.

Don't let that deter you from making battle animations that look good or have a bit of flair...  I just don't think that aspect of any game is more important than the story, the characters, combat, states, equipment, maps, items, and the skills in general.  I'd say animations would be something you do when you've got the rest of that done.  But, that's just me.  Some people love graphics above anything else in a game.  I try to avoid those people, but they do exist

 

[Galenmereth]

Ctrl+click lets you do just that.  Also, alt+click and drag frames to move them two pixels at a time instead of eight.  That TIP'S on the house (I swear to god that's not a pun).

I actually kind of love the animation editor, haha.

Waaaaat. Thanks for that

 

[Tsukihime]

Check the help file on the animation editor. It's actually quite...complicated.