woootbm's YT channel: hard critiques on RPG Maker games

[woootbm]

Here's a new episode!


This week we play Star Shift Origins, thanks to Kiyasu Oka (and @TheAM-Dol 's meddling). It's the longest video yet! Probably because we recorded gameplay for like 2 hours. Whoops!

This game knows how to tickle us with its ridiculous blood effects. But will it be enough to end Simple Gaming's reign of terror?

 

[RCXGaming]

Here's a new episode!


This week we play Star Shift Origins, thanks to Kiyasu Oka (and @TheAM-Dol 's meddling). It's the longest video yet! Probably because we recorded gameplay for like 2 hours. Whoops!

This game knows how to tickle us with its ridiculous blood effects. But will it be enough to end Simple Gaming's reign of terror?

It's so interesting seeing the difference in reaction between you+Tony and Nolan towards Kiyasu's game.

I'm also kind of a sucker for Star Trek-like outer space games, just because I feel you can do a lot more with it than a bog standard medieval setting. It's neat. Not sure how I feel about the 7-man party though, I think that's a pretty excessive headcount for units the player has to control in turn-based combat - especially if each individual member has A LOT of techs to use.

 

[TheAM-Dol]

It's so interesting seeing the difference in reaction between you+Tony and Nolan towards Kiyasu's game.

I'm watching it now, so no spoilers

but, that's why it's good to watch multiple people play the same game: getting different perspectives on opinions. It may also help me see if there was just something I missed or perhaps I just wasn't getting it at that time, but with another's perspective, maybe I can appreciate the game.

 

[woootbm]

Hey, a new dev log!



Whoops, I never responded to these posts. I think there was a particular edit I was curious to see how people reacted to, heh.

@RCXGaming I think Tony and I both might have been suckers for the setting, as well. Although I think outside of genre bias, having cool location(s) and showing it off in eventing is definitely a good idea in a more general sense. The 7 man party felt quite arbitrary, to be honest. Like they figured out what was the biggest number of characters they could have at once and went with that. I read that there's a piece of gear you can get that gives you an extra action, and if you farm you can equip it on every character. Imagine having 14 attacks on your turn!

@TheAM-Dol I definitely got the sense from watching you cover it that we'd have differing opinions. I didn't think we'd change your mind. Different tastes, goooo!

 

[SpyroFan67]

Hey all!

After thinking about this for a long time, I finally bit the bullet and made a YouTube channel to make video reviews! My goal is to be a source of direct, hard-hitting critiques for RPG Maker games. No kiddie gloves here, we're going through the fire and flames, baby!

To start off we'll specifically be reviewing commercial games. We're not gonna rain on anyone's parade who's just doing this casually. The idea is that if you expect people to pay money for your product, you should also expect people to want to get their money's worth; consumers are fickle!

In this first episode, we tackle a game that epitomizes the dreaded RPG Maker stigma: Ballad of Radolf.


I apologize that the game audio is too high in the video. I'll have to adjust it manually with Windows mixer next time

Format:

• The reviewers are me (woootbm) and my buddy Jabroni Tony (not on these forums).
• Examine store page and discuss the game at large and how it is presented
  • Dig around reviews and any auxiliary posts to analyze the "story" of this game's existence
• Play the game for ~1 hour (this might get cut short)
  • Commentary during gameplay discussing shortcomings and offering fixes or suggestions
• Review the game using 5 categories with an out-of-ten system and give it a final grade

Possible questions:

Are you guys ***holes?

Yes.

What makes you guys the authority on game dev?

The internet.

Will you review my commercial/non-commercial game?

Yes, but you should expect us to be harsh. Like, if you go in with an attitude that you're gonna blow us away you're gonna have a bad time. The point is to nitpick games to death so dev's have something to fix or improve.

How often do you plan to post?

Ideally once a week. More realistically once every two weeks or once a month. Editing takes a lot of time!

LOL sounds like you guys could be the next "Angry Video Game Nerd"! Quite frankly I find reviews of bad games very amusing. It's funny to watch people pick it apart and be extremely harsh. The more harsh, the better. It helps to make it so the consumer doesn't let themselves be taken advantage of or ripped off.

 

[bgillisp]

Within reason. If you trash just to trash at some point you will not be having any fun with anything. Sadly many end up doing that and then just grumble about the good 'ol' days. But proper feedback is valuable too.

 

[SpyroFan67]

Within reason. If you trash just to trash at some point you will not be having any fun with anything. Sadly many end up doing that and then just grumble about the good 'ol' days. But proper feedback is valuable too.

I know it may surprise some people that I'm saying this given how I'm just a young millennial and not some old guy who played video games when they first came out in high school or college back in the 80s, but I actually think video games were better back in the day. I mean just think about how many cheap crappy badly-made games there are now on the Apple Store and Google and whatnot. There's thousands of them. And they're all badly-made, rushed pieces of crap. Back in the day people had less stuff to work with; you couldn't just slap a game together and try to get people to download it to make money; you not only had to be more creative and put more effort into it as far as the technology went, but the majority of games back then weren't just mass-produced cheaply to make a quick buck. The graphics and hardware in games may be a lot more advanced than it once was, making some past games especially from the 80s and 90s era seem primitive in comparison, but none of that matters if you just slap a game together to make a quick profit and rip people off. There's a lot of good games out there being made nowadays, but there are also just as many bad ones. My point of course is that back in the day, you couldn't make a crappy game without being called out on it by your customers and the video game industry, but nowadays you can literally make hundreds of them, and nobody will question it. Not trying to be overly negative here; I'm just being honest.

 

[RCXGaming]

@RCXGaming I think Tony and I both might have been suckers for the setting, as well. Although I think outside of genre bias, having cool location(s) and showing it off in eventing is definitely a good idea in a more general sense. The 7 man party felt quite arbitrary, to be honest. Like they figured out what was the biggest number of characters they could have at once and went with that. I read that there's a piece of gear you can get that gives you an extra action, and if you farm you can equip it on every character. Imagine having 14 attacks on your turn!

Good lord.

Hey, a new dev log!

Yet another topic of interest!

Stunning enemies is another difficult aspect of RPGs to keep under control. I haven't exactly seen an MMO that controls status effect use (don't really have interest in playing MMOs), but my fix for "can't move" and other such impairing states (Charm, Confusion, etc.) was to do a few things:

* Have enemies be affected by different state amounts per turn - whether it's longer or shorter

* Have a troop event that makes enemies become immune to a status effect that would otherwise wreck / stunlock them. Almost exactly like what you have in your video, but they become immune for the entire fight and not just a few turns.

Both work together in making states viable and even useful on actual bosses, since... well, here's an example.

Stop affects enemies for 2 turns normally. But a boss has a +1 modifier so they're affected by it for 3 turns. However, once you inflict it on them you cannot inflict it again.

An enemy that requires Stop will have to be insanely tricky/powerful (which my other systems support), so you need to learn how to use those three precious free turns properly.

Another aspect of stunning is how the player handles being stunned, which is equally important if not more so because I've been in the situation of being stunlocked to death because I couldn't get out of a "can't move" status.

My answer to this was to introduce two items - the Pure Fruit and the Auto-Fruit. The Pure Fruit is an accessory item that, if you have it equipped, automatically cures the player when the turn ends if they get affected by any status, even ones where they can't move (Freeze, Petrify, Stop, etc.)

The cost is that the Fruit uses itself up and you have to re-equip another one, and you can only carry three (I think? I forgot what the number was). However, you can also change equipment mid-combat so it's not an inconvenience to re-spec.

The Auto-variant automatically cures everyone if they're hit with a "can't move" status just by having it in your inventory, but you can imagine the stack for this is only 1 and it can't distinguish who is stopped, just that someone is.

Also had a thought of a "Sentry Gem" accessory item where it automatically attacks the enemy with little magic bolts even when you can't move, but it occupies the same slot so you can't have both a Fruit and the Gem at the same time.

 

[woootbm]

but I actually think video games were better back in the day. I mean just think about how many cheap crappy badly-made games there are now on the Apple Store and Google and whatnot. There's thousands of them. And they're all badly-made, rushed pieces of crap. Back in the day people had less stuff to work with; you couldn't just slap a game together and try to get people to download it to make money; you not only had to be more creative and put more effort into it as far as the technology went, but the majority of games back then weren't just mass-produced cheaply to make a quick buck.

Soooo I am old enough to remember the old days. And I can tell you that games were not "better" back then. The limitations of having to rely on publishers and make cartridges acted as a gating system so there was a certain level of investment and know-how required to make a game, sure. As a result perhaps a higher percent of good games came out, but they were still mostly bad. It's hard to tell because you had a smaller sample size. But there were some definite stinkers. AVGN isn't covering rare finds, he's just finding the best (funniest) examples.

Of the 300ish games released on the NES, you'd probably struggle to find 20 still worth playing today. Unless you have a high tolerance for outdated design. Then it's probably like 40.

And people tend to think games were less buggy, but that's also not true. Almost every NES game would have slow down caused by having too many animated sprites on screen. Even a quality game like Mega Man has a 100% repro crash by just wiggling the character back and forth on a long stretch of level. The difference is we have tools to make recording and reporting bugs to the entire world now, so we're all hyper-aware of every bug.

The SNES and onward got better. But then you'll encounter some overlap of BS from greedy publishers wanting a piece of the growing video game market which grew more and more till we got to what we have now.

Weren't we just talking about that "90% of everything is crap" philosophy in this thread?

Stunning enemies is another difficult aspect of RPGs to keep under control. I haven't exactly seen an MMO that controls status effect use (don't really have interest in playing MMOs),

I probably should have explained what MMO's and MOBA's do. So say you have a 4 second stun. You stun a guy, and within 30 seconds you stun him again. This time it'll be 2 seconds. Do it again: 1 second. Again: immune. Sometimes there's other factors like other CC abilities used, other players, etc. It gets really complicated. Too complicated, especially for an RM game.

Have enemies be affected by different state amounts per turn - whether it's longer or shorter

This sounds like a lot of work to implement. Unless there's some kind of plugin to partial resist states? Admittedly I stick to binary pass/fail when it comes to hit chance type stuff.

* Have a troop event that makes enemies become immune to a status effect that would otherwise wreck / stunlock them. Almost exactly like what you have in your video, but they become immune for the entire fight and not just a few turns.

I would just need to remove the duration on my status immunity to do this, unless the idea is that not every enemy is to have diminishing returns.

Another aspect of stunning is how the player handles being stunned, which is equally important if not more so because I've been in the situation of being stunlocked to death because I couldn't get out of a "can't move" status.

Ohhhh I didn't talk about the player. This is even more specific than my usual design taste because AM has such a funny party structure. I'm probably never going to stun the Chassis, because that would be too crippling to the player. I might stun the other parts for 1 turn, though.

My answer to this was to introduce two items - the Pure Fruit and the Auto-Fruit. The Pure Fruit is an accessory item that, if you have it equipped, automatically cures the player when the turn ends if they get affected by any status, even ones where they can't move (Freeze, Petrify, Stop, etc.)

The cost is that the Fruit uses itself up and you have to re-equip another one, and you can only carry three (I think? I forgot what the number was). However, you can also change equipment mid-combat so it's not an inconvenience to re-spec.

The Auto-variant automatically cures everyone if they're hit with a "can't move" status just by having it in your inventory, but you can imagine the stack for this is only 1 and it can't distinguish who is stopped, just that someone is.

It sounds like you got a lot of CC management possibilities!

 

[RCXGaming]

This sounds like a lot of work to implement. Unless there's some kind of plugin to partial resist states? Admittedly I stick to binary pass/fail when it comes to hit chance type stuff.

The way I did it was by having a Yanfly custom apply affect conditional branch in the state's notetag section and then mark the enemy ID I want to be affected by longer turns.

<Custom Apply Effect>
if (user.isEnemy() && [1,2,73,74].includes(user.enemyId())) {
   user._stateTurns[26] += 5;
};
</Custom Apply Effect>

I dunno if you could call that a lot of work, but it does involve having to think of which enemies are affected by states longer or not. Which then in turn affects how I make their primary design.

If I want the player to land a specific status on an enemy, the chance is going to be 1000%. Everything else is a fun bonus.

This is the type of RNG I hate in RPGs, so I just omit it altogether. Plus, if the enemy becomes completely immune to it afterwards then I might as well make landing the actual status effect as consistent and easy as possible.

I did have the idea of making Stop spells inflict Slow if the target is immune, as a consolation prize for not being able to stop the enemy outright.

I would just need to remove the duration on my status immunity to do this, unless the idea is that not every enemy is to have diminishing returns.

(Also I wasn't insinuating that you absolutely have to do this for your games? I was just sharing how I did it for mine since the topic made me think about it, and if anybody else reading this wants to take my method then they're free to.)

It sounds like you got a lot of CC management possibilities!

... CC management?

 

[SpyroFan67]

@wootbm I agree with everything you said about the old days. Only a handful of NES games WOULD be worth playing today. But "Super Mario Bros." and "Legend of Zelda" and "Mega Man" and "Final Fantasy" will always be classics. At least for a while. What I'm saying is, the few NES games that are still worth playing today are real treasures.

 

[wilpuri]

Some of those old games are so simple and at the same time so good, they will be good forever.
The thing with many new games is that what made them impressive year 2010 can be outdated and clumsy 2023.

Mario 3 and Mario World do the 2D platforming perfectly still today. Something like Tomb Raider was groundbreaking 1996, but almost unplayable ftom today’s perspective.
Some new games might be ”new Marios”, but many will be ”Tomb Raiders”.

 

[woootbm]

The way I did it was by having a Yanfly custom apply affect conditional branch in the state's notetag section and then mark the enemy ID I want to be affected by longer turns.

Ooh, this is a cool bit of code. I might have to steal this for ... something. No idea what, heh. I've always wished RPGM had a "enemy type" variable built in. This is a good way to fake the end user results of that.

I did have the idea of making Stop spells inflict Slow if the target is immune, as a consolation prize for not being able to stop the enemy outright.

A+ design!

... CC management?

Ahh I guess this is a term that comes from MMO's/MOBA's. CC = crowd control. It refers to things like stuns and sleeps. Your equip item was reminding me of a PvP trinket in WoW that removed CC effects when you used it. So it was generally considered best in slot for PvP because ya gotta counter that CC!

Some of those old games are so simple and at the same time so good, they will be good forever.
The thing with many new games is that what made them impressive year 2010 can be outdated and clumsy 2023.

Mario 3 and Mario World do the 2D platforming perfectly still today. Something like Tomb Raider was groundbreaking 1996, but almost unplayable ftom today’s perspective.
Some new games might be ”new Marios”, but many will be ”Tomb Raiders”.

There's always going to be a handful of games that stand the test of time. I don't think I'm too optimistic to think that there are still going to be games that are good forever coming out now and in the future. It's just harder to accept right now because we're actively parsing through the trash. We are far removed from the experience of renting something like Street Fighter 2010 and wishing we got Mario 3 instead, heh.

 

[woootbm]

It's time for another dev submission, it's @Starmage 's game!



My most cluttered thumbnail yet!

Today we got a game with some gen Z talk and a dash of humor, but it's not terrible! Imagine that!



PS: I have some RL things coming up so probably won't have a game review for a few weeks. I might try to load up a bunch of dev logs to sprinkle them in to fill the absence, but I might miss a week still.

 

[Starmage]

It's time for another dev submission, it's @Starmage 's game!



My most cluttered thumbnail yet!

Today we got a game with some gen Z talk and a dash of humor, but it's not terrible! Imagine that!



PS: I have some RL things coming up so probably won't have a game review for a few weeks. I might try to load up a bunch of dev logs to sprinkle them in to fill the absence, but I might miss a week still.

I already posted my response on the video! Thanks so much again you guys for the detailed review and feedback! I had fun with the playthrough! <3

 

[woootbm]

Another dev log!



Numbers numbers numbers! A little bipolar today as I added both a silly edit and classical music for the backing ambience. Just a little bit aware of how boring this topic can be for people. I say it's pretty neat, and if you're making an RPG you better got-dang care about numbers!

Anywho... the good news I did a batch record and I'll have dev logs for the next two weeks. They might feel a bit rushed, though

 

[Michael Primo]

I don't know if I'll ever make a commercial game (even if I am...can I say "half trying" now?), but I'll watch this channel. Seems interesting! Thank you for making content for us and make us avoid rookie mistakes with your critics!

 

[woootbm]

@Michael Primo it doesn’t have to be a commercial game if a dev submits it, but we will still be just as hard on those who do!

Thanks for the watch!

 

[Michael Primo]

@Michael Primo it doesn’t have to be a commercial game if a dev submits it, but we will still be just as hard on those who do!

Thanks for the watch!

Oh man, that sounds like a challenge!

Have you other episodes planned of the series?

 

[woootbm]

Another dev log!

Dev Log 8: Attrition Part 2


This time asking if this feature is enough to merit its own video.

@Michael Primo well I have a plan for the next ~2 episodes. But after that we tend to decide week to week mostly.