1101: Just Finish the Damn Thing

I’ve lost count of the number of “make my own game” projects I’ve started and abandoned over the years. I’ve started a new one recently which, theoretically, should be relatively straightforward to finish, so I will keep you all updated on its progress occasionally via this blog.

I’m no programmer, so I tend to gravitate towards solutions that allow you to flex your creative muscles and create interactive entertainment without having to, well, code anything. My weapon of choice for the last few attempts has been the excellent RPG Maker VX Ace, which is an immensely powerful tool capable of doing some really great things while at the same time allowing pretty much anyone to churn out a fairly generic top-down JRPG without too much difficulty.

It’s the “capable of doing some really great things” part that I often find myself struggling with. Y’see, the trouble with being presented with a wealth of possibilities is choosing which ones you want to pursue and which ones you want to ignore. The temptation is to incorporate as many of them as possible in an attempt to make something as awesome as possible, but inevitably if you do that — particularly if you’re working alone — you’ll hit a brick wall where something doesn’t quite work properly with something else, get disheartened and probably give up.

I’m talking vaguely. Let me give some specific examples. The new game I’ve started making as a means of proving I can take a project through from start to finish is simply an adaptation of the quests from MB/Games Workshop’s classic board game Hero Quest. Given that the structure and storyline of the Hero Quest board game is very much a generic sort of dungeon crawler, this shouldn’t be too difficult once I’ve done what I always initially think of as “the annoying bit” — setting up the characters, statistics, skills and whatnot, and finding some appropriate graphics for their sprites. (I call it “the annoying bit” but if I sit down and get on with it, I actually find this part quite fun after a while.)

Anyway, I’m about halfway done with “the annoying bit” — its initial stages, anyway — and already I’m finding myself torn in several directions. Do I stick with RPG Maker’s rather generic first-person battle interface? It doesn’t evoke the feel of Hero Quest that much, but then trying to adapt a board game and sticking too religiously to its rules can often ruin the “computer gaminess” of it. All right then, I thought, I’ll stick with this battle system, but I’ll tweak it so things like damage formulae are a little closer to rolling the dice in the game. Except when I thought I’d done that, I discovered that my ineptitude with composing damage formulae to accurately simulate dice rolls created a number of monsters that were literally impossible to hurt. Not good. I replaced the formula with its original one, which deals with much higher numbers than your average tabletop game. Will that ruin the atmosphere? Is “Rogar does 96 damage” somehow less powerful than “Rogar does 4 damage”? Probably not. That’s a stupid thing to think.

I’m probably overthinking it, I know, and should just get on with it. What I think I really need to do is just make the game with the default systems, and then tweak and fine-tune afterwards. Difficulty balancing and that sort of thing is an important part of testing, so I’ll leave that until there’s actually a game there to test — there’s no point getting hung up on problems that don’t actually exist yet.

So that’s the plan. Over the next few days I will be taking some time to plug in Hero Quest’s various spells and items into the game in a format that will work within RPG Maker’s style of play, then I’ll put the game itself together. Then I’ll show it to some select friends — this project probably won’t get a wide release, unless it actually ends up being surprisingly good — and then, flush with satisfaction at having actually carried something through to completion for once, I can embark on something a little more ambitious.

One step at a time.