Repetition: When is it too much?
Repetition is a commonly used tactic in rpg games in order to extend playtime or to hammer in a point. So when does that become too much? A simple answer is when the player gets sick of it, or really, just before that point.
If you have constant battles and all the battles end up the same, the player will start to tire of battles, especially if they don’t have a goal to push them through that tedium. If you have repeating scenes (see endless eight as an example), it can easily become tedious for the player to keep seeing the same scenes over and over again. Even replayability can suffer if the player feels like they are just repeating the same thing.
Now, some players will have more patience with repetition while others will have less. Your goal is to focus on your target audience though. Will your target audience be okay with the amount of repetition? In most cases, you want to err on the side of less repetition. In other cases, you should have a specific reason for wanting more repetition.
Increasing playtime is a bad reason to increase repetition in and of itself. A player is more likely to enjoy less repetition and shorter gameplay than a longer gameplay that feels like a slog.
Healing. Why to have a source of free healing, why to skip it.
So a very common issue is healing. Healing plays a very important role in RPGs where resources matter and there are reasons to provide it and reasons to skip it.
So first, let us take Demon Souls as an example. Demon Souls did a very fine job at balancing their game for the most part. That said, you’ll notice that they have frequent healing points, but they balance this by making it so that using the healing also resets the enemies. This acts as a sort of balancing factor, which is often a reason why a developer might not want healing - it can be hard to balance. By making it so that certain things reset (and other things don’t) when you heal, this allows a more specific level of balance that is, to some extent, controlled by the player as well as the developer.
Now, some things to note:
Healing methods: There are generally several methods that this is done. Healing at checkpoints, healing at town, healing after battle, and constant regeneration are four common methods. Each has their own advantage. Knowing you will heal after battle can make fights easier to balance and also allow players to feel confident in fighting, which can help reduce the feeling of slog. Simply knowing that a healing point exist can make a player play very differently. Healing by action can add to strategy.
Healing HP: This can be extremely important as this allows your player to grind as needed (especially if there is an element of randomness). This also acts as a safety net if your player makes a mistake. This is why having a free healing (or some safe way outside of battle to pay for healing) is important.
Healing MP: This is a very important consideration if you have a mage type in your playable characters. Mages are often very weak in RPGs, especially in RPGs made by newer developers. Why? MP. Many games have a poor balance with mages and MP. Sometimes the spells cost so much MP that you can’t reach the next healing point before running out of MP, forcing your mage to spend long periods of time fighting with physical attacks, which can be simply annoying and tedious. Sometimes, the spells themselves are just too weak and aren’t really useful, so you end up having to spend more MP anyway. Now, this can be easily solved with MP Regeneration of some form. If your player has confidence that they can keep casting spells with some form of recovery option, they are more likely to feel less restricted with using magic.
Now, why might you not want the player to heal or have free healing? Specific cases, such as a roguelike. You might want the player to die every so often. You might have a game based on the player pushing as far as they can as a challenge run. There are other cases, of course.
Repeating events/Lack of sanitation
Now, some devs know I played a lot of games with my name as \V[1]. This caused some issues/weirdness in some games, especially when some long string was stored into variable 1. While not something most RPGM devs would have to deal with, string sanitation is something that plugin makers might want to consider and something RPGM devs might want to consider in if using a plugin that allows free input. Those that know me know I’ve done crazy names like “\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n” or “kid, really now. Where are your parents?\nWhat? They let a kid like you wander around?\nWhat irresponsible parents.\nI’m going to go talk to them.” and such then walked around changing chunks of the story.
Now, another common issue is repeating events. Events that repeat when they shouldn’t and lock the player into an infinite loop, events that repeat when triggered even though they shouldn’t repeat because no switch keeps them from repeating, events that repeat whenever you re-enter a map because they don’t have some method of saving the event state. These are common issues to look out for and there are various techniques for having these not reactivate.
Movement speed: The effects on the player when you use various movement speeds
Now, there are benefits to reducing the player’s movement speed, but in many cases, it feels more frustrating for the player to have to move at a slower speed, especially a noticeably slow speed. This means when you slow down a player’s speed, you need to do so with a very specific purpose in mind.
Conversely, there are benefits to speeding up the player’s movement speed, but this can make the player feel rushed.
One thing to note is that these effects can be compounded by map design and size. A large, windy map can make slow speed even more painful. A tiny, straightforward map can make high speed feel even more fast paced.
Now, what this means is that you want your player’s speed to be based on several factors including map size and how natural the speed feels. This is a balancing act in many cases and goes a bit into the next topic.
Realism vs Comfort. When is too much realism bad?
So we all know that many developers and some players are always touting realism. They want the game to be super realistic. Gravity has to be perfect, we want a food system, injuries to individual body parts that have realistic effects!
Okay, let us stop there and examine the issues on the development side. It costs time and potentially money to develop all these systems. Having all of these in a game can also actually limit what the developer is able to do. Maybe you want to add in a system for fighting enemies with weapons. Okay, that is fine, but can a real person actually hold that 200 kg sword? Now, assuming you find someone who can hold that sword, could they actually swing it freely? Obviously no normal person could do so, so now with realism in mind, you need to further consider sword designs. Or you could scrap it and say you don’t need realism there. But see the potential contradiction there?
Looking from the player side, is it really that fun for the player to keep having to find food to eat, exercise in the game to maintain their weight, feel fatigue from adventuring, potentially collapse from built up fatigue over several days, etc.? To a certain extent, it can be, but it goes back to the developer to make this fun and that does take some work.
So there are two things to consider with realism: Budget and audience interest. Even someone who says they want realism might not actually want realism. They want things to be realistic and want a certain level of realism, but once it goes beyond a certain point, they start finding it less fun. This will differ from person to person, but it is something to consider when deciding on how much realism to have.
For the developer, it is a balancing act. You want your world to be realistic (for example, don’t have a monster that is immune to bullets in a cutscene, but takes bullet damage just fine in battle as that will be immersion breaking), but realism can and often should be dialed back when it comes to player enjoyment.
Basically, you want the player to feel comfortable when playing your game and have fun. If adding realism doesn’t add to that or even detracts from that, consider whether or not it is really worth adding.
Taking Criticism to heart. How to respond to criticism.
(Note, I fail at this still, so take what I say here with a grain of salt. Hopefully someone else has some good tips on this subject.)
So one thing all developers should love is criticism. Good or bad, it means someone is willing to give you feedback. Positive feedback tells you what people enjoyed. Negative feedback tells you what people didn’t like or what people think you could improve on. These are both important.
Look at your feedback from a neutral perspective. What is the feedback telling you about your game? How can you implement it? Should you implement it? Would implementation work with your vision of your game? Would the implementation improve the game beyond your vision? These are all just some questions to consider.
Now, one thing I fail at is responding to criticism. Sometimes it is something that I think most devs would agree with - when the criticism is unwarranted and revolves around acting in a way that essentially purposefully breaks the game. (For example, if a bug only happens if you edit a map outside of the game, then that criticism may not be valid (although it could still be)).
Other times, it can be somewhat hard to convey what you want to your reviewers. You might agree with their suggestions and have a hard time to say it. You might disagree with their feedback, but still find it valuable. That can be especially hard to respond to.
One thing I’m trying to do is to say something to show that I did understand their feedback, but to say why I might use it or not use it. This may not be the ideal thing to do, but it is something that is definitely hard to do well.
One thing to definitely not do though (and I can’t say I follow this well enough) is attack those leaving feedback you disagree with. You might disagree with their review, but definitely do not attack them personally. I’ve definitely seen this happen where some dev or another goes out of their way to attack those they don’t agree with. I’ve even seen devs make attacks on things like a person’s appearance, gender, etc. That is definitely crossing the line in any situation, so I don’t know why some devs think it is okay to do so just because they aren’t happy with someone’s review. (Plus, in some places, this may be illegal depending on how it happens).
Even for troll feedback, if you feel like you might end up attacking the person, it might be better to just ignore the feedback instead of responding.
Saves: Why to keep saves plentiful vs limited.
For most cases, it is better to keep saves plentiful. Let your player save anywhere that isn’t a sealed location or point of no return. Do NOT let your player accidentally lock themselves out of progression by saving in a point where they can’t go back.
This is very important because, let us say I enter an area that I can’t leave. You need to be a minimum of level 50 to survive even the weakest encounters, but I am only level 30. If I am able to save and do so, now I can’t leave, can’t load a save to escape, and am not strong enough to progress any further, so now I have to restart from the beginning. Many players will just quit at that point.
Outside of that sort of thing though, you want the player to save often because you never know if maybe the player can only play for 5 minutes at a time. Even if you have to figure out some way to explain it, still let the player save anyways.
Now, there are times when you might want limited saves. For example, maybe you want the player to feel like they are in a stressful environment and can only save so many times. Take horror games as an example. Many horror games limit your ability to save and part of the reason is to add stress to the player.
You might also have a very specific lore reason to limit the saves of the player. Whatever you are doing though, make sure that when you limit the player’s ability to save, to do it very cautiously. Only limit the save ability if you have a specific reason in mind.