Dragonitas wrote:An update to the poll has been made and I will happily answer any questions anybody has. I apologize for the lack of content but I had (and still have) to deal with personal issues as well as having to reimagine how the game would look like since a lot of what I had planned in advance would need to be, at the very least, changed in a minor way. The good news are, I suppose at least, that without a combat system I won't have to worry about balancing at all which means I will only have to work on scenes which, although they take longer and are more complex to write themselves, aren't as convoluted and hard to work on as a moveset, theme, statline, etc from a monster encounter that would have to line up with items unlocked by the main character at different points of the story. WHICH leads me to my next point:
If you've taken enough time to read my message thus far, now that a balance for encounters won't be needed, would you like the game to take a more open approach to the story? Similar to Mysta's Mist Adventure 1 and 2? My only fear is that by taking that approach Gulp Quest may become a bit too similar to the formula of those games in execution, even if the worlds are vastly different.
Let me know what you think of that.
I do think that getting rid of the combat system is actually a good choice if you don't have much experience with balancing and programming that kind of thing in RPG Maker. Focusing on the scenes themselves (which I think is what most people are here for) instead of balancing combat does seem like a more effective use of time. Regarding the poll you updated, I think all three of the options could be a lot of fun and have their own place, but I also don't view any of them as mutually exclusive or think that they necessarily should be. My vote would be for using a mix of all three methods. The only one I would advise being cautious about implementing is option 2 (Having enemy sprites walking around the environment that trigger scenes) as I've seen some games that do this get exceeding frustrating when trying to avoid the AI.
Regarding the comparison to MMA 1 & 2, I think the game could work perfectly well either in a more open or more linear structure. Both of those games use a combination of linearity (New areas & scenes open up as you progress through the game) and open-endedness (A large number of scenes need to be found through exploration and aren't encountered as part of the main story). I think choosing to follow a balance similar to the MMA games is perfectly valid. If it ain't broke don't fix it, and I don't think anyone would decry you for sticking with a formula that's proven to work. That being said, there's a lot of room to do something different by rebalancing or committing entirely to one of those two approaches, and I think either could work too. I think it all comes down to how safe you want to be, and how much you want to try to do something different.
