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The main issue with buffs/debuffs is that their value is hard to tell. A game may tell you Protect buffs defense by 10, but it takes some knowledge of damage formulas to figure out if that's good. Poison or sleep may be great, but the hard part is getting it to land and if not the turn's wasted. Usually you don't even know if an enemy's vulnerable to it and you missed or if it's immune. FF4 is made massively easier by most of the bosses being vulnerable to Slow, but good luck knowing that without a guide, or figuring out that it did anything when you don't know how fast they usually attack.
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Jul 25, 2019 04:47
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MR. J posted:What makes this interesting is that because the numbers in this game for the most part are pretty clear cut with little variation (you can only level so much until all available fights give you 0XP) is that you can carefully balance fights to be more like a puzzle. When you know it's going to take x many attacks to deplete the player's HP and vise versa, it's easier to come up with "tough but fair" challenges. My worry is if things get tight enough to hit a "if you didn't put this many levels into HP you're screwed, hope you kept backup saves" situation.
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Aug 7, 2019 15:11
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Most romhacks are made by people REALLY into the base game and mechanics. Once you know something it's "obvious" and the human brain tends to gloss over the effort spent learning a skill once it's learned. So they design for their skill, something that would challenge a person who knows it inside and out and all the ways to break it. Mario levels requiring mid-air shell jumps or pixel perfect distances. A DKC romhack with krushas on tiny platforms with *just* enough space to get around them. Pokemon fangames where seemingly mundane ones are locked away until endgame because they can bypass the dev's "clever" mechanic of OP bosses with 500 in every stat and a single weakness if you go grind this one guy 70 levels. It's easy to design "easy" and it's easy to design "impossible." Anything in between? That takes skill because you're designing for unknown skill levels and have to hold yourself back. And "fun"? That's going to be different for everyone and I think a flaw here is that the kind of personality that goes and makes a romhack is going to want to explore the limits and, more importantly, is used to winning. They're on the other side now, but most romhacks out there still have the personality of a designer trying to beat you rather than challenge you. That said, I think the main issues here are just that the poison damage is scaled for later-game use but the enemies' other damage is balanced around not getting poisoned. Everything else seems standard hard romhack territory.
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Sep 1, 2019 18:10
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MR. J posted:Still amused that allegedly the insane numbers do level off according to one poster and that the creators actually did blow their numbers load too early. Pacing for these hard mode hacks is probably the most common and biggest issue they have. Upside of the Mario RPG games using low numbers: a single point of something makes a big difference. Downside: a single point of something makes a big difference.
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Sep 24, 2019 05:27
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The Elder Scrolls games, I'm not sure if it's all or just some of them but enemies scale with level. The problem is that they scale to keep pace with someone pumping combat stats so if you spread your focus around you start falling behind.
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Nov 30, 2019 05:33
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:If I put food on top of another piece of food, will I become the best cook in my town too? Growing up instead of commercial cereal for breakfast we'd add milk to oats and raisins. We called it Oats with Milk and Raisins. I'm not sharing the secret recipe for Cheese Over Tuna on a Hot Dog Bun though.
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Dec 3, 2019 22:30
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I'm a bit worried by that last sentence. Is it a good idea to mobilize your personal fans to bully the people finishing up your hack for you?
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Dec 27, 2019 02:20
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heeheex2 posted:do you not understand jokes. Yeah, I've been on the receiving end of those "jokes". Eyeball deep in lines of code and some guy wanders by "Jack says you've been slacking ha ha ha". Whole bucket of laughs, great for morale.
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Dec 27, 2019 02:47
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heeheex2 posted:what are you talking about. this is a n64 game difficulty hack Code is code. I think it's bad form to talk about other people trying to run down elusive bugs and then dangle a treat behind them finishing. There's no feeling of team in the message; "I want to give you this, but THEY need to finish first". It's poor leadership.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:19
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To be fair, I'm definitely putting too much of myself into my read of those words. Old scars.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:42
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On a theoretical level, it depends on your definition of hard. One could abstract a game out to... hold on let me sketch up a chart: Where Max Ability is the maximum possible limits of the game and the lower bar is what the game actually requires of the player. Player skill then (ideally) resides somewhere between those two levels. A hard mode hack doesn't have to bring the required ability up to the maximum, it can just narrow the range between the two. How that's accomplished, of course, depends on the mechanics of the game and is beyond the limits of this abstraction. The difficulty comes from variable player skill and who the hack is designed for. Ideally someone goes into the task saying "current required ability is X and I want to make it Y, how can I do that" but it tends to be "I'm going to beat the player, no matter what their skill level is." That results in pushing the bar higher and higher, retroactively removing any solutions players discover until it becomes so much of a "read the dev's mind or die" game that you may as well just slap a Sierra logo on it.
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Dec 27, 2019 21:09
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Somebody call the CDC, it's spreading.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:31
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Just make a DK64 hack that plays the OH BANANA effect for every small banana.
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Dec 30, 2019 20:21
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I like XKCD's take, "blockchains are like grappling hooks; it's cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution but that happens way too rarely in real life."
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Feb 15, 2020 00:16
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