LogFAQs > #922558728

scar the 1 posted...

Hey Devs, there's a dormant Gamedev and programming board just dying for activity. Have you been there? I don't remember. There's also a community board about indie game dev, with a discord channel. If you wanna bounce ideas I think those places would drink it up gingerly.

I have but it's been a while. I thought the place was totally dead. Thanks for the tip.

LightningAce11 posted...

Devs, what was your pitching process? Any tips for newcomers in the industry?

I'm funding it myself so I've never had to pitch it. If you mean on the marketing end, the best (sounding) advice I've heard is "if it's an entertainment product, your marketing should be entertaining."

I guess my advice would be just get started. I worried forever about how I'm awful at all things graphical and visual but in the informarion age, it's easy to find tutorials and other resources or straight-up a forum where people will literally teach you techniques for no charge.

My second advice would be to overthink the crap out of everything. When I designed the element system, I had a gigantic spreadsheet filled with tables comparing the advantages and disadvantsges of every element against ever pair of elements (counting none as an element), with increasing number of elements from 1 to 7 and several different weakness structures, for example, how is the strategy effected if every elemental weakness works both ways, what if elements are weak against themselves, what if every element has two weaknesses, what if one of those weaknessed is twice as effective as the other, what if elements opposite each other in the weakness chain are weak to each other, etc etc.

I was so glad I did. The system I decided on is a thing of beauty. Red beats Orange and Yellow, Orange beats Yellow and Green, Yellow beats Green and Blue, Green beats Blue and Purple, Blue beats Purple and Red, Purple beats Red and Orange. Each of those elements has some advantage too, like having a chance of putting the enemy into a negative status or getting a small damage bonus.

It's fairly easy to learn and remember because of its simplicity, but it also tons of strategy and player preference built in. For example, an early dungeon is filled with Red and Orange enemies, so it's kind of a no-brainer to use Purple. A mid-game dungeon has Yellow and Blue. Now the the player can choose between Yellow because it beats Blue, or Orange because it beats Yellow, based on which side effect they like more or which enemy element has the side effect they like less. Then an endgame dungeon has Red and Green, in which case it's a pure risk/reward deal as Red and Green have no strengths or weaknesses while the other elements each have one strength and one weakness, then from there they always have at least two choices of element. For example, if you choose not to risk, you can still pick from Red or Green, but if you choose to risk it, you can choose from any of the others. The player can even put each character on a separate element if they want to.

I love that it lets me expand the strategy as the game progresses without straight up locking out mechanics in the early game.

Banjo2553 posted...

That's a pretty interesting premise.

Thanks!
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