Friendship is Dragons
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Page 186 - Pony RPG
Author Notes:
Guest Author's Note:
"I remember the Ultima series being inspired by someone's own RP experiences, so I figured someone among the group would try to do the same with their game.
"And who better than Twilight's player? Of course someone has to test it out and considering how Dash's player is, I bet she would be level grinding before actually starting the game.
"Can't blame her, I tend to go into every battle opportunity I see in RPGs myself."
Brock: "Can you believe some people choose fire as their starter?"
Anyone know where those sprites are from?
Do you happen to have a DA or FA? If so let me know when you release then game or a demo of it. ^^ GIGA-XISBASS & DEVIOUS-DISCORD-RP on DA & GIGA-XISBASS on FA. ^^
btw the flashwork website isn't showing me anything except a green background for some reason.
also watching you on DA now. ^^
Great job Akuma; quite the pleasant surprise before going into work.
The catch: Making a platformer that's actually good (rather than mediocre) is difficult. Making a CRPG that's even _mediocre_ is hard. Making one that's _good_ is almost unheard-of. It's like trying to plan out a level-1-to-level-20 pen-and-paper RPG campaign that's fun and engaging, _without_ a group of creative players to interact with during this process.
It can be done, but it'd take a skilled DM and a skilled fic writer working together over a long period, in addition to skilled sprite artist and a competent coder. The engine is actually the easy part (there are plenty of existing ones you can use, if it comes down to it).
It took me quite a while (and a couple of attempts of my own) to realize exactly how much creative work goes into designing a good game.
Alt-script time!
TS: Rainbow Dash, I wanted you to playtest this to make sure that players would feel the quest levels are appropriate. How can you do that if you just breeze through everything?
RD: Twilight, you said that this game would be based on our adventures, right?
TS: Yeah?
RD: And the first quest is facing Nightmare Moon?
TS: Well, I wanted to set her up as a recurring villain and...
RD: And have her wipe the floor with whatever level 1 scrub faces her. Not this time. I'm going to beat her, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
TS: What? But I haven't prepared for that to happen. I mean, how many players are going to overlevel just so they can beat an unbeatable boss?
RD: Clearly you haven't played enough MMOs.
Who would they go to for this? Activision's High Moon Studios made the recent Transformers games, but that was a pitch they made to Hasbro, not the other way around. I don't think Hasbro's gonna take the time to go shopping for an outside studio to make an AAA MLP game. If any pro-grade game gets made, it's because a professional group goes to Hasbro of their own initiative, makes a really good pitch, and the time is right for such a game to be made.
And, of course, it's all about retail. The Transformers games, being action/adventure shooters, fit right in on the GameStop shelves on launch day selling for $60 to the average gamer. Ignoring My Little Pony's periphery demographic for a second, that's not quite going to fly for little kids and their parents (unless the parents happen to be gamers and/or bronies, but that's outside the target). Ideally, they'd be looking to sell this in major department stores, in the electronics section along with all the other heavily licensed games on the most prominent displays. Those games still sell at retail for quite a bit of money, but the presentation is much different there.
They could go with a downloadable approach, like an app store game, but that probably wouldn't be the kind of not-sucking game that bronies would be looking for.
So no, it wouldn't be like printing money and waiting for it to arrive in your pocket. Hasbro already gets that from their other licenses.
Big corporations have money. This is a given thing that people understand. At the same time they want to make money. This is also a given thing that people understand. And yet nobody really gets it in their head that why they might want to get money is because content production loses a lot of money and costs a lot of time.
And of course, magically perfect design does not happen in a flash, either. There is no one perfect creator of content. (There cannot even be anything nearly close to this as long as the industry is dominated by old white straight dudes.) We cannot have such a thing as somebody who is totally morally and politically aware, especially since those things vary by area. And so ideas are taken on by multiple people who hack away at the core concept and criticise and criticise until something is found that they believe works. This hacking away at ideas also takes a lot of time and money. Creating assets takes a lot of time and money. Creating in general takes a lot of time and money, and this is not even the whole production, and this does not even include test audiences. It's still brewing in a tiny bubble compared to the massive, diverse world of opinion out there.
If you watch movie credits you'll probably switch off after the cast names go by. You might know the director or producer, particularly if they're already a big name. You probably have the constitution to stay and look at, see, lead animators and assistants for key-frame animation, but how much longer do you stay? Do you look at the huge list of names for technical R and D? Do you look at the accountants? Do you think about the legal team in all of this? (And again, majority of these people are all still from the same set of people. Don't forget this point. Remember this point as often and as actively as you can.)
Production of content at a professional quality and scale is a massive undertaking. This is why ZUN is the impossible god-tier creator, for example.
The mind looks at small independent projects, looks back at professional projects, and doesn't get where any of it goes. It seems like you can just pull an idea out of a hat and then find some fun random people and everything will be okay. Well, actually, the people working on independent projects are people who are making sure they can dedicate every second of their time, effort and creativity to it. They are people who, for the project to work, need to be on-task every millisecond. If they fall out at any moment, the project can fall out too. Oh, and they're also not perfect. Let me state this again: there is no one perfect creator of content.
(You might point out the references to 'old white straight dudes' and note that Lauren doesn't complete the phrase. Think of it as a verbal Venn diagram rather than a specific indicator of somebody falling into the centre. There's still a dominance of guys to girls, this is true, but there's also a dominance of white to POC and Lauren falls into the dominant group there. Issues, oppressions and privileges intersect.)
So if you keep thinking it's totally possible to just have a magic idea and then never have to work with it and it'll end up on the shelf alright in a couple of weeks, really, stop it. You have a lot of thinking to do and very little time to do it.
I'm a 30 something. I remember when game companies would simply reskin something they did well as a new product and Marvel vs Capcom is proof that reskins can meet the originals and get something quality out of it.
RD is so funny here because she reminds me of... well me when I play Final Fantasy games.