/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General★

I don't get how her dress covers her ass

Just read a professional book on script/scenario writing. You try to be a pro, don't you? There are many random tips or short listings of scenario structure on the Internet, but they won't get you anywhere without explaining how to use them and why are they important.

This describes how Yoko Taro does it.

Simply put, he starts at the emotional climax and figures out what kind of setup the climax requires to work best.

>>25175

I think she's pushing it against her cheeks with her feet to keep it in place to not be lewd.

For characters I've always tried to think of some sort of motivation or goal that they might pursue and how it shapes their personality. Though to be honest, I draw my designs first and then come up with their personality after.

As far as a coherent plot goes, I got no clue. Lots of writers seem to think of a beginning and an end, then fill out the middle after.

>>25274

Dude, seriously. You're asking questions and finding answers that already exist, are well established and built upon. Being creator isn't just reinventing the wheel. Read a book on it. It's a piece of advice I wish I had earlier. Don't look for the answers on the internet, it's filled with crap!

>>25169 (OP)

One of the best ways to make a character likeable is to show them learning something important. Humans, by definition, are dynamic beings; we change all the goddamn time. We don't like to admit it, but we do. And seeing someone else grow instantly tells us that that person is real.

As for story, make sure that the story directly affects the characters, but also have some side goal that the characters have unrelated to (but affected by) the story. The main character wants to spend time with their family, but also gets wrapped up in the mafia. Feisty Female Lead wants to prove that she can fight too, and joins the quest to save the world. Tanky Dude secretly likes Female Lead, and joins the quest because he can spend more time with her. So on and so forth.

bump

This seems like a decent thread to ask/confess something I've realized recently.

I am split in two extremes: part of me wants to just make fun games with little to no story, while the other half wants to make games with stories that mean something and are, for lack of a better term, pretentious. Take, for instance, this small RPG idea I'm trying to work out: it's about a young girl who is on a journey to a magic fountain with healing waters to get a cupful to save her mother. On its own, a standard RPG plot.

The problem is that when I work on it, I see the issues with both sides of my creative process. Early on, it was just a flat story with no real cohesion to the enemies/bosses and wasn't all that interesting from a story perspective. Then I decided to base the bosses around the stages of the Kubler-Ross model for the stages of grief, and suddenly the plot started coming together nicely. Problem is, now I fear I've gone too far into the other direction, because what was just going to be a simple RPG has turned into some pretentious-ass commentary about grief and losing a parent and all that shit, and though it's more interesting from a narrative perspective, I'm worried the new "deep story" has hijacked the direction of the game in a negative way. After all, it is still a game and I still want people to have fun playing it.

I can't seem to find a middle ground with how I create, it's always either bland and tasteless or deep and fart-sniffing. Any suggestions on how to moderate myself?

I'm not an expert.

That said, I think a character's personality consists of a set of desires and fears. This nature is illustrated with their choices. Feeding off of >>25172 , you might get some serious mileage out of having the character make unexpected choices in normal circumstances.

There's generally some hierarchy of values within a character guiding how they achieve their desires and avoid their fears. Shift the order of this hierarchy and you could get some interesting results.

>>26249

I'm not a fan of narrative games so I'm not really the right person to ask. but RPGs are a little different in that the "role playing" is pretty standard. if you're making a standard game in RPG maker then it's really just some simple math with flavour text so the players believes that they're playing the part. my issue is mostly that a lot of story games fall short in that you may as well read the story and drop the game. if I can watch someone play a game on youtube and get just as much out of it, then a lot of time was wasted making the game part.

I guess my shitty advice is that story should provide context for the player's actions, but shouldn't be the main motivation for playing the game. talking out of my ass but maybe try delivering your narrative in as few words as possible, all the story games that I remember liking barley had any text at all.

also I feel obligated to make sure you know about Majora's Mask's take on the Kubler-Ross model.

>>26257

And I agree entirely. The bosses show off the stages of grief in how they react to the main character and her background. For instance, the boss that represents pure Bargaining is a vampire whose whole shtick is that he offers to cure the girl's mother by turning her into a vampire, while the Anger/Bargaining boss is another sorcerer who put the curse on her mom in the first place and brings up the fact that he COULD save the mother, but won't. I don't want to beat players over the head with the concepts, but at the same time I want them to be noticeable enough to provide meta-context for the game, and I worry that doing exactly that is what will change my game from "fun game with overarching theme" to "pretentious game whose sole use is for hipster artfags to jerk themselves over".

>>26264

you don't have to worry about any of that, it's not like anyone is going to play your game without you asking anyways. just make the game you want, get some feedback and improve on it.

game or narrative, what you're trying to make is art. other than a few guidelines you can gleam from books, nobody can or should be able to tell you how to express your ideas. just follow your gut and then figure out if it was right or wrong after the fact.