From the Inbox
Sometimes people send me great emails about suggestions for Flare. Some are good, some not so much. I wanted to share my favorite email so far about Flare. I love that he’s so passionate about the genre and has such specific suggestions.
Things I would like to see in Flare
* A Camera Zoom In-Zoom Out Mode, if the engine can handle this.
* Hot key brings up map with icons
* Voice Dialogue humor
* Scripted Level Thresholds.
* More variety of monsters
* Levels can exceed 200 thresholds.Strange to see an RPG with no bats.
Most RPG’s have up to 300-400 different types of monsters in their games, but Sacred II had over 1,000. That game also had a massive 22 x 22 square mile seamless loading terrain.
But Most of these Commercial RPG games seem to cap their levels and character attributes off at 99-200 with ridiculously high level thresholds.
But if you want to be unique, then if this game engine can exceed the 200 barrier (if the engine can handle it.) then it would be an RPG that would be unique.
Because its all script based, we can add more level thresholds because its a simple text file, That opens up alot of potential for further level scripting to spawn in at random stronger classes of different monsters depending on a certain level threshold that the player reaches at.
But not all the scripting for the game have been done yet. There is only about 10 monsters in the game that have been so far scripted in. But I haven’t looked at all the Tilesets yet to see just how many monsters have been done. but I will take a look.
You also need your spiders to start making HISSING noises soon as someone approaches near them.
The Gobblins need to have some voice dialouge too when they detect you are coming near them. And they need to say ‘Ow,’ start complaining when you are killing them.
So you need to bring human interaction into the game.
You also should allow your Character Attributes to be buffed up to around Level 200 if the engine can handle it.
You also should have your character flashing or charging up each time they get to a level up….Your monsters need different behavior patterns to make the game more unique instead of the same, predictable rush and charge boulderdash behavior.
Your Map Location Box at the top right corner should be put in a circle.
There’s always the option too of using a GUI window editor to do all the work of putting down the tiles for creating new maps and the editor supporting scripting commands. I couldn’t find any editor or the map files when i looked in the game directory so the map files are probably inside the main exe.
It depends on what type of RPG you want to create. Whether you want just a small RPG, or what this RPG to be big in scope.
Making a Hack ‘n’ slash RPG is probably more easier to do because those kind of games rely alot on random seed generators for spawning in the monsters in small groups.
Even though you use tilesets, if you can script your game to spawn in different types of monsters at different level thresholds then the game would have more surprises for the player and not be so predictable with everything spawning always in the same spot.
You should beable to hit a hot key to bring up a portrait of the monster you last killed with all its stats, number of monsters killed.
There should be an option implemented where you can press with the keyboard to bring up a encyplopedia of all the monsters in the game showing
all the danger classes and stats. Have you got a graphix artist to create the portraits?Bascially, as you can see its a lot of work involved in making a good RPG…
There were many good criticisms about flare in this email. I’m genuinely pondering some of these features for the future of the engine.