Originally on RXC, Barver posted this post, which is useful in my opinion. Here it is:
So taizou posted this link in the recent GB topic.
I decided to translate it, it's kind of interesting, plus you get to see how fully aware a developer is of his own work. Sadly the guy really speaks weird, scrambling grammar in places I'm not used to seeing it or forgetting to separate different sentences, which lead to confusion. This should be accurate though, save for the obvious places I noted with these bars [] since I could not understand a thing it said.
- Quote:
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None of the games I made used the attack power and HP hook(?). I actually was always trying to change the battle engine, such as in Lei Dian Hua Pikachu (trying to stay as close to the original, same attributes, imitate all the skills you learn, and follow the same way that Pokemon evolved), Saint Seiya (your abilites increase after a battle), Samurai Spirits (making your own weapons[?]), FF7 (learning magic, gain amounts of experience based on enemy levels), KOF (gathering energy to release tricks). When making games, you like put some effort into ideas, but the people upstairs don't give you much time to write anything, so fellow members come in and just keep reusing the some old engines as before. The health and attack hook(??) system was from Mars Electronics. Of course, the work of other companies was sometimes used in order to simplify the work that had to be done. Nanjing's Robot Wars A is an example of such garbage, the engineer(s) on that one just blindly built over someone else's engine without knowing what they were doing. They don't understand games, too many people get involved, we end up going over competitors work [note: just guessing on this translation]...[and more stuff I don't understand :/]. This is how Pokemon Gem (note: this is Pokemon Red I think?) was made, like for example no monsters could evolve... I later made Lei Dian Hua Pikachu, basing the system upon the original game, which in turn gave me much more work, like setting the specifics for when a Pokemon evolves, or using a stone to evolve, dispersing the Pokemon( like water Pokemon won't appear on land), their skills, the randomness of their encounters, flying, cloning spell numbers[??], anti-matter double returning [note: I honestly have no idea what this is saying] and other special effects, the music was even trying to imitate the style of the original. It was lots of work, but the time and pay given was still the same as usual. The market for FC games is not good. Whether you do a good job or not, it's all the same. you put your soul into it and you don't get anything in return, you try to make as fun a game as you can under the given circumstances. Of course, I still bullshit my way through it all, taking the pay but not doing the work, or trying to get out of having to do much work by using inferior work, anything just so I can finish the job. There may be less games now, but progress is still being made. Have you noticed how a lot of the games have the characters head in the dialogue box? And a lot of the characters use more than one palette (8 colors). Before it used to be just be one (4 colors), or other characters would be colored the same. [following this he basically says to look at the ads, I can't tell what the heck he's talking about though]. Pray you'll be lucky enough not to have to endure playing Super Robot A, play Gao Da indtead [note: some other game I'm not recognizing by that name). Don't play any of the Pokemon games built over the Red or Crystal engines, try Lei Dian Hua Pikachu instead About FF7, people often mention how the battles are really long. That's my fault, at the time I needed to increase the gameplay time, so I raised the enemy's stats. The game is Nanjing's biggest as far as the plot goes(over 100 different areas, plus the map). It's pretty linear, what made it tough was lowering the average levels of all the team members, giving the leading character all the powerful magic, having the other two members having to level up with lower level magic, having enemies give experience based on your average level, and having enemies not give any experience at all if your level is too much higher than theirs. I didn't want to have to make people grind in one area in order to gain any experience.Thank you all for your support, your opinions help motivate me to do better.[/quote]
