New platform for my games.

I somehow managed to caught a flu.. as a consequence of this I'm laying all day in bed (with headache and stuffy nose all the time..). On the bright side of this, now I have time to think about my next hobby project. Yeah, I'm still starving to make a nice rpg game (not necessarly direct Sigmore Mines continuation), but this time I want to target different platforms and decided to check my luck with PC and PocketPC and the same time. I already have a simple 2D engine for PocketPC (but running on OpenGL so 3D is also possible) and I want to make a simpe minigame to test it. However I havent decided yet, how simple is simple enough...

RPG Rules

I was thinking a bit about rules system for rpg game. If your system is poorly designed, it in no time become uncontrollable and you end up with unbalanced game. When to think of it, all those stats numbers are probably interesting only for economists, but not for gameplay. The truth is that player will not see the difference between attacking monster which is for example 10% stronger than player, from monster,which is 15% stronger..

To see the difference, the difference must be big enough, and if small differences are not useful, the rpg system should not allow them at all. To make such system I have grouped tasks into difficulty levels. I've created a few groups, just easy, normal, hard and difficult.

I run a simple test program to see the outcome of such system, here are the outputs:

Attacking easy enemy

• Hit
• Hit
• Miss
• Hit
• Hit
• Hit
• Hit
• Hit
• Hit
• Miss

Attacking normal enemy

• Hit
• Hit
• Miss
• Hit
• Miss
• Miss
• Hit
• Miss
• Miss
• Hit

Attacking hard enemy

• Hit
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Hit
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Hit

Attacking difficult enemy

• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Hit
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss
• Miss

Of course output is randomized, so different runs give different results. What I like about the approach I used is that you can just by looking see clearly the difference in the task difficulty. Now all what game needs to do is to tell which monster belong to which group, taking into account such thing like experience with using weapons(hitting a monster with a bow for an archer is easier task than for a warrior) and other factors.

Forum

Maybe you already noticed, or maybe not, but I want you to note that there is a forum link on my ktgames website. You can post questions there about my games and of course read the answers ;). PS My friend is developing his own J2Me game in similar climate, so I have decided to share the forum with him. Check it out. Forum Link.