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[Discussion] What about fangames annoys you most? [Aspiring developers look here!]

What is the worst thing(s) about Pokemon fangames?

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You know what I hate? HUGE MAPS. Like ones with so much space you're wondering why anyone would ever WANT to visit the Pokemon Center. Places so big you're praying you don't go into that monster of a forest and get Poisoned, 'cause your team is dead meat then.

I mean, a different style of mapping is nice, but excessive size is a bit much to me. Smaller, cleaner maps that use space efficiently are more professional, and even though the squareness bothers people, Pokemon games in particular are based on linear movement.

Maps, and visuals in particular, form most of the game. I wish people would put more into their maps than just throwing things together.
 
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incognito322 said:
You know what I hate? HUGE MAPS. Like ones with so much space you're wondering why anyone would ever WANT to visit the Pokemon Center. Places so big you're praying you don't go into that monster of a forest and get Poisoned, 'cause your team is dead meat then.

I mean, a different style of mapping is nice, but excessive size is a bit much to me. Smaller, cleaner maps that use space efficiently are more professional, and even though the squareness bothers people, Pokemon games in particular are based on linear movement.

Maps, and visuals in particular, form most of the game. I wish people would put more into their maps than just throwing things together.
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That line made me laugh. Anyways, I completely agree with you. And not only are large maps unpleasant to play on, they're also difficult to make to. So you're doing yourself and the gamers a favor by keeping it reasonable.

I also share the sentiment on visuals. That's what usually makes or breaks a game for me, except when the gameplay is completely awful, then it's not justified.

And about the squareness: that's Pokemon's style. A lot of people advise against following the official mapping style because of how square it tends to be, and really they have a point, but that's also a trademark of sorts of the nintendo games. Mappers shouldn't be afraid to emulate the style, at least as long as it's for a Pokemon fangame and not something else. It should be more a matter of personal preference.
 
Man am I glad for this thread (and that it's a sticky!). As a newbie to fan game making, it really helps to be able to see what NOT to do. It's interesting what seems to be all around no-nos, and what seems to be more a matter of taste. I now have good idea of what to pay attention to while I'm working on my game.

There's a few things I wanted to comment on as well.

Fakemon- It seems that it's not necessarily the design or even the existence of a fakemon that people don't like, but the quality of it's sprite. I feel the same way. I personally love seeing peoples ideas, but if the art sucks, it just ruins it for me. Pokemon Chaos Black was the first ever fan game I've played, and it almost completely turned me off from fan games forever!

Bad grammar/spelling- It drives me crazy! This is by far the worst, absolute worst thing a person can do in a game. What the frack is so hard to understand about running your text through a spell/grammar check? Or maybe even having a few people proofread a few times? I don't even tolerate bad grammar or spelling because the creator isn't a native English speaker, get some one who is to help you! There's been a few games I've played that I quite because of the language.

Huge maps- Even though the game I'm working on is enormous, I actually agree with this. I hate games that are massive for no reason. I makes me feel lost and apprehensive, which would be fine if that where the reason for large ares (like in mine), but to do it just for the heck of it drives me nuts. It's not bad though if there's huge areas balanced with smaller, tighter ones. That I actually like.

No creativity- Another thing that boggles my mind, is that people actually bother to put the effort to make a game, with a program that is so incredibly versatile as RMXP, and not actually add anything significantly new. I mean, what's the point? Hacks I can understand to an extent, since they are so limited, but to be lazy like that while using something that grants you so much freedom is just asinine.

No/bad demos- This is another thing that really confuses me. The point of a demo is to show off new features and to get people excited in your game. Again, if your not going to at least try to do that, then why even bother?

No one seem to know how to script- Like I said I'm new to this, but if I can't get the scripting down, I'm not even going to bother with my game. It's like saying you want to write a novel but you don't actually know how to write! It's not like Ruby is even hard to understand. I think the problem is that it actually takes time and effort to learn.

Presenting the game early/ no updates/ not finishing it- This is why I'm not even going to bother to make a thread for mine until it's about 75% complete. The Showcase forums on this site are actually really disappointing :( The only two complete games that I've played are full of errors, and the rest of them seem like they're never actually going to happen. So, so sad.

And lastly, making promises that can't be kept- This one I can see being very upsetting. This is why I've only ever mentioned what I want to add to my game, and not what I am. It's awesome when people come up with really cool ideas, but to say they're going to be added to the game and then not do it is really, really lame.
 
SpiralHorn said:
Huge maps- Even though the game I'm working on is enormous, I actually agree with this. I hate games that are massive for no reason. I makes me feel lost and apprehensive, which would be fine if that where the reason for large ares (like in mine), but to do it just for the heck of it drives me nuts. It's not bad though if there's huge areas balanced with smaller, tighter ones. That I actually like.
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I think the main problem with huge maps is that they tend to be made for the sake of art rather than the sake of playing through them. That is, the designers forget how big the game window is that the player will be looking through in order to see their maps.

It's all about proportions. Maps can be whatever size you like, so long as the features in them are proportional to the game screen. Personally, I wouldn't like to walk down a forest path for half a minute (traversing many screen widths) only to find it's a dead end. On the other hand, huge forest mazes where the dead ends are short and don't take up much time to explore (i.e. about 10 seconds tops for the return trip) would be fine. It's all about the sense of progression, which is something you don't get when you're forever stumbling down mile-long dead ends and not making much real progress. On the other hand, very long boring paths in which nothing happens is just as bad, even if you are heading in the right direction. You can't even do something clever with the camera angles like that bridge in Isshu (which was still tedious, by the way).

Another disadvantage of large maps is that they're much more difficult to fill in. Consequently some don't, and have awful wide open spaces. And the way you fill in the space is important too - an array of fields is neither clever nor nice. If it's not adding anything to the map other than "realism", and particularly if the player should never have to venture near it, then get rid of it - put it on the other side of an untraversable fence or something. You can still have it, just don't force the player to go through it.

Of course, as I mentioned, not all huge maps are bad by default (just all the ones I've ever seen are). They can be good, so long as you remember how big the window is and keep the map features to that scale, and keep things interesting (enemy trainers/acres of long grass are not interesting).

Oh, and huge maps means more events, which means more lag. Just saying.
 
95% of the fangames being talked about are still in developement. and the "demo"s are infact betas.

You may not realise it, but you the whole point of a beta is to report glitches and spelling errors so the full game doesn't have them.
 
Maruno said:
I think the main problem with huge maps is that they tend to be made for the sake of art rather than the sake of playing through them. That is, the designers forget how big the game window is that the player will be looking through in order to see their maps.

It's all about proportions. Maps can be whatever size you like, so long as the features in them are proportional to the game screen. Personally, I wouldn't like to walk down a forest path for half a minute (traversing many screen widths) only to find it's a dead end. On the other hand, huge forest mazes where the dead ends are short and don't take up much time to explore (i.e. about 10 seconds tops for the return trip) would be fine. It's all about the sense of progression, which is something you don't get when you're forever stumbling down mile-long dead ends and not making much real progress. On the other hand, very long boring paths in which nothing happens is just as bad, even if you are heading in the right direction. You can't even do something clever with the camera angles like that bridge in Isshu (which was still tedious, by the way).

Another disadvantage of large maps is that they're much more difficult to fill in. Consequently some don't, and have awful wide open spaces. And the way you fill in the space is important too - an array of fields is neither clever nor nice. If it's not adding anything to the map other than "realism", and particularly if the player should never have to venture near it, then get rid of it - put it on the other side of an untraversable fence or something. You can still have it, just don't force the player to go through it.

Of course, as I mentioned, not all huge maps are bad by default (just all the ones I've ever seen are). They can be good, so long as you remember how big the window is and keep the map features to that scale, and keep things interesting (enemy trainers/acres of long grass are not interesting).

Oh, and huge maps means more events, which means more lag. Just saying.
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I have in mind a huge, open wasteland that the player has to survive in, and I've been trying to work out how to map it. I'm going to make the screen size of the game pretty large, but I know I'm still going to have issues with too much open space and not enough interesting things. See, a huge part of my game is realism, with (hopefully) a lot of OW events and actions. You've given me a lot to think of, so thanks.

You may not realise it, but you the whole point of a beta is to report glitches and spelling errors so the full game doesn't have them.
Click to expand...

Good point! It seems a lot of people don't realize that. Bleh.
 
No original content

this is the most annoying i belive
 
In the short time I've been here, I've already seen many common issues that are the same with the RPG Maker community as a whole:

1) Most projects, especially ones that look impressive, never get finished. This is highly disappointing, and while I'm guilty of this myself, you should consider that once you have a fan base going on, you should keep it. I guess it's easier said than done, as most indie-developers don't devote their lives to this sort of thing, and finding motivation can be hard sometimes.

2) The projects are too ambitious. It kind of comes with the fact that we are developing pokemon games. It is horrifically time consuming to design, purpose, and assign movepools to new pokemon, and to do about 100 of them is even worse. And it's not just with creating pokemon, its with coming up with gameplay, level design, story, etc. I think people need to realize that they are NOT going to make a game that matches the professional quality of the real games, but rather try to do the best they can in a condensed amount of time.
 
To me, being a copy of the GBA or NDS games, no original content. Fakepokemons are also unnecessary. If it was at least an attempt to copy to another system such as PSP, would be awesome
 
As an aspiring new game developer, I chose that they all look the same, or I should have chosen that they all have the same story line. I know it breaks away from the formula which is Pokemon, which is what I'm looking into, but these Pokemon games are the same thing of "Get badges, fight bad guys etc" and it does get boring sometimes. I'd like to see some new things in fangames.
 
Alternative said:
As an aspiring new game developer, I chose that they all look the same, or I should have chosen that they all have the same story line. I know it breaks away from the formula which is Pokemon, which is what I'm looking into, but these Pokemon games are the same thing of "Get badges, fight bad guys etc" and it does get boring sometimes. I'd like to see some new things in fangames.
Click to expand...

yeah, i agree, the "Beat the champion, spoil the bad peoples plot, etc." is really getting old :/ but i really dont care about the graphics. and another thing, good looking hacks never get finished, which i find disappointing. Also, (yeah i know im going on and on) most newbees dont really plan out the whole hack, for example, i found a hack where a legandary just appears with absoulutly no backstory at all! And some fangames (hacks in particular) dont have any originality, some that do are
pokemon ruby destiny rescue rangers by destinyjagold
pokemon topaz by bazza (because you get to be evil for a change)
etc.

~Cyndaquil2607~
 
I just read this entire thread... And, well I'm no longer sure if i learned anything. Actually there is one thing. Grammar, grammar, grammar and grammar some more. Get it right.

Wow do people on Pokecommunity love their grammar.
 
This Poll is going to help me so much because when i make a game i can youse this to evaluate what i will do

sorry if theres any mistakes
 
The worst thing is that the best ones never get finished...
And most part of fakemons are simply very ugly (except for Acanthite).

There are guys who just waste their precious time making stupid games, when they should join to make a good game. I see lots of unfinished and bad projects, with bad fakemon... I would prefer to have only 1 finished project of a decent game.
 
What just gets me greatly annoyed is that people just decide this:
lolololololololololol let's just make 150 NEW Fakémon without putting any effort into spriting them
OR we promise new features and never do them or get somebody to do everything for me lololol orz
 
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