Perhaps you can encourage two people with different art abilities to work on different aspects of a similar project (eg. 3d character modeling + portrait painting).
Or two people with similar art skills to work on mass producing one type (eg. 4 pixel art NPCs).
Hrm, I really like a lot of the points Danimal suggested. Also, it would be hilarious if the person accidentally ended up as the lord of a goblin village. Reminds me of the time one of my players killed the orc chieftan in a D&D game I was DM'ing and immediately declared himself chief. After a long series of epic roleplaying (he relinquished his dwarven race to become an orc in heart by publicly chopping off his own finger with a hatchet! :-o ) and rediculously high persuade/intimidate rolls, I finally permitted a small portion (~10%) of the warcamp to become loyal to the dwarf.
I am still fond of the idea of "The Chosen One" (preferably a noble or prince or something cliched) playing a significant role in the first act or two of the game (he's really saving the world at that point), but something in the player's actions causes his death, either indirectly or directly. The blame is tacked onto the player, though it wasn't intentional, and he is sentenced to death. The player must escape those he once called friends who now wish to kill him and either carry on the Chosen One's quest (because it will bring redemption or something) or he travels the world attempting to escape the vengeance of "the good guys." Perhaps he never really regains the trust he once had, but in the end he should find his place in the world.
Alternately: Maybe the hero is a soldier in the military of his nation. The army's campaign marches them all over the world, but the hero is often assigned tasks that ease victory for the army (eg. assassinate the enemy leader in his sleep, or scout out the cave system to find a safe passage through, or rally a group of tribal natives to join our cause.) This would give the campaign a linear direction (you can't question where your army takes you) and an end goal (defeat the other side's forces) and provides many large quest goals.
Maybe I'll take that second idea a step further. Perhaps the two (or more! some of which get destroyed throughout the game...) armies are racing to capture a powerful magical artifact. The Fire Chapter would end in the enemy general acquiring the artifact and ascending to great and terrible power. Then, the player (and that handful of powerful NPC's) have to go up to the sky bridge / villain fortress to defeat him.
"I want to float the idea, though it might be too gimmicky: all magic (green or blue) melee weapons have an additional bonus. All swords have Life Drain, all axes have Bleed, all hammers have Stun."
Hrm... interesting concept! (It is rather gimmicky, like you said, but I'd certainly give it a shot). On a similar note, it might be fun to have inferior weapons have effects too. Imagine a Warped Shortbow having a small amount of angle_variance attached to it. :)
If you give longer cooldowns on ranged weapons, you might consider adding magical "Quick" versions of the weapons too.
And though I've said it before, causing multiple creatures to attack at once removes a lot of the player's ranged power. The hero can only stunlock one creature at a time. So perhaps causing the enemies to attack in packs would drastically affect the balance issue.
Are we talking about cross-class balance issues here or game-breaking issues that cause monsters to not be effective? I personally believe that most of the classes are fairly balanced (with obvious exception of the defense-only build).
Things that will empower monsters:
Traps: Cause the player to be careful every step of the way. Traps should most often be locationally randomized (so they can't be memorized) or made unavoidable (like a monster spawn trap that goes off as you cross a bridge).
Wandering/Patrolling Monsters: Now the Ranger can't stand back and pick off monsters one at a time. He might get flanked by other monsters...
Monster Group Awareness: The whole mob attacks you, not just single monsters.
More creatures should have (or be paired with) a ranged attack: Because it's more dangerous.
Hero Powers should have a cooldown: Because spamming Quake is lame.
Things that will balance cross-class issues:
Cause Rangers to Manage Ammo: Fighters have to manage HP, Wizards - MP. Rangers don't have to manage any resources. Their class should differ by causing them to have ammo. Perhaps a slingshot shouldn't need ammo. So they can always trade down to a lower-damage weapon if they are low on arrows, but ideally they would want to use their Greatbow...
Create greater diversity in powers: Why do all attacks do 100% weapon damage? Why do all powers cost 1 MP? Make it so high level powers to do greater damage, but cost more MP. Make a power that hits a large area, but does lower damage. Right now, it feels like Wizards and Rangers are basically the same. Perhaps make Wizards focus more on Area of Effect powers and Rangers on single targets? (Rangers should still have area powers, but make them costly in MP, ammo, or cooldown).
Pure-defense characters suck: Is there really any way to fix this? Probably not.
Also... is there any way to promote cross-class specialization? Most players find it easiest to go all out in one stat rather than take a strategic number here and there. (eg. Why are there never 2,3,2,2 builds?) I think the reason this is is because powers are unlocked based on your stats. If the engine unlocked powers a different way (like specialization points awarded based on level choices or something) you might do it differently. (Imagine a blood-mage power line, which requires both Physical and Mental spec points to unlock?) Naturally this would take a great deal of code changes, would require much more room to explain than I am giving here, and is probably a bad idea.
Just some thoughts. Some are certainly better than others.
There's a lot people who can code, but very few people who can make art in a style distinct to FLARE. It would probably be a strong move for you to shift focus toward art and content (coding when you want/need to implement new features for the content). Chances are it would push back the speed of releases, however there would be a lot more for people to look forward to in each release. To tell the truth, players don't care about "classes refactored to use the FileParser class" so much as new maps or quests.
Perhaps you can encourage two people with different art abilities to work on different aspects of a similar project (eg. 3d character modeling + portrait painting).
Or two people with similar art skills to work on mass producing one type (eg. 4 pixel art NPCs).
Absolutely awesome. I will certainly use these for a game in the future.
Hrm, I really like a lot of the points Danimal suggested. Also, it would be hilarious if the person accidentally ended up as the lord of a goblin village. Reminds me of the time one of my players killed the orc chieftan in a D&D game I was DM'ing and immediately declared himself chief. After a long series of epic roleplaying (he relinquished his dwarven race to become an orc in heart by publicly chopping off his own finger with a hatchet! :-o ) and rediculously high persuade/intimidate rolls, I finally permitted a small portion (~10%) of the warcamp to become loyal to the dwarf.
No problem. I think it looks awesome! I'm really interested to see how the village turns out.
I think there's a 256x256 size limit on maps currently, but I suppose that can be changed easily. You'd have to take that up with Clint, though.
Hrm... I came across a very weird bug; it seems I've been awarded ALL the medals. I think now I even outrank you, eh?
P.S. You don't have to fix this if you don't want! ;-)
I am still fond of the idea of "The Chosen One" (preferably a noble or prince or something cliched) playing a significant role in the first act or two of the game (he's really saving the world at that point), but something in the player's actions causes his death, either indirectly or directly. The blame is tacked onto the player, though it wasn't intentional, and he is sentenced to death. The player must escape those he once called friends who now wish to kill him and either carry on the Chosen One's quest (because it will bring redemption or something) or he travels the world attempting to escape the vengeance of "the good guys." Perhaps he never really regains the trust he once had, but in the end he should find his place in the world.
Alternately: Maybe the hero is a soldier in the military of his nation. The army's campaign marches them all over the world, but the hero is often assigned tasks that ease victory for the army (eg. assassinate the enemy leader in his sleep, or scout out the cave system to find a safe passage through, or rally a group of tribal natives to join our cause.) This would give the campaign a linear direction (you can't question where your army takes you) and an end goal (defeat the other side's forces) and provides many large quest goals.
Maybe I'll take that second idea a step further. Perhaps the two (or more! some of which get destroyed throughout the game...) armies are racing to capture a powerful magical artifact. The Fire Chapter would end in the enemy general acquiring the artifact and ascending to great and terrible power. Then, the player (and that handful of powerful NPC's) have to go up to the sky bridge / villain fortress to defeat him.
"I want to float the idea, though it might be too gimmicky: all magic (green or blue) melee weapons have an additional bonus. All swords have Life Drain, all axes have Bleed, all hammers have Stun."
Hrm... interesting concept! (It is rather gimmicky, like you said, but I'd certainly give it a shot). On a similar note, it might be fun to have inferior weapons have effects too. Imagine a Warped Shortbow having a small amount of angle_variance attached to it. :)
If you give longer cooldowns on ranged weapons, you might consider adding magical "Quick" versions of the weapons too.
And though I've said it before, causing multiple creatures to attack at once removes a lot of the player's ranged power. The hero can only stunlock one creature at a time. So perhaps causing the enemies to attack in packs would drastically affect the balance issue.
Are we talking about cross-class balance issues here or game-breaking issues that cause monsters to not be effective? I personally believe that most of the classes are fairly balanced (with obvious exception of the defense-only build).
Things that will empower monsters:
Things that will balance cross-class issues:
Just some thoughts. Some are certainly better than others.
There's a lot people who can code, but very few people who can make art in a style distinct to FLARE. It would probably be a strong move for you to shift focus toward art and content (coding when you want/need to implement new features for the content). Chances are it would push back the speed of releases, however there would be a lot more for people to look forward to in each release. To tell the truth, players don't care about "classes refactored to use the FileParser class" so much as new maps or quests.
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