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!!!!

I was right months ago!

I guess I need to join in the posting pictures of your kids challenge:



My wife and I went to a party as the day-shift rangers, and Emi was Pablo the Penguin!



She's still working on the whole peace-sign-in-every-picture thing that all Japanese girls have to do.

Just last night, my wife was telling me that she was nervous about us moving to America because there are so many shootings in schools there and she didn't want our daughter anywhere near that.  I told her it was fine and that it's really not as common as it may seem.  Yes, guns are far easier to come by in America compared to Japan which has very strict gun laws.  And yes, there are some shootings, but compared to the size of America, and the number of schools we have, it's not really that common, statistically speaking.

I had finally calmed her down about it, and then we wake up to see this on the morning news.  Sigh.

Thanks!  That's the most pretentious review I've ever received!

Yeah, I think people usually think of interviews as being for informative purposes (TV or print news) or publicity purposes (celebrity interviews), but with these interviews, at least from the second one on, I've tried to focus on one specific area of game development and explore some areas that might provide good advice or at least inspiration to aspiring developers like us.  I hope that each one of these can help out someone who might be struggling with the topic on their own project.

Hopefully someone can get some insight from this one into what it takes to lead a large team on in the creation of an epic game and either be encouraged to downscale their plans to something more realistic, or find some good advice that can help them accomplish their lofty goals.

Of course if you just enjoy reading it, that's fine too!

Thanks again Radiant, I appreciate you taking the time to A my Qs.

And SilverTrumpet, I don't have any plans!  I just kind of do them when I feel like it or when inspiration comes.

It's been a long time since I've done one of these fellas, but GarageGothic encouraged me to make a new entry in the Twelve Interviews series.  He even suggested the topic and interviewee!  So GG, this one goes out to you.

Pieter Simoons (a.k.a. "Radiant") is the proprietor of Crystal Shard Games.  In the past two years he has released several innovative and fun adventure games such as META and Warthogs.  More recently, he accomplished the thing that hundreds of doe-eyed amateur adventure gamers attempt and fail to do: He released a huge, epic, and high quality adventure game.  During the creation of A Tale of Two Kingdoms, Pieter led a team of dozens of people on a quest that took over two years to complete.  This installment of Twelve Interviews focuses on the difficult task of leading a team through the development of an amateur adventure game.

You can read the interview on my blog, and if you have any questions for Radiant, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer them right here in this thread.  Leave a comment here or there if you enjoy these things!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE INTERVIEW

PREVIOUS INTERVIEWS HERE

I'm also a teacher, and love it.  If and when I move back to the US, I will likely continue teaching.  Being an employee of the Japanese government, my salary is a matter of public record, so I don't mind discussing it.  My contract stipulates 300,000 yen per month AFTER taxes.  So, no matter how much Japanese tax I have to pay, I always get 300,000 yen per month. (which thanks to the horrendously weak yen, is only about $2,600 USD, it was a lot more three years ago when I was not married and regularly sending money home.)  Since tax doesn't come out of my salary, I'm not sure exactly how much I'd be getting if taxes were included.

It's not a lot, but it's been enough to carve out a very satisfying living for my family and I and we even save about 1/3 of it each month that we put in a savings account to use for going on vacations, or buying some extra things that we need or want.

I agree that teachers are not paid enough for how important they are to society or how hard they work.

I think you'll be less frustrated if you start scripting on your own, rather than take somebody else's RPG script and attempt to modify it to suit your own plans.

The only way to learn scripting is through a lot of patience and effort.  It's impossible to tell you how long it's going to take.  It depends on how easily such things click in your brain and how much effort you're willing to put in.

The problem with what you're asking is that battles in RPGs are done in a million different ways.  That's why no one can just give you an RPG template, because your idea of how the RPG is supposed to work will undoubtedly be different from the template makers'. 

Just start with the simple things and implement everything slowly as you go, asking questions in the beginner's technical questions board after you've spent a lot of time trying to figure it out yourself.  Make sure to read the manual thoroughly.

Or, easier still, as ProgZ said, use a tool that's better suited to the job.  Make your game in RPGmakerXP.  It makes it very easy to create RPGs because that's what it's designed to do.  AGS is not designed to make RPGs.  It's just one of the many different things you can do if you're willing to put in the effort.  And I haven't seen any evidence that you're willing to put in that effort.

My advice is as I said several posts before.  Don't worry about the art.  Do the best you can, but concentrate on -- first of all -- finishing a game, and -- second of all -- telling your story.

When I went to the Game Developers Conference several years ago as a college student, I talked to as many industry folks as I could.  I went to dinner one night with a designer and programmer at a minor development house that has recently been bought up by EA.  I told him I had all these ideas that I was saving until I could get a team together.  He advised me not to hold back my best ideas. 

Show them.  Make them.  Demonstrate my best ideas to the world.  Then, those ideas would eventually get me noticed and help me get the team that I dreamed of.  So what if I had already used up my best ideas to get there?  At least I would have gotten there.  And then I could come up with new great ideas.

If you don't just run with your ideas, you'll just be left alone, with a bunch of ideas and nothing to show for them.

Just make the game.

I thought you understood "more less complete" to mean that the RPG system is in production.  My bad. 

He was saying that him and his friends have finished ("more or less") acting out the world in their chat room role play.  Reread his posts, he never said anything about an RPG.  He even specifically mentioned that the role play took place on MSN.  Maybe I've just talked to him on MSN enough to be able to wade through his poor grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Though this should have made it pretty clear: 

Seeing that you want to make it an RPG, do tell us about the system you're going to use: Japanese RPG, Diablo-style hackfest, open-ended a la Elder Scrolls? Juding from the story I'd say Japanese style, with fixed characters and heavy emphasis on the plot... It has that FF ring to it, somehow.

Oh no no this will be a interactive story/point and click plot branching game

I think he meant "more or less" which changes the meaning completely. 

Ghost, you misunderstand him.  He's not planning an RPG.  He's planning an adventure based on a role play.  Not a role playing game.  In this case, the role play was him and his friends creating a fantasy world by acting out characters (hence "role play") over MSN.

It's advice and a comic!

Sorry guys.  No idea why that was happening.  I have three websites, and one, for reasons I won't get into, is chained to a different, extremely crappy host.  That site is mostly used for holding random files that I want to distribute, because the host is too unreliable for anything of importance.  I don't know what caused this, but I've moved my avatar and sent emails to the support staff.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

And sorry, Branden, for inadvertently hijacking the thread.  Although I don't know that there's anything else to say that hasn't already been said a few times:

-Start with something small.
-Don't worry at first about graphics.  If it plays well and has a great story, people will enjoy it, and it will help you recruit an artist to either redo the graphics or to help you with your next, larger project.
-Good luck.

Still the chance to meet Kinoko, Vince, and now Brad seems extra nice

Don't forget Luke aka Space Pirate Cain!

Pics look like fun Kinoko.  I would love to have come, but Tokyo is so far away from my beautiful little island!

I think making an adventure game based off of the story developed by your MSN role plays is a decent idea.  Hopefully everyone involved in the role play will be interested in helping out and you have a team right there.

I wouldn't worry about people saying your plot is derivative or unoriginal.  Especially don't be bothered by Enkerro's rather rude and unhelpful post in which he summarizes your story and adds question marks after each line as if they prove his point.  As long as you love the story, it will be evident in the game that you create out of it.

Your story has a workable starting point, and now you need to develop it into something suitable for an adventure game (if that is, indeed, where you're intending to go).  That means finding parts of the story where challenges, characters, and events will become gameplay.

With what you've shown of the story so far, I would mostly be worried about making it too epic.  You should absolutely not set off to make a game with vast kingdoms and lots of characters.  You should plan something small first.  Maybe four or five rooms.  Let it serve as an intro to your story world, rather than a epic sweeping tale.

First, take a small part of the story.  Perhaps the part that you've talked about where the mystic impersonation orb infiltrates Sen's palace and finds it's way, unnoticed, to the king's chambers.  Make that small part into a game.  That way you have something that you actually can finish with a reasonable amount of work, instead of jumping in and dedicating yourself to something you may never be able to finish.

After you finish this smaller game, it can serve as an introduction to the world for players as you work on something larger.  Or, maybe you'll decide not to do something larger, but at least you'll have something to show for your efforts.

Find out how much your friends are willing to help.  Agree on the jobs that you each will do.  Take on some responsibility yourself, be it writing, programming, or art.  And start working.  If you don't have anyone who is a stellar artist, don't let that stop you.  You're probably not going to be able to find an exceptional artist to work with you until you've proven yourself a bit.  Just make your game with simplistic graphics.  It doesn't matter how it looks, it can still play well and have an awesome story.  If it does.  I guarantee you'll find someone who will want to work with you to either redo it with better graphics or help you with the next one.

As for your posts, at least make an effort to place periods in between sentences so that we know when one ends and the next begins.  It will make a world of difference.

Good luck on it and let us know when you have something to show.

I even asked myself what I would have done if I had witnessed this happening. Would I have reacted violently to this person, perhaps even to a dangerous level? My anger would drive me to, but I doubt I would. It's not in my personality. I'd try to help the woman, as any decent person would. Of course, other people may see red and go straight for the jugular.

Maybe you wouldn't be driven to a dangerous level of aggression, but what if you were in the middle of a mob of people?  I'm reminded of a story I read about a while back:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8PSKSDO0&show_article=1

Basically, at some large public gathering, a man hit a child with his car.  The child sustained non-life threatening injuries.  But the crowd around him was enraged and tried to attack him rather than wait for the proper authorities to handle the incident.  Another man tried to stop the mob and was killed.  The driver got away and is cooperating with investigators.

Now, not only does the driver need to be investigated for his dangerous driving, but the members of the mob need to be investigated for the killing of an innocent bystander.

Well said, Andail.

Where can I preorder?

I'm not sure that infamous means what you think it means.  But it's oddly applicable.

Go to the link I provided and ask the creator himself.  As ProgZ said, it's allowed to post these questions here, but as I said, you're far likelier to get information from the source than from a forum full of people that have never heard of this project (as a forum search would suggest).

Just please don't bump this thread in a month asking if anyone has found out anything.