I’m somewhat early on in the development of my own romhack and having an excellent time doing it. Much of it is going easily for me because writing, world-building, and fleshing out characters are my strong suits. However, people of course don’t play these games just for a story! If that’s all you want, you’ll just read a book instead. I’ve never been especially great at these games and never been a hardcore player, with a Binding Blade ironman being the most challenging thing I’ve ever played in the series, and I was curious to see what the community thinks about what makes maps “click” for people as being fun and challenging without being too unfair or terrible.
There seems to widely be a preference for player phase oriented gameplay, and I can certainly understand why. Choking points and setting up for all of the action to happen while you watch a five minute enemy phase just isn’t as riveting and isn’t conducive to making the player feel like they have the most active role in the game. More to the point, player phase oriented gameplay is more precise, with the newer Fire Emblem games having the ability to make their higher difficulties much harder than their predecessors because when they are geared towards player actions there is more strategy and less luck.
So I guess my question here is like the title says: for those experienced and knowledgeable, how does one ensure that a game will be more player phase oriented on the whole and what decisions can be made on the scale of individual maps to play into that? For those who don’t concern themselves with such details, what are some things that generally make maps fun, dull, rewarding, or infuriating?
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I can’t give a full response as I am stuck with my phone so here are bullet points for making a game more player phase oriented.
- Make enemies threatening, but reasonable.
- make maps that encourage player to kill enemies limited chokes, good formations, etc
- make the player desire to play fast with chest, village, strong reinforcements, missable gaidens, or other rewards and punishment, faster movement will require player phase action
- make sure whatever you do it is fair the odds should always be in the players favor even if they don’t feel they are, tell the player about objectives and punishments for example if strong unfightable reinforcements appear on turn 16 tell or strongly hint to the player in dialog or system messages.
That’s all I have for now.
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Sharing some additional thoughts to the above.
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Enemy formations need to be tight, but not overwhelmingly oppressive. You want to avoid situations where the only safe or safe-ish move is to bait enemies one at a time (this is a “know the rules to know when to break them” kinda thing). Likewise, heavy use of artillery and status staves will slow down the player. Use them judiciously.
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In line with FuriousHaunter’s 3rd bullet point, create time-sensitive side-objectives. To add to the list, you can have enemies holding droppable or stealable items try to escape the map, NPCs you have to save, a side boss to kill to stop reinforcements from appearing. It’s all out there.
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A perhaps more controversial option, but one that has been proven successful is to nerf thrown weapons. We’ve seen games where they are just plain very rare until later in the game, we’ve seen games where regular thrown weapons can’t double, we’ve seen games where you can defend with thrown weapons only once on enemy phase. All of these are great at reducing the value of wating and baiting.
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