[RampantCoyote]

Or, rather than hard, I should say, "Time Consuming."

This bugs me. A lot. But here are a few reasons. Reasons, not excuses:

Why Are RPGs So Hard to Create

Might be crying from the heights of Mount Obvious to this crowd, but I hoped the reasons might provide insight to some.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[cowgod]

I've only ever finished developing one rpg. And that one had a relatively small scope and didn't have much in the way of professional artwork.

The reasons I can never finish a larger rpg are:

1) I don't work on it enough.
a) I spend altogether too much time working, eating, sleeping, and doing other things necessary for survival.
b) I spend some time on leisure activities (especially Fallout 3).
c) I spend some time reading books about writing stories and refactoring code. I actually take notes about this information. This is necessary but time consuming
d) I fell on some ice in February, and my arm was useless for a while.
e) I write "articles" for my website that no one ever visits. I also sell games that no one buys as an affiliate.
f) Maybe I just don't have the motivation necessary to program enough to get things done - this is essentially a 2nd job that I don't get paid for.
2) I can't seem to stick to one design. (However, some of the changes are necessary.)
3) I write code that isn't necessary for the project.
a) A medium size (though incomplete) library of gui code that isn't wholly necessary. However, this seems to be somewhat useful.
b) Collections classes that already exist in the Java API.
c) A Trie class that could be replaced by Java's HashMap class.
d) Parsing code that probably exists in the new scripting extensions for Java.
e) I have a sort of spiffy map editor. Unfortunately, I've put more work into it than into the actual game.
f) The artist (who may or may not actually be working on the project) effectively vetoed some things by drawing art in a certain way:
!) I had to throw away my 99% done isometric code to use orthogonal code because the artist said that isometric art was too much work.
@) I had to keep changing the way the art files were supposed to be loaded. I even had to change the interface of the map editor because he wanted to do things in a different way.
4) I have difficulty acquiring art resources, though I haven't had a problem with music resources. This is not yet an issue on the current game.
5) I do all my own programming. While it would probably be wise to change this, I don't think I will.

My current game hasn't gotten beyond the stage of a demo that doesn't do much (though the map editor isn't bad). I've been working on it for over a year, though there were several interruptions.

It's not an issue of content generation or debugging. I'm so far from that point that it's not even worth talking about. I think alot of people are in the same boat, though I acknowledge that the problems your articles list would be real problems for those people who get that far.

[Jinroh]

Good article RC.

I liked the part Variety of Interconnected Game Systems and Activities which is true because if you want to have a breadth of cool stuff to do you basically have to write a bunch of different engines or have a really general scripting system to handle all the stuff.

Art was always a big killer for RPGs I'd be planning. Just the large breadth of characters and locations are annoying to say the least. I can crank out characters like the ones my game School Maze no problem. I made a nice template, 3D characters aren't much different for me since I templated those too. The big problem for me is not characters, but locations.

I had drawing/modeling locations because I'm not a very creative architect. I can draw people, but backgrounds and such are my weakness.

Great article RC. ^_^ You never cease to provide thought provoking articles.
_________________
Mao Mao Games
The wolf and his mate howl, taking solace in the silver moon. Pressing ever foreward to see what the future holds.

[XMark]

You should post some of your articles on the RPGDX front page - it hasn't really seen much activity lately.

I got nothing against the Sonic tile collision tutorial, I'd just like to see RPGDX being more visibly active. Maybe I should write something for it also.
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[RampantCoyote]

Heh - Cowgod, I like your list, too! That probably describes most of my projects before I went professional. And probably most indie projects in general.

Articles for here - yeah, maybe I should. I hate writing such developer-centric articles for my site, because I'm really trying to draw more RPG fans than RPG developers. But I'm so knee-deep in the friggin' development that it's about all I think about these days. But those kinds of articles would be fine for here, I guess. If ya'll can stand them.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Tenshi]

That was a good article. :)
_________________
- Jaeda

[killxo]

its taking ahwile for me because i'm the only person working on it. so i can only do some work when i'm in the mood and when i have free time.

[tcaudilllg]

[RampantCoyote]

Yeah, the guy who rocked the house on our Beta-1 test with feedback (and the first person to complete Frayed Knights without any debug commands or cheat codes to get past broken parts) is an elementary school teacher in Taiwan.
_________________
Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz