Need some advice

[Zerlina]

So for my first dungeon, it's a forest (of course). And I know normally the forest is the "normal" dungeon, ie: you just have to get through it without thinking, because it's for practise.

What I made was a sprite (a kind of spirit) that means no harm but is just bored and mischievous. The sprite (Robin) curses the hero so they can't leave the woods until they've answered a riddle. The letters making up the answer to the riddle are hidden on stones around the forest.
Is this a good idea? Is it too hard for a first dungeon? I'm not really sure.

[Raen Ryong]

It's fairly original... the difficulty of the dungeon lies within four factors there:

1 - The size of the thing.
2 - The difficulty of the monsters.
3 - The monster encounter rate.
4 - How much healing the characters have, and is it available?

I don't see anything wrong with starting with a dungeon like that. Break the mould

[Meiscool-2]

Yeah, so long as you can heal yourself, and you don't fight a lot of monsters, it's fine. You should never die in a first area, and you should never meet enemies that take more then 1 to 2 hits from a player to kill.

[Ruler of the Dark]

Depends if the stones stand out or not as well.  If they're too easy to spot, the puzzle could almost seem like a reason to make the player walk around a lot and fight some random battles.  Maybe since this is the first dungeon, make most of the stones easily obtained/found, and maybe one is harder to get (maybe via a simple jumping puzzle/simple maze).

[Toolophile]

Originally posted by Zerlina
So for my first dungeon, it's a forest (of course). And I know normally the forest is the "normal" dungeon, ie: you just have to get through it without thinking, because it's for practise.

What I made was a sprite (a kind of spirit) that means no harm but is just bored and mischievous. The sprite (Robin) curses the hero so they can't leave the woods until they've answered a riddle. The letters making up the answer to the riddle are hidden on stones around the forest.
Is this a good idea? Is it too hard for a first dungeon? I'm not really sure.

Depends. If your battles are random, this will be very annoying as you may not remember the stones you've seen thus far and going back to all of them while getting attacked can be annoying.

If your battles are not random, this idea is fine.

[Ruler of the Dark]

Originally posted by Toolophile
Depends. If your battles are random, this will be very annoying as you may not remember the stones you've seen thus far and going back to all of them while getting attacked can be annoying.

If your battles are not random, this idea is fine.

IMO random battles are fine.  Just make the encounter rate really low (which I think means for rm2k(3) to set the number higher, as it's number of steps maximum to run into a battle).  Keep the battles to a minimum and make them practically mindlessly easy tp solve the problem Toolophile mentioned.

[69_so_fine]

Yeah that sounds like a good idea it would probably be better if you made a variable to change the word from time to time

ie:
If the player guesses the word wrong to many times the word changes

or

The word could possibly change after everytime you do it. So When a player beats the game and wants to play it again it will be different. It ads replay value to the game.

[Shadowless1]

the guy who curses you could give you a note with riddles to where the letters for the other riddle may be

[Zerlina]

Thanks for the advice, I'm glad people here are so good at suggesting!
I understand the random battles having to be low, as it's more of a puzzle place.

What I started this morning was that you find the stones (it's fairly easy to notice when you find items in my game, because when you step over a square near an item, it alerts you), each of the stones are marked with a letter. The stones are saved in your inventory so you can't forget the letters.
When you go to another area of the forest, you find a sort of forest spirit that tells you this

(Spoiler...)







My power lies along the shore, at Carabas' spring,
Where once poor Whalia wept to see the greedy woodland king.

If thou finds the sound of truth between the Jade and Lair
Then thou hast found the secret and will find the secret there



Here I'm going to let the player choose which riddle stone to present. The answer to this one is "K", because it's between the "Jade and Lair" (ie J and L). As well, once this is done, a bridge appears at the map containing Carabas' spring, so that the player can continue further into the forest. This way, the riddle stones serve a double purpose.


My problem is... I don't know how to go about doing these choices except with a heck of a lot of conditional branches.
Is there another way to do this?
Or is it even a good idea?

[69_so_fine]

How many letter stones are you carrying at this point

[Raen Ryong]

Well, there are five ways I can suggest:

1) Use a lot of Show Choices, with the fourth option being "Next Page"

2) Ask for the number of the letter and use it as a variable

3) Use Fork Conditions (Fork Cond: Stone A OWN), and then a choice "Use Letter A" yes/no... probably the worst idea.

4) Have the hero teleported to a custom map and lay out all of the stones and make him choose.

Or, this one...

5) Enter Hero Name - Enter the letter
Fork Condition IF Hero No. 100 Name = K

I would use that one.