Yay, I have a blog now... Hopefully this will get updated frequently. I certainly think about games often enough.

Something that I've been wanting to mention about the amateur CRPGs I've seen developed... There's a fairly easy change that will make the game more interesting: change the available weapons and equipment. The problem with a lot of games (even commercial games fall prey to this - FF7 comes to mind) is that when given the choice to buy a new weapon, the new one is better in all aspects than your last one. So of course, given the choice to upgrade a weapon, you'll always take it, as long as you have enough money. (I'll talk about weapons for now, but I mean all kinds of equipment.)

A simple change is to make weapons slightly different. Make several different elemental weapons with the same attack power, and the player is going to have to choose which element they feel they need most. Give the player a choice between two weapons of the same price, but one does more damage and the other gives a small bonus to defense.

The problem with this, of course, is that the player might feel overwhelmed by choices and not be willing to commit. In that case, it might be a good idea to have "paths" of weapons, where every weapon in the path is strictly better than the next-cheapest weapon.

Well, there's also the problem that this is a bit more work than not thinking about weapon stats at all, but even occasionally giving the player two weapon choices - say, one elemental, one not - will add a bit of interest.