The State of the Independent RPG Scene
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You've been outspoken about the fact that you dislike the idea of releasing a game in multiple chapters. Why do you feel this is a bad thing?
It's not the idea of chapters that I'm against, it's the fact that some developers use them as an excuse to be lazy. I have no problem paying for an RPG that's only a few hours long, as long as I don't spend the time fighting the same enemies or blindly navigating mazes.
Comparing the length of an RPG to the length of a hidden object game is cheating. RPGs use a lot of tricks to extend play time because that's what they're about. The development time to play time ratio is much higher for a hidden object game.
We're probably our own worst enemy when it comes to play time. We try to stop the player from fighting the same enemies. We try to make it pointless by lowering the amount of XP you get from enemies and instead giving it out for quests. In the end, I think players appreciate it. We may not be able to promise 40 hours of play time but the hours we're taking out are the boring ones.
Aside from the chapters trend, what other things have you noticed about the indie RPG scene that it could be doing better?
I think a lot of indie RPGs suffer from the same problems as many early RPGs. They can be very tedious and rely too much on battles or other time wasters to keep you busy. When I was younger I enjoyed that but I don't have that kind of time to play anymore.
I'm happy to see that most developers are moving away from random encounters. To this day, I have never played a game with random encounters for more than a few minutes.
As a player, I'm not looking for a game that will waste my time. I just want to play the good bits and move on to another game. I'm sorry about Slime Island.
