Game system ideas?

[Scout]

I've certainly noticed that myself. I don't know if letting the player turn off movement animation would quite work out, though, at least in my case.

The majority of the game will be spent in travel. The idea being that all the moving encompasses days long trips, and most of the narrative will take place in scenes that are "on the road." Once it's decisively determined that they are in fact going somewhere (I'm not sure quite yet how I'll do that, but I'll figure it out), it'll lapse from the map to a regular scene. But I don't think this'll really have the right effect if you can just skip through the entirety of movement.

I'm hoping that the fact that you're only moving a single unit will stop the player from being bored like in your examples.

Edit: That does bring up a pretty good question, though: how long does it take on a map screen before the player gets bored? I know I've gotten sick of some journeys in Final Fantasy games, but that's often just because I have no idea where I'm supposed to go. I guess the key is also to make sure that the player isn't wandering aimlessly (unless they actually want to)?

[monele]

I don't know your exact requirements but I've noticed something about giving "freedom" to the player for movements : if the player can only trigger new things by going to clearly marked places on your map, you might want to consider a simple "click-to-go-there" scheme instead of allowing arrow-keys movements. I mean... what's the point of being able to move in a very precise way if in the end, the game only cares about a few specific points of the map?
If you plan on having secret places or events based on how long you've been on the map (random battles in rpgs?) though, it does make sense to have that freedom since things can also happen in-between places and moving in circles, for example, could trigger something.

[BellosTheMighty]

I don't know your exact requirements but I've noticed something about giving "freedom" to the player for movements : if the player can only trigger new things by going to clearly marked places on your map, you might want to consider a simple "click-to-go-there" scheme instead of allowing arrow-keys movements. I mean... what's the point of being able to move in a very precise way if in the end, the game only cares about a few specific points of the map?
If you plan on having secret places or events based on how long you've been on the map (random battles in rpgs?) though, it does make sense to have that freedom since things can also happen in-between places and moving in circles, for example, could trigger something.

Another thing- make sure that, if the player is told something is to the west, she can find it by actually going west. That annoys me in RPGs- they say it's west, but it's actually more like northwest, or there's something in the way and you have to go around it, becoming disoriented, and you wander around for ages trying to find it. Uber-expansive games like Morrowind are especially bad with it, but even the Final Fantasy games with their generally smallish maps have this problem occassionally.

[DrakeNavarone]

Ahh, that Oh-Zoku map sorta reminded me of Sengoku Rance... which has sorta Risk-esque gameplay with actual rpg battles in it. I kinda wanted to make a Sengoku Rance framework, and maybe I will one day, as the game is insanely fun... but one of the nicer features of the menus is that a lot of the UI features click-and-drag buttons. I'm guessing Ren'Py doesn't support dragable UI objects? It's easy enough to just get by with buttons and clicks, and maybe click-and-drag buttons can be down with renpygame, but I suppose it's not a part of the Renpy proper, is it?

[monele]

Click and drag? How does it work? o_o... *curious*