Here's what I figured: Elaborate RPG's take a LONG time to make (see the year long contest where most slackers took over a year to finish.... nothing) and let's be honest. As far as re playability, you get serious negative returns on your invested time. Now, When I finally made a good map (HS) that took me over 4 months to get it to a point where it is now, BUT I enjoy playing it, other people enjoy playing it, and the time spent by people playing the game has already gone over the time I invested in it's creation. This is satisfactory to me.
RPG's are a different ball game because it's a lot more difficult to get positive returns like i just described. This is the real reason why I've never finished an RPG I started, but I am not willing to end my (very short and technically not a) map making career without having made an RPG. Then, during class the past couple days I was not paying attention and decided to think about RPG interfaces instead. Then, I thought of a way that I could create a RPG Interface that revolved around 3 screens.
Inspired by "Room" maps and Zelda for the SNES, I decided that center screen would be a VERY good thing to fuse into interface designing. I would just need 3 screens and a way to toggle between them.
This is what I came up with:
The 3 screens used in this interface are 1. Current location screen - the area where the player's character stands. 2. Menu #1, and finally Menu#2 is the third screen. That was the easy part, so then I went on to ponder effective ways to toggle between screens. Before I could do this, I had to think about how I would want my RPG to be like. I'm not going to go into any details (that's best left for when it actually goes into production), but I will say that the use of a Melee character and the need to share Screen1 among two people made my options very limited.
Then, I remembered something. Mutalisk.
Then, my interface was born. Given an approximate screen size of 12X20, that would indeed leave room in the top corner of every screen for 2 mutalisks to be placed. In times where the menus are available, 1 mutalisk is given to the player and he can morph it into either guardian or devourer. This will bring him to either screen2 or screen3 respectively. Then, I could make like a hydralisk in the bottom corner of each menu screen that upon morphing into lurker returns you to the default screen: screen1.
Bam. I got to work on designing these screens and the layout last night, and when I am done with classes for the day I can resume this. I think that this minimalistic approach to the interface in RPG's has been hinted at by many people and the combined result is this. Working with this design, I may finally be able to bring to SEN a traditional rpg - something I've wanted to make ever since I started mapping a little over a year ago. I'll probably be able to pump out a demo of all these systems within 2 weeks, and we'll go from there.
None.