Trawling the Forums

In this multi-part series, I'll be digging through the Slime Salad and Castle Paradox forums looking for interesting tutorials and helpful guides. These group discussions are an interesting departure from authored articles showcasing only one viewpoint, but are just as helpful.

Welcome to the first edition of Trawling the Forums! This time, we'll look at three extremely interesting discussion ranging from game balance to graphic design to town planning.

Balance? - Balancing any game is a difficult task, but an RPG can be exponentially more challenging than, say, a platformer. In this thread, quite a few users pitch in as to the best way to balance an RPG, from math and spreadsheets to instinct and practice.

The stuff they don't tell you about making good graphics - shakeyair is one of the most prolific and excellent pixel artists on the Slime Salad forums, so when he tells you how to make good graphics, you should pay attention. You may disagree with his techniques, but the end results are hard to argue with.

Is this backwards? AKA The convoluted town layout solution - This thread starts out with a specific question, but quickly branches out into tips on laying out towns. This is stuff that I'd never explicitly thought about, and brings up some interesting points on the nature and purpose of towns in RPGs.

That's it for now! If you know of any other interesting forum topics that deserve to be highlighted, let me know!