Lives and Health Bar

Hmm. How does this sound as an alternative to lives-

Each time you die, your 'starting health' is halved (down to a certain minimum). So, it's inconvenient to lose lives because it makes you likelier to lose them in the future.

Eating food can restore your 'starting health' as well as your current health, so you can recover form repeated losses.

Would that be enough to make death more than a trivial setback, while still avoiding the hard limit of a number of lives?

Yeah I did-away with the health and lives system in Spuds Quest in favor of just a save system. Had no complaints at all, in fact I think people classed it as an improvement so go for it.

The lack of lives / save mehcanism is related to another issue that needs to be addressed - only being able to examine / talk to someone once.

Back in the day, because you had three lives, you wouldn't complete most dizzy games in a single attempt. This often meant that you would talk to people several times and would remember that "the bucket in the castle courtyard needs fixing" and would hence, when you found the chewing gum, recall that you could fix the hole in the bucket.

With Saving - which I do a lot in New Dizzy - I only ever get this hint once. This can lead to situations where you forget about the existence of problem X / what Grand Dizzy wanted this time and struggle to complete the game. A really good improvement can be made to New Dizzy games if you could repeatedly examine / talk with main characters, rather than having to remember what they said two weeks ago.

[quote data-userid="205" data-postid="68529"]

The lack of lives / save mehcanism is related to another issue that needs to be addressed – only being able to examine / talk to someone once.

Back in the day, because you had three lives, you wouldn’t complete most dizzy games in a single attempt. This often meant that you would talk to people several times and would remember that “the bucket in the castle courtyard needs fixing” and would hence, when you found the chewing gum, recall that you could fix the hole in the bucket.

With Saving – which I do a lot in New Dizzy – I only ever get this hint once. This can lead to situations where you forget about the existence of problem X / what Grand Dizzy wanted this time and struggle to complete the game. A really good improvement can be made to New Dizzy games if you could repeatedly examine / talk with main characters, rather than having to remember what they said two weeks ago.

[/quote]

Yep, that's a very good point. You have to be very careful about making sure hints are in the right places in the dialogue.

In the new version of Clover we recorded funny lines of dialogue for if you try to use the 'wrong' item on a character. However, as use and talk are the same thing in my game, it meant people would keep missing hints, so we had to cut it out :/