Project Xenoverse: Dec 11th Progress Report

ID:51738
 
Dec 11 2008, 4:20 pm (Edited on Dec 11 2008, 4:43 pm)
Well, I'm out of school. What's more, I impressively sabotaged my financial aid so it will stay that way for several months. Even better, unemployment is extremely high right now. Bottom line? Plenty of time to develop games!

Thus, at the risk of inviting imitation, I present to you a screenshot of the December 11th version of my game.



Outstanding, isn't it? It's a pity I just decided to go in a completely different direction. Here's the really promising concept I came up with just today that I'm probably stick with:

The players are invaders in an Artificial-Intelligence-Gone-Mad station (or other environment) which is perpetually trying to kill them off and return the environment to its former state.

That will be the game. It's somewhat survival horror, quite similar to System Shock, but it's also an open-ended dynamic content game, which has always been my goal.

The thing is, players don't very well respect their virtual environment. Give them a fully functioning space station (or whatever), and more players want to tear it apart than put to together. Guess what? That's the name of this game: the station is run by the forces of evil and it's your job to rip it out of their dirty little fingers and take it for yourself.

I should probably stop talking about it and posting on forums and get to work. After all, I'm free man now, and with this freedom comes absolute accountability for every moment wasted.

Whee?
Dec 11 2008, 5:14 pm
Well, I'm out of school. What's more, I impressively sabotaged my financial aid so it will stay that way for several months. Even better, unemployment is extremely high right now. Bottom line? Plenty of time to develop games!

I know that feeling. But I'd rather work and less game development time myself. Being poor sucks.

--

You have so many different ideas and continue to change your game to suit them. Have you considered taking the approach that other ideas could be game modes?
Dec 11 2008, 5:25 pm
Tiberath wrote:
I know that feeling. But I'd rather work and less game development time myself. Being poor sucks.

True, that. I'm being somewhat sarcastic in my appreciation of the wealth of time I have for game development. :P

You have so many different ideas and continue to change your game to suit them. Have you considered taking the approach that other ideas could be game modes?

Good idea, that. I could try to design in such a way that this option is open. (As it is, I was thinking in terms of taking other ideas and using them for sequels.)

What I may end up doing is an evolving game mode, where the AI might be overcome only to reveal a new challenge that involves a different mode of play. Of course, if this approach puts the players needs as secondary, that's no good.
Dec 11 2008, 5:38 pm
Sequels are good too.

Any idea I manage to come up with which doesn't suit my current game properly, I'm keeping and going to write for other game servers.

The plan is, the game takes place on a planet dubbed "Evalon", mainly because Mobius Evalon is fantastic with answering my constantly asked questions, and it's a suiting name.

The different servers are countries in this world. And each server uses the same player datum and graphics, so the players can go freely from one to the other. This plan gives me ultimate freedom in what I desire to do. If I want to make a grinding RPG, I can make that take place on some other server based in the same game. Or a very quest-driven game can happen in a different one.

The beauty of my plan is, the sky is the limit, provided it falls into the scope of the player datum (which I can evolve as needed as time goes on). The only difficult part is balancing the game so if someone comes from a grinding server, they're not super-strong and can beat any boss in the original game itself.

The entire system is done via a global project. Any resources and code used through-out all games I'm making like this, will be placed here, and the games themselves just include the global projects dme inside their own DME.

// BEGIN_EXTERNALS
#include "../_global\_global.dme"
// END_EXTERNALS

It seems to work wonderfully for my purposes. =)
Dec 11 2008, 6:10 pm
I recently came under the understanding myself that a highly modular design does wonders in terms of being able to produce more robust games. What your talking about here sounds like a powerful example.

The Evalon plan sounds good, and you've already identified the issues I'd see. I'd probably throw in some good meeting hubs - really big online worlds have an issue that players have a hard time finding each other.
Dec 11 2008, 6:13 pm
Geldonyetich wrote:
I recently came under the understanding myself that a highly modular design does wonders in terms of being able to produce more robust games. What your talking about here sounds like a powerful example.

The Evalon plan sounds good, and you've already identified the issues I'd see. I'd probably throw in some good meeting hubs - really big online worlds have an issue that players have a hard time finding each other.

That wont be a problem. =)