Need Game Story And Design Ideas

[Senoska]

No. It was lost.


This was an old video of it. I had based it on the Eclispe Engine, although, a ton of things were changed in the engine. It was mainly used for networking. It had kind of a Minecraft take to it, in that it was a MMO and to build a house or a shop or weapons, you had to actually get the resources, for example, chop down trees to get wood to make a house. The main focus was the crafting system. Nothing but this video remains of the project. If you read the comments of the video, people were all butthurt I used ripped sprites, which is what I was worried about in this game.

[hey]

No. It was lost.

Your current project <.<

[Senoska]

...What? The current project is fine.. I'm confused. The source that was lost was the old project, and thats what I was talking about in the quoted post. Current project is fine and is developing as expected. Although, it may take a bit since most of this XNA crap is trial and error, and I'm finding that the solution is usually the hardest of possible solutions. However, yeah, its moving along fine.

edit: Okay I get what was being asked. That was worded funny...

Yeah, the problem was that the last game was written in vb6(lol) which is old as hell and was prone to problems. Not to mention I made it in 2008, which is when I wasn't all that great with programming. I've managed to figure out how to back my shit up, as well as if there is some type of corruption (which has happened in other projects), I figured out how to solve it.


edit 2:
NPC drawing finished:

http://bucket.bluegartr.com/f18b9485...78290e57bb.jpg

[The Stig]

There are tons of things wrong with this post. For starters, the mmorpg I had made was complete. The engine worked fine. I was in map development and sprite creation. However, I lost the entire source and couldnt open it in visual studio.

This game is ENTIRELY from scratch. There is no code that is contributed to it. The engine is totally custom, and uses the XNA language, which is based on the c# syntax.

RPG maker is not what I'm looking to do. I'm not doing this just to make a game. I'm a programmer by trade, and hobby, and am always looking to explore different programming paths to learn new things. This particular project is my attempt at XNA, which is a directX wrapper that is used for Xbox360 games, and computer games.

I'm not sure what you mean by the overall scheme of things. Thats what I'm asking you for. I can code anything I want to. So if people come up with a good idea, it'll be implemented. Basic things like battle systems are what I was looking for while I developed movement and collision detection. However, I already settled on what I'm going to do. Also, I have the ability to have a long term hobby. I don't know if people just have ADD, but when I typically do something like this, I do it for months. My last project before this one took me 8 months to complete, but I was happy with the product.

The music was just something I found on newgrounds while I was browsing around. Sprites are required to do the frame animation for movement and battle systems. There is no "one at a time." you plan out what you're going to do, and everything works together. You have to have movement and animation before you can have anything else.

I dont want to base it on the MMORPG I made because it is not the same game and the play-style is entirely different. Rather than having several people to group up for instances, you get to do it all by yourself. Different game, different structure.

I have no intention of using another engine as this is a learning experience for me, and I'll be doing it for fun and as something to do when I'm not at work. This is not an effort at all to 'break into the industry' or anything like that. I wanted to learn how to write a game for the xbox, so thats what I'm doing.

I suppose I'm ultimately skeptical in my original post, but based on the assumption I do not know your situation or background, I'm coming off as very surprised that:

1. I'm not aware of this project being announced before, nor has anyone made reference to it, but I do understand the need to keep it private before mentioning any word of it, you want to get it to a stable point before making any word of it, but might contradict point #2

2. As your lost project was complete and such, who was going to test it? - unless you had just finished it and you were just about to distribute it, but hardware failed for you, leading on to point #3

3. I can't view the video from work, but will take a peek when I get home, but if that's what is the only thing left of it, I'm very surprised that this was not announced and/or discussed and/or distributed for testing where backups could've been made

4. The lost game sounds advanced, more than anything I could ever do at my current state, likewise, what you're doing now also seems impressive already; if you're rolling in progress by the masses then that's great, keep it up

My reaction here stems from game maker communities where suddenly one day someone announces an "epic" project on forums, shows all these cool details (along with screenshots or videos or development in progress), gets everyone somewhat hyped up, gets everyone to start contributing ideas or resources, only for it to flatline where it is almost deemed for the project to vanish, or the creator says "soon, soon" but nothing is actually accomplished.

[Senoska]

I suppose I'm ultimately skeptical in my original post, but based on the assumption I do not know your situation or background, I'm coming off as very surprised that:

1. I'm not aware of this project being announced before, nor has anyone made reference to it, but I do understand the need to keep it private before mentioning any word of it, you want to get it to a stable point before making any word of it, but might contradict point #2

2. As your lost project was complete and such, who was going to test it? - unless you had just finished it and you were just about to distribute it, but hardware failed for you, leading on to point #3

3. I can't view the video from work, but will take a peek when I get home, but if that's what is the only thing left of it, I'm very surprised that this was not announced and/or discussed and/or distributed for testing where backups could've been made

4. The lost game sounds advanced, more than anything I could ever do at my current state, likewise, what you're doing now also seems impressive already; if you're rolling in progress by the masses then that's great, keep it up

My reaction here stems from game maker communities where suddenly one day someone announces an "epic" project on forums, shows all these cool details (along with screenshots or videos or development in progress), gets everyone somewhat hyped up, gets everyone to start contributing ideas or resources, only for it to flatline where it is almost deemed for the project to vanish, or the creator says "soon, soon" but nothing is actually accomplished.

Well... When I was making the game, there was a post on the forums about it than ran several dozen pages long. There were a lot of old threads that you cant find any more. This being one of them. The game was developed in 2008, which was almost 4 years ago. Stuff happens on the forum. The video was one of the things posted in the thread when it was nearing completion. Its clearly my game since I'm talking about BG in the video, and it has my name as the character. Several people here were helping me test it. If you read the comments of the video, you see people like Magnus posting when it was on these forums. So... I'm not too sure what you're implying. The game was obviously created and I have no reason to lie about it, if thats what you're saying.

No backups were made because I didnt expect to just up and lose the project one day. Shit happens. Nothing could be done about it.

The last game was advanced. I'm a programmer by trade. I work as a full time software engineer, and have been in this business for years. I've been releasing programs in this community since 2006: LinkshellLeaderPro being one of those (Looking back: loooool.) If you've used any *chan downloaders, chances are good I made it, as well. I've released probably 6 chan downloaders over the years.

I enjoy what I do, and get shit done when I do it. This was never intended to be some 'super epic game.' its just development of a simple 2d game engine.

If you think about it, what actually goes into games like this? There isn't very much. In terms of basic systems, there is movement, collision, maps, characters, pathing, and fighting. Anything that follows that is just saving and loading. I'm basing armor ratings, items, damage, etc, off of the pathfinder system. Once that is implemented, adding an item or map or anything else to the game is just dragging and dropping a XML file into the game. Releasing developer tools is as simple as laying out the classes and serializing them to xml, or deserializing them back into the class. Saving and loading, basically. Setting up scripts or quests is just checking inventory for items, or using bool values to detect if certain events are completed, which are easy to script in.

Once I get the engine laid out, I intend to give people here some tools to help develop the game as it goes. When people typically say "I'm going to make a game," they expect that they are going to do the sprites or music, or they just have some shitty idea without any programming background.

Now, I'm not saying that there is zero chance I wont see this through. XNA is a new language to me, but it is based on the syntax that I work every single day in. I like to pick up hobby projects, and this is one of them. I'll do what I can and release what I have.

TL:DR: This type of game is not hard if you have any basic understanding of how games work. I'm not making sprites since I stole other people's. I'm not making music since I stole other people's. I'm not making game mechanics because I took them from the pathfinder system. I'm not making much content since I'll be releasing developer tools that will load things into the game. The only thing that I have to do is lay out some basic save and load methods and a basic level of decent content that is given to me.

[Senoska]

Just a bump. Sitting down to work on this some more today. Will update with the nightly progress.

edit: I'm working on NPC vector pathing tonight. Got it mostly working with some graphics glitches that need to be handled. Everything needs to be subclassed as well. Too much of a clusterfuck right now.

[Senoska]

http://www.stickam.com/senotaru9

Live Development if you want to see what's going on or where I'm at with this.

[Senoska]

Alright. That took a little bit longer than I expected. Here's what I got done tonight and last night:

Movement

• Subclassed all the movement methods. Split things up into NPC and Character movement classes, animation and drawing classes, and information classes. This keeps things neater.
• Scripted basic npc pathing. There are two methods involved. One is a roaming algorithm that generates a vector on the map and paths to it. The other is you define a list of vectors that the charater paths to. This will be handy for scripted npcs or cut scenes and the like.
• Redid the Character state and animation scheme so that things are very easy to edit. This will easily allow things like cut scenes in the game, or allow you to script things into the engine once its done
• Started the Character class which is designed to serialize into XML for easy character creation. This will house all the stats.

Things left to do:

• There are a lot of things left to do. My next undertaking is going to be camera control. This shouldn't be a problem or take more than an hour. After this, I'm going to tackle the map creation and loading. I'll get some developer tools out that people can play with probably within the next week or so.

Overall, this is proving to be a pretty large undertaking, but I am learning a lot. I've decided to open source this project once it gets a little further along and has some basic functions, so stay tuned for that. Will keep you guys updated. Still looking for nifty things to add to the game. So any ideas are welcomed right now. Once this gets farther along, adding specific things may get a little harder.

Class Diagram: