Drethon's first blog
by Drethon · 06/10/2009 (4:19 pm) · 4 comments
Hi all, I'm a lifelong gamer who has always wanted to develop games but just never really sat down and worked on them. I'm beginning to progress on developing the core features of a 2D space scroller and decided to start blogging to track my progress through game development. If manage to achieve a game release these blogs will chart my progress from the very beginning and will hopefully be an inspiration to other developments, otherwise it may just chart my decent into game developer oblivion :)
(if you don't care about my background you can jump past this to my thoughts on game design)
I'm a software engineer with past work on the L-3 SmartDeck glass cockpit (www.smartdeck.com) and currently working on the avionics for the C-130J Super Hercules upgrade (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130J_Super_Hercules). Most of my focus has been developing requirements and software (occasionally tests) for flight planning and navigation.
In addition to working with a little overtime I'm taking two classes a semester while working through my graduate degree. My current classes are on computer architecture and distributed operating systems.
All this really cuts into available time for working on my game.
My game design interests:
If you actually read though my background, my apologies ;).
My interests in computer games is car and airplane simulations and RPGs. Car and airplane simulations are fairly straight forward (do what happens in the real world but make it fun...), RPGs on the other hand have a whole range of design choices.
My feelings on most RPGs these days are they are too focused on the player. A lot of people are probably looking at that statement and thinking but the player it the one who pays for my game...
What I mean by this is I think game worlds are too dependent on the player. Changes to the game world only occur when the player does something and often those changes are prescripted and predictable. Even the progression of sandbox games seem mostly handcuffed to the player. I'd rather see the player reacting to the game world.
I want to design a game where the world is basically a simulation. The player can choose to do nothing and just watch the world do its own thing or jump in at any point and steer the world in a different direction. Now the PC is no different from an NPC, its up to the player to allow the PC to have an impact on the world. For those who want easy rewards there is easy mode but the player will still have to actively impact the world by choices instead of just following the bread crumbs.
One of the ways I know of that can do this is forget the trees for the forest, simulate the entire game/region/city with numbers and the NPCs are just realizations of these numbers and actions by the player just tweak these numbers. This system looks extremely predictable which is what I'm trying to avoid.
The other approach is to focus on the trees and let the forest sort itself out, create an organization of NPCs and their actions will determine what happens in the world. This system looks very unpredictable because of the large number of variables which is good for game play to the extent it doesn't break the game.
The approach I am looking at is to combine the two. Have a overall controller that adjusts the individual NPCs to keep things in line. Don't want any of the city-states to be completely destroyed? Adjust the NPCs in the smaller city-state to be fiercely loyal to their state that is in danger and adjust the NPCs in the larger city-state to be less loyal the the bloated state.
My current game
Well the above is a way off while I build the pieces that will eventually turn into a game.
The back story on the game. The year is 2075. Space colonies have been built and are flourishing but the earth's economy is in shambles thanks to the police state that currently governs earth push at all costs to expand into space and lack of realization that earth's resources are far less than once believed. It had also been discovered that the rest of the solar system had even less resources than earth which produced enough to sustain the colonies but not enough to bring back to Earth.
As a result the colonies were largely left to themselves while earth's government tried to maintain control on earth. With no police patrolling space the space between the colonies quickly became filled with pirates that hijacked mineral loads being brought back to stations by mining ships. The colonies turned to mercenaries to protect their interests.
Hijacked loads plummeted in operations protected by mercenaries by pirates still roamed space. Because the mercenaries were provided with cheap ships to patrol space and were only paid upon completion of a job, most mercenaries barely made a living. Some gave up protecting the mining operations for piracy, some of which was subsidized by the less scrupulous corporations, while others persisted and gained enough wealth to begin constructing their own stations to produce goods.
Progress
So having said all that, where am I at now? Not that far :)
Currently I can fly the spaceship around the scroller as well as docking with a station and having a station produce NPCs that patrol between waypoints. Mining targeted asteroids is successfully implemented so now I need to implement a method to unload those mined goods into a station and then move on to combat and missions.
For those of you who completely read all of this you must either be very board or I write better than I think I do :). My future blogs will be shorter and more to the point of what ever I'm currently working through.
Till next time, glad to be a part of this great community!
(if you don't care about my background you can jump past this to my thoughts on game design)
I'm a software engineer with past work on the L-3 SmartDeck glass cockpit (www.smartdeck.com) and currently working on the avionics for the C-130J Super Hercules upgrade (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-130J_Super_Hercules). Most of my focus has been developing requirements and software (occasionally tests) for flight planning and navigation.
In addition to working with a little overtime I'm taking two classes a semester while working through my graduate degree. My current classes are on computer architecture and distributed operating systems.
All this really cuts into available time for working on my game.
My game design interests:
If you actually read though my background, my apologies ;).
My interests in computer games is car and airplane simulations and RPGs. Car and airplane simulations are fairly straight forward (do what happens in the real world but make it fun...), RPGs on the other hand have a whole range of design choices.
My feelings on most RPGs these days are they are too focused on the player. A lot of people are probably looking at that statement and thinking but the player it the one who pays for my game...
What I mean by this is I think game worlds are too dependent on the player. Changes to the game world only occur when the player does something and often those changes are prescripted and predictable. Even the progression of sandbox games seem mostly handcuffed to the player. I'd rather see the player reacting to the game world.
I want to design a game where the world is basically a simulation. The player can choose to do nothing and just watch the world do its own thing or jump in at any point and steer the world in a different direction. Now the PC is no different from an NPC, its up to the player to allow the PC to have an impact on the world. For those who want easy rewards there is easy mode but the player will still have to actively impact the world by choices instead of just following the bread crumbs.
One of the ways I know of that can do this is forget the trees for the forest, simulate the entire game/region/city with numbers and the NPCs are just realizations of these numbers and actions by the player just tweak these numbers. This system looks extremely predictable which is what I'm trying to avoid.
The other approach is to focus on the trees and let the forest sort itself out, create an organization of NPCs and their actions will determine what happens in the world. This system looks very unpredictable because of the large number of variables which is good for game play to the extent it doesn't break the game.
The approach I am looking at is to combine the two. Have a overall controller that adjusts the individual NPCs to keep things in line. Don't want any of the city-states to be completely destroyed? Adjust the NPCs in the smaller city-state to be fiercely loyal to their state that is in danger and adjust the NPCs in the larger city-state to be less loyal the the bloated state.
My current game
Well the above is a way off while I build the pieces that will eventually turn into a game.
The back story on the game. The year is 2075. Space colonies have been built and are flourishing but the earth's economy is in shambles thanks to the police state that currently governs earth push at all costs to expand into space and lack of realization that earth's resources are far less than once believed. It had also been discovered that the rest of the solar system had even less resources than earth which produced enough to sustain the colonies but not enough to bring back to Earth.
As a result the colonies were largely left to themselves while earth's government tried to maintain control on earth. With no police patrolling space the space between the colonies quickly became filled with pirates that hijacked mineral loads being brought back to stations by mining ships. The colonies turned to mercenaries to protect their interests.
Hijacked loads plummeted in operations protected by mercenaries by pirates still roamed space. Because the mercenaries were provided with cheap ships to patrol space and were only paid upon completion of a job, most mercenaries barely made a living. Some gave up protecting the mining operations for piracy, some of which was subsidized by the less scrupulous corporations, while others persisted and gained enough wealth to begin constructing their own stations to produce goods.
Progress
So having said all that, where am I at now? Not that far :)
Currently I can fly the spaceship around the scroller as well as docking with a station and having a station produce NPCs that patrol between waypoints. Mining targeted asteroids is successfully implemented so now I need to implement a method to unload those mined goods into a station and then move on to combat and missions.
For those of you who completely read all of this you must either be very board or I write better than I think I do :). My future blogs will be shorter and more to the point of what ever I'm currently working through.
Till next time, glad to be a part of this great community!
#2
bored not board ;)
Actually your good spacing and small paragraphs help immensely. Also, some PICS would have been nice. You've got a few things working in game so show them off visually.
I like the idea of an organic living-breathing gameworld which happens regardless of player interaction, though a few constraints on it's activities would help reign in the more extreme events and try to keep a balance. Making it an interesting callenge to occupy the player would need a fair bit of thought.
I remember playing a couple of games with a more basic approach to that back in the 80s. But as technology has increased to cope with such things, games seem to have tried to steer clear of it. Predictability ensuring a definitive play experience over the more abstract.
06/10/2009 (6:13 pm)
For those of you who completely read all of this you must either be very board or I write better than I think I do bored not board ;)
Actually your good spacing and small paragraphs help immensely. Also, some PICS would have been nice. You've got a few things working in game so show them off visually.
I like the idea of an organic living-breathing gameworld which happens regardless of player interaction, though a few constraints on it's activities would help reign in the more extreme events and try to keep a balance. Making it an interesting callenge to occupy the player would need a fair bit of thought.
I remember playing a couple of games with a more basic approach to that back in the 80s. But as technology has increased to cope with such things, games seem to have tried to steer clear of it. Predictability ensuring a definitive play experience over the more abstract.
#3
I'd consider posing pictures but everything I've got is stolen from the tutorials as I'm better at coding logic than building sprites :)
Later on I'll look into making some custom sprites as I used to be fairly good at making race car skins in photoshop.
06/10/2009 (6:41 pm)
Meh, dyslexic one gave up grammar a long time ago... (good catch either way)I'd consider posing pictures but everything I've got is stolen from the tutorials as I'm better at coding logic than building sprites :)
Later on I'll look into making some custom sprites as I used to be fairly good at making race car skins in photoshop.
#4
Good luck with your current Game.
06/10/2009 (8:41 pm)
I definately like the organic game world concept too. To some degree, mmorpg's fill that role though. I have considered something like what you describe myself, but it would be too big for a one man job. Good luck with your current Game.
Torque Owner Tuomas Kaukoranta