And so it begins

Weston Cresswell — 2007-03-04T12:03:46+00:00

Well, I'm wes. just a sixteen year old with a need to make games. about a month ago me and some friends decided we were tired of the old pay to play mmorpg like wow, everquest 1 and 2, and the games alike to those.Now don't get me wrong, we enjoy those games we just don't think that there should be a monthly fee. so now we've set out to make a mmorpg that all of us ( being 10 in total, all 16 except for my brother who is 13) will enjoy playing.

The main thing that we want for our game is a working governement in our game. It's going to be in a futuristic setting with 3 races to start with and we're planning on adding another one in in a later patch of the game. for this to work though me and my friend kieran are going to be coding in a dynamic quest sort of thing where in quests can only be done a certain amount of times( this is still pending ) and then the first person to have done it is recoegnized by the npc for a little while and everyone who does the quest gets points for it, people who have enough points will get rewards at set interverals. this will mean that we have to come up with alot of quests, quests that we want to be fun, not just go here and kill twenty million rabbits and come back for some experience.

We want there to be a depth to our story. People should be enjoying the game and get involved with the community not just constantly running instances, although some people like that. There will still be mobs and PvP but it will be relevant to the story and the factions. As i said above we're going to include an ingame event where we introduce the new race. Proboably going to be where we hand select a few individuals playing the game to create new characters of that race and have them join in the pvp war going on that day.

A thing that we would enjoy having in the game is sort of interplanar transport system where you can buy a ship varying in price and quality and travel between planets.( oh yah there are going to be three fairly large planets then the fourth one introduced later and a space station )with those ships you can battle other players and land on other planets, sort of a game inside of a game. Also there will be mobs in space and quests in space aswell, they may be harder to create creative ones for but we have a pretty good writing staff.

Another thing we're interested in is having extremely deep factions. We plan on being very involved in the game, letting players have mroe control over what happens in the game through constant interaction. Say for example on faction wants to assasinate another factions NPC leader then we here would make that possible, we would change that npc to be a killable mob. If another faction hears about it then they may try and stop it, if they metion it to us we may suggest making it a pvp zone for that time aswell and then letting them try and stop it. Does that not sound like something youd want to be a part of? another thing is that the three races aren't friendly with each other. We want to be able to make the npc's from other races hate the players of other races and attack them and or not talk to them, unless said personis friendly with that faction through some kind of interaction.

We may include a black market sort of mob like feature where players are smugglers for planets and governement officials where the players can gain faction with the "mob"" and get favors from them such as assasinations, and thievings but almost everyother faction hates the mob so we'll put in some quests from the mob that involve an undercover official, if you choose to do that quest and complete it you become a know member of the mob and if you want to be a regular citizen again you have to do something for the government of that faction.

The three races are going to be Humans, Cyborgs, and Aliens. The fourth is still to be decided. We may throw in some class structure over this, like jobs. or we may just stick with a universal tree that you can choose your own patah in, because a cleric can weild a plasma sword right? anyways those three races will be divided into factions and split over four planets and a space station and then the fourth will come in. The planets are going to be big and dynamic in the way that biomes it contains work. We're going to try and make it so that it is independant and grows without the player being there. Say maybe a band of animals develops a little bit of intelligence and decides to raid a town. Bam cool event right there, if no one stops it the town is damadged, it starts a fund the person who donats the most money gets a statue. Wouldn't that be fun?

We want there to be an active market in the game aswell, Not one person controlling everything. We're going to study working mmorpg economics a bit before we decide on a course of action on this aspect. But what we're hoping to do is crack down on gold farming and exploiting. There are going to be many custom items, we've already talked to our artists about it a bit and about making character models and basic item sets and rare weapons and items.

We're going to talk to our artists about making interesting fun enviroments to be in. Awe inspiring buildings, beatiful backdrops and just awesome scenery. and one of our favorite things about this engine is the portalized buildings, where it just renders the inside of the building when you go in, no zoning of ineriors. We are so stoked over this feature but we have to read more about it. also we're interested in how far we can push the torque script and how you can use python in it, I thought it was all C++ but me and the other programmer have been reading into all three, torque, C++, and python.

Now no one on this project is very experienced. infact this is the first game any of us has worked on besides little one in flash 8. I've written C++ programs before but not with a gui, just a simple console program to call upon letters for programming a P.O.V. (oh yah, almost everyone on the project is into electronics) so this is a learning experience for all of us. Myself and Kieran ( the other programmer with us) are going to look into the way to make the basic client server work and have it load a world as a starting point then from there we're going to continue to develop the game from there. We still have alot to learn about how server and client interact. I've been on private server project before but itwas always a precompiled one( for ragnarok) and all you had to do was edit some lines in a conf file and that was it....This is a big step up form that.

From what we've seen we really like the engine, and we want to setup a subversion for it in a little while, I'm going to check with our school to see if we can set it up over the lan there and use part of the info tech class next year to work on it more. Also we may lease a loft in downtown to open an office for our company that we've yet tot make a name for but we're working on it. If we can get an office set up, we'll work on this and once this is started, we may make a single player game aswell but that is in the future for now it's work on the no name rpg for ourselves.

I'll keep updating this blog with anything new we come up with wether it be scripting, art or story wise we always apreciate feedback on any ideas we put forward ( we being the company)

Blog for Weston Cresswell at GarageGames.com

And so it begins