New game I'm coming up with....

Let's be honest: A small town is NOT the place for a tech person. Finding a relateable job is extremely difficult, even if you have some big-name stores in your area. Thank goodness for the internet.

Case modding really isn't going to be a profitable job. It's fun, but it's a hobby, not a job. So, let's change focus.

Games. New ones out there all the time. Some good, some OK, some big, some small.


What you're about to read is a TBCS exclusive....








Over the last few days, I've actually been brainstorming a game. A game of little choices, of big choices. A game of consequences. A game of discovery. A game of peace, of war. A game of government. A game of law, of war. A game where a family dispute could start a galactic war....



You start off with nothing but the clothes on your back. You are strong, immortal, and infertile. (Another person joining the game makes another person.) While you can "die", you respawn elsewhere.

You pick up a rock. You scratch it against the wall. Nothing happens. You pick up another rock and scratch it against the wall. It sparks, and the sparks land on a twig on the ground. It catches into flames. You now know you can use that rock against the wall to make fire.


A short while later, you and several other people have come together to form a community. Who should be the leader, or leaders? How will resources be shared? Will it be "every man for himself", "central community supply depot", "wages", or something else?

Some time after your community is established, you find another, nearby community. You form a town together. Or do you just stay as two separate entities.

Exploring a bit more, you find oceans. You cross them. You find that there is a small community thriving, but two large cities at war about a rare resource. Do you form alliances with either of the communities, or join the war independently?

Now you are the leader of a nation. What position are you? Are you a judge, a president, a king, a dictator, or something else? Or is it complete anarchy? Who are your ally nations? Is there a war happening between whole nations?
Or are you at peace with other nations, but war happening in the communities?


More time passes. A citizen discovers teleportation technology. You are on the maiden voyage to another planet. What do you find? Is it a community that is still scraping rocks, or one that was seconds away from teleporting to you? Or do you end up in the middle of a warzone?

Now you have planetary alliances. You are leader of your local cluster. You recieve word that another planet outside your jurisdiction has a resource you've needed for a long time. Do you invade them, negotiate with them, trade with them, or look elsewhere?

What I don't want it to be is a "pop in in exactly five hours to farm" kind of game. There's plenty of that on Facebook. I want it to be a game of little choices affecting cities, nations, worlds, clusters. Also, those huge choices affect the little guys at the same time.

The purpose of the game? All in the title. "To Be A". What does that mean? You'll know what it's like to be a lot. To be a peasant. To be a mayor. To be a king. To be a president. To be a chancellor. To be a god....








One little obstacle: I really don't know any programming languages well enough to create this by myself. Also, I don't have money right now to hire anyone. If you can recommend someone who's willing to help me, or if you want to hop in, feel free to help.

Sounds like a heck of a game. Like Civilization or Age of Empires meets Sim City. I really like the idea, but the reason you haven't seen anything like it, is the scope of your idea is huge. Programming languages is the least of your worries.

First you need to map out exactly the "resources" that each level of "evolution/age." These resources will be the basis for what your players can't build, and trade for other resources. Are the resources going to be used like in starcraft, where a certain unit of measurement of resources allows you to build something, or can resources be combined to make other things or be processed into other things (making the system even more complex)? Regardless, the value of the resources needs to be carefully planned out. How common is the resource, how useful is it. Supply and demand will dictate alot of your game play from what can be built and how quickly to how much the resource is with when sold or traded.

Then you have your players. Are they all of humanoid origin? The difference between men who have just discovered fire and men capable of intergalactic travel is, forgive the pun, light years away. Your description implies that this is a MMO game. When these different civilizations managed by a player encounter each other how is the playing field leveled? Is this turn based, or realtime. Can the civilization you've built be interacted with while you're away from the game? If so an AI will have to play for you, so that will need to be built out.

These things needs to be fleshed out before one line of code gets written. Starcraft II was delayed for months because they had to even out the hit points/build rates/etc of the different races to guarantee that no one race had an advantage. Blizzard has a bunch of devs and already had experience with this kind of thing already. To get these values honed, you could prototype the game with index cards or something and play it out before you ever touch a computer.

Now you can finally get to your code. I'm thinking you want cross platform as you prefer Linux. The language you use is going to depend on the engine you use or vice versa. You need to pick an engine that is going to work on the platforms you want it to run on. Then you need to see what language bindings it supports. I would try to find one that supports C an or C++. A language that supports object would allow for tracking each item in the game as an instance of an object which can be a difficult concept to grasp at first, but could make accessing a game item's properties easier in code in the long run. What features does the engine provide? Rendering only, input handling, sound/music playback, networking? Whatever the engine does not provide, you will need to handle. SDL can handle input, sound and networking if your engine doesn't. Some places to start your research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...nd_open_source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer

While your developing your code, you'll need characters, vehicles, buildings, props, and environments. I don't know if you've ever played with Blender, Lightwave or 3d Studio but making 3d characters isn't the easiest thing. You need the mesh, the textures and the animation/walk cycles. These need to be designed to have the least amount of polygons to keep from bogging down your 3d engine, but detailed enough to look good. Blender is free so I would start there. The textures can be done in GIMP. Sorry to say it, but this will probably be the show stopper. If you've looked at the credits of a triple A title, you know that there are a TON of people involved in creating art for the game. Many a game mod alone has died on the vine because volunteers couldn't crank out enough meshes to get the job done.

You're probably either discouraged at this point or think I am a buzz kill. I have been working on this post for over an hour and a half. Why? Cause it sounds like a hell of a game and would love to see something like it. If I didn't care, I wouldn't have even replied. I'm sure you knew that there would be other things other than programming in your way. Hopefully I have given you more groundwork to develop your idea. I am totally serious about prototyping on paper first. Game mechanics is step one if you intend to proceed and could take months by itself. Let me know if you want any help in any of these stages.

If you want to do it - I say go for it. Just realize this is going to take years of work - even for a full dev team. Tons of time, money and resources get dumped into video game design and production.

Characters, storyboards, artwork, models, animation, physics engine, graphics engine, advertising, original music compositions (see where I'm going with this). I mean there's a reason it takes someone as big as Rockstar 2-3 years to come out with GTA games. It isn't because they don't like money lol.

Again, don't get me wrong because I too like the idea but I'd start with writing ideas down. Get characters and their personalities together. Then write what sort of environments they're presented with. I would imagine the first stage would be much like writing a book, just much more annotated and open ended. After that I'd look to see how you want your game to be styled. After you've really thought about the above and fleshed it out - look into presenting your idea to a game manufacturer. They have the manpower to make the technical work and PR happen.

Yeah, that's going to be a huge game. Still an amazing concept, though, I must admit.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AmEv

Yeah, that's going to be a huge game. Still an amazing concept, though, I must admit.

---

So, are you going to continue work on it?

Yeah. I mainly wanted to get my thoughts down on paper for now, per se.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AmEv

One little obstacle: I really don't know any programming languages well enough to create this by myself.

---

Hey, creating things (which didn't always work) is how I learned half my code.

You did say you wanted a hobby.

Learn any programming language, even lowly BASIC. Once you know one you can learn another quickly, and the more you know the more similar they all become. Books like C for Dummies are great for starters, and they provide the software you need. Just get your idea working, it doesn't have to be elegant, it doesn't have to be universal - if it's workable then it can be corrected and streamlined and cross-compiled onto other platforms.

No matter how slowly you progress, not matter how many mistakes you make ... you're still way ahead of everybody who doesn't even try. And nobody else is gonna build your dream, bro.

If you hire somebody to do an Android java app but you don't know anything about java code then you'll be completely at his mercy, you won't understand all the options and limitations of the code, and you'll be less able to communicate your design concept into implemented product.