State of the genre

[Anery]

Take wyrm, make it easier, add some sci-fi, sprinkle some better graphics, take a smattering of quest givers and top with some eve style open world (s) add multiplayer crewable pirate ships and voila!

[Dog Pants]

I have three key ideas to propel the genre forward. Lots of other little ideas too, but these would revolutionise if they could be mate to work:

Parallel PvP and PvE - PvP groups run the empires in which the PvE players do their thing. Having PvPers warring to encourage PvEers to come and play in their town meshes the two together and creates a player driven dynamic like Eve without alienating those who don't want all the politics.
Player created content - CoH has done it, so it's possible. Some sort of formula would need to be used to generate reward so people didn't just make a 'kill one goblin, get phat lewtz' quest, but devs will never be able to keep up with player demand. It's like a mod community for an MMO. Add this idea to the last one and you have groups competing to make better content in order to attract players and generate revenue.
Directed NPCs - Every game has GMs who play. Have them do both, playing the leaders of the various political groups. You're paying them anyway, and rather than seeing a faction leader NPC who sits on a chair in his castle all day, he would be leading armies against the enemy, who would also have a human leader.

You might notice a lot of this is close to what Eve has. Despite me not liking it a lot, I think Eve is the most original MMO on the market and has huge amounts of potential ideas for future MMOs.

[Roman Totale]

The following was rather interesting:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5- ... icted.html

It's mainly about the way in which games create an environment that makes people keep on playing, but turned on its head it would be a good guide for creating a game.

[Thompy]

Have 5punkers ever thought properly about making a game?

There seems to be a lot of codies of one form or another, IT guys, web designers, general creativity etc.

Would it just be time that's the limiting factor?

[Dog Pants]

I think the limiting factor is that we're 5punkers, so have the attention span of a mayfly on speed.

[buzzmong]

Have 5punkers ever thought properly about making a game?

There seems to be a lot of codies of one form or another, IT guys, web designers, general creativity etc.

Would it just be time that's the limiting factor?

Making an engine from scratch for modern systems is actually quite a lot of difficult work, especially if you plan to make it in such a way that it can be reused or one that has to handle masses of content or lots of users.

It's something I plan to undertake at some point, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in a sense of the amount of effort involved in back end codez.

Ignoring actually coding the game logic itself such as AI, firing off sounds and position tracking, you have to spend time writing all your methods and classes to deal with loading data like sounds, levels, models et al to memory in an accessible fashion, you've also got to deal with the game loops (one main one, but splinters off into a precisely timed logic loop and a seperate rendering loop). You normally end up writing memory managers as well to deal with the loaded content.

Then you have to deal with the 3D by writing the rendering engine. OpenGL/Direct3D mearly handle the hardware side, you have to present the API with a generated frame to display. Quite a lot of work goes into vertex manipulation (translation, rotation etc..) and applying textures and stuff. More work goes into *not* rendering items to improve performance. Saying that, 2D games are simplier, and you can fairly easily do faux 3D by going Isometric, but it's still a fair bit of work.

This is stuff I'm just starting to delve into, I've no idea how to deal with a 3D world yet.

Basically, it's quite a big undertaking even if you've got lots of experience in the area. Obviously lots of this can be avoided if you licence an existing engine, but that can be quite expensive (Unity is perhaps a valid option though)

Outside of the codez you have all the assets: sounds for fx, music, models, levels, textures for models, textures for levels, the levels, and the artwork for splash screens and the menu. These obviously take quite a bit of time to generate and need to be done quite well.

In short, it's a massive undertaking to do something like what you're thinking off, and in my view, far outside the scope of what we're actually be capable of.

[Thompy]

In hindsight asking that question in a thread about MMOs wasn't the greatest idea It's something I've been meaning to ask for a bit but always forgot so just stuck it in here as people were musing on game ideas.

Anyway, no, I was really thinking much simpler. Terraria complexity at the very maximum, or a simple Dwarf Fortress, or a point and click adventure, or one of the beardy forum RPGs adapted etc. I appreciate a lot of those principles will still apply but I'm sure within the technical/time constraints of some people here.

I understand though. I'm no expert obviously or I wouldn't have asked the question, but with a small amount of ActionScript knowledge, and inspired by Machinarium, I felt I could muddle my way to a simple point and click adventure. But as I had no means of producing media assets, I quickly gave up. Afterwards I realised there was a shit load of other potential pitfalls and walls.

I was thinking you could do it as a team casually over a long time. But yeah, it'd probably quickly get abandoned.


So, MMOs. Someone said it earlier, but it's hard to call many of them proper MMOs these days. 90% of WoW could be played through a lobby, and that's probably the base reason why I don't play any more. True persistence is hard to produce, you'd either need a 1000s monkey working on a 1000 typewriters or one nifty game engine. But when WoW has a huge open world and then asks you to queue for all the end game content and then to enter an instance, meh.

[FatherJack]

I'm doing a programming course with the eventual aim being to program games and am about at the stage where I could make a 2D game, indeed that's now what I have to do - or at least demonstrate I understand how to program some of the principles used in them, sprites, blitting, pathfinding and so on. Next I'll be moving on the 3D stuff though, which I'm far more interested in exploring - as those are the games I have much more interest in. When I've finished the course, I'll be building up a portfolio to hopefully get myself a job, but I'll certainly be posting demos and updates here, as well as fishing for suggestions.

[TheJockGit]

What language are coding in FJ?

[FatherJack]

C++

[TheJockGit]

I'm currently "working" on C# using the XNA framework, when I say "working", I mean "tearing my fekkin hair out and feeling like my heads going to pop"

[spoodie]

C++

What's the course, details? I'm probably too lazy to do a course but I'm interested to see what's involved.

Do you think you could make a game as good as this one, eventually?

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0hakn_hWC8[/media]

[buzzmong]

[FatherJack]

C++

What's the course, details? I'm probably too lazy to do a course but I'm interested to see what's involved.

There are few different ones here http://www.tiga.org/Course.aspx?Latest=yes which give you an idea.

[friznit]

Interesting arcticle on IGN along similar lines to this topic: http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/117/1177008p1.html

It actually sounds like GW2 could entice me back into the world of MMaoism.

[Dog Pants]

Possibly a little optimistic - I don't think we've abandoned grinding just yet - but they're right in that it's a big step in the right direction. My own experience has told me that the "WoW Clone" doesn't cut it any more, no matter how good it is, and I'm certain I'm far from alone. I've yet to see how either game (GW2 and TSW for those who didn't read the article) intends to prolong the player experience in an interesting way. Doesn't mean they can't - I've posted some ideas in this very thread that would work, and Eve has successfully been doing it for years - but unless they're playing their cards to their chests I can't see anything to suggest it's not just a take on the old quest system without the exclamation marks. Even so, I'm cautiously excited about both games.

As an aside, while pondering again the problem of longetivity without the grind I considered WAR. WAR was noteworthy among MMONGs in that it was the closest (WoW-style) game so far to decent, far reaching PvP. It was part of the world, it didn't feel like you were being ganked - hell, I teamed up silently with handfuls of randoms on several occasions to out-gank some gankers - in short it didn't feel like the shite, unfair, tacked on PvP that every other similar game has used. I think this is important to the genre. If they could have expanded this to become more of the long-term focus of WAR and not made progression dependent on a half-arsed PvE grind it might well have triggered this drive for the next gen MMONG years ago. In fact, I want to list what they should be looking at:

Eve - Player driven goals in a single-shard, open PvP environment. Give the more casual player a way of getting involved without them getting raped every time they set foot out of their front door and you're onto a winner.
Warhammer - This is how character based PvP should work, and it can be improved on from here. Like the flipside of Eve, everyone can pile in and have a go without feeling outclassed, and if you lose it just makes you more eager to get back in there.
Rift - The group quests were pitched perfectly for randoms cooperating. This is good, and being able to do it silently is good.
Wyrm - Let us build stuff, damnit! It doesn't need to be easy, but being able to make our own house (or giant statues of willies) makes the world feel ours. Minecraft has proved this beyond a doubt (and Age of Conan made a valiant attempt).
City of Heroes - We want to be individuals. That's why people grind for rare stuff - they want stuff other people don't have. They want to be recognised, even if it's only themselves who recognise them. Character customisation doesn't have to be as detailed as CoH, but cosmetic costume pieces which don't affect your gear stats, dyes, maybe even little custom add-on pieces like skull adornments or kitten stickers. All it takes is a theme you can stick to and be yourself.

Also, and I don't have a decent example of a game which has done it, please consider something other than the swords and sorcery setting. Maybe SWTOR will fill this placeholder, maybe not.

[FatherJack]

Interesting arcticle on IGN along similar lines to this topic: http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/117/1177008p1.html

It actually sounds like GW2 could entice me back into the world of MMaoism.

The ideas all sound interesting, but is it too much too soon? Perhaps like many of us, I'm sick of the same old old formulae, but mixing a bit of the old in with the new might be a more palatable option for some. Without obvious, marked, set quests some will be left wondering what to do, and it's hard to show a new buddy the ropes when the ropes randomise themselves every time you get a grip of them.

I remember in the original Guild Wars I was asked to select a class. Then, having successfully triumphed over the tutorial section I was asked to select a second one. I was totally confused and didn't even know what I was supposed to be anymore and had even less clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. The reason they're called Role Playing Games is that you play to the strengths of your character - if everyone can essentially heal, tank or damage, then what is likely to happen is that the people who are best at doing particular things tend to most often play those roles in a battle. But that is unequivocally not roleplay - it's being you.

If all characters are the same, and the best players are those that can press buttons the fastest - we're in FPS or RTS territory. I see value in the fact that the character I painstakingly built in sober moments is still inherently better at performing certain tasks even when I'm drunk off my arse.

[Dog Pants]

Come on, there's no roleplaying in an MMONG. Unless you're on an RP server, but then it's more like weird Second Shite stuff.

[buzzmong]

Interesting arcticle on IGN along similar lines to this topic: http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/117/1177008p1.html

It actually sounds like GW2 could entice me back into the world of MMaoism.

Personally, I thought that entire article was essentially describing a sandbox in MMO's as a brand new thing. Then I realised that most of what it says like being classless, needing to explore, not having set quests, and flexibility with how you set up your character essentially describe the main selling points of EvE.

That's not in a negative way mind, I'd quite like the idea of a hack and bash planetbased sandbox.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Come on, there's no roleplaying in an MMONG. Unless you're on an RP server, but then it's more like weird Second Shite stuff.

There kinda is, unless you're an 8' cow named soncho in real life, but equally, not many people bother beyond that.