[Flawe]

I'm finally done with my project and I can start on this one. I've been longing for a while to get this going as I have some nice ideas. Though I'm not sure how well they will work.

I'll have this thread here for posting updates and progress and so I can hopefully get some help from you guys.

Right, here's what I have so far. The main idea is to have a sideview platformer, basically, but with some RPG elements. The RPG part would make the game heavily story driven, character advancement and the "find cool items and spells in a big world" thing. I still want the game to take place in a magical world that doesn't exist with a bunch of cool swords and spells and the like.

I would also like to use a physics engine to have some nice interactivity in the world. Imagine bad guys coming towards you in a cave and you use your powers to grab rocks from the roof and make them fall down on them. Easily achieved with a nice physics engine and creates a nice base for interesting spells and effects.

Another technical feature I'd like to have is dynamically loading of the map. I'd like to create a continuous feeling throughout the game, just like and RPG. Well, in a top-down RPG you might teleport to different maps for towns and dungeons, but I won't really have a "outdoor" world part and a town/dungeon part. So therefore I'd like to have everything run smoothly with no teleportation between "levels". I have some ideas of how to make this work so it shouldn't be a problem.

My first milestone and hopefully a nice little demo for you guys is to have dynamically loaded maps and have a character run around on it. I guess I might as well get the physics engine in right away cause it's probably not that much extra work.

[DeveloperX]

all I can say is good luck. If this is your first game then my advice is aim low.
If this is not your first game, then ignore me, and plan plan plan, and write lots of unit tests to ensure all your mechanics work before trying to build the actual game.
I'll help you any way that I can. If you've got code questions toss em my way.
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Principal Software Architect
Rambling Indie Games, LLC

See my professional portfolio

[Flawe]

Hehe, it's far from my first game, but thanx for the offer :) I'm afraid code questions will be the last of my problems. I'm currently trying to plan the structure of the engine and make sure to plan for as much scalability as possible. I guess motivation would be the worst enemy here, but that isn't a problem currently :)

[Nodtveidt]

Check out Cadash for a good example of a seamless side-scrolling platform RPG. Of course, to get the full effect, the arcade version is the only version that is truly seamless...the home ports have transitions between areas but everything is always the same perspective whether you're in a town or a dungeon. Also, Cadash shows one nifty way of handling magics without getting overly complicated.
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[Flawe]

Cool, thanx a lot for the tip. I'll definitely take a look at that one!

[Flawe]

Small update:

Everything is going smoothly. I got a strong base upp and running. Entities, a map manager loading and keeping track of map segments and a solid input manager for player input.

The idea is to divide the entire world into map segments that can be dynamically loaded so you get rid of any loading screens. It should be completely seamless from the village to the bad monster boss. I haven't decided if I should have any changing of "maps" when the player goes inside dungeons or houses, or if that should be seamless too. One idea is to see the house from the outside and form the side, and when the player is standing by the door, he can "go inside" and suddenly the walls disappear. Don't really know how good or annoying that would be so I guess it requires some testing.

Another goal of mine is to actually have a persistent world. For instance if you slay an enemy, the corpse should be left there until it rots. I would also like to allow the player to affect any dynamic objects, like dead enemy corpses, e.g. move them, decapitate them, etc. Continuing on the persistent thing, I've always hated the concept of stuff not being there when thrown on the ground. If I don't have room in my bags for something I want to be able to throw something on the ground and several days later when I might get to this location again, I want to see it there. I have an idea of how to achieve this and it should be a problem. Working on top of my map segments that are dynamically loaded, I could store a small info patch for every map segment that on top of the default, hardcoded map, keeps information of eventual player modifications, like dropped potions, corpses, etc.

One problem I see with this entire dynamic loading thing is the actual scripting. If you speak to an NPC and he needs to run to another city to do something important for the story, it's kinda hard to affect a map segment that isn't loaded. I guess you could cheat by not really having the NPC run all the way and simply set a flag for some action to happen, or I could completely avoid such quests, but I don't like restrictions. I believe there is a way for this by using the patch system to apply dynamic data to any map segment, but I haven't thought that much about it.

Thanx for listening :)

[Nodtveidt]

I have a couple of ideas for you.

First of all, you can make your events worldwide, unaffected by the loaded map. So, if said NPC needs to run to another village, it won't matter if that other village is loaded or not...he'll work on his own. One way you could handle this is to have at least two kinds of events...one which is only active when its corresponding map is loaded, and one that runs regardless of the map.

The idea of dropping an item and then going back and picking it up later is a decent one. Although, if you're going to go for that level of realism, don't forget that someone else might go through that area too, see the item, decide they need it themselves, and pick it up for themselves. A festering monster corpse may not be such a hot idea though, unless you're going to have very limited enemy populations...which really takes away from this style of game. If you've got respawn points that trigger at a certain location of the camera scroll, imagine how high the corpses are going to stack up.

Really though, the best thing to do is to keep events out of the map data. Obviously events are going to exist in a certain map, but you don't want events "hardwired" into your maps because then you have to write exceptions and that becomes a hassle.
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[Flawe]

I like the worldwide event idea. I really don't see why I would need to have the specific maps loaded just for quest events so global events would solve that problem.

When it comes to the persistent behavior, I was thinking it would proably be a good idea to have some sort of restrictions and give the world a bit more depth. For instance a bottle of mana fluid, or whatever, that has been thrown on the ground could be broken by travellers and corpses could decompose and fade away, etc. If the "keeping things where they are" idea is used fully it will start to distort the realism and having random events that change the state of those items would provide more realism in my opinion.

I don't really expect to end up with something like your scenario where the bodies stack up and the player can't get past, heh. My idea was simply to not show a nice light effect when the monsters disappear and die. I want to give the player the opportunity to interact with the body. He should actually search the body for loot and not just receive it when he wins.

This opens up some possibilities to expand the gameplay and get it closer to the story. For instance an in game event could be that the king's army is searching for a thief who's stolen something and they search everybody they see. Of course the player has the item they are looking for so in order to not get butchered by the guards when they pass, he has to hide that item. Now, allowing the player himself to search for a location like killing a monster and putting the item inside his corpse, would be a totally more enjoyable game play concept then simply forcing the player to hide the item at the hardcode position A.

I'm hoping by creating small, meaningless details in the game play mechanics it will allow the player to get past obstacle in the story in his own way.

[DeveloperX]

[Flawe]

Thanx :)
Like I said, this won't be hard to implement but I doubt it will be enough to create the emergent game play. I hope it'll get to be more than just some small unnecessary details in the end.

[Hajo]

Supercool feature would be to have such events randomized, so that the game varies a bit each time it's played. Having said that, I fail at trying to get random/procedural story elements or random/procedural world evolution implemented in my projects.

A platformer with RPG Elements reminds me of Maple Story, but that seems quite popular, so the concept should work.

[Flawe]

I tried MapleStory and I found it quite interesting, but it was very story challenged. I played the game once and that was enough.

When it comes to PCG I think it's a good way to create content in games but would never in a million years use it to create a story. And to be honest I would probably not like a game that had a procedurally generated story. That's just my opinion though :)

[RedSlash]

MapleStory is a MMORPG and so it being story challenged is quite the norm.

In terms of storyline, I prefer completely linear. I enjoy a good story from start to end and wouldn't mind having to replay the exact same thing the second time if the story is really good. I think once you start auto-generating stories it gets really random and its hard to get the same impact from it as a solid linear story.

[Hajo]

[Flawe]

It's just a personal preference, really. I'm sure generated story lines can work well but I doubt the plots would become as deep and captivating as FF or Secret of Mana or whatever.

I just don't like the idea of generating random missions. For me it wouldn't feel like the game is "larger" or has more content, it would only feel like a poor attempt to give the player more things to do.