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[Armok]

To be honest whit you, I wouldn't play that game.
There is NOTHING as boring as leveling! Not even school!
The game should be its own reward, fighting should be fun and spectacular and cool and the reason for fighting is to see new emergent behaviors or try out new cool ideas; the same basic reason one play DF.

the game you described sounds basically like one of those modern games that stay alive only because of their graphics, except it wont have graphics.

Try to go as far away from the norm of RPG as possible, the game you described sounds like Oblivion whit ASCII graphics and vikings whit horned helmets, think more like Corins mystery massacre whit physics based super combat system, and realistic vikings. Long ago, before DF saved me from the corruption of commercial games, I played a game, Just Cause, that had a similar feeling of freedom and movie-style action that aim to describe. In various other places I find that freedom from purpose except your own murderous enjoyment, in this movie it is not exactly the same, but close, also if you look upon a tantruming dwarf in DF.
Senseless slaughter is it's own reward.

Really 90% should be the fighting engine, and for a first game a single focus is a good thing. have you played Toribash? Imagine an system based on bodyparts and inertia, but hidden by the low resolution of ASCII you can trick physics quite a lot leading to wonderfully graceful and gruesome action, I don't remember if Einherjar feel pain and vomit, but if so a system similar to DFs can be used. More on the combat system later.

I also suggest a sense of timelessness, you have been dead for thousand of years and Ragnarok is NOT close, change has not happened in ages and is not likely to happened any sooner, think Noctis for the feel, as the troops of Odin you are always armored and armed to the teeth whit the best gear possible, and after several thousand years of constant fighting the few days the player plays is not likely to make any difference, really a save system will not be necessary, as one day is like the other, change or progress is not the goal, fun is.

Using a system similar to Toadys is probably a good idea, as well as some of his methods, most notably the telling of stories and then including the features needed for them to happened, as this is smaller in scope some customization might be in order, split it in arcs, reqs, bloats, and power goals.
Some arc suggestions:
Wrestling arc.
environment arc.
equipment arc.
feast arc.
AI arc.
Mythology arc.
etc. etc.

Ok, I have rambled enough, if you are interested I will continue, if not that is your decision and I will try to forget...
---------------------------

Also I checked up on some of the mythos and it turns out we were both partially wrong; there were no fire giants in muspelheim from the beginning but they moved there later. Also "heim" means home, so jotenheim means "the home of the giants" whits is quite descriptive, also it turns out muspelheim means "the home of world destroyers".

My primary source is "Gods & heroes from viking mythology" (Goggled but couldn't find a good link), very good book if you are interested in vikings, as you state you are.

[ January 16, 2008: Message edited by: Armok ]

[Fenrir]

Ok, I see what you mean. My temporary insanity has passed.

How can I make entire Feasting Arc? Does that refer to just hunger and eating or is this deeper somehow?

 

quote:Originally posted by Armok:
<STRONG>...think Noctis for the feel...</STRONG>

Noctis bores the shit out of me. All you get to do is fly around and look at planets and environments that aren't very pretty. What the hell us up with the hopping giant origami weasels?!

[ January 16, 2008: Message edited by: Fenrir ]

[qwertyuiopas]

Heres an idea: recieve an unusual quest, get an new ability/item that can be powerful once you can use it. The only leveling is your skill with the new thing. And that is "purchased" with points earned as a by-product of having fun.

And the new thing can be very fun, much like the RYNOII in ratchet and clank 2... powerful, but not insta-kill, fun to use powerful.
Like a portable plasma gun in the middle of a hostile army: you can kill them quickly and funly, but the masses ALMOST overwhelm you anyway.

Fun, superpowerful, but still small in comparison to what you face.

But most of all FUN.....

But, thats up to you to decide, this is only an idea.

[nerdpride]

Well, sorry about your Vista problems, can't help at all there (I'm sticking with XP...  XP).  Windowed mode isn't so bad though.  If you have the user give information about their screen and whatnot (maybe akin to DF?) then it would work out okay, methinks.

You might want to try a more modern library, like SDL or something, which usually has a lot of good features for games such as more direct input, audio, etc.  But I still don't know about them so, again, no help from me.  Even if I knew about them, there are some things it's really hard to give instructions for, you know?

Toady's method of organization is pretty good, I think (better than me).  But he probably goes a little further than what would normally be needed because he publishes his thoughts for other's to see and understand.  Personally, I'd prefer to shorten things up a bit, using key concepts to refresh my memory and core principles so I can derive notions again if I need to instead of writing down everything.  But I don't know, maybe writing everything down is a good exercise, it can get awfully messy up there.

"Fun Theory" is pretty hard.  Here are some of my thoughts:

Unlike Armok, (well, I don't know, that was only suggestions for a first game) I don't think that it's all about violence.  I particularly like DF because you can manage systems in a fantasy world, things like armies and industries, without the usual credentials required or any of the physical suffering caused by incompetence.  So, yeah, I'd say I like playing as a god-like, manipulating entity (Loki?).

Limitations make the game more fun, because they're part of the system, they're the faults that you work around to achieve the goal.  By adding more faults to wherever I start, I get a little more of that fake feeling that I accomplished something.  

I'd say that a game is really fun, it's because the illusion of doing something real is deeper, rather than when the overall image conveyed is larger.  So, you could make a game about conquering the galaxy, which could still be bad next to the immersive game about managing a small town.

Violence is just one way to get a game to fake the "possibility" of being able to do something in real life.  If you saturate a person's mind with gore and the like, it stimulates some chemicals or whatever in their brain, produces adrenaline sometimes, you know.  This real-world effect is part of the illusion.  

Producing the adrenaline, fighting it out, and then standing over your enemies' broken bodies makes you think that you did it yourself, your own effort went into it and caused this result, even if it was just a game.  Some nasty things happen if it goes too far, but anyways:

There are other possibilities.  You can make characters with extremely realistic and complex personalities to also get a rise out of the player.  Or, in my case, you can allow gratification types of things like pride in accomplishment.

So, basically, games have to have some kind of mental effect on the players to be fun (even horror games are fun!).  Otherwise it's just a bunch of randomized memory operations.

Anyways, as far as your first game goes, I think combat is actually kinda hard to make fun.  There has to be some place to create the illusion of doing work.  It isn't easy to create without a complex system if you ask me.  You might go for pure violence, but I think that would get boring, personally.

[ January 16, 2008: Message edited by: nerdpride ]

[qwertyuiopas]

Permadeath seems to work, by it's popularity among roguelikes...

[Fenrir]

quote:Originally posted by qwertyuiopas:
<STRONG>Permadeath seems to work, by it's popularity among roguelikes...</STRONG>

Einherjar don't die.

[DJ]

Sorry if it's been already mentioned (I can't read this forum due to it's colour scheme  ), but you might want to look into SDL for your input/output needs. It's easier than trying to get stuff to nicely align in console, and you're not restricted to ASCII.