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[Kitsunin]

This sounded cool until you reached the last paragraph.  If the detective stumbles upon the murderer and shoots him, tough luck.  The game shouldn't warp reality to continue it, and it definitely shouldn't force-kill the murderer like that.

I agree with you, unless the game has really great graphics, then it might be a bit different, as it would be more dramatic, in my opinion, drama isn't that import if things don't look reasonably realistic.

I mean, there would have to at least be animations and such, in other words, I don't think it would work for a roguelike.

[PTTG??]

When it gets down to it, I feel that the game would be more consistently enjoyable when it loads the die. It's what every good DM does- you don't let the players die from falling off the back of a wagon, and you don't let them kill the Big Bad by pushing him off the back of one either... at least not without some drama. And a good DM definitely doesn't let a player say "I've played this aventure before, and the evil priest always escapes down the secret passage right over there, so let's set a bunch of traps there." Indeed, a good DM would probably cheat physics by either getting the priest a couple "natural 20s" to dodge the traps, or else changing the temple around so the secret passage is somewhere else.

In the same way, the game engine should move things around so that, while driven by the players, boring endings don't happen.

That said, if the murder does something stupid like slashing people left and right in the middle of the street, either the detective or the NPC cops should be pretty much able to one-hit kill him right there. That's not because it makes a good story, which it doesn't exactly, but it encourages the murder to be stealthy, indirectly encouraging good storytelling.

[Gatleos]

I was rather thinking of having a detective mystery simulator where there's a medium-sized town with a whole bunch of radiant-style AI, and two human players. One is a serial killer that gets computer-assigned MOs that they must fulfill, and the other player is the detective who has to question NPCs to find the killer.

The neat thing is, there would be human observers who would be able to say things to the killer, with a mask that distorts it into groans and whispers. The brilliant part is, no matter what the observers say, it'd be totally in character for voices a serial killer hears.

Each game would be saved, particularly highlights, could be played back later. So, naturally, killers will try to set up complicated and bizzare plots, and detectives will try to do awesome things because if they do well, everyone will want to see the video.

It's important to note that there would be a strong narrative causality system, so that if it's two minutes in and the detective happens to run into the murder and whips his revolver out, there's a 99% chance it'll jam or miss, but if the detective just suprised the killer after tracking him for twenty minutes, beat him down with fencepost, and went for a cue-de-gra (or however it's spelled) on the murderer while he's down, then it doesn't matter how many HP he has, it's over.

I don't know how any of that could apply outside of the serial killer class. Maybe a Vigilantie class?

This sounded cool until you reached the last paragraph.  If the detective stumbles upon the murderer and shoots him, tough luck.  The game shouldn't warp reality to continue it, and it definitely shouldn't force-kill the murderer like that.

Exactly. The best part of open-ended games with emergent stories (like Dwarf Fortress), is that there's a real sense of involvement with what's going on. When you're playing an RPG with a pre-scripted linear story and something really cool happens, it happened because a writer wrote it to happen that way. When the story emerges from interaction of players with each other or the game world, it's totally different. Knowing that whatever happens next will happen because of your actions and not a pre-defined story can do wonders for player immersion, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. So while that pre-scripted RPG might have a much better story, ones defined by the players through their actions are far more exciting. Much like a story suddenly becomes much more interesting when you find out it actually happened, rather than being a fictional story made up by the storyteller.

While "loading the die" might make for more drama, it dampens the unique advantage that video games have as a storytelling medium, that advantage being interactivity. And if this were more a cinematic experience than a video game, we wouldn't be making a rogue-like, would we?

[Jack A T]

So, how's progress?  Anything still going on?

I've been kind of taking a break from spriting and mapping for a while, myself.

[nenjin]

I've left off most stuff until Lap had a big push with the engine, now that (I think?) he got the update he was looking for.

[Jack A T]

Does anyone mind if I dump the sprites/tiles I made onto OpenGameArt.org?  This doesn't seem to be going very far, Lap hasn't been on for over a week, and I might as well make sure my stuff ends up useful to someone.

[Kusgnos]

At this point, I'd say go for it. Nothing wrong with making sprites available for others' use.

[Megaman]

Do it, considering this is a project cooked up on the forum I have a feeling it WILL go nowhere.

[nenjin]

It's always nice when people that put no effort into the project still take the time to slam it.

On the art, I don't mind. No one had any delusions of copyrighting it, I think.

[Megaman]

People either get bored or just don't care in the first place in this kind of situation.

[mendonca]

Given that it is open source, the project is still very much in development.

It's just waiting for people to develop it.

Any of the tile stuff I did is fair game, feel free to do what you want with it.

[Lap]

Does anyone mind if I dump the sprites/tiles I made onto OpenGameArt.org?  This doesn't seem to be going very far, Lap hasn't been on for over a week, and I might as well make sure my stuff ends up useful to someone.

There's no reason not to. No one is doing this for money. I know as an artist I'd want my work to benefit the most possible people; that is how I feel about my code. That is far more important than leaving them exclusively tied up to a project that might never see completion.

Repost from the main forums in case some of you have stopped checking there:

The project is not dead.

Though there has been code contributed by others, I am the primary coder. When I stop updating, only art assets and ideas continue being submitted. This can only go on so long without code updates.

Where have I been? Well for those internet stalkers out there, I never left and you'll see my posting on b12 and lurking daily. Send me a PM or email and I'll likely respond within a day. However:

1. I code in spurts. I get a great idea for a new game mechanic and I sometimes end up coding that same thing for hours straight and often continue working on it for days. After this high productivity period I temporarily burnout and need to give myself a break. My current break involves me working on a previous project; a 4X game (http://76.26.38.52/forum/index.php?topic=3.msg54#new). Looks familiar huh?

2. I was losing direction. There are tons of great ideas on these boards, but a lot of them are simply not detailed enough. When I go to code something in it is going to take 10x longer if I have to keep switching gears from actually coding and stopping to figure out how the whole mechanic works and should be balanced. So when posting an idea for combat or something, it helps tremendously for the actual formulas and such to already be worked out. Writing in pseudocode also helps. I waste a lot of time screwing around on my TI-89 trying out different damage curves and formulas. Most of which is work that will never be seen.

3. The T-Engine was being angry. Updates to the T-Engine, the engine that Crimelike is built on were causing my personal computer much suffering and causing impossibly long load times. I worked with darkgod for a while to fix them, but the cause was really hard to find. I've since been on a break so I haven't checked to see if later versions are as problematic.

4. IRL busy. Went home for holidays, no computer, studying for massive board exam, rest of month in and out of long surgeries.


So now that my long list of excuses is done, what about the future of Crimelike?

Well, towards the end of the month I'll be releasing a tech demo for the 4X game I've been working on so I won't be too active here. Inbetween doing that I'll try to see if I can get my T-Engine issues worked out with darkgod so that when I'm ready I can jump right back into coding.

How can you guys help?

You're already helping out just by showing interest. Nothing is more inspirational than checking in and seeing that we have so many forum users and ideas being submitted. Most important though is if I see well discussed mechanics WITH NUMBERS AND FORMULA so that I can get right in there and code. You can also try to learn a little about the easiest coding language ever and make some very basic stuff to help out. Aside from that try to recruit some more coders. Hell, if someone comes along that has the time, passion, and know how I'll gladly give them project lead if they'd like.

[Lap]

It's been a little hiatus, but I'm getting back in gear as are some other people. I've still been getting questions a couple times a week with people asking how they can help move things along, so that's promising.

Since the last major code updates the TOME engine has seen at least six major revisions. For us this is a double-edged sword; there are a lot of new fancy graphics stuff as well as online profile features that I'm going to have to explore, but I also have to spend some time bringing Crimelike up to date with the new functions. If you download the latest SVN version right now and try to play it with TOME 20, it's not going to run. I'm working on that right now, but I might just end up scrapping some of our oldest files and just rewrite them for the new better version.

Looking around, there still aren't a lot of hard formulas and mechanics written for the features everyone is waiting for. As said before, when I have to spend hours experimenting with how game play should work, that's time taken away from actual coding. Since there's very few coders, but everyone has ideas, I'd much rather be put to work actually implementing these ideas. Special thanks to nenjin for creating so many mechanics so far.

I've also had about five or so people offer to either transfer over from another coding language or learn Lua from scratch to help out. I am more than willing to help anyone transition over or even learn from scratch. At this point, coders are the bottleneck for this project and they directly relate to how fast we can release playable versions.

[nenjin]

I can get into seriously writing out numbers, but one thing people I've tried to bring into this have asked for is a design plan.

I.e, a prioritized list of goals just so we can design with some surety we're not writing mechanics for a future systems. I know you said you're comfortable with shorthand, i.e [SKILL CHECK], but it's not easy to conceive mechanics with confidence or implement them when your text is littered with those references.

Even something as basic as 1) Character stats 2) skills 3) checks 4) gear would give us some direction.

So yeah. All this time we haven't really had a concise list of priorities to code from, it's been "find what interests you, develop some code around it." I think we need a little more cohesion. Bringing together the work that people have already done so it can be understood by others would also be a big help. We kind of don't know where we stand on many features atm, other than art, of which we have tons, and building plots, which were last waiting on some re-write from TOME last I checked.

What I did in my last major push was just try to get some discussion on each major area, mostly character advancement, HIDEN, and what the shape of the city and the districts would be like, and get ideas down. After this long, I think the time for debate has kind of ended in most places, so I guess I'll head back and see what motivates me to write out numbers, until I get some firm direction on what needs to be done first to get something remotely playable.

[Jack A T]

Ooh, active again!

Ready to sprite, map, and perhaps think again.