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Total Members Voted: 0

Voting closed: September 17, 2011, 12:37:34 pm

[eerr]

Well, yer digging for something. The conflict being the hazards you meet on the way.

Yer short term goal is to dig, and survive to dig.
Yer long term goal is something that doesn't need to be filled in beforehand.

You can dig a narrow tunnel, in which you can get stuck.
You can dig a medium tunnel, weakening the ceiling
you can dig a large tunnel, with a significant chance of collapse.

The shape, how good of a tunnel it is, is determined randomly, by material, and by width.

Digging also costs the player a large investment of real (actual time)

Note that a cave-in of say, dirt, won't necessarily cause death. but the tunnel is even weaker than before.

A medium or large tunnel below another tunnel is a hazard.

There is also digging efficiently as leveling a mountainside should take at least a year in a game.

I do have a problem though, I don't know what the goal will be.

Mining gold
Strip-mine a mountain (A la Miner Disturbance)
Building the halls of Moria (establish a Dwarf Fortress.)
Dig to the major Archeological find ( Indiana jones!, but more boring because it's not spelunky, at least, at first)

[Mechatronic]

I hadn't heard of dating sims. I looked them up on wikipedia and read that they were necroromances. That's what I read anyway, it actually said neoromance.

[Armok]

I vote archaeological.

... Hmm, what about a fossils thing, rather than human made stuff? Either just for bones for some academic reason, or encountering forgotten beast/eldrich abominations, or "lost world" type stuff like Jurasic Park or A Journey to the Center of the Earth?

[Knight of Fools]

How about a game where you play as a dragon?

Start as a hatchling thrown out of its nest, and try to survive the world on your own, evading dangers such as farmers that find you sleeping in their loft, mercenaries, knights, giant creatures, and other dragons.  As you grow larger the threats change - An ancient dragon may not pay attention to a young, wandering dragon, but later on they might see you as a threat and confront you.  Throw in skills, magic, and the ability to alter the terrain (Dig caves, destroy villages, etc), and it might be a fun little game.  The ultimate goal is to survive to maturity, surviving everything man, nature, and dragon can throw at you.

[Armok]

That'd work better as a mod for DF 2.0

[BunnyBob77]

I like the dragon idea and the spelunking idea.  Hopefully this thread goes well, and you end up with an awesome game!

[Siquo]

Reminder: This is a design thread, not an idea thread. The big difference being that you follow up on the stuff you throw out

eerr, that starts to sound like a design, but...
A: I don't know anything about mining and tunneling (well, except for the one project in college but I just did the safety measures)
B: I'm still having trouble envisioning it as an actual main gameplay element. Exploratory Digging in DF is one of it's most boring features, IMHO. DF's digging is supplementary to the actual game, and it's entirely possible to play it without digging.

Digging for the sake of digging should be awesomely fun if it's ever going to get anywhere, and I'm not seeing it. Even DF threw out it's cave-ins (it had those back when it was 2D and you needed support pillars every x tiles or the ceiling would come crashing down).

Unless we take the caves as a given, and digging can create shortcuts. But that's already done in NetHack for instance, and doesn't really add anything.

A dragon building a lair is cool, but A: digging is kind of "beneath" a dragon, I think they choose pre-made caves and B: A dragon lair is canonically quite boring: one or two entrances and a large room to sleep on the hoard.

Plus that digging is a main feature in my "Other Ongoing Project", and there it's so awesome that nothing I do here can even come close.


In short: Either we get a really good digging-mechanic, or digging as a useful (perhaps optional) supplement to the main game, or digging is out.

[Max White]

Digging in and of itself can be fun.

Ok, but serious, if you want to make a game to develop your Java skills, we should start with the core focus of the project; To develop your skills. The following should be game features you implement for that reason

Load/Save game: Because persistence is important!
Procedurally generated world: Doesn't need to be big, but good to have under your belt.
Real time game: For practise in threading.
Multiplayer: For practise in plugs/sockets.
Collision detection: A VERY common problem in games, and the sort of logic it uses can be applied to a lot of applications, like anything where you need to check for scheduling conflicts. So another nice one to have under your belt.

[Siquo]

Ok, but serious, if you want to make a game to develop your Java skills, we should start with the core focus of the project; To develop your skills. The following should be game features you implement for that reason

Constructive post is constructive.

Load/Save game: In. Although i need to figure out if applets are allowed to have a local storage. Otherwise I need to implement  serverside stuff and I don't know if I've got the time for that.
Procedurally generated world: In. This was a given, as level editing is effing time-consuming.
Real time game: Probably in, but animations require threading anyway.
Multiplayer: For practise in plugs/sockets. Maybe, for reasons given at Load/Save.
Collision detection: Maybe. Depends on if we're going to do pixel-type movement or roguelike grid movement (moving per square).

I'm going to close the poll. Unless I get a good digging gamedesign, it's going to be an "afterthought" at most, and the second option wins (survival/crafting). In that scenario, digging can be a method of acquiring resources. Next up: Perspective. If you want a certain perspective, be ready to provide graphics for it as well. This is a collaborative project, meaning that I'm not going to do *everything*

If you manage to steal a decent set of sprites, that's cool, too, as long as they're "free" (All CC licenses are good, as long as it's not a NoDerivatives license, BSD or MIT are good too, as long as we don't get into trouble).

Are there any other "perspective" ideas to add to the poll before we continue?

[Max White]

Constructive post is constructive.

I know, that isn't like me at all!


...
 
DATING SIM!!!DATING SIM!!!DATING SIM!!!
But anyway, while I'm thinking about it, and some what sober, and rare combination, crafting systems are becoming popular, you might want to throw in one of those too.

Sounds like you will be making a simple, sprite based Diablo clone with item crafting and moustaches.


Also, I wouldn't take the poll too seriously, as the majority of people are neither programmers nor games developers, so asking the majority is silly. Also, the numbers might be skewed, because I voted dating sim for shits and giggles.

[Virex]

Damnit here I was hoping to be in time to still cast a vote for a dating sim RTS...

[Max White]

Just chant "DATING SIM!!!" over and over again, and it will all work out.

Oh! Throw in a skill tree too! It gives players a warm fuzzy feeling for gaining all the levels. ALL OF THEM!!!!!!!!!

[Siquo]

You do know that now we shall have trees in the game that bear a "skill"-fruit.

Hmmm yeah, Diablo-1-ish with crafting and perhaps some digging, but will we go for survival or monster-killing? Or a bit of both?
And do you get to play one char or a cast of chars (like in the D&D games)?

Edit:

Spoiler: Yes I take all suggestions seriously (in a way) (click to show/hide)

I've been thinking about a 4D dungeon crawler, but it's really hard to display. Of the third dimension we can only see two layers (current and the one below), and we can't normally move in those directions unless we have stairs or something. Now it is possible to make a "4D" stair, but that'd just act as a teleporter, so it's a lot more boring than it sounds. Actually rotating the world, making it possible to suddenly move in the 4th direction, relinquishing control on how you move in one of the previous two x/z directions, would be a lot more interesting but FRIGGIN HARD. Even doing that in a 3D world (wall-walking) is already disorienting enough).

[Max White]

You do know that now we shall have trees in the game that bear a "skill"-fruit.

... THAT IS AWESOME!
I must now make a great game with this feature and finish before you!

Also, taking game scope into account, I would suggest one character. And both, because both are fun, therefore it will be fun ^ 2.

If you need inspiration for the style that digging owould fit in well here, try stone soup or Elona. It isn't a major feature, just something left over from the way they construct the world that was easy to throw in.

[Siquo]

You do know that now we shall have trees in the game that bear a "skill"-fruit.

... THAT IS AWESOME!
I must now make a great game with this feature and finish before you!

What? Your game has 20 different skill-trees? We've got THOUSANDS!