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Non-Fantasy

Very Light Fantasy (Extremely Rare Mythical Creatures, Magic, etc.)

Light Fantasy (Rare Mythical Creature, Magic, Etc.)

Medium Fantasy (Magic, and Mythical Beings are common)

Heavy Fantasy (Both are abundant, but most Magic is very weak)

[Svarte Troner]

There are too many fantasy games. If you made a historically accurate game about the dark ages, my inner early medieval history buff would be overjoyed.

[adwarf]

If enough people ask for it I will eventually make a fantasy version once I have most of the actual game completed.

[Svarte Troner]

If enough people ask for it I will eventually make a fantasy version once I have most of the actual game completed.

Yeah, it'd be great if you could make fantasy stuff toggle-able.

[adwarf]

It is coming along slowly, but I am learning how to program, so that is expected. Also if anyone wants to help out they could research kingdoms, town names, and historical figures of the Middle ages, and PM me what they learn. Note: Anyone who helps out will get credit for what they helped me with.

[Acid]

OK, I don't want to sound like an ass, but here's my (negative) comments:
Firstly, I have to agree with BDthemag. I'm a high master lurker here, and I have noticed that you, adwarf, tend to create unrealistic goals for yourself and never actually reach them. The Fallout pnp and some Oblivion RTD (CMIIW), among others, are the projects with big aims and no future I have in mind.
I'm saying this not to discourage you, oh no, jsut to point out that in teh long run you will be wasting time and energy chasing after unreachable things. And I do understand that this game might be one of your dreams, but it is extremely complex (something that would give doubts to even a skilled programmer) and, as you stated, you have never done any coding. Think about it. It might take a month to grasp the basic concepts of programming. Three to four months to memorise all the functions of a language. And at least a year of constant programming exercise before you finally do not feel the need to open up the documentation file to look up how something works. Even if we're optimistic and you do mane to master the language, starting from zero, after a year, only then you can start constructing the engine - after all, a game as complex as your simply requires major structurisation (? grammar nazi, I choose you).
Well, enough with the flak. My advice would be to keep your vision in mind and not to expect to begin actually coding the game (that is, writing functions that wouldn't be scrapped after a short time due to your rapidly increasing knowledge of the language) in the following year. Start off small, read a bunch of tutorials and work every day.
Finally, I highly doubt that you will stick to your idea for long enough. I mean, I'm a lot like you - a walking bag of concepts. But now I understand that they're just that - some thoughts and ideas. In my case, they disappear if I do not start expressing them the day they come to my mind. Sure, this game might look like something you could be working on for the rest of your life, but, believe me, in a young age things come and go.

Enough ranting! To sum up, sit down and rethink this whole thing. Does it have any possibility of seeing the light of day in the coming year or two? As I see it, this just might become one of your 'the higher they are, teh harder they fall[out]' ideas.

(sorry it's late and I don't feel like going to sleep yet, so I have to kill some time)
(also sorry if it's incomprehensible)

[adwarf]

I understand what your saying, but I am going to college to become a programmer, because I have always loved games, and this is, as you stated my dream game. I know I most likely finish the entire game, but I will at least try to make it. As for the goal that is just what I wish the game to come to my current aim is to just get all the base stuff in (The Map, Towns, Factions, Combat, Crafting, Items, NPCs, Damage System, and Character Generation) I know I most likely won't have a version I want to release until sometime after I finish college just doing it myself, but as I said earlier I am going to try.

[Biag]

Spoiler: Probably-uninteresting rebuttal to Acid (click to show/hide)

Look, it's possible I'm wasting my time encouraging the guy, but why are you so negative? Nobody posts in Creative Projects to say "Hey, I've got this cool idea. I'm really inspired to try and do it, even though it's a big project and I'm going to have to learn a lot of stuff to even get started. Could you shoot me down now, please?" Adwarf has dropped a couple of projects in the past, yeah, but that's no proof he'll drop this one. Time passes, people change, and much of the time people have to try a lot of things before they find out what really works for & inspires them. That's not an age-based tendency, either. Why do you think people go to adult pottery classes?

This project also isn't nearly so complicated as to be impossible. Looking at it right now, I only see a few avenues of especial difficulty: crafting, general NPC stuff, and map generation. All of these problems can be solved with initial simplifications (if you want a design as proof, I am prepared to give that to you, but a simple roguelike map generator is only about a week of work). Admittedly, I've got a lot of the code for a project like this already lying around, and I'm a moderately experienced programmer, but I could likely scrap it together into a fairly interesting demo in a month or two, were I sufficiently motivated.

TL;DR Yes, it's a very ambitious project. However, game design is about combining simple elements to create depth and complexity, and when approached individually all these elements are fairly simple- each item in the Planned Features list could be thrown together in seven days or less. There's no reason to tell the OP he should just give up because he hasn't finished an ambitious, long-term project before.

Sorry for the intensity of my reaction, but pointless negativity is one of my biggest pet peeves.

I've been working on a pet project of similar scope (but modern-times) for the last year, so here's some things I've learned from my experience.

Spoiler: Assorted Tips (click to show/hide)

1. Program every day. This is pretty much the most important thing. Definitely not something I follow as often as I should. Force yourself if you have to, but you don't have to work for longer than a half-hour or so if you really don't want to. It's less about what you get done and more about staying in touch with your code.

2. Never waste a productive mood. If you feel like coding, open up Notepad++ and get to work! I've found that the occasional two-hour "programming fugue" will produce more results than a full day of working against myself.

3. Unify as many concepts as possible. This is really a programming/software design principle, but it deserves special attention with projects like this. Write down a list of features and try to figure out how many you can fit under one general system without sacrificing general quality. An obvious example is NPCs- stick with one system for handling actors, rather than creating separate classes for "soldier" and "farmer" and "merchant" NPCs.

4. Don't waste a whole lot of time on procedural generation at the beginning. If you can throw together procedural monsters in an hour, great, but focus on getting some actual gameplay up and running in a test map before you turn it loose to the Random Number God.

5. Every few days, stop and ask yourself, "Does what I'm working on contribute to the fun?" You want as many hours as possible going directly into things that are fun. Spending a week working on a perfectly-simulated economy will not, in the beginning, contribute to the fun. See #4.

6. And lastly, to tie it all together, make concrete, visible goals. Meaning, focus on one specific feature or mechanic at a time ("Today I will implement castle guards") rather than big, sweeping arcs ("Today I will improve the experience of being king"). Not only do the smaller ones contribute much faster to gameplay, if you manage to hit ten little goals in a day you will feel much more accomplished than if you spent ten hours without anything crossed off on your checklist.

7 (Bonus Tip!). Program every day. Really, #1 is the most important thing I've written here. Every day you program, no matter how little, is a day you made some progress.

I could probably go on forever about my experiences with this style of work and particular strategies that have succeeded in the past, but if I really did go on forever I would never post it and you would never read it, so that would be a waste of both of our time.

To sum up, sit down and rethink this whole thing. Does it have any possibility of seeing the light of day in the coming year or two? As I see it, this just might become one of your 'the higher they are, teh harder they fall[out]' ideas.

I agree with Acid that it's a dauntingly large amount of work, but you're not going to finish a big project by saying "No, that project is too big." It's much better to start a lot of things but never finish than to never do anything at all.

[Acid]

Yeah, I didn't want to seem negative. The point I was trying to get across (but seemingly failed) was that adwarf should firstly try learning programming, and see if he likes it at all. Yes, he stated that making games was something he would like to do for the rest of his life, but as he, apparently, didn't even try writing games, this ambitious project seems over-ambitious to me.

I have to note that I do encourage him to make this game - after all, the idea caught my attention - it just seems wasteful to create a to-do list and post it for everyone to see if you don't even know how to do the tasks that are in it. I say come back in a year or two when you have somethign to show us

(man, I still sound negative... maybe I'm just getting old)

[Gamerlord]

This looks like it could be awesome. ptw.

[Bdthemag]

Yeah, I didn't want to seem negative. The point I was trying to get across (but seemingly failed) was that adwarf should firstly try learning programming, and see if he likes it at all. Yes, he stated that making games was something he would like to do for the rest of his life, but as he, apparently, didn't even try writing games, this ambitious project seems over-ambitious to me.

I have to note that I do encourage him to make this game - after all, the idea caught my attention - it just seems wasteful to create a to-do list and post it for everyone to see if you don't even know how to do the tasks that are in it. I say come back in a year or two when you have somethign to show us

(man, I still sound negative... maybe I'm just getting old)

I totally agree, idea's are great and all but unless you can do something other than being an ideas guy/writer your not going to get far.

[MechPlasma]

I don't disapprove of large projects, but honestly? It looks like you haven't really thought this out. You're thinking too general - you're concerned with the overall "Play as anyone in a medieval setting and do anything" thing, but you're not thinking about how to do that from a game point of view, or thinking about how it'll actually be any fun. Which is... pretty much the entirety of game design. All you have here is just a basic premise, and are just expecting it to work.

But mostly, if you haven't made even a small videogame before, you're instantly going to fail. Being a game designer means knowing a bit about everything - knowing what music suits what mood, knowing what graphical stuff suits the game and what makes a worse user experience, and knowing a good deal about programming first-hand. If you've never done programming, you literally cannot know what is easy to do and what isn't. And a change of mind half-way through development because you then realise you can't do something is extremely time-consuming.

[adwarf]

I know where you guys are coming from, and I have actually took that I know nothing about programming into consideration, I got several books on it to help, but I am not going to drop this project. It might take me awhile to get anything for you guys to play (Most likely sometime during college), but I still want to work on the game no matter how much you tell me it is going to be difficult, or impossible, because I really want to do this. Even if I know nothing about it I can still try, and that doesn't mean I have to do everything by myself I can get help, but I don't want to get that until I have the basics down.

As for me failing instantly, so what, if I fail I will just try again, and again, and again until I get it right, because, like I said earlier, I really want to do this game. As for making it fun I will take suggestions on how to make it more fun, and interesting, but I will still try to do this even if I didn't have anyone that actually liked the idea, and concept for this.

[MechPlasma]

As for me failing instantly, so what, if I fail I will just try again, and again, and again until I get it right, because, like I said earlier, I really want to do this game.

Umm...
Hold on, you are making this game for fun, right? And not just so that you can say "Look at this awesome game I made"?
Because if it's the former, then you're going to quickly find out that this is not DF; losing is not fun. And if it's the latter... then you have some really messed up priorities.

[adwarf]

As for me failing instantly, so what, if I fail I will just try again, and again, and again until I get it right, because, like I said earlier, I really want to do this game.

Umm...
Hold on, you are making this game for fun, right? And not just so that you can say "Look at this awesome game I made"?
Because if it's the former, then you're going to quickly find out that this is not DF; losing is not fun. And if it's the latter... then you have some really messed up priorities.

Yes I am making this for fun. As for the second part if you are talking about in game I know that is precisely what I want, your character isn't some super soldier who can slay fifty foes, and come out unscathed (Though it is possible). You can die, and if you do your dead for good, though that is toggle able, I want the player to have to think about whether or not attacking that bandit camp alone is even possible.

[MechPlasma]

I was talking about making the game itself. The whole "failing a lot" thing.