Ripper
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- Joined
- November 8, 2014
- Messages
- 12,085
Indeed not.
I never trust my mother when it comes to my own person. I'm essentially perfection in her eyes.
I would never have guessed.
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2014
- Messages
- 12,085
Indeed not.
I never trust my mother when it comes to my own person. I'm essentially perfection in her eyes.
I would never have guessed.
25 years ago, I got addicted to text-based MUDs. One I played in particular, was a MUD that was converted to single player. I always thought it would be fun to create a text-based single player experience. As anyone who's ever played/created a DnD campaign, making worlds can be pretty fun and addicting. I started back in the DOS days using Quickbasic. I pulled out the graph paper and started making maps and rooms, then optimizing the code. Then I experimented with the parser, making commands to look around rooms to get more detail. Then came the inventory part. That became complicated starting to use 2D and 3D arrays so that things could be picked up and dropped, and stuck inside an inventory. Over time, it's gone through different languages until I settled on Python. Eventually I went all in and decided to put everything together that I had been tinkering on all those years. Setting up shops was easy. The most complicated part was the combat system (which I based on a compact version of the D20 system), because training, character generation, spells, weapons, armour, and other usable items all ties into it, and it can't be built in modules as easy as the other parts of the game. Now 25 years later, I have a fully working game, that has a city with 2 dungeons. That's a bloody long time to develop a text-only RPG. The great thing is, all the systems are in place. It would take me about a dedicated few evenings to script an entire overworld with extra cities and dungeons, however planning it out and making the descriptions good would take much longer. Now i've been planning out version 2.0 of this game, which will most likely be a tiled graphical version. Things i've learned:
- A text-based RPG is an EXTREMELY niche product, but it's satisfying when people have as much fun with it as you do, and is a great way to learn the underlying mechanics of scripting an RPG
- Make a design plan, and keep it simple, or you will spend 25 years on an unfinished game
- If you're a 1 person team with no art experience, or strength in coding, it's a big undertaking. Focus on a few core essentials on the game that make it fun (what am I making? Is what i'm adding making it fun, or just adding bulk for the sake of it?), and flesh those out. That's part of the design plan. To quote Todd Howard: "We can make anything, but we can't make everything." Or something along those lines. If you're going to make money off of it, there's going to be a time when you need to cap the project and say "this is done now".
- Make a game YOU would play. That way, you will be passionate about it, and not see it as a chore (this is relative of course, there will be the boring bits, which makes this even more important).
- There's a lot of great art assets out there. Some of them inexpensive, and some that are free. Make sure you know your art style before you start creating the game. This will setup the mood and feel of the game. Make sure you're looking through everything on AudioJungle, OpenGameArt, RoyaltyFreeGameArt, GameDevMarket, GraphicRiver, Unity Asset Store, tigsource.com, Gamasutra, Roguetemple, and of course all the Reddit devoloper/asset threads.
I've been bouncing between GameMaker Studio as well as Unity (depending on if i'm doing 2D or 3D). Here's some concepts i'm working on at the moment:
3D 3rd Person RPG Unity Concept
3D 1st Person Dungeon RPG Unity Concept
2D Top Down Dungeon RPG GMS Concept
2D Top Down Tile-Based RPG GMS Concept
You probably know or are aware of most if not everything i've said, but maybe there's some inspiration in there for you. Good Luck!
I know you like games like Elder Scrolls and the original Diablo. While they can be complicated games themselves, there's still the core mechanics that make them fun. You've already answered that you don't like pixel art or procedural content, so you can strike that off the list. Perhaps your drive is pushing you to a simple RPG with card game in place of combat? However, just because the mechanics are simple, the story and world can still be detailed and complex.
But the art would be more primitive - that's what I mean by card-based characters. In that your character, on-screen, would be represented by a 3D card inserted into a "plastic" base - like a board-game character.
That's one of the reasons why i'm considering a 2D tile, with a avatar that moves, but isn't animated in any way. Kind of like moving a piece on a board game. There's some great looking tile art out there, but keeps it ultra simple.
My initial thoughts would be to focus on a combat only game, a la Blackguards. Focus solely on the combat mechanics you want and the character system. Make players go from node A to B to C, with a couple of side paths, but focus on the combat.
These games can do relatively well and there are many around from the likes of Templar Battleforce to Dungeon Rats. Shadowrun and Banner Saga essentially mostly focus on this type of node to node combat too although they incorporate other large systems within their games too.
I think these types of games can be made to be a lot of fun and if you simplify graphics a bit like how Battle Brothers did, you can probably get a good game together.
Many people were turned off by the graphics/art style of Battle Brothers, but it was still hugely popular.
Another potential idea would be to have a game like Slay the Spire, but it would be difficult to get it to the same state, however, I kept thinking that that game would have been great if you had more units and each with their own skillsets rather than get random cards throughout…
What I meant was to use that gameplay but make a very simple art and animations related to it... Maybe I misexplainedMy game will be more or less combat oriented. But the games you mention all have an art style that I will have a hard time pulling off.
They're not one-man jobs.
I'm trying to stay within my limits.
But there are games with primitive art styles that do very well - simply because they play to their strengths.
If you look at something like Card Hunter - that's doing extremely well, and it has art that I could probably pull off.
Dark Quest is another example. The first game sold 20K copies - and I can definitely do better than that in terms of art and mechanics.
Of course, many of those copies were sold at a very low price, but still.
But the sophisticated 2D art of Banner Saga or Slay the Spire is not something I can achieve.
That's ok, though. My game will never sell a million copies.
I'm aiming for anything above 1-2K copies - as that should be enough to stay afloat during the initial time.
Do you have anyone interested in helping you, or are you going to be entirely on your own?
Start out small. Create something that you think will sell enough to bring income for a larger project. I know you don't want to create a quick cash-in, but there's nothing wrong with that if it allows you to progress with the game you really want to make.
I'd also hold onto your regular job for as long as possible too. It's not just about money. I'm sure you have other benefits from your employer - i.e. retirement fund, etc, that you're not going to have as an independent game developer. See if you can finish your first project in your spare time, or maybe take an extended leave of absence, instead of resigning altogether.
Have you considered doing something like a variation on Arcomage which was very popular when it came out in M&M7 and is still fun to play?
Since you can't afford high quality art or cutting edge 3D graphics, perhaps it'd be best to go for a deliberately retro style… There seems to be some market for those games, like the "Unknown Realm" RPG (raised $120K on Kickstarter) that is actually being developed to run on C64. Even if you don't want to actually develop it to run on obsolete hardware, which is probably a fair bit of work for what amounts to a silly gimmick, simply doing the graphics in the style of older system / era might appeal to a lot of older gamers or hipsters I guess
While I see you mentioned Cyberpunk assets in the unity store and I don't know how often those get used in games / how good they look. Perhaps that would appeal more to modern audience than 8 bit graphics. However, a deliberately retro style might actually help your game stand out more. Either way if it's a turn-based tactics game in a cyberpunk setting it's automatically on my wishlist.