Looks promising, looking forward to hearing more.

This looks excellent!

If you haven't seen it yet, I think Miasmata may be worth a look -- it's entirely based around exploration of a large island, and has a fascinating navigation system in which you fill in a map by triangulating your position with landmarks. (You're trying to find components for a medicine to cure yourself of a disease). Does a great job making simple exploration engaging. It also has pitch black nights and a panther-thing hunting you.   

Hello everyone!

Short and sweet: I want to make a website for your game! Whether you want a blog type deal to chronicle development that I could set up the framework for then hand over to you or a fire and forget announcement/marketing page, I want to make it. Any framework, CMS, or whatever you want is fair game! My services are free, but you'll need to provide any media of your game and, of course, host the site.

The backstory: I recently designed and launched a website for the company I work for (I'm not sharing it for privacy reasons, but it's pretty cool), and really enjoyed it. I want to do it more! I also love indie games. So this seems like a good way to build up my site-building skills and hopefully help out some cool game designers.

The only caveat is that because I have a full time job and a life outside it, sites will only get built in my free time. So not super fast, is what I'm saying. But not super slow, either. And hey, free!

If you're interested, PM me and maybe we can work together!

- G

I just checked out the initial pre-alpha. Really impressive stuff. I will say I struggled with the dialogue in verse. What you just posted, about the origins of Kayamgadh, was interesting to read, and I like the overall atmosphere of what you're creating. But verse is really hard to pull off. It's simultaneously infantile (nursery rhymes) and pretentious (bad poetry).

So... think hard about how crucial verse is to your project, and how you might make it easier to handle, is I guess what I'm saying.

But this is incredible work, and I look forward to seeing more, verse or no verse!   

I wandered around a bit in the linked Unity module (I actually wandered right off the edge! Might want to include a barrier or a warp back to edge function). Really nice. The premise is great too. Sounds like a wonderful foundation for a simple, affecting experience. Looking forward to seeing more.

Thanks for the thoughts, guys!

Getting stuck with a character it turns out you don't like would be frustrating... not sure how to deal with that (unlike skills, respeccing a personality is strange). Maybe certain opportunities to alter your character as a result of story actions.

The more I think about it, the more I want to try it out. We'll see how it works if the game ever gets to the playtest/feedback phase. 

Runefrog,

It's extremely difficult to attract talented implementors with an idea alone. Game design as a discreet skill isn't really recognized (and hard to demonstrate in any case) and while no one bats an eye at a screenwriter or playwright looking for actors or set designer or whatever, a game designer looking for programmers and artists will be ignored. Basically, those programmers and artists probably have their own ideas for games, why should they implement yours?

Fortunately, implementation is easier than ever! Tools like Unity make the basics of putting a game together fairly straightforward, and there's a huge community eager to teach (like this very board!), and artists who give out assets for free.

So my advice is: grab unity, grab a book on game logic/design, and throw together a prototype! It's not something you'll do in a day, but with a little bit of discipline, you'll have the skills to create your own game! 

Hello all,

I'm in the design stages for a text-based game (sorry). It's not really a visual novel or a text adventure -- more like Fallen London, if you're familiar with that. (fallenlondon.storynexus.com)

Something I'm thinking a lot about is the difference between the player and the protagonist. Obviously the player can't make every choice the protagonist does. I'm thinking about providing a list of attributes the player can choose from during character creation (like "aggressive"), and the character will then do different things at certain points, without further player input (obviously there will still be a ton of choices for the player to make).

Does this sound interesting? Or silly? I feel like it might be fun to create a certain type of character and then see how it plays out (especially if I mark what choices were made based on character attributes). On the other hand, I worry that players might get frustrated when their character does something they don't want (always a risk, anyway). 

Basically the player would be front-loading certain choices at character creation, rather than making them in the moment.

Do you think it would be interesting or frustrating? Help me think out loud!

The Void.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/37000/

Character lie to you about how the game works, plus you have no real idea of how the game works.

Assassin's Creed Multiplayer

Each player has a specific target to assassinate that the other players don't know.

HEY! HEY! HEYHEYHEY!

Very cool work, Greg, you're definitely inspiring me to work more with 3D!

This looks very interesting! Are there any details you can share about how the game's economy will work, what the player will be doing, etc.?

I am honestly too afraid of Dwarf Fortress to get close to it! Trapping is a neat idea, but stuff like that will probably be handled in the abstract with things like the hunter trait. I don't want to get too carried away with features, especially since this is my first time making a game! I need to keep it simple(ish).

The player starts in a small trading outpost (which he has founded) and as he gets money though the game he can pay to upgrade it with a some buildings that affect the player in different ways (basically each tier of development can fit in only a few buildings, so choosing which ones to build is an important decision). Eventually this trading post can be developed into a full city.

This looks set to be the Animal Crossing/platformer mashup I've always wanted! Good luck, looks great!

Feedback!

1) I think it's fine. The dude points his stick ominously -- that part's good. The fact that the enemy card simply disappears is a bit jarring. Maybe slide it off the screen? Flip it over? A simple card-like animation I think would work well.

3) The mouse seemed pointless, easy kill and no experience. I guess it adds to the boss meter.

4) Yes, but after one attack the level 2 sprite was replaced by the level one sprite and he lost the two extra hearts. He kept the 4 attack power, though.

5) Yup.

6) ? Not sure I understand... Leveling up feels good, as usual. Everyone likes to get buff.

7) Swords = attack - intuitive, shuffle = switch enemy - not instantly obvious but once I did it it was clear and made sense, hold shuffle = discard - I would never had known if you didn't tell me.

8 ) Well, what's it supposed to represent? I guess it's like... Bonus attack power or something, maybe lightning bolts?

9) I find the most powerful thing (= most experience) I can kill, and then I kill it. If everything is too powerful, I discard. What other strategy is there?  (at this point)

10) Probably!

11) How do you lose?

Maybe have a numerical count somewhere for the boss bar? The bar's slick, but I can't tell how many points away from waking up the boss I am, which makes pin-point planning tough. Maybe that's intentional?   

I think this is a really neat foundation, and with some extra complexity built on top, this will be a fun little game!

EDIT: If possible, new monsters (either through discarding or killing) should come to the top first. As it is, there would be two monsters I couldn't beat, I'd kill the other one, and then have to scroll down through those other two every single time while I was trying to get enough xp to lvl up.

Awesome idea! Dragon teeth are definitely going in there!

I agree with SirNiko -- keep it focused on the unique player participation aspect. Cram the place with secrets and peeps will just do what they want.

Consider a player-based reward, something like hidden rooms that contain the message "Eat a cookie" or whatever.

All right, a few updates!

Above is a screenshot clipped so that you can see it at "actual size" -- so it's part of the screen rather than the whole screen (the actual games runs at 1024x640 right now). I've upped the tile size to 16x16, which seems like the sweet spot for now. You can also see, in the cash count, the new font I'm using, which is Texture Fancy by tsampson of fontstruct.com. It's used under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution/share alike license.

I've been tweaking the world-generation code, and you can see the more-interesting monster tile configurations and a halfway-decent desert, with a city in it.

Under the hood, I have the bare bones of the trade system implemented: the game tracks how much wood, glass, books, gears and phosphor the player has (the only 5 goods I've included so far, but it will be very simple to add more), and the player can purchase these goods from cities. No selling yet, though  , although I have a plan for that all ready to go. Once I put selling in, I'll probably shift focus to coming up with some interesting tiles and general map generation. Oh, and I've also included a basic trait, "hunter." The idea for traits is for them to be aspects of your character that significantly change the game. You choose one when you start a game and gain one per level up, for a max of four, probably. With the hunter trait, you get gold from monsters you slay -- the more powerful the more gold! So it can be easy to scoot through a few monster tiles and rack up some gold, but there's always the chance you'll run into something you can't beat and be killed.

I have plenty of ideas of my own, but I'd be interested to hear what sort of fantasy world goods people would be interested in trading. The stranger the better.       

And oh, what the hell. I'll bump this up to 10% complete!

I don't sell games or have access to special numbers, so here's some blatant speculation. Isn't it just during this last year or so that Valve has really pushed Mac on Steam? Maybe a lot of Mac users who used to comb the wilds of the Internet for the rare game that would work for them are now content to focus on a centralized service for games. I wonder what the Steam Mac numbers are like.

My thought is: what distinguishes the Metroidvania world design is that it is (often) a single, continuous map through which the player is expected to criss-cross and explore to find the path forward (this is as opposed to the linear level series). Designers put in upgrades because hey, getting new stuff is fun, and to effectively restrict certain areas of the map until the access upgrade has been found.

Really, you could replace combat upgrades with keys or spells or songs or switches or whatever, you wouldn't be making too meaningful a change, if they allowed access to a new area.

I'd recommend (if you are committed to getting away from upgrades) simply making a world which the player can freely explore, right from the beginning of the game (hence no need for upgrades). (Not to say you couldn't also have puzzles, just that they would all be solvable from the beginning of the game). This also forces you away from the standard equating of progressing geographically to progressing in the game (since your player could go anywhere at any time). As a simple, hasty idea, you could base game progress on knowledge, rather than geography. (Perhaps the player is a scientist, and as he travels through the game world he collects information about the world, and once he has enough the game concludes.)

Anyway, good luck with your design!

 

Well, space trading has certainly gone nuts since Elite, with the X series being the most robust (and frustrating and slow and...)

I myself am working on a small trading game (not like Elite, however), so I have been thinking about trading game mechanics recently.   

I think the core of the appeal of trading games is simple and tycoon-like: it's a pleasure to start small and end up big. In typical RPGs, this progression is earned through fighting: fight, get XP, level up, be more powerful. In a trading game, you trade goods, get $$$, which you can use to expand your capabilities.

A good trading game will reward the player for being shrewd (again, in a typical RPG the player is rewarded for sound tactical decisions in the moment of combat. In a trading game, a grasp of the big picture is rewarded). This is the most difficult aspect to a trading game. You want the system to be clear enough that your players can understand how things work, but opaque or dynamic enough that they need to think about how they can make the most money. That way, when they do find a very profitable route (oh! Gamma 9 makes rayguns which means they always need a lot of zinc alloy to build them with! I should sell all my zinc alloy here). Dynamic events that change the flow of trade is good: if the player can influence them, even better.

Also, all that money should be good for something -- expanding your trade empire should be fun in its own right.

And, as in most games, introducing difficult decisions is a good idea. Upgrade your ship this way or that way? If you travel here to trade, you may miss out on an opportunity over there.