PS: I hope that there is a mix of balanced/unbalanced encounters even in a balanced world. It's nice to have to make a decision about whether you can handle the battle Smiley

That is something I have always wanted to do, although I have wondered if it will be a fun feature or just realism gone too far. I get annoyed by games where you always meet perfectly balanced mobs to suit your level, and prefer once where you can interact with much higher and lower level NPCs although not always through combat. Of course if you start playing with the mentality that you should win every battle it will get very frustrating.

Spice Road is quite economically minded - so sometimes you will be picking your fights not just on whether you can win them, but also on whether the consequences are worth the risks. Hiring new troops and restoring wounded ones is expensive, while killing a rival factions agents could make them retaliate against your own. So I do want the player to be selective about combat.

I like Pistols and Sabre as mounted weapons. You don't really have a chance to reload or aim very well in a charge so melee combat will become more important. So yes, what you see here is limited by the amount of art I have - in fact I am getting all the gameplay finished before I add more breadth to the art and units.

As for Canned Gameplay...

Canned: Towns, prices, Faction alliances, missions all hand made by designer. World is effectively a snapshot in time with no dynamic changes. eg: Warcraft

UnCanned: World grows organically through simulation, trade and criminal opportunities appear out of simulated flows of goods and workforce between towns. World changes dramatically through player actions. eg: Civilisation

The canned version offers a more reliable player experience, balancing is easier, and certain activites the player wants to do can be automatically presented for their gaming fun.

The uncanned version offers more replay, but is less accessible to new players as you have to make the most of an unknown world. For example the encounters you face would not be even matches, and there may be times where trade or bandit opportunities are hard to find.

Realistically I think I am going to find a compromise between the two, perhaps a well balanced world to start with, but with opportunities to unbalance as the player progresses - countered by helpful measures to steer the player to challenges within their capabilities. The replay and sandbox elements are pretty important to me - but not at the expense of a fun experience.

I've been concentrating on getting the fundamental gameplay working, trading and town building, but have found a little time to make a



At the moment the big dilemma is Deep Simulation or Canned Gameplay (Scripted). As time goes by I am thinking Sim is more cool, but Canned might well give a more fun player experience.

Somehow this did make adding shadows to my game seem less scary, and the choice of stencil or lightmap shadows was a useful addition. Thanks

I'm reading the pdf and it is a useful overview of the design and marketing of this genre of games. A lot of the ideas should carry over to a non-text MMO too. Shame there is so much stigma attached to the Facebook login - it is a convenient way to avoid endless new logins/passwords.

Did you test the 3 day claim on new users?

Every now and then one of my game's actors disappears. I can see their footprints moving across the map. Sometimes other actors render fine at the same time (all drawn in the same loop within a DirectX effect setup).

I think it is missing the skeleton matrix update - but really I am clueless after several hours trying stuff out. It is complicated by the indirect relationship between actors and renderables:

GameplayActor has a MapObject has a pointer to Entity which is a RenderableActor which has a Skeleton and renders the character.

Comes from trying to reuse old code and getting an explosion of classes and indirection! Might just flatten the whole thing out and see if the problem goes away.

I use Curvy 3D to make game sprites [example sprites]

Animation is made by making copies of the objects and posing them side by side. Then I can take a single screengrab and cut it into frames for each sprite. Not very high tech, but works for me.

Playing the tutorial is crucial to making an appealing game - I like it when tutorials are disguised into the game itself, so the full complexity only appears bit by bit but while you are really playing the game.

I guess time spent on content or late game features is all wasted if someone gets confused or bored during the tutorial and quits. Trick is to have the it engaging and interesting even through the simple tute gameplay. Easier said than done.

As for content/features, I am hoping to be feature complete about 1/3 of the way through my project leaving the rest of the time for beta and content creation. I am hoping this will give a good balance, keeping my features broadly applicable throughout the game and adding a decent amount of depth to the world in content. Most of the game prototypes I have made are all features and minimal content - but in fact most real games are mainly content with a narrow selection of features - so I am trying to hold back on being over featured.

@bateleur That sounds like fun - but the complexity and length is scary! I think if Ispot my design looking too big to finish I will cut it down. I agree that lots changes after beta - it is such an interesting phase of the project.

I am interested by the release early idea - it would take a couple of months to get my current game mechanics ready for even a beta release, but as @cheeba says it is work that I would have done anyway in the end. The extreme of this is the Release-Any-Day method where you could theoretically trigger a release build at any stage of the project... a technique that might come in useful later on when unforeseen deadlines/opportunites appear.

You've got the energy - so if you've got the time - you can do your project successfully on your own, there's forums and the internet to fill any holes in your knowledge, and readymade game engines in all genres to take care of the math.

Collabs are best for shorter projects, otherwise you might lose some key people partway through and find it even harder to finish. On the other hand, idea bouncing and feedback is very useful, doesn't have to come from a collaborator

@Klaim I agree with the release point being crucial. A big part of my design process is comparing my feature wishlist against the amount of time I will need to polish and finish each one - often cutting a detail out seems to streamline the gameplay and GUI and make the game more fun, an added bonus of working to a deadline.

Thanks for the encouragement It's good to hear from other long timers!

I guess the trick is knowing when to round things up and finish it off. There is an old wilderness tradition ( Perhaps from some MacGyver episode ) where the newly come of age tribesman would run a massive circuit in a day, and all the land inside the loop he ran would be his inheritance. If he failed to complete the loop he would get nothing. I'm up for a big land grab 

You've heard of Game Jams where all the dev happens in a single weekend - well I live at the other end of the spectrum. Serious time sunk into ickle indie games.

My last project took 2500 hours, not including sound and music which I got from several talented sound guys. That is about 170 Game Jams in a row on a single project. Was the game 170 times better than a Jam game? Well no not really. It probably had 30x the play time and 5x the graphics quality.

So, flush with success I am having another go - I am 180 hours into a new 2000 hour game project. A bit quicker this time as I learnt a lot from the last game.

So, I really wanted to find out who is making games on a similar scale to this or bigger on TIGSource - it would be great to know I am not out on a crazy-indie limb.

  I will upload some combat video soon - but you will have to forgive the AI at this early point of development

  I'm working on a cross-section of the main systems at the moment, Combat, Travel & Trade. These are all working in a very rough way at this stage. This is not an RTS or Total War type game - the combat mechanics are far simpler to make room for deeper party and town management adventures. But that said the battles should make for good eye-candy when you don't feel like skipping them.

[Spice Road]

I've been researching bandits, villains and highwaymen - the worst I found so far were the Thugee, they would join large caravans in small groups and befriend the caravaneers... before strangling them all in cold blood.

Along with Arabian Desert Raiders and Oriental Monk Renegades - Spice Road also features the most famous of the raiding hordes, the Monguls, seen below in a skirmish with Avalon Troops.

[Curvy 3D]

Hi,
 I dev a sculpt program called Curvy 3D when I'm not writing Indie games - and I've just released a major revision Curvy 3D 2.0 Pro

 It is an easy sketch-based lathe modeller with surface sculpting, texturing and export tools. I've used it for making sprites and 3D poly models for my games - while others have found it to be an excellent basemesh builder for ZBrush and Mudbox.

 Curvy's priced under $100 to suit hobbyists, there is a handy 20% off launch offer running now, and a massive Free trial version.

Curvy in Indie Games

All the buildings and spaceships in my last game on Steam were textured in Curvy.

I made all the artwork for the AS3 Flash Game "Slice: Fortress Defence" in Curvy:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/aartform/slice-fortress-defence

You can see several Art topics for my DirectX 9 game "Spice Road" on the AartformGames blog here:
http://www.aartformgames.com/blog/category/art/



Journo PR...
PRESS RELEASE: Aartform Releases Curvy 2.0

Happy to hear feedback + crits

Simon de Rivaz
Aartform
http://www.curvy3d.com

Game map for a "60 Second RPG" experimental game. Made using a displacement map in Curvy 3D.

I've got some more of the engine working now (Parallax and Particles). Also I wanted to add a feeling of summoning magic so I added a mouse spinning powerball-esque charger to the cast.

Once the first gargoyle is in flight you can charge up the spinner for a second and third cast in flight to throw the smaller gargoyles.

I've only got placeholder art for the background, and only a couple of enemies so far - But can you tell me if the mouse spinning mechanic works? Cheers!

N.B. Powerups are automatically upgraded each time you play up to lvl 20... this will go into a shop/upgrade screen in the end.

Gargoyle Cast BETA

[EDIT: Here is a playable minidemo]

EDIT: Here is a playable minidemo Gargoyle Cast BETA

These are the heroes of a fantasy themed throwing game Macha (Blue), Eiffel (Green) and lil Red. Chuck a gargoyle deep into the swamp and bounce your way to destroy the minions of evil. For extra range the bigger gargoyles throw the smaller ones in flight.

I've got the core engine working in AS3 and am now plumping up the gameplay.

My theme for this project was "quick and simple", I wanted to spend mode time on the gameplay than the graphics so used the photo sky (which I like, even though the perspective is impossible) as an easy shortcut.

Level 80 is the highest I've had reported so far - nice one! I have tried strategies that start placement in the top right, and delay leveling up the units in bottom left to get a more even spread of damage + hence xp across the units.

In some ways I think this game is too balanced - it is quite forgiving which units and strategies you use. But it is great to hear your power-gaming stories