Until further notice, assume that research is continuing to continue to continue. (Related, continue no longer sound like a real word.) On another note, I've decided that time management, bane of the creative process that it is, will still need to be factored in to this project. As such, I've decided to quickly draft up some wide blocks for dividing the project up, so at a later date it will be possible to put together a schedule more easily.
DESIGN BLOCK:
Creating Concept
Develop Concept
Produce Design Document
Review Concept?
CODING BLOCK:
Code Client Engine
Code Server Engine
Code Client (I like how I can just say all this. I know it's gonna be harder than that, but it still feels good to just say "yup, gonna get that done, then move on!". Not relevant, but just as an aside)
VIDEO BLOCK:
Choose Aesthetic (See Design Block)
Create Concept Art
Create Character Art
Create Background Art
Create Peripheral Art
Create Effects Art
AUDIO BLOCK:
Choose Aesthetic (See Design Block)
Compose Music
Produce Music
Script VA
Record VA
Edit VA
Create SFX
MARKETING BLOCK:
Compile Standalone Client
Host Server
Distribute Client
Advertise Game
Continue Patching/Updating Game as Needed
Looking at this list, having written it, and knowing there's probably something I missed... I'm beginning to think I might have gotten myself into more than I originally bargained for.
Oh well. I'm committed now. Here goes!
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
On Concepts
Research continues. Meanwhile, I'm going to go into more detail on how the concept as a whole is shaping up.
As of yet, gameplay is centered around a planetoid. For sense of scale, say it's circumference is around the length of a football pitch. This planet is represented in 2D. Gravity pulls the players inwards towards the center of the planet. At the east and west "poles" of the planet are coloured areas- arbitrarily, red and blue. The "red" team start off in the red zone, and the "blue" team start off in the blue zone. Additionally, if a player dies, they respawn in that zone after a short delay. There are, in addition, two "teleport pads", one at the north pole and one at the south pole. Before the start of the game, the two teams of 5 are matched up somehow- probably using a matchmaking system. Some considerably research would be needed to find how to balance this. These are teams of 5 in order to be large enough that teamwork and strategy is in effect, but small enough that it doesn't become a free for all. At the start of the game, each player chooses a class. They will play as this class for the duration of the game. Classes are differentiated into different roles on the team- so some offensive, some defensive, some supporting.
Once play begins, the players spawn at their starting zones, and are allowed to start moving and preparing. After a short wait, the "ball" is spawned on one of the two "teleport pads". Herein lies the objective of the game. Players have to work with their team to pick up the ball, carry it to the opposing coloured zone, and drop it to win the game. While holding the ball, players are essentially defenseless, necessitating teamwork in pushing forward. The teleport pads can be moved between freely during the game, with a moderate cooldown specific to the player, to allow play to move between the top and bottom halves of the planet.
Individual players have a number of unique abilities, each with different effects and cooldowns, as well as a unique speed and quantity of health. In addition, all players will have some means of turning "up" into a valid direction to go, to encourage play in two dimensions, rather than just one curved dimension- the most likely candidate for this slot is jet-packs, which thematically makes sense with the "spectator sport of dystopian future" aesthetic and story. Players holding the ball will not be able to use any of their abilities, but will instead be able to throw the ball or place it on the ground. This will allow passes and "ruck overs" to be made if a particularly slow (or otherwise ill-suited to play the ball) class ends up holding it.
This is obviously a VERY rough outline of gameplay. Significantly more work and design needs to go into this, and will do so over the coming months. But, as of yet, it seems a solid enough concept. However, I'm not an impartial judge- so, audience, I have a question!
Would you play this?
As of yet, gameplay is centered around a planetoid. For sense of scale, say it's circumference is around the length of a football pitch. This planet is represented in 2D. Gravity pulls the players inwards towards the center of the planet. At the east and west "poles" of the planet are coloured areas- arbitrarily, red and blue. The "red" team start off in the red zone, and the "blue" team start off in the blue zone. Additionally, if a player dies, they respawn in that zone after a short delay. There are, in addition, two "teleport pads", one at the north pole and one at the south pole. Before the start of the game, the two teams of 5 are matched up somehow- probably using a matchmaking system. Some considerably research would be needed to find how to balance this. These are teams of 5 in order to be large enough that teamwork and strategy is in effect, but small enough that it doesn't become a free for all. At the start of the game, each player chooses a class. They will play as this class for the duration of the game. Classes are differentiated into different roles on the team- so some offensive, some defensive, some supporting.
Once play begins, the players spawn at their starting zones, and are allowed to start moving and preparing. After a short wait, the "ball" is spawned on one of the two "teleport pads". Herein lies the objective of the game. Players have to work with their team to pick up the ball, carry it to the opposing coloured zone, and drop it to win the game. While holding the ball, players are essentially defenseless, necessitating teamwork in pushing forward. The teleport pads can be moved between freely during the game, with a moderate cooldown specific to the player, to allow play to move between the top and bottom halves of the planet.
Individual players have a number of unique abilities, each with different effects and cooldowns, as well as a unique speed and quantity of health. In addition, all players will have some means of turning "up" into a valid direction to go, to encourage play in two dimensions, rather than just one curved dimension- the most likely candidate for this slot is jet-packs, which thematically makes sense with the "spectator sport of dystopian future" aesthetic and story. Players holding the ball will not be able to use any of their abilities, but will instead be able to throw the ball or place it on the ground. This will allow passes and "ruck overs" to be made if a particularly slow (or otherwise ill-suited to play the ball) class ends up holding it.
This is obviously a VERY rough outline of gameplay. Significantly more work and design needs to go into this, and will do so over the coming months. But, as of yet, it seems a solid enough concept. However, I'm not an impartial judge- so, audience, I have a question!
Would you play this?
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Research Log, Part 1
I've got a spare moment now to elaborate on research I am doing at the moment (if you're charitable enough to call it that). Essentially, what I'm doing is looking at developer commentaries of other games in a similar (but not identical) niche to what I'm aiming for. What I'm particularly looking at are Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat, Third Person Shooters with Strategic/MOBA elements themed around spectator sports in the far future, Team Fortress 2, a class based shooter (Team Fortress, the Quake Mod, essentially kickstarted the class-based shooter, so it makes sense to look at their design decisions), a strategic 2-D Platformer/Shooter/MOBA called Awesomenauts, and the Gravitee series, which I have mentioned earlier. As I intend to draw elements from all of these games, it makes a certain amount of sense to look at the reasoning behind their design decisions, so I'm able to make informed choices on what to do with Contact Sport rather than just blindly copying, and so I'm able to see how the thought processes should work, so that I might be able to come up with my own unique ideas.
Creating the Concept
So, onto stuff that people have a hope of actually caring about!
In a probably fruitless effort to keep this project grounded in subjects OTHER than computing, I decided from the start that this game is likely to be designed with interesting physics in mind. With that noted, I decided that a fun game to draw inspiration from might well be something like Gravitee Wars, a game incorporating multiple-body physics and gravity-affected projectiles to create an odd blend of puzzle and turn based strategy.
Looking at the maths behind it, it quickly became apparent that having a single, central planet as a basis for a shooter of some kind would be an interesting concept both to design for and, hopefully, to play. So I decided to work from that as a concept. For the next step, determining the variety of shooter was next on the list. For me, this was a no-brainer; multiplayer class based shooter. My reasoning for multiplayer is twofold- One, without other players, some description of AI would be required, and I know from experience that game AIs are very VERY difficult to implement (That said, it would be nice to have an AI at some point, for 'vs bots' play.), and two, being multiplayer means that you could play with friends, which I've seen in the past as a major draw to games with anything approaching strategic elements. An added bonus is that when you have a multiplayer-focal shooter, you don't really need to have a compelling storyline, as whatever story is there is likely to just be an excuse for "run around shooting things". As for class basis, this was a conscious decision between 3 options. These options lie on the sliding scale of player freedom like so:
<CLOSED-----THE SLIDING SCALE OF PLAYER FREEDOM------FREE>
A B C
Option A is a closed shooter. Think Quake, here- all of the players are exactly the same, differentiated only by what powerups and weapons they find lying around. On the plus side, they have balance- all combat will be won on skill and luck, not just tactical rock-paper-scissors. Unfortunately, it suffers from that too- things can end up horrifically unbalanced if one player on one of the teams is significantly better than anyone else, and the gameplay can get very repetitive.
Option B is a class based shooter. Think Team Fortress, now. The players get to choose from a selection of characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. The benefits here are that there is generally a 'counter' to any given strategy or character, meaning you can't always employ the same tactics and be guaranteed to win. Equally, the balance can be fine-tuned by the developers, without forcing all of the characters into the same mold. On the other hand, it can suffer from breaking strategies being employed by players, or from one character being too powerful by comparison to the others.
Option C is a freeform shooter. Think Counterstrike. The players create their characters of themselves from a blank template, equipping themselves with gear with thought, prior to the match starting, rather than being equipped by the developers or by grabbing their equipment mid-match. This allows the players to have total freedom over their characters, and thus over what strategies they can employ, and so on. Unfortunately, it leads to similar issues to option B- if one weapon or strategy is noticably more effective than the others, all other options will fall into disuse. If you don't believe me, go say 'AWP' or 'AWSM' to any veteran Counterstrike player and check whether their eye twitches.
Given these choices, I decided that Option B was probably the best, partially because it gives the developers (ie us) the most control over what's going on, and partially because it gives us a chance to put some character into the characters. With Option A, every player is identical- any characterization would be applied to every character, and would kind of lose its meaning. As for Option C, it's harder to characterize anyone for the opposite reason- everybody is different, and there's no way of predicting HOW they'll be different, so you either need to apply separate personalities to every possible combination of equipment, making it no different from a particularly elaborate version of option B, or leave the characters bland and faceless- something I want to avoid. As a disclaimer to everything I said here, I do not want to insinuate that options A or C are bad, they're just not directions that would be good for this particular project.
With the genre mostly decided, it was time to find a unique selling point. I won't go into detail as to how this idea came along, because I'm not entirely sure how my train of thought works myself, but it should suffice to say that I ended up thinking "What would it be like if rugby was played on a planetoid?". From here, I was able to come up with what should be a fairly obvious USP and some core gameplay. Essentially, there is a ball of some kind, and two teams of players are trying to transfer the ball from somewhere on the planetoid to somewhere else. The obvious conclusion here is to use opposite poles of the planet as goals, making the main play area the space between them.
From here, it just needed some fleshing out. I took a hint from Monday Night Combat and decided that this game is the spectator sport of the dystopian future- two teams of genetically modified combatants, battling it out, ostensibly to score a goal and win the game. The rules are simple. Grab the ball, and make it to the opposite side of the planet alive. The execution, less simple. Each player is armed to the teeth with unique weaponry and unique training, and they won't let you score without a fight.
Sound good?
I sure hope so.
Welcome to Contact Sport.
In a probably fruitless effort to keep this project grounded in subjects OTHER than computing, I decided from the start that this game is likely to be designed with interesting physics in mind. With that noted, I decided that a fun game to draw inspiration from might well be something like Gravitee Wars, a game incorporating multiple-body physics and gravity-affected projectiles to create an odd blend of puzzle and turn based strategy.
Looking at the maths behind it, it quickly became apparent that having a single, central planet as a basis for a shooter of some kind would be an interesting concept both to design for and, hopefully, to play. So I decided to work from that as a concept. For the next step, determining the variety of shooter was next on the list. For me, this was a no-brainer; multiplayer class based shooter. My reasoning for multiplayer is twofold- One, without other players, some description of AI would be required, and I know from experience that game AIs are very VERY difficult to implement (That said, it would be nice to have an AI at some point, for 'vs bots' play.), and two, being multiplayer means that you could play with friends, which I've seen in the past as a major draw to games with anything approaching strategic elements. An added bonus is that when you have a multiplayer-focal shooter, you don't really need to have a compelling storyline, as whatever story is there is likely to just be an excuse for "run around shooting things". As for class basis, this was a conscious decision between 3 options. These options lie on the sliding scale of player freedom like so:
<CLOSED-----THE SLIDING SCALE OF PLAYER FREEDOM------FREE>
A B C
Option A is a closed shooter. Think Quake, here- all of the players are exactly the same, differentiated only by what powerups and weapons they find lying around. On the plus side, they have balance- all combat will be won on skill and luck, not just tactical rock-paper-scissors. Unfortunately, it suffers from that too- things can end up horrifically unbalanced if one player on one of the teams is significantly better than anyone else, and the gameplay can get very repetitive.
Option B is a class based shooter. Think Team Fortress, now. The players get to choose from a selection of characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. The benefits here are that there is generally a 'counter' to any given strategy or character, meaning you can't always employ the same tactics and be guaranteed to win. Equally, the balance can be fine-tuned by the developers, without forcing all of the characters into the same mold. On the other hand, it can suffer from breaking strategies being employed by players, or from one character being too powerful by comparison to the others.
Option C is a freeform shooter. Think Counterstrike. The players create their characters of themselves from a blank template, equipping themselves with gear with thought, prior to the match starting, rather than being equipped by the developers or by grabbing their equipment mid-match. This allows the players to have total freedom over their characters, and thus over what strategies they can employ, and so on. Unfortunately, it leads to similar issues to option B- if one weapon or strategy is noticably more effective than the others, all other options will fall into disuse. If you don't believe me, go say 'AWP' or 'AWSM' to any veteran Counterstrike player and check whether their eye twitches.
Given these choices, I decided that Option B was probably the best, partially because it gives the developers (ie us) the most control over what's going on, and partially because it gives us a chance to put some character into the characters. With Option A, every player is identical- any characterization would be applied to every character, and would kind of lose its meaning. As for Option C, it's harder to characterize anyone for the opposite reason- everybody is different, and there's no way of predicting HOW they'll be different, so you either need to apply separate personalities to every possible combination of equipment, making it no different from a particularly elaborate version of option B, or leave the characters bland and faceless- something I want to avoid. As a disclaimer to everything I said here, I do not want to insinuate that options A or C are bad, they're just not directions that would be good for this particular project.
With the genre mostly decided, it was time to find a unique selling point. I won't go into detail as to how this idea came along, because I'm not entirely sure how my train of thought works myself, but it should suffice to say that I ended up thinking "What would it be like if rugby was played on a planetoid?". From here, I was able to come up with what should be a fairly obvious USP and some core gameplay. Essentially, there is a ball of some kind, and two teams of players are trying to transfer the ball from somewhere on the planetoid to somewhere else. The obvious conclusion here is to use opposite poles of the planet as goals, making the main play area the space between them.
From here, it just needed some fleshing out. I took a hint from Monday Night Combat and decided that this game is the spectator sport of the dystopian future- two teams of genetically modified combatants, battling it out, ostensibly to score a goal and win the game. The rules are simple. Grab the ball, and make it to the opposite side of the planet alive. The execution, less simple. Each player is armed to the teeth with unique weaponry and unique training, and they won't let you score without a fight.
Sound good?
I sure hope so.
Welcome to Contact Sport.
Monday, 21 January 2013
A little background information
So, about me, about the team, and about the project. Probably not in that order:
I'm Phillammon. It would take all of 10 seconds for you to figure out my real name from my screen name if you really wanted to know, so I won't bother saying it here, but let's just say you'll know if it's me. I'm based in England, which means I am contractually obliged to love tea and crumpets, wear a derby hat, and say "Gor'blimey!" and "'Ello Guv'nor!" a lot, I'm currently in lower sixth, meaning I'm going to be 17 this academic year (That's right, a teenage indie dev. What could possibly go right.), and my main net presence is, whaddayaknow, gaming. I can code in maybe one-and-a-half languages (go figure) and as you'll know if you googled my screen name, I can't draw or make music worth anything.
Hook&Crook Games (Lack of spaces intended) is a new umbrella to be releasing under for me. In the past, I have released under the name Forsaken Games (however, these were indie BOARD games, rather than video games, and I've learned since then that the name Forsaken Games is... contested, shall we say.)- incidentally, two of the members of Hook&Crook Games were also in Forsaken Games. Having thoroughly googled, however, I've come to the conclusion that Hook&Crook Games is original- and thus less likely to get me sued or into any other legal nastiness- so this is likely to be a studio name I'll be sticking to for a fair while. Assuming I don't utterly embarrass myself here to the point of having to go into hiding.
The Project has a story to it. The A-Level course that I'm on includes, amongst other things, the Extended Project. What this consists of, assuming I have understood it correctly, is doing something for the best part of 9 months, learning new skills from it, and having something substantial coming out of it- for example, I am aware of various people in the past who have researched, collected and compiled recipes to make a cookbook, or others who worked with a team to put on a (very very good) performance of the musical "Rent". So, what I decided, in a fit of madness, is that I could use this as a way to kickstart myself into actually making a video game, something that I, like many other geeky teenagers, have aspired to do for a great many years now.
Unfortunately for me, there is that "learning new skills" clause that I missed when I decided that- and coding is not a new skill to me, meaning I cannot credit that as a "new skill", even if I am learning a new language- so I decided to approach this from a different angle. Rather than creating a video game at a code level for my Extended Project, I will be focusing more on what goes on outside of the code- the design process, the parts of creation not directly related to the engine- so art and sound assets- working with a team to create it, the process of testing, and- with any luck- audience interaction and adding new content after the game releases.
So! Any questions?
I'm Phillammon. It would take all of 10 seconds for you to figure out my real name from my screen name if you really wanted to know, so I won't bother saying it here, but let's just say you'll know if it's me. I'm based in England, which means I am contractually obliged to love tea and crumpets, wear a derby hat, and say "Gor'blimey!" and "'Ello Guv'nor!" a lot, I'm currently in lower sixth, meaning I'm going to be 17 this academic year (That's right, a teenage indie dev. What could possibly go right.), and my main net presence is, whaddayaknow, gaming. I can code in maybe one-and-a-half languages (go figure) and as you'll know if you googled my screen name, I can't draw or make music worth anything.
Hook&Crook Games (Lack of spaces intended) is a new umbrella to be releasing under for me. In the past, I have released under the name Forsaken Games (however, these were indie BOARD games, rather than video games, and I've learned since then that the name Forsaken Games is... contested, shall we say.)- incidentally, two of the members of Hook&Crook Games were also in Forsaken Games. Having thoroughly googled, however, I've come to the conclusion that Hook&Crook Games is original- and thus less likely to get me sued or into any other legal nastiness- so this is likely to be a studio name I'll be sticking to for a fair while. Assuming I don't utterly embarrass myself here to the point of having to go into hiding.
The Project has a story to it. The A-Level course that I'm on includes, amongst other things, the Extended Project. What this consists of, assuming I have understood it correctly, is doing something for the best part of 9 months, learning new skills from it, and having something substantial coming out of it- for example, I am aware of various people in the past who have researched, collected and compiled recipes to make a cookbook, or others who worked with a team to put on a (very very good) performance of the musical "Rent". So, what I decided, in a fit of madness, is that I could use this as a way to kickstart myself into actually making a video game, something that I, like many other geeky teenagers, have aspired to do for a great many years now.
Unfortunately for me, there is that "learning new skills" clause that I missed when I decided that- and coding is not a new skill to me, meaning I cannot credit that as a "new skill", even if I am learning a new language- so I decided to approach this from a different angle. Rather than creating a video game at a code level for my Extended Project, I will be focusing more on what goes on outside of the code- the design process, the parts of creation not directly related to the engine- so art and sound assets- working with a team to create it, the process of testing, and- with any luck- audience interaction and adding new content after the game releases.
So! Any questions?
Welcome to the Hook&Crook Games DevBlog!
Hello, and welcome to the DevBlog for Hook&Crook Games! My name is Phillammon, as you can see by taking a glance to the side, and I'm going to be using this blog to put up notes and thoughts on the development of an indie video game from the ground up. With any luck, this will have reasonably frequent updates, and I'll be trying to interact with readers as much as possible (Yup, all two of you!)(Being a tad optimistic there, actually.)
So yeah. That's all for now, folks!
So yeah. That's all for now, folks!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)