Charas-Project
Off-Topic => All of all! => Topic started by: Drighton on August 24, 2005, 08:01:28 PM
-
My friend and I were talking yesterday about possible game mechanics to implement in my game. There was one that interested me particularly, but would be kind of difficult to maintain.
The game would require an internet connection (dial-up would work fine) to sync with a central server, grab the current day and time, then disconnect. This is important for the mechanic.
I most games, your arrival in a city begins an event or cutscene. No matter how long you wait before going to that city, the event will always execute upon your arrival.
Well, what if that event was set to take place at day 30, hour 10, minute 3? That would mean that whether you are anywhere near the town or not, that event would occur. Your presence in the city is not required for the event to take place. In fact, your not even required to be logged into the game.
Lets say said event takes place while you are at school or work or even sleeping. When you log into the game, and the time-sync is done, the game will have changed around you. People, shops, and even cities may be changed or gone entirely. Now the changes that take place could be small and insignificant, or huge, and a major part of the story element.
Whether your character, and you yourself, are present or even involved in that event depends on the actions and opportunities you've taken in the game. For example, lets say someone in the game is murdered. It is going to happen no matter what, but you may be a witness to that event if you are playing in that area at that time. Now lets say the person murdered was a government official. This would, of course, be a major plot turn. Not only would you be there to witness it, but you may have more information than someone who didn't witness it. That is because for a player who was not in that area, or not logged on at all will only hear about the event through casual gossip.
This allows for one other unique game concept. Most games last about 30 or 40 hours in length. With a scheduled game like this, the entire story could take 2 months or more to reach the finale. There would be more play value out of a game like this than any other.
I know this is long, but please tell me what you think. Would you play a game like this? Ask me questions if you don't understand the concept, because if I don't get enough feedback and get an "its okay" reply, I just may implement it into the game.
All your help is appreciated. Thanks.
-
Bump. You can read now. Please give me your feedback.
-
Is this for an RPG2k3 game? I think you could do it with a day/night system where you increment a variable and some events only kick in after a number of days pass.
If it's for just a game in general, well MMORPGs do have events happening at a specific time, whether you're there or not.
It's a good idea in general... but I don't see the fuss about it. If you want a murder to happen at a set time, then make it so.
-
Originally posted by Drighton
Bump. You can read now. Please give me your feedback.
Do not bump threads. Its bad.
-
Good point Bluhman. But here is the clencher.
You can't go back. In most MMOs you can take a quest at any time you want, sometimes more than once. In any RPG, there is a point in the game where you can go complete every sidequest before finishing the game. With this, when an opportunity arises, if you choose not to take it, you will never get that opporunity again once the time runs out on that event. If you do take that opportunity, you may miss other opportunities. If you are grouped with other players through LAN, then you have a completely different opportunity, but will miss out on the others.
Thus, the sidequest you go on will be unique in comparison to that of another player, due to the circumstances of your character.
-
I think you could run into the same problems as the MMOs developers ;) In most MMOs, you have events, they're not just balloons and christmas drops, they're also story progressions, that might only last 1 week. They also change the gameworld to a degree, we might see them more in the future.
Here's the beef, they don't do it that often because #1, it's a bit new, #2 time & money!
Go ahead, that level of open-endness might be fun. I have a similar idea in a huge RPG project of mine that if it ever gets off the ground, you basically play 1-3 years as a young adult and choose your career. Like being a pirate, soldier, thief, and they affect quests, your class as well as who likes you and the story as a whole. It will evolve and we'll see if I get to it.
I don't get the online part, it just means more trouble for you / your team. MMOs don't have the resources to do daily updates. They only do events every few months.
-
i would play that game... I love that idea. maybe you could also amke it to download updates to the game, so that it coyuld be in constant development.... there is so much that can be done with this idea.
-
It's a pretty cool idea, but I can see a major flaw: what if the players get lazy. What, for example, a player that would be a key witness to that murder decides to quit the game? Maybe he has real life, maybe he thinks the game is boring, who knows. If this player was important to finding out who murdered the official, and he's just GONE and nowhere to be seen, the whole thing collapses.
And besides, two months real time is a long time to wait for the end of a who-done-it. People want results. If the game moved too slow, people would get sick of waiting. If it moved too fast, people's real life would conflict and they would miss important details. Either way would be big trouble.
-
Originally posted by charaman
i would play that game... I love that idea. maybe you could also amke it to download updates to the game, so that it coyuld be in constant development.... there is so much that can be done with this idea.
I like your enthusiasm. :p The idea that the game's story would stretch over time would give any developer that ammount of time to develop the next chapter of the story. AND, if the game isn't released until the second chapter has been developed, then the developer has even more time. He/she could develop the third chapter while people are still playing the first with that head start.
Originally posted by SaiKar
It's a pretty cool idea, but I can see a major flaw: what if the players get lazy. What, for example, a player that would be a key witness to that murder decides to quit the game? Maybe he has real life, maybe he thinks the game is boring, who knows. If this player was important to finding out who murdered the official, and he's just GONE and nowhere to be seen, the whole thing collapses.
And besides, two months real time is a long time to wait for the end of a who-done-it. People want results. If the game moved too slow, people would get sick of waiting. If it moved too fast, people's real life would conflict and they would miss important details. Either way would be big trouble.
I like this fedback Sai. Thanks. But the story has to move forward irrelevant of the player's actions (or inaction... is that a word?) so no big plot turning event would involve any player directly. Events that involve the player directly are most likely side quests that are irrelevant.
Ive been thinking about how this would work and the only real way for me to implement this into any game would be with an MMO, and I'm not looking at doing that right now. Plus it would require way too much detail than I'm willing to devote to a simple project for now. But I may pick it up later. :D
The hardest part of this concept is that I want everyone playing the game to be in sync with each other. In this scenario, no one player should be 2 or 3 hours ahead of another simply because he/she has played the game more. It would complicate things.
However, I may implement the time-delayed plot turning events into my current project (this will be simple), and it will definately have a few expansions or chapters to the storyline (my friend is a genius at creative writing :D ). All this will, of course, be added on after I acheive my inital goal: an RPG that is playable both solo and multiplayer.
If you want to keep with the feedback and input, I encourage all to do so.
-
Everyone may hate me for saying this, but this can be done with the real time script with RMXP, or it can be easily modified to do just that. If you decide to use RMXP, use the legal english version when it comes out ;)
Anyway, I really like this idea, if you don't make it an MMO, it might be cool to have a pause feature in case you can't play for a week or so. It may take away from the game, so maybe you could give the player a few pause tokens, or just have certain points in the game where you can choose to pause or not, that way the player can only do it a few times, and won't missuse the system :)
-
Originally posted by DragonBlaze
Everyone may hate me for saying this, but this can be done with the real time script with RMXP, or it can be easily modified to do just that. If you decide to use RMXP, use the legal english version when it comes out ;)
Anyway, I really like this idea, if you don't make it an MMO, it might be cool to have a pause feature in case you can't play for a week or so. It may take away from the game, so maybe you could give the player a few pause tokens, or just have certain points in the game where you can choose to pause or not, that way the player can only do it a few times, and won't missuse the system :)
The idea is that everyone in the world who is playing the game is on the same page at the same time, thus the requirement of an online sync. That is why an MMO setup would be better.
But for my game, I still need to develop a way for multiplay games to be in sync. For instance. If Player A is beyond Event 4, which has made Town A non-existant, is playing with Player B who has no yet reached Event 4, how do you get them to play in the same world with each other. This proves difficult, especially if Player B's last location was in the Town that is no longer existing for Player A.
The conflict is that you don't want Player A to have access to that town, but you don't want to give the story away for Player B or thrust Player B ahead, skipping all plot points along the way.
-
Originally posted by Drighton
Good point Bluhman. But here is the clencher.
B]
Did somebody say my name!?
-
i think he meant blademon.
-
That makes sense.
-
This sounds awesome, truly. Whether you'll find the time and effort required is another story entirely :p
-
If you make a game like this, I would pay for it. Yes! Pay! Me!
-
You would need a large team for this to actually be possible. I too have thought of this sort of idea in my mind too. In the first chapter keep the events simple such as a small building being shut down or haunted. Then when the amount of players rises elevate the events to whole towns being destroyed and mass murder. Of course I dont beleive this level of gaming will be available anytime soon.
Though I dont understand how you connect to the internet while your in school/work since your computer is most likely to be off.
Another concept is I doubt these events could be frequent as the updates would be constant & poeple would spend ages updating their files before entering the actual game. This is a nice idea an all & i support it in everyway but unless you have a large team to do such a thing you wont be able to make events weekly it would be more like every couple of months like the MMO of today.
This plan does sound very nice I agree though it conflicts with how you would pay for hosting/bandwidth etc. I like the Free Online FPS named Gunz. It is a nice deathmatch shooter with permenant servers etc. I hear their adding a quest mode & I'm pretty sure its the same as Runescapes.
What you want to do is have one quest done by a bunch of poeple and once its complete it can never be done again. You might want to have some smaller quests that CAN be done again by anyone just so when there is no major event going on at the present time. Also an evolving world sounds like a project that could take a couple of years & by then I doubt you would have the enthusiasm to go on. That is unless you were going for earning cash with this MMO idea.
(Sorry if this is total Bull**** I probably made no sense to you but in my mind it sounds like it make sense. Remember im a 13 year old teenage not a rocket scientist)
-
Originally posted by Drighton
The conflict is that you don't want Player A to have access to that town, but you don't want to give the story away for Player B or thrust Player B ahead, skipping all plot points along the way.
Well that's inevitable really, isn't it? I mean, if the town is going to get destroyed at a certain real-life time, and Player B isn't on when it happens, then he should miss the destruction of the town. Otherwise it undermines the entire purpose of the online synch.
The flipside of this is that if the players get word that the town is going to be attacked at a certain real-life time, they can try to get online and coordinate their efforts to defend the place, which would just be wicked cool.
-
Indeed. They could astemblish several defense lines, creating a parallel world for Player A.
-
Originally posted by SaiKar
[B
Well that's inevitable really, isn't it? I mean, if the town is going to get destroyed at a certain real-life time, and Player B isn't on when it happens, then he should miss the destruction of the town. Otherwise it undermines the entire purpose of the online synch.[/B]
Sai: the part about player A and B was in a scenerio where you are not playing with a constant internet connection, as with an MMO. I face the same general problem with implementing LAN play in my game (http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=13409&forumid=11&catid=4) except that is something I will have to face and isn't just speculation.
The flipside of this is that if the players get word that the town is going to be attacked at a certain real-life time, they can try to get online and coordinate their efforts to defend the place, which would just be wicked cool.
That is another mechanic all together: the ability to learn of the impending event from an NPC ingame and attempt (and possibly succeed) to stop the event from reaching fruition. This, once again, is something only acheivable in an MMO.
Originally posted by Drace
If you make a game like this, I would pay for it. Yes! Pay! Me!
It seems that I'm sleeping on a gem here Drace. Too bad I spilled the beans, now someone can steal my idea. :p I have a similar problem with my game (http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=13409&forumid=11&catid=4). The leveling system I dreamed up in high school was eventually used in Fable by Lionhead. Now, I can't say that they stole my idea... because I haven't found the bugs they hid in my house yet. :D
Originally posted by Greeny341
You would need a large team for this to actually be possible.
Indeed.
Though I dont understand how you connect to the internet while your in school/work since your computer is most likely to be off.
It would only connect to the internet when you get home and load the program. But thats irrelevant now, since its been determined that the game would need constant online connection.
Another concept is I doubt these events could be frequent as the updates would be constant & poeple would spend ages updating their files before entering the actual game. This is a nice idea an all & i support it in everyway but unless you have a large team to do such a thing you wont be able to make events weekly it would be more like every couple of months like the MMO of today.
...
What you want to do is have one quest done by a bunch of poeple and once its complete it can never be done again. You might want to have some smaller quests that CAN be done again by anyone just so when there is no major event going on at the present time. Also an evolving world sounds like a project that could take a couple of years & by then I doubt you would have the enthusiasm to go on. That is unless you were going for earning cash with this MMO idea.
Most of the "sidequest" events would be randomly generated by the server. Thats not hard to do, since it can pull all the information from a database. The major story/plot lines would be programmed by a team when they get the story from the writer.
Again, since this can only be an MMO, all the information, including the map and events, would be stored on a server which would handle all those calculations. The client, which you would have on your computer, would simply recieve the information it needs to build the environment and make the necessary changes. Basically, you have the graphics, the server has the map and tells you where to put the graphics.
I've been working on my current project (http://charas-project.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=13409&forumid=11&catid=4) for a few years now. Its mainly for my enjoyment (i like programming, its fun to me), as would an MMO. Though, if I did do an MMO, I would definately have to charge for it to support the money I would spend hiring graphics artists, programmers, and to help pay for the server or servers I would need to maintain and the people who would maintain them. I would basically be starting a business... so yeah, money would have to be involved. :p
-
Drighton nobody stole your ideas. I also had some nice ideas that ended up being used in Star Wars Galaxies(not the greatest of games, but still) Like the Scout class or the Merchant Class. as well I still having a few in my backpocket(some as old as 2000) that haven't been thought up. I give full props to Blizzard, they're so innovative, when everyone was following up Everquest, they revolutionized the MMO genre. They do it everytime and that's why they make money.
I also had similar ideas that ended up being taken a few years later. What I learned from this ( and maybe you might as well ) is that once you get the idea, someone else around the globe might as well at that very same moment, the difference is some people who have that spark have the resources at their disposal to make it a business/game.
It takes 2-3 years to make a game, you get the idea today, tommorow you start on it, and 2-3 years later it's out to revolutionize everything. Once you have an idea, you need to get to it ASAP, other people probably also have it around your time as well.
Anyway, it's great if you're the kind who comes up with new ideas as well, it should come constantly, and maybe you'll be in a position where you can exploit your ideas.
-
You should so make this. It sounds f0rkin aw0ersom!
-
Originally posted by Blademon
Drighton nobody stole your ideas. I also had some nice ideas that ended up being used in Star Wars Galaxies(not the greatest of games, but still) Like the Scout class or the Merchant Class. as well I still having a few in my backpocket(some as old as 2000) that haven't been thought up. I give full props to Blizzard, they're so innovative, when everyone was following up Everquest, they revolutionized the MMO genre. They do it everytime and that's why they make money.
I also had similar ideas that ended up being taken a few years later. What I learned from this ( and maybe you might as well ) is that once you get the idea, someone else around the globe might as well at that very same moment, the difference is some people who have that spark have the resources at their disposal to make it a business/game.
It takes 2-3 years to make a game, you get the idea today, tommorow you start on it, and 2-3 years later it's out to revolutionize everything. Once you have an idea, you need to get to it ASAP, other people probably also have it around your time as well.
Anyway, it's great if you're the kind who comes up with new ideas as well, it should come constantly, and maybe you'll be in a position where you can exploit your ideas.
I was joking... well semi-joking... actually its kind of an inside joke between me and my friend (who has helped me on and off with my game). I don't really think that anyone stole my ideas. Its just fun to think so. I like conspiracies. :p
Originally posted by AsakuraHao2004
You should so make this. It sounds f0rkin aw0ersom!
I just might. I might even take my current game/story and mix the two together. Hell, I might as well. A LAN/TCP-IP connection being enabled in my game is the first step... but I don't know the first thing about setting up servers and the like.
If I do, this would be like... years from now. And who knows, EverQuest3 will probably feature this system. :p
-
I sure hope we get a free copy then.
-
im sure you'll be needing beta testers....
:heart:
-
Well, here is the deal.
I can implement this concept only a fraction of the way as the game is right now, and I plan to. My main goal, to have all players on the same page at the same time, is impossible to do unless i go online, won't be acheivable, but all other concepts, like the illustration about the city being destroyed, would.
I still plan to put LAN play in the game, but the concept creates a problem with players being in sync with each other, as far as being able to play in the same world. As of now, the only solution I can think of is to restrict players to multiplayer only with other players who each have the same major flags turned: If player A has reached a point where Town X was destroyed, but player B has not, they cannot play together. If you guys have any other solution to this problem, I'd love to hear it.
If I ever do take the game online, that will be later... like after I finish the game later.
And yes, I intend to offer free Beta to people here, and the game will be free. When it goes online... thats a whole other situation. ;)
-
Originally posted by Drighton
And yes, I intend to offer free Beta to people here, and the game will be free. When it goes online... thats a whole other situation. ;)
well, wouldnt you want to reward your charas beta testers in some way?
:heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:
-
:badboy: FORBIDDEN LOVE!!!!
-
Yeah. I wanna Beta test too when you need a Beta tester.
-
Beta testing won't begin for a while. If you take a look at the development page on my website, you will see just how far I am from finishing.
I supposed I could throw a small demo together right now, but it wouldn't be anything fantastic, nor would there be any battles, nor could you buy anything.. you would just be walking around and looking at my graphics glitches that I haven't ironed out because I'm too lazy ;)
-
Originally posted by Drighton
:badboy: FORBIDDEN LOVE!!!!
fair enough. I'm looking forward to it.
-
It is pretty cool, although my connection would probably prevernt me from partaking in any actual gameplay..
-
I would hope a 2D game wouldn't need a cable/dsl connection. that would be lame.