Ultimate Game Idea!!!

[knorke]

uhm what? Sorry i dont understand.
Of course the "ultimate super game" is different for everybody, thats obvious. I wasnt really serious about that..

[Caydr]

Unfortunately, you can replace "rogelike" with virtually any other genre that hasn't gone extinct in the years since Halo introduced the world to shitty repetitive mass-produced gameplay, and it sounds like a revolutionary game idea.

There's change coming, more and more I'm actually hearing people complain that Doom of Honor: Warfare Medal Battleground 16 is not piquing their interest anymore.

This next handheld generation is going to be really exciting. Because handhelds are typically home to things besides FPS games, there's a good chance that a trend might start that will even overflow into the next console generation.

How awesome would that be... More than one competent flight sim a year. More than one strategy game that isn't dumbed down into R-P-S. Hell, an adventure game that doesn't take place in a fantasy universe so that developers don't have to waste time on things like believability and can just use "The wizard did it" deus ex machina plot devices.

...Holy shit, Deus Ex 3 is coming out soon. Relatively speaking.

[Gota]

I only expect daring and smart things to come out of the free projects like spring even though commercial games can once in a while create something original.
free projects are where the soul is.

[knorke]

Flashgames sometimes feel very innovative and with nice graphics.

This next handheld generation is going to be really exciting. Because handhelds are typically home to things besides FPS games, there's a good chance that a trend might start that will even overflow into the next console generation.

Sorry, I don't think so. But there will probally be a lot of "casual games", as that seems to be a new market. Or just take the old already known gameseries and make a lol-version for the handheld. They already did this with need for speed etc.
I do not see how something like a "competent flight sim" will come out of this. Not saying, there will be no more flight sims, but what does it have to do with handhelds? Its the complete opposite of games/target audience.

[SinbadEV]

I think Gota's point is that FPS and RTSs suck on handhelds so it's forcing the industry to innovate again.

[SinbadEV]

Stage 1: The just do it stage

Break down the idea such that I have a manageable piece to work with.

• First I'll use XNA, I'm familiar with the technology and it is powerful enough to get what I want on the screen.
• Second, super simplification... a turn based roguelike with an isometric graphics set and only a "bump into bad-guys" attack method.

After the basic "demo" is built I can start thinking about complex stuff like network code, mouse input, real-timeiness and servers and such...

[Argh]

I am going to lol when you request isometric graphics and suddenly find out what that's really like.

I used to do that stuff a very long time ago. Here's some free advice: find one of the free / Open Source repos of tilesets, and build your game around one of the specs. There are at least two of them out there, and IIRC, most of them are working in a format that's either 64 or 96 pixels on a tile side, something like that, but go get them and see first.

You will cry buckets if you try to do iso art that isn't utter rubbish or try to get a crew to execute a lot of that otherwise, unless you write something so amazingly mad-cool that you can get the few artists who are still really into that stuff to come party. There is a huuuuuge difference between an iso cube and a really nice iso tileset for building, say, a dungeon with. Especially if you want to allow for various heights.

There are ways around *some* of the utter yuck that is iso that can be done on modern computers, come to think- the old stuff we did was always texture atlases (usually 8-bit in restricted ranges, too, yuck), so for tall stuff, these days you could just make the engine use the lowest pixel as the base, etc. and eschew atlases, since on a modern machine unless you let people zoom out, it's never going to be an issue, in terms of grabbing all the textures.

It's a lot harder than it looks, and frankly I think it's more time-consuming than 3D for a lot of stuff. Just imo, but I built tilesets / animated sprites for Runesword and The Xenology Crisis and Mythos, and I hated it so much that I thought 3D was a liberating experience.

[KaiserJ]

hmm... well, he could use renders of 3d models as the basis for his tiles... i think that's what they did in "crusader : no remorse" which looked pretty decent iirc

[Argh]

You do not just "render some model" and it's magically iso in the right aspect ratio and lighting without any problems.

Plus, if you go that way... you're building the entire art content for a game... in 3D. Talk about a total waste of time.

[JohannesH]

Hmm... Roguelike with isometric graphics, mouse use, rea-time control, and multiplayer. Gonna be a lot like Rogue then?

[TradeMark]

You do not just "render some model" and it's magically iso in the right aspect ratio and lighting without any problems.

Plus, if you go that way... you're building the entire art content for a game... in 3D. Talk about a total waste of time.

wait... doesnt opengl support iso rendering? sucks then... ive also thought about making iso rendering...

and you dont need to render lighting to the sprites you create... its all about drawing sprites and shade pixels on your own...

[Pxtl]

I think Gota's point is that FPS and RTSs suck on handhelds so it's forcing the industry to innovate again.

Robocalypse.

[Caydr]

You do not just "render some model" and it's magically iso in the right aspect ratio and lighting without any problems.

Plus, if you go that way... you're building the entire art content for a game... in 3D. Talk about a total waste of time.

Why Argh will never be a game designer.

[Neddie]

wait... doesnt opengl support iso rendering? sucks then... ive also thought about making iso rendering...

It doesn't do it automatically for you. Classic isometric games are merely sprite, it is the sprites and tiles which are created in such a way as to appear isometric, when generally you're just dealing with a grid which is rotated forty-five degrees. I believe you would need to force the orientation of your models and force the orientation of the camera in order to achieve an isometric view, which can be done but will require manual effort.

[Pxtl]

You do not just "render some model" and it's magically iso in the right aspect ratio and lighting without any problems.

Plus, if you go that way... you're building the entire art content for a game... in 3D. Talk about a total waste of time.

Why Argh will never be a game designer.

What do you mean? He's exactly right - since Diablo, every sprite-based isometric game was implemented by making all the content in 3D and then baking it into sprites. The advantage was they got to avoid hardware limitations that no longer exist. The kind of insane polycounts you'd need wouldn't even be visible at the distances most isometric games take, and you'd flood your texture memory with animation.

The only realm left for isometric gaming are games that are deliberately cartoony like Disgaea, where you take the Doom approach of making a farktonne of sprites, manually re-drawing each animation for each of the 4 cardinal directions (or more, if you want diagonals).

Forcing an isometric perspective now is silly - isometric perspectives are an artifact of sprite-based gaming. Just make a typical 3D game and use an elevated camera.

Personally, if I wanted to do a low-budget RogueLike, I'd ditch any illusions of good graphics and stick to a top-down perspective with paper-doll-style pop-ups to show details of what you're looking at/like. It would be ugly, but it would be the simplest to make art assets for, since you could use a static image for just about everything. Go with pseudo-turn-based play (everybody acts in synch) so that the fact that nothing is animated is less obvious.

[TradeMark]

wait... doesnt opengl support iso rendering? sucks then... ive also thought about making iso rendering...

It doesn't do it automatically for you. Classic isometric games are merely sprite, it is the sprites and tiles which are created in such a way as to appear isometric, when generally you're just dealing with a grid which is rotated forty-five degrees. I believe you would need to force the orientation of your models and force the orientation of the camera in order to achieve an isometric view, which can be done but will require manual effort.

Blender uses isometric rendering mode too, and it works great. Maybe you should use same method... you could rotate the world as well.

Then just make 3d models for trees etc, and render them in cartoon mode (outlines black etc)

[SwiftSpear]

ever since i saw these stupid text based games, ive always wondered how stupid the makers were when they still use text symbols in the graphics (i mean after year 1980 when computers had only 2 colors in screens), even though they could replace them with real graphics instead without losing any performance.

i dont see how this idea is any special...

go grab some text based games source code and modify the rendering code to render each letter with own image of yours? and then youre done

Depending what you're talking about... graphics waste a huge amount of time. With character based game development you can create some new item or object and the graphical realization of that item is as simple as "Graphic = "@"; Color = "red"". If you actually have to boot up paint, or worse, photoshop, for each unit created productivity goes down the toilet.

Still, it depends, there are some things that can be done fairly easily with graphics that are really hard to do with a character based interface, like anything at all in 3D. It can even be faked with sprites, but with characters it just isn't remotely convincing. It really all depends on the scope of the idea. If you're a 1 man team trying to make something with a game play scale of oblivion, you'd better not waste any time trying to play with graphics. On the flip side, if you want to make a cool shooter... it better look ok because looks make a game like that.

[TradeMark]

Depending what you're talking about... graphics waste a huge amount of time.

you dont need to make more tiles than you already use, 256 i presume. wont take long time... 1 day job, and then you will never need to edit them again.

With character based game development you can create some new item or object and the graphical realization of that item is as simple as "Graphic = "@"; Color = "red"". If you actually have to boot up paint, or worse, photoshop, for each unit created productivity goes down the toilet.

lol no, you only need to redesign the ascii chars which are already used in the game, you can still change their colors too, and you could add more than 1 color to make it nicer too.

Ascii chars (or whatever theyre called) doesnt represent what they stand for in the game, for example "&" could be car, and "¤" would be bus, and red "&" would be a carrot, etc. which makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. see my point?

It would be so much better to play such shitty games if they didnt use normal letters there at all, everything would be abstract shapes - as many different shapes as possible, but still distinguishable from each other clearly. for example, one category of stuff would use similar shape, for example aircrafts would be triangle style shape etc... tanks would be square type, dudes would be circle type... but the shape would still differ depending on the power of the unit, but still easily distinguishable from other same type of units.

When youre done redesigning universal symbols for every possible things with just 256 tiles, its time to triple the resolution too -_-

And make the tiles squares... thats also one thing that annoys me in such games; that the aspect ratio is something like 1:2

[SinbadEV]

so I think it will be easier to got 3D here (for terrain that is) so which of these looks better:

Traditional 3D:

Orthographic:

Orthographic/Isometricy:

[Neddie]

The symbols are all distinct from one another. Attaching meaning to the symbol is a simple single relation, psychologically. It is actually a much less intensive process to connect the basic ASCII characters to content than it is to deconstruct and assign complex images. This is not debatable, this is simple psychology, specifically visual orientation and relational processing.