Game Ideas

[Nick]

Brad and I were talking and we came up with an idea: An RTS that you play as a commander of dinosaurs, defending your kingdom/island from invading armies of man.

[Brad]

Wow... I totally forgot we had this idea. That is actually pretty good.

Awhile I started a notebook sorta thing to keep track of my various programming/diy construction ideas so that I don't forgot by the time I actually am able to work on stuff.

None of the ideas are online or anything, just in an actual paper notebook but that seems to be the most easily accessible thing for me at the moment.

I think back to all those random game ideas and stuff we talked about and I can only vagually remember the details. Nick had one idea for an RTS which was pretty detailed. The game mechanics were very realism oriented requiring you to take into account fuel usage, etc for each unit. Unfortunately I can't remember much else. Stuff like that was why I started writing them down in a notebook.

I figure if they still seem like good ideas after a few months/years then maybe they actually were pretty good.

[zourtney]

Yeah, true. I joy some ideas down in a text document some times (synced to all my 'puters via Dropbox). Sometimes I look back and think, "wow-no". But that's the fun of writing down everything that comes to mind. I need to get back to my latest project... It's more fun to start them than to finish them

[Brad]

It's more fun to start them than to finish them

So very very true...

[Nick]

I have new awesome idea for game! But as I am an idea man I will need everyone else to do all the work and I will give you 10% of the monies! What do you say? It will be the next big MMORPG/Facebook!

More seriously, I do have a game idea. More just something to get myself comfortable with XNA and 3D graphics.
It will be a simple 3D world (flat to start with, later randomly generated) with 2D sprites for all the PCs and NPCs. The world will be made of square blocks. Ultimately I want to make a deformable world that encourages building and trap setting to survive an endless army of ever harder waves of mobs (or maybe the harder mobs would be in areas with better stuff) Not to sure yet, mostly just want a working world that you can move in and kill something to start with.

[Brad]

The 3D/2D thing was THE thing for quite awhile, pretty much everything pre-Quake was like that (Doom, Hexen, Dark Forces, Chex Quest).

I have lots of questions... What sort of traps and buildings were you thinking about? Do you need materials to create them? How do you get the materials? What kind of setting is it (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Modern, etc..)?

You could probably accomplish that (or the basics of that) by yourself. There are some good XNA tutorials out there... I've been doing some XNA myself lately (mostly 2D stuff though) so let me know if you need help. I like bouncing programming game ideas around.

If you get bogged down drawing stuff I would suggest just borrowing graphics from another game or something. That gives you more of a chance to work on the programming without having to create every single art asset.

[Nick]

I was thinking an isometric projection for everything and a third-person view, kinda like how C&C was (well, almost all old strategy games) But with enough depth that multiple layers would be easy to discern from one another. 

For building I was thinking basic constructions (wood wall, stone wall, iron wall) all from materials gathered in-world (See Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Terraria, and any other game with resource gathering) For material gathering I think just mine, chop etc. I am not real set on any way of doing anything yet.

I am kinda particular to the Fantasy setting given the freedoms one can take with it, but the same can be done with a Sci-Fi setting. So probably Fantasy with the possibility of some 'magic' powered futuristic stuff.

All the graphics will be super simple until I get the thing working. Even then I might just jump on the 8-bit band wagon and stick with that for graphics and sounds/music. Give the thing a retro feel so everyone will excuse the poor artmanship.

If anyone has any input or ideas, I would be happy to make this a collaborative project.

I have some question with how you (all you alll!) would do things, but I will post them to someplace more appropriate.

[Brad]

So how much 3D are you planning on having? From what you've said it sounds like you could do the whole thing in 2D if you wanted to.

With XNA you can mix 2D and 3D stuff pretty easily. So you could take advantage of a 3D type camera.. but all your assets can still be 2D. Just stuff to think about.

[Nick]

I'm not sure how best to do it. I was thinking of having the world "blocks" be 3D for easy clipping and possibly allowing for rotating the view. For all the characters in the game and items I was going to make them sprites.  Both 2D and 3D seem crazily easy with xna.

[Brad]

That would work OK probably. You could slap some textures on those cubes for various variety of dirt, rocks, ore, etc...

Depending on how deep your word is... that can be a lot of boxes though. You'd have to try it out to test.

[Nick]

That's what I was thinking, some low rez textures for the blocks. Unless anyone has a better idea for making deformable terrain bits then making everything into blocks, I guess I am going to at least try that route. It shouldn't be too bad. You can only see so many at a time, and if it gets slow I will find some way to only load the surrounding area. Not that memory will be an issue for most people.

Each world unit (block? I would use cell, but that already has a meaning coopted) will need to store it's position, its material type and current damage. The material type will tell what its max-damage is and what its friction co-efficient is (for walking on it, sand and mud and the like will slow things down a bit, ice will be hard to stop on. *Maybe*) And that should be it. I can store them in a nice ordered fashion that will make looking them up easy.

Should I keep all possible block location in memory and fill in the occupied one, or only store the blocks and leave the open space to be assumed as empty?

[zourtney]

These are pretty fundamental data structures. And everybody's doin' it. Are there storage mechanisms like this built into XNA? Or widely adopted libraries? Or are you just wanting to roll your own?

Obviously, I have no idea what I'm talking about...yet!

[Nick]

Yep they are the most fundamental of data-structures But I am unfamiliar with how their speed versus easy access trades off. Too much PHP, makes you lazy it does.

Doing a quick search on what extra data-structures XNA might have I found a post with a similar queston to mine:

     http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/67195.aspx

Looks like a good bunch of reads for a little later. I still have a lot to learn about 3D drawing.

[zourtney]

You're several steps ahead of me. I want to get playing with this stuff!

[Nick]

Here, I read through most all of these and found them useful for the basics. XNA seems to make everything almost stupid easy to get onto the screen, after that it's up to you.

http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials

So far I have just made a sprite move around the screen and played with embedding fonts. Soon though I will get some blocks on the screen and then get some collisions happ'nin, yo.