StarDestroyer.Net BBS

OK, you guys may remember my thread I posted a couple of days ago on the gaming project I wanted to do:

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4&t=134024

Well I pretty much convinced them and I am now all set to start putting stuff together. Now I need to know which good programs I need to make this game. Its going to be 2D and we are considering doing a small text based one too as a little test so I would like to know what good (and prerably free) programs I need to do both. Now if its going to be more dependent on genre then just ask me to specify. Including RPG makers would be useful though. I also am curious if an isometric view game would require its own special program.

On top of that, is there any sites or places you guys would suggest for finding people who can use the programs/code, do sound etc? I know that general searching around on places I go on is a good idea but I would be happy to know any sites to look at in perticluar.


Thank you for the help.

I don't want to appear needlessly negative, but you seem to have no idea about how to do what you intend to be doing. Anyway, since apparently you won't be coding or drawing anything, those who potentially will will have their personal preferences, I suppose.

Destructionator XIII wrote:Of course, you could roll your own engine, since it isn't too hard to just do sprites. I do strongly recommend the D programming language though. It is pure awesome.

Much as I like D, it isn't a good choice for a first programming language, and even if the team already has a competent programmer I wouldn't recommend learning a new language at the same time as learning how to write a game engine. There are enough ways for the project to go horribly wrong as it is.

In this case Flash, Javascript or at a push a Java applet would be ideal, because then you can show it to random people on web forums without them having to install anything. This is a real boon if you don't have a testing team; no one likes to keep downloading and reinstalling but if it takes one click to make the latest version appear in their browser, you can probably get a lot of people to try it.

I also am curious if an isometric view game would require its own special program

Not really, they are just a case of 2d sprites.

At minimum, isometric display requires code to handle occlusion properly. If you actually want to model a 3D environment, as opposed to just a 2D plane viewed from an angle, considerably more code is required (e.g. games like X-Com use a coarse voxel model).

There won't be many people who you can go up to at random and say "hey dude devote 80 hours to helping me make this really cool but vague game" and get much of a response.

Everyone wants to contribute ideas, but most programmers can't or don't want to do art and writing. I recall when I used to frequent furry forums, there were a ton of mediocre-to-awful programmers who wanted to make anthro-themed games; I'm sure plenty of them would want to do something involving werewolves. Good programmers are found on places like Freenode discussing OpenGL driver design, whether garbage collection is fundamentally evil and the relative merits of assorted kernel scheduler algorithms - and even then it's sometimes hard to separate the genuinely skilled from the fakers. Your chances of recruiting someone capable of writing a commercial quality game for a random greenfield amateur project with no track record are effectively zero (it's hard enough to hire then with $60k salaries), so plan to do without.

Melchior wrote:I don't want to appear needlessly negative, but you seem to have no idea about how to do what you intend to be doing. Anyway, since apparently you won't be coding or drawing anything, those who potentially will will have their personal preferences, I suppose.

Let the man dream, in any event.

The RPG is easily the simplest genre to program, so that's a good choice on your part to get started with. What you need to remember about programming is that the less complex the language, the less freedom you have to work with. RPG Maker and Scratch are very easy to work with, but hugely limited. C++ is colossally powerful, but gives you that "staring into the abyss" feeling the first time you open it.

I highly recommend, for an RPG, that you start off by creating your combat engine, since that's the meat and potatoes of the game anyway and requires the least graphical work. That can be done fairly easily in JAVA (for instance, BlueJ) or even more ideally, Processing. Once that's done, creating the overworld map and triggers is much easier, in terms of math and programming. Come to think of it, I believe NetBattle was constructed using Visual Basic, and I did some very tentative work using that on a similar project. I'm sure there are tech demos for Processing on how to do isometric view, but I couldn't even begin to tell you where or how they work, so I don't know how compatible with your project.

Now, the Flash languages (AS2 and AS3) are very powerful, but they're very complicated to work with for first time users and need you to mortgage a firstborn. Processing's good to use here, but I should warn you that an entire development team at my school spent a semester working on a Processing RPG and only came out with a tech demo. I can't stress the importance of doing this stuff in text first enough: just getting Room() objects in BlueJ to cooperate took a couple of days for me, and that's without having to worry about what they looked like. Just getting the game to correctly scroll between rooms while using good programming habits is a complicated affair, and should be done first. I'd almost be inclined to say "Do the whole thing as a text-based in JAVA first so you can straighten out your inheritance tree," but that's your team's decision.

Best of luck to you and your group: as was mentioned above, this is a mammoth undertaking, and I hope you're all aware of that. That's not to discourage you at all, but please keep in mind that there are whole college courses dedicated to doing what you're trying to do. Like I said, I've seen game teams work from January to May and come out at the end with platform demos with gravity problems, limited Mode 7 demos, and RPG overworld demos, and these were considered rousing successes. It took me close to two weeks to make a single level of a skeleton text RPG.

If you want any help, I can try, but my experience is somewhat limited. Good luck, and have fun.

You could also try Adventure Game Studio. Apparently it can be successfully scripted to work as more than just point-and-click adventures, but even if not, your text-based adventure concepts might be easily converted into adventure games.

Destructionator XIII wrote:

In this case Flash, Javascript or at a push a Java applet would be ideal, because then you can show it to random people on web forums without them having to install anything. This is a real boon if you don't have a testing team; no one likes to keep downloading and reinstalling but if it takes one click to make the latest version appear in their browser, you can probably get a lot of people to try it.

I don't know if this really is ideal - it is too centralized; if an artist wants to see how his new picture looks in the game, he needs to push it to the programmer to put into the site/jar/swf, which can give a really big delay and kill the flow.

Flash can easily be set up to use external files from other locations, so you could easily have say an online repository of all your unit data/pictures that it would use, thus creating exactly the situation you describe below.

Qwerty 42 wrote:The RPG is easily the simplest genre to program, so that's a good choice on your part to get started with.

Coding RPGs can be a rather daunting task, especially since it sounds like this probably isn't a particularly experienced group (especially if they only have one coder!). The only thing simple about them is that the math and numerical rules governing everything are already abstracted for you. Hell, I'm writing a mere combat tracker utility for an RPG right now, and that's headache enough.

So, Bluewolf and Co., unless your coder is eager to roll up some sleeves and dig in, you'll probably want to stick to something a little simpler, either in terms of genre and gameplay and/or the medium with which you create it. A proper high-level language (such as C++) may not be ideal for your needs - if you do go that route, you'll also need support libraries like SDL, which require further expertise to put together.

Clearly you should make a werewolf dating sim in the style of Let's Meow Meow, as that would be by far the easiest to program.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:

Qwerty 42 wrote:The RPG is easily the simplest genre to program, so that's a good choice on your part to get started with.

Coding RPGs can be a rather daunting task, especially since it sounds like this probably isn't a particularly experienced group (especially if they only have one coder!). The only thing simple about them is that the math and numerical rules governing everything are already abstracted for you. Hell, I'm writing a mere combat tracker utility for an RPG right now, and that's headache enough.

So, Bluewolf and Co., unless your coder is eager to roll up some sleeves and dig in, you'll probably want to stick to something a little simpler, either in terms of genre and gameplay and/or the medium with which you create it. A proper high-level language (such as C++) may not be ideal for your needs - if you do go that route, you'll also need support libraries like SDL, which require further expertise to put together.

I suppose to each their own, I personally found an RPG to be easier to program if you're willing to skimp on the AI and replace them with a random generator. Of course, as with all AI, it scales up in difficulty if you want to have something that knows to use a fire spell on ice monsters, etc. At the end of the day, an RPG could be done with System.out.println, and I'm more comfortable there.

If you want any of the source code I did for the println RPG, Bluewolf, while it's JAVA, it might help.

Speaking as someone who's been in a position of having talents that are useful to game designers (art, not programming), the most important thing you need is a detailed plan. Like it or not, this kind of thing is a seller's market, there's a TON of games/mods/etc that need specialized talent, so anyone who can do good art/coding/writing/etc is going to have way more offers than they could possibly ever help with, and that's in addition to their personal projects and life outside of work. Even without leaving the forums for one RPG, I could've joined 5-10 large mod projects, and countless smaller ones.


So: you need to sell your project to the people you're trying to get. A detailed plan tells me two things:

1) Whether it's something I want to work with. Everyone has their own style/taste, so the more you give up front, the more likely you are to find that rare person who thinks it's a really cool idea that they'd love to help with.

2) More importantly, it shows that you're organized. While there's still a high failure rate, at least I know you're taking it seriously and have moved beyond the "hey, it would be really cool to make a game" stage. The better your planning, the more likely you are to convince someone that you're not just going to abandon the project in a week or two after wasting a lot of hours of their time. A good design document puts you above a solid 90% of the games/mods out there in the eyes of the people you're hoping to recruit.


Based on your previous thread, I'd say you need to do a lot of work on this. Figure out exactly what you want to do, what skills you have, what skills you need, and be honest about it. And the more detail you can include, the better. This post in your previous thread gives you some good questions to start with.

And if all else fails? Offer cash.