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relee11:30pm - So I slept on it and thought about it a lot. I figure there's three ideas for me to make an indie game right now and I need to figure out which one would have the shortest dev cycle and thus the earliest return on investment. I think they're all good ideas so I shouldn't be heartbroken picking just one.
The ideas:
- A Space (Pirate?) Game
- An Action Roguelike Game
- A relatively small RPG
The Space game is one I've wanted to make forever, but have problems with because of my preference for hard sci fi getting in the way of gameplay decisions. I was reading Sid Meier's Memoir! and the parts where he talks about the creation of his Pirates! game and how it differs from the simulators he made in the past, kind've gives me some ideas how to deal with that. I think the biggest danger of the Space game would be feature creep.
An action roguelike's main problem would be gameplay. I'm pretty confident on my ability to make interesting procgen dungeons, but I'm not as confident when it comes to action gameplay. It's something that would require a lot of tuning.
An RPG is generally a long undertaking, but indie hit Undertale was done in a year. I'm a little less confident in this idea since the game would have to be gimmicky and short and have a good story all in positive ways.
12:00am - Let's look at the game ideas in more depth.
I've got a lot of ideas on how to do the space game, and they're all pretty interesting, but some are more difficult than others.
Like, one thing I'd like to do is have everything be in constant relative motion. I probably wouldn't show the stars moving, but things like planets, gas clouds, asteroids, stations and ships would always be moving.
I'm not exactly married to the idea but I think it would be a good quirk that I haven't seen in other space games.
The big question is how do I want to handle the gameplay? My main inspirations are Sid Meier's Pirates! and Platinum Games' Infinite Space and Toys for Bob's Star Control 2. They're pretty different games though.
Following the advice and display of Sid Meier, there should be many 'right' things to do and no 'wrong' things to do, and it should capture the essence and adventure of being in space.
I don't want to have the player directly control the ship though, and so it loses a bit of the fun of Sid Meier's Pirates right off the bat. The thing of it is, space is big, and if everything is moving then it's easy to get off course.
Rather I'm thinking the player will be given flight paths to different objects in a solar system on a map, which would vary depending on time. So, it might be a shorter or longer distance, but the ship would always be able to catch up to it.
For interstellar travel, I'm thinking about using point to point jump gates to make 'roads' between stars. I'm not sure if they'd be located in system or out in interstellar space, such as the oort cloud. I would probably make something up to satisfy whatever was best for gameplay.
Game-wise you'd set the course on a map screen then watch the ship travel from a bridge view perspective between the two points, and any events that happen in the interim would be handled by the player.
I worry this would lead to a lot of sit and wait gameplay, but even in Pirates! you had to wait a bit to get places without much usually happening, and I personally at least enjoyed watching space fly by in Infinite Space, which used this style of view, interrupted occasionally by ship encounters.
Ship encounters wouldn't be terribly realistic in space but I think I can allow them for gameplay's sake.
Actually let's discuss what is neccesary for a Space Adventure and figure out how we can put that in the game, or not.
Flying in Space, Space Pirates, Laser Guns, Far Off Alien Worlds, Robots and Androids, Aliens, Body Modders, Cyborgs, Space Ships, Trading between Locations, Smuggling...
I feel like I'm missing some important things.
Let's look at the activities from Pirates! There was Swashbuckling, Ship-to-Ship combat, Dancing and wooing governor's daughters, trading was a minor part of it, and there was searching for treasure, and sneaking in and out of hostile towns...
6:01am - Things got really distracting and I ended up not working for a while, and now it's frickin' six am and I can't stand to look at the whiteness of the screen. I'll have to work on this more tomorrow.
The ideas:
- A Space (Pirate?) Game
- An Action Roguelike Game
- A relatively small RPG
The Space game is one I've wanted to make forever, but have problems with because of my preference for hard sci fi getting in the way of gameplay decisions. I was reading Sid Meier's Memoir! and the parts where he talks about the creation of his Pirates! game and how it differs from the simulators he made in the past, kind've gives me some ideas how to deal with that. I think the biggest danger of the Space game would be feature creep.
An action roguelike's main problem would be gameplay. I'm pretty confident on my ability to make interesting procgen dungeons, but I'm not as confident when it comes to action gameplay. It's something that would require a lot of tuning.
An RPG is generally a long undertaking, but indie hit Undertale was done in a year. I'm a little less confident in this idea since the game would have to be gimmicky and short and have a good story all in positive ways.
12:00am - Let's look at the game ideas in more depth.
I've got a lot of ideas on how to do the space game, and they're all pretty interesting, but some are more difficult than others.
Like, one thing I'd like to do is have everything be in constant relative motion. I probably wouldn't show the stars moving, but things like planets, gas clouds, asteroids, stations and ships would always be moving.
I'm not exactly married to the idea but I think it would be a good quirk that I haven't seen in other space games.
The big question is how do I want to handle the gameplay? My main inspirations are Sid Meier's Pirates! and Platinum Games' Infinite Space and Toys for Bob's Star Control 2. They're pretty different games though.
Following the advice and display of Sid Meier, there should be many 'right' things to do and no 'wrong' things to do, and it should capture the essence and adventure of being in space.
I don't want to have the player directly control the ship though, and so it loses a bit of the fun of Sid Meier's Pirates right off the bat. The thing of it is, space is big, and if everything is moving then it's easy to get off course.
Rather I'm thinking the player will be given flight paths to different objects in a solar system on a map, which would vary depending on time. So, it might be a shorter or longer distance, but the ship would always be able to catch up to it.
For interstellar travel, I'm thinking about using point to point jump gates to make 'roads' between stars. I'm not sure if they'd be located in system or out in interstellar space, such as the oort cloud. I would probably make something up to satisfy whatever was best for gameplay.
Game-wise you'd set the course on a map screen then watch the ship travel from a bridge view perspective between the two points, and any events that happen in the interim would be handled by the player.
I worry this would lead to a lot of sit and wait gameplay, but even in Pirates! you had to wait a bit to get places without much usually happening, and I personally at least enjoyed watching space fly by in Infinite Space, which used this style of view, interrupted occasionally by ship encounters.
Ship encounters wouldn't be terribly realistic in space but I think I can allow them for gameplay's sake.
Actually let's discuss what is neccesary for a Space Adventure and figure out how we can put that in the game, or not.
Flying in Space, Space Pirates, Laser Guns, Far Off Alien Worlds, Robots and Androids, Aliens, Body Modders, Cyborgs, Space Ships, Trading between Locations, Smuggling...
I feel like I'm missing some important things.
Let's look at the activities from Pirates! There was Swashbuckling, Ship-to-Ship combat, Dancing and wooing governor's daughters, trading was a minor part of it, and there was searching for treasure, and sneaking in and out of hostile towns...
6:01am - Things got really distracting and I ended up not working for a while, and now it's frickin' six am and I can't stand to look at the whiteness of the screen. I'll have to work on this more tomorrow.
