What type of game are you doing?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/What type of game are you doing?
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| I am only wondering what type of games people are doing or working on i am my self thinking about doing a Adventure game! |
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| Just playing around learning the syntax here. Now and then ideas for a 3D engine crop up but then I remind myself that Mark will do a much better job so I just go back to dabbling and trying to find bugs ;) |
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| I'm currently in the process of writing a 2D arcade game in BlitzMax, which is coming along pretty nicely. Last year I was doing some off-and-on work on a 2D graphical adventure engine... currently on the backburner, but maybe at some point in the future I'll dust it off again. 2D Graphical adventures are one of my favorite genre's, love the old Lucasarts adventures, especially the Monkey Island series. Anyway, just one bit of advice: If you are seriously considering a graphical adventure, you better consider everything it needs to be able to do before you start programming anything, because it's a LOT easier to do things 'right' from the start than it is to try to mickey-mouse certain features in later on. Things to think about: - How to implement the depth of you scenes, so objects can pass in front / behind each other properly, and scale down when walking into the distance - How to implement 'walk-maps', so your character(s) can properly walk around in the scene, around objects like tables and such - How to implement path finding routines, so a character can properly walk from one side of the screen to wherever you want him to go, evading objects on his own. - An extension on the pathfinding: reverse pathfinding, so if you click on an 'unreachable' spot, the characters automatically walks as far as it can, and then stop. - How to implement an inventory system - How to implement hot-spots, that trigger certain actions - How to build/store/load levels - How to implement your character controls - How to implement a somewhat linear storyline that can progress based on your actions, its dependencies, scripts, cut-scenes, etc. Overall, creating a good 3rd person adventure (where you navigate a character around the screen) is a lot more complicated than a 1st person adventure (where you see the game through the eyes of your character, like in 'myst'), but in my opinion the 3rd person view is a lot more appealing than the 1st person view for these kind of games. Seem to make 'em more fun, in part because there is a lot more happening on the screen. Anyway, creating a good adventure game is definitely not for the faint of heart, there's a lot more to those than one might think up front. :-) But the biggest hurdle in making any graphical adventure, is the magnitude of graphics work that would be required. In any good adventure, there are *tons* of graphics necesary for the background, countless variations of your sprites so they can move around and perform the tasks you need them to, etc. There's a reason the big studies have dozens of people making the graphics for these kind of games. Personally I started out with doing some google image searches to pull up some screenshots from existing adventure games, and used those as some placeholder graphics , so I had a typical 'scene', and worked on moving a character around in it, including some obstacles that were already in it. |
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| I'm actually playing around with some idea and test studies of "mouse only" game ideas which are focused on a simple gameplay which are hard to master ... |
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| Master of Orion ripoff. But to take a break from that, Im doing a little "OIDS" ripoff. The OIDS is to take a break from doing the MOO. :) |
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| im currently jazzing up robotron in my own little way. cheers charlie |
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| Grid based puzzle game, but with 3D characters. :) |
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| 2D platform game |
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| mouse only, 2d, fast klicky,klacky reaction game with highscorer - i-net server |
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| I guess I am currently working `towards` a game but mostly experimenting with creating an unusual graphics engine (using OpenGL) to see what kind of things I can get to happen. Really, at the moment the development is entirely dictated by what turns out to be possible, or not possible, so I don't have much of a plan. I finally got it working at a good framerate fullscreen (640x480) but I'm still dabbling with different extra steps and possibilities. Just playing around with ideas really, and trying to see how I could use it to make a game. It kind of has a life of its own so I'm just seeing where it leads me. I think eventually I will have to harness the effect and instead of letting it roam free, tie it down a bit maybe with some sort of elastic support structures or grouped objects, something like that. The main jist of the graphics technique is based on metaballs/blobby-objects, all done in the hardware GPU. It's fast enough but it does take some effort and I think it has potential to be something unique. I don't know how `big` of a game it could become, I guess we'll see how things pan out. Overall I'm aiming towards more of a new-age/metaphysical theme, kind of electric and mystical in some way. Not sure yet whether I can have a static screen or some kind of scrolling engine - to scroll would be easy enough but collision detection is a big concern because everything is changing all the time. Hopefully it'll aim towards more than one player but probably waiting on some easy to use net module before it gets into networking. It's definitely looking cool so far (if I do say so myself) and I kinda got it to do what I originally intended, by mistake, which about sums up how early days this whole thing is yet. :-) |
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| I am working on an isometric engine for a turn based strategy game. Hopefully one day turning into a Master of Magic remake. I had a fair amount done in B2D, but decided to go iso and hopefully jumpstart my motivation by starting over in BMax. It has been fun so far. |
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| I'm planning out an interactive board/card game !?? |
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| I'm planning a BlitzMax project of a Monkey Island-style game too. I'm pretty sure of how I'd do most of it (Z-ordering, perspective, inventory, controls, hotspots, character views and walk animations) but the best way to do walk zones and pathfinding still eludes me. |
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| @Monkey Island guys: I used a program on the amiga called grale or sumit that was a monkey island style advenure maker, they did walk zones by allowing a user to draw out rectangles (player could move any where in this rectangle) then join rectanges by a single node or path, that way the player would know how to move from one rectangle to the other. For example say you have a scene with a bridge in the middle and two street either side of the bridge.  As you can see the yellow rectangles show where the player can move the white lines show how they are connected. As it is the charcter is in "a1" (green X) the character can moe any where in this rectangle unless the user clicks in another rectangle.... Look at "a1" top right, say the user (green X) wants to moves to "b1" top left, then the user clicks somewhere in b1, then the character moves to the centre to a1 then to the centre of a2 then to the center of a3,b3,b2 and then b1. BTW b3,b4,b2 overlap, they shouldn't but i was being lazy... HEY! i draw a picture what more you you want.. BLOOD? Hopw it helps... a bit off topic but hey. |
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| I used a program on the amiga called grale or sumit that was a monkey island style advenure maker, they did walk zones by allowing a user to draw out rectangles (player could move any where in this rectangle) then join rectanges by a single node or path, that way the player would know how to move from one rectangle to the other. That looks like a pretty nice way of finding paths quickly, with not a lot of number crunching involved - the only problem I see with it is if you are in the far right corner of a cell and want to move to the far right corner of the next 10 pixels up, it may want to walk left first and then back right, resulting in unnatural paths. I used a different approach: I took the original image, and painted mask of the 'walkable' area on top of it. Then analyzed the mask, and stored it in a lower resolution array of the same proportions. (e.g. 800x600 image, 200x150 array) If the mask was drawn, a cell was walkable, otherwise it wasn't. Then I used a standard A* pathfinder to find the most efficient way to find the destination point in the array, scaling the results to the real screen positions. The array was a smaller scale because walkmaps didn't need to be pixel-perfect, and the smaller size would be much faster to analyze. As far as dead ends: If there was no path to the destination point, it would take an imaginary straight line between the destination and the source point. Then jump back from the destination along that line at 10 pixel intervals or so (bigger steps on slow computers to cut down pathfinding time), and try to resolve a way from there to my character. As soon as one resolved, it would start walking from its origin to this point. It makes the game look a lot smarter than not doing anything at all when you click on a dead end. (I guess you can do the same with your method, and move to the center point closest to your destination) |
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| a strange mix of asteroids, tron and a mix of oldish style graphics and modern (with vector objects), using my gl engine. cropped pic below.  |
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| I have built an educational program called "States and Capitals" for my son (4th grade). He memorized all 50 in just under 1 week. After 2+ months to v1.0 I am now in the process of making refinements to the code, graphics and sound. Quite a learning experience - and so much more to learn. :-) |
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| Looks nice! |
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| @ xlsior You method will work but I can see the method I stated as being less CPU intensive, more dynamic and script friendly. Let me explain.  In this scene the players way is blocked by a log, so if you had a simple script system for the game you could set up the cells as normal but then in script say something like: Scene1.DisableZone=a2 Becuase zone a2 is disabled the player has no path to get to zone a3. So the quest is find a axe to chop it up, he finds the axe and chops the log, then in script say. Scene1.EnableZone=a2 That will then link the 3 zones so the player can move to a3. Your method to me will need more work to acheive the same result. But I guess it all depend on how your coding the game. |
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| I had GRAC on the Amiga which had a very similar system to how you describe, cdb. (I was aware of GRAAL but never tried it. Some of the games I saw made with it were quite cool though.) I want to do that kind of system (the other way with a walk zone layer image is a possibility though, I know the popular AGS system does it that way). I suppose the number of walk zones on a single screen would be small enough I could just pre-generate a matrix that says which zone to go to first to get from any zone to any other zone, and it just consults that each time until it reaches the target. |
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| Yes that was it... GRAC, i think grale was a demo made it. |
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