Creativity in games.
Community Forums/Technical Discourse/Creativity in games.
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 After 12 hours of work it is impossible to be clear what to do in my project, so I resort to your experience, ideas to create a game simple. Do you have an idea?. The concept of the game is simple, the robot is supervening to a landing on Mars, where all human crew has died as they enter the athosphere of the red planet. Only the robot remains .... But I'm blocked, when I cleaned the floors had a great mountain of ideas, now I only have trembling fatigue and sleep. I accept any suggestion. Greetings. |
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| Bring a small notepad along so you can write down ideas when you think about them, and look back at later? |
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| How simple do you want? The hard thing is that if you make it too simple you will get bored very quickly although the difference between a simple game and a more complex one in development time can be quite large. I like to use a notepad and pen and draw diagrams of screen interfaces that I can pretend what I'm going to see on the screen. Because I often develop for mobile I get out my mobile, turn the screen off and hold it in either landscape or portrait mode to imagine what I want to create and try and envisage if it will be fun or not. A quick demo in either blitz3d or blitzplus and I can get a feel for whether it will be fun or not before coding anything serious..... |
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| radio control of a robot race. the robot seeks to return to earth robot builds a mate :) |
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| I like that one...robot builds a mate.... Robot is stuck on Mars with no other life forms as all the humans died. Robot is lonely and seeks to build a robot companion from collected bits and pieces around the crash site. Robot has to perform little mini games to teach the creation's AI different things in order to become a good companion. At the end of a specified time period the robot is evaluated and a score is given indicating the intelligence, agility, attributes of the robot you designed as a partner for the main robot character. It has a sense of human emotion in it which is nice. |
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| Is there a reason to start something without a "plan in mind" ? Why didn't you finish the "forklift racer/parcours" first? It was on its way to become something "finished". All projects you "showcase" here are just exposing something like "loading and displaying a model + some gui buttons". To see how things "work" (gameplay!) you do not need to use complex models, you could "prototype" them. A Car does not need weels to checkout if a "bring A to B"-gameplay will work. So back to your forklift game: sorting items in the building should be "arcade like". I do not know if it is something I would play, or others - but at least it sounded like an idea - a solveable/finishable idea. Maybe you should consider asking Krischan for advices - seems you liked the screenshots he achieves with OpenB3D. OpenB3D might be preferable to Xors (open source, more up-to-date). Or you already follow "monkey 2 development" so you could toy around with that a bit. Regarding Framerate. I assume you could also tinker with "low poly style". It is something people today seem to like. Low Poly + good lighting/shadows so it looks a bit like a toy ground. For arcade games auch low poly style will really be good enough, as it does not need to "look photorealistic". This might also help you and your "slow" gpu (mine is also an integrated and years old APU-gpu). Final words in this post - repetition!: do not start project after project without finishing the project. I strongly suggest to first check "gameplay" and then do "polishing". I understand that learning "how to animate / put in armatures" is also needed but it wont finish your game. As your daughter was kind of interested in the fork lift game, I assume she might be a wonderful help (game tester, opinion giver) there. If you are not sure about finishing a game: why using 3D at all and not trying something small in 2D ? some simple arcade game with pre-rendered/drawn graphics? Use your modelling skills and render them out. If you are afraid of your low-detail-models in renders: think again about that low-poly-style (soft shadows + low detail models with barely-visible textures - or no textures at all). This is what I meant:  (source: blendernation.com) https://www.blendernation.com/2017/03/20/isometric-3d-game-tiles-tutorial/ https://www.blendernation.com/2017/03/20/tutorial-low-poly-trees/ https://www.blendernation.com/2017/03/21/create-3d-cartoon-stylised-tree-blender-3d/ Or have a look at this: See how "gradients" (lighting!) make it look "wonderful" while still being so low poly? I assume you could create good/nice-looking low-poly assets - and maybe it helps yourself to toy around with gameplay rather than creating never-finished-projects. bye Ron |
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| Things I would add next a map, mars has a ton of interesting geological features driving and flying assortment of pickups |
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| and of course deadly rays... |
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| Robot Can't return to orbital vessel until it solves the mystery of what did for the human crew of the lander. Accident/foulplay/is the return of the robot to the orbiter for the best? IE Make it into a detective type RPG with lander interiors for a backdrop. Have fun cps |
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| a visit to the underbelly of jupiter crazy droids that chase you, think candy the dog x 20 put your daughter in charge of design and creativity department |
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| Good old Flash Gordon, very popular in TV syndication when I was a kid. The clay people oozing out of cavern walls was very creepy. The new Jupiter imagery reminds me of one of the most unexpected things ever, Saturn's polar hexagon. I half expected to see a pentacle on Jupiter. |
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| Thank you all for the motivation in your comments. Derron, this has been a hobby, all my projects although they have not finished successfully in a video game, has been the ladder to learn something new. For example the last thing I learned that helped me a lot is what you taught me about working with objects. In the end I never did a game with Blitz3D, but they were the first steps to move to blitzmax, which incidentally I loved, and I have acquired some ability to organize the code and it is easier for me to resume projects. Unfinished projects are part of the learning, where I always reached a point where I did not understand something, then the learning process in my case is usually a bit complicated, try to understand things with the translator but things With time they are easier to understand and possibly make a game, a simple game, something simple. The rational motivation in which I like 3d, and from my point of view, maybe not the most successful is to use Xors3D, the motivation to learn BlitzMax, this is a hobby, maybe not achieve anything, but if you learn that for me is what more important. On the other hand I think the advice to write down things in a notepad is correct. I respect the frames for low seconds, it is due to my graphics card, it does not give for more and at last the animo is lost when you execute everything in slow camera, but hopefully I can do something. Initially I have to do a hud of energy from the robot's batteries, the first thing is to search for debris that may be useful, and then move away from the accident area to reach a camp. Greetings.  |
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