2014-08-19 10:06:31

4am after work, so expect some rambling as I try to stay awake.  Hehe.  tongue

I'm with Dark here.  While your plan might work (I stress "might"), you have been envisioning grand plans for both of those games for a long long time, and it would be very difficult to create super simple games bearing those titles.  The temptation would be to, just add 1 of the features you've thought about for years.  Now 1 more, and 1 more.  Pretty soon you're back to working on a larger scale project that gets hung up again.  The titles Mysteries of the Ancients, and USA Raceway carry a lot of designers baggage, that you wouldn't have if you started on something new.

Your post talked about the ups and downs as you switched languages and searched for the right API to build with, and this really makes me want to bring up my own philosophy for making games.  For many years I have been saying this to people looking to develop a game.  Build the game with what you already know.  When you decide to create a game, that is not the time to try to learn something new.  While planning out a game you wish to create, plan out its construction using only the things you can already do (and do well).  If you have no idea how to handle multiplayer (just an example), then don't plan out making a multiplayer game.  If you have no idea how to add fancy echoing effects to your sounds, then don't include that as part of the game you're wanting to make.  If we violate this rule, we can all sit and imagine the most amazing mind-blowing game that could ever exist.  Anyone could!  Holding an imagined game concept in your mind doesn't count for anything... what matters is what will actually exist.

By limiting yourself to only what you currently know, you never have to go looking for new sound libraries or languages to make a game work.  If the sound library you are using at this moment won't be supported down the road, who cares?  Use it anyway, because you know how to use it, it is already right here in front of you, and it does what it is supposed to do.  Build the games of "next year", next year, not today.  Chasing what Will be cutting edge tomorrow is a losing battle.

When you want to learn some new coding thingy, do it simply for the joy of learning something new, with no actual need for it.  Later when starting on a new project you will have this new knowledge to use in the design, but when done in this order everything flows nicely.

This is an approach to game design that you have very much disagreed with in the past, but it seems like a good time to at least run it past you again.  Lots of people have thought I was crazy for doing things this way, but it results in insanely fast development times.  I never get hung up trying to figure out how in the world I'll make feature X work, because if I didn't already know, I wouldn't have had it in my project plan.  The progression of my games here in the audiogames world has followed this design philosophy, even if it meant some of my earlier titles were a bit clunky.  When I had no idea how to make a screen reader read text, I just self voiced stuff.  Before I knew how to pan sounds (in my sighted games I never really used sound) I just made games that had no need for sound panning.  Same for adjusting sound volumes.  When I didn't know how to add JAWS support, screw Jaws, my games just didn't support it.  When I was between games I would experiment, do a little reading, and figure out new stuff I could use down the road.  The main point is, building with only what you know may stop you from ever building those next-generation mind melting games, but for good reason, so you don't follow that siren's call... luring programmers to their death.  big_smile

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2014-08-19 13:00:11

Hi Tom.
Maybe you should contact the Italian company and ask them how they make cross platform games? I'm totally amazed how quickly they are able to make games. They have an awesome spaceship game in development which should be released this month, and Inquisitor adventure 3 for next month or in a few months. All their games are cross platform, works on Mac and Windows. I'm not sure about Linux, and most of their games are also out for IOS. I have no idea on how they are making games that fast!


regarding to my idea on making a game which others can expand, here are some other thoughts:
Make an engine which have a map editor so people can make maps pretty easily. I don't know how complex it is to make this.
Make a very simple scripting system like in Tactical battle, where people like me who nearly have given up on learning programming can learn to write things from scratch, in a simple text file.
Make the possibility for others to code scripts, so they can make even more features in the game. One example is from Tactical battle. People wanted a feature where you could mount horses or other transportations. Well, someone just made an awesome script and made this awesome feature! big_smile
In this way, you could make a very awesome game engine with endless features which people with different skills could keep working on if they feel like doing it. It might have some limitations, I don't know, but it would be awesome! Then, an online system could be designed, so people could upload their stuff, so you don't have to put lots of work into uploading stuff to a website.
I have no idea on how much work it would take to make all this, but I could imagine it would require much less work than writing a big game from scratch.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
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2014-08-19 21:18:30

Dark, I do see where you are coming from, and I don't really blame you for feeling the way you do. However, I don't think you see where I am coming from here.

Yes, in certain respects I am sick to death of Mysteries of the Ancients and Raceway, but that is more to do with what they have become not what they could be. To explain I am upset with Raceway because I tried to create a cross-platform version of Nascar Thunder, clearly too much to do, and I think I could be quite satisfied and comfortable with writing a simple racing game like Poll Position. I am sick of Mysteries of the Ancients for similar reasons. I tried to write a clone of Tomb Raider, make it cross-platform, etc and I'm tired of the Tomb Raider clone idea. If I went back to a simple 2d side-scroller like Montezuma's Revenge I would be more than satisfied with that, and could get excited about that. Especially, if I started over with a new storyline, new sounds, new music, etc and it would essentially be a new game but with the same name.

Finally, there is another aspect to those games why I will not let them go. I paid money for both of those games. I preordered them, and want my money back or the games. Getting my money back is an impossibility so I want the games I paid for. Even if that means writing the games myself.

In addition to the money I lost on the preorders I have spent hundreds on sounds, music, and game libraries. Not to mention the hundreds of man hours working on said games. I want a return on that investment so just quitting is not an option. If I give up on those games, write that time and money off as a loss, then I would have spent all that time and money on nothing. I suppose I can recoup the money I loss over time, but the hours and time I lost can never be recovered. So I might as well get what I bought and paid for.

To put this in a university analogy it would be a bit like a man who went to university for several years, was going for his doctorate, and deciding at the last moment not to write his doctoral thesis. Any sane person would ask that man why put all that time and effort into something to just quit when his or her goal was in reach. All he had to do was write and turn his doctoral thesis in, but he up and quit at the eleventh hour.

In the same way not completing what I started would be on par with not turning in that doctoral thesis at the eleventh hour. I have literally thousands of lines of code I can reuse on these projects which would speed up the process of writing Raceway and Mysteries of the Ancients. I have purchased sounds and music for both which I can use over since I licensed them legally. I have purchased high quality TTS voices which I was planning on using for the games. It doesn't seem logical to me just to quit after purchasing all that content and spending hundreds of man hours on producing reusable code just to throw it all away for no reason. What you do not understand is that a rewrite of these games would not take years to complete. the entire point of writing the Evolution Engine was to have a way to produce games in the matter of a few months, and that is all it would take assuming I had the time to do so.

Anyway, that's all I really have to say. Weather one agrees or disagrees with me my mind is made up. I will finish those games, and no sense trying to talk me out of it. What I will do though is go back to more what James North had in mind for the projects and complete them as originally intended. That should be easy enough to do, and won't take long once I get back into development.

Sincerely,
Thomas Ward
USA Games Interactive
http://www.usagamesinteractive.com

2014-08-19 22:09:37

I'll admit, it's a lovely song.  smile  Good luck on the games man, and mind the rocks.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2014-08-20 20:36:48

Well tom I'm currently at anual music school for a week so am rather shattered at the moment due to an intensive day of  vocal technique and fun, but very hard work offenbach, (I'm playing Paris prince of Troi). So I don't really have the time or energy for a  protracted conversation and will just  echo aprone in saying good luck. 

I will confess I'm not entirely easy on your  decision here, but it is after all yours, and I do  understand the reasoning, and I would like to see  games like monti and race way  be completed, heck,  if Blind swordsman has taught us anything it's that simple gaes can still have great appeal  if  the  mechanics are there, so best of luck and I hope things get sorted out.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2014-08-20 21:32:17

It really works out either way Dark.  Either the plan works and we have 2 new games soon, giving you no reason to debate this decision, or you'll have a lot of time to rest up before trying this same conversation again.  Hehe.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2014-08-21 11:11:18

Tom: I'll also wish you the best luck. The most important thing is that you're not giving up regarding to development. Keep up the good work, and I hope to se something, small or big game soon.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2015-10-19 05:00:38

Just checking back in to see how development has gone over the past 14 months.
It was a shame to see the "180" from post 24 to post 28, but continuing to work on those 2 games might have paid off.  I tend to miss announcements about new audio games and demos, so I don't really know how either of the games turned out.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software