My big future project:

[Bustaballs]

After my current project (which will take a while to finish), I plan to work on a new very large project that will take me a long time to finish. It won't be like most projects where I get bored of them easily because there will always be new awesome things to design no matter how much progress I've made. This is because almost literally everything will be randomly generated. Inspired by many aspects of Dwarf Fortress, this game will be a 100% completely new game ever time you play it. I'm not just talking about a dungeon crawler. I'm talking about the name of every NPC, town, building, dungeon, item, quest, story, and anything else relating to the game.


     I consider myself to be enough of a pro at design enough that I can design and develop (in my head and on paper) basically any game out there as well as anyone out there. Dwarf Fortress, however, left in me shock of how amazing the level of design was. It was the first game I ever played and thought, "How did they do this? Where do you even begin to start on making something like this?" It's the first of it's kind and will always be known for its greatness. The first game where an entire world with its entire history and geographical features and layout completely randomly generated. Every battle for thousands of years, every legendary happening, all lived out in extreme detail. And yet, all of this is randomly generated and still has a very authentic feeling to it.


     I want to take this process and implement it into a style of game that better suit my style. A TRUE RPG. A game where you don't play THE role. You play A role. Whatever role you can dream up, you can play it, with the computer being your DM. But this DM will create an entire WORLD for you to quest, explore, and battle in. Doing all of this while keeping an authentic feel to it. While great games such as Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis and Daggerfall for the PC has nice randomly generated quests, they were very repetitive and felt very bland. I hope to change this by implementing some of the same characteristics of Dwarf Fortress. Characteristics from many other RPGs will also be implemented. The chat systems from Shadowrun, Morrowind, Fallout series, and Mass Effect are major influences. Each NPC will have randomly generated dialog based on randomly generated personalities given to them (each chosen from an incredibly large list). Your questions and response choices with NPCs will also be randomly generated but mostly chosen based on your own personality.


     Your character develops entirely depending on what you do, what you say, and basically just every single choice you make during your adventure. Your traits and abilities will develop based on how you play your character and will also be, you guessed it, randomly generated. NPCs and monsters will react differently to you based on your character's personality, the traits you've generated, and choices you make while interacting with them. Your personality is decided by a long list of stats that change based on every choice you make in the game.


     This is all well and good but what is a CRPG with no main story? How would this be done? Well, I'm still thinking this one over but at the moment, I plan to have multiple main stories that are randomly chosen and branch out depending on what you choose to do. This idea could change, though.


     Because the content that will be included in this project is too large for a single person to think up, I'll will be requesting help all around for content. For example, one category will be "insults and replies to insults" and various communities can have fun submitting ideas to me. I'll chose the initial ones for the vanilla game. But what about the others that I don't accept? Nothing except the base engine will be hard-coded or encrypted. Any player may add to or change anything they like. I will include my editors so they may even build their own world if they so choose. Even their own game with or without random generation. So, modding would be a popular feature. I don't even expect the vanilla game to be the most popular.


     That the basic overview of the game concept. All features shouldn't be too difficult to program as long as I can understand the design concept of each stage. Most of the difficult tasks will be taken care of by me sitting around thinking my head off with some pen and paper along with researching how it's done in other games. More ideas will come with time. The programing of the project won't begin for quite a while, so until then, it'll stay in conceptual stages. Thank you for reading and I look forward to your comments.

[Zenn]

Thinking big, I like it.  Remeber to keep your code modular (theres my two cents worth).

How is pre planning coming on?
What battle system are you going for?
Are you nuts, taking on such a complex idea?

King Monkey wishes you all the best in such an epic endevour:)

[Juha Kämäräinen]

Wow i really liked shadowrun on genesis. I only played it on pc with emulator. Since the game never got released in europe i think. Actually my mech game im working on has some of features from it.

I hope you manage to complete your project.

[Bustaballs]

Thinking big, I like it.  Remeber to keep your code modular (theres my two cents worth).

How is pre planning coming on?
What battle system are you going for?
Are you nuts, taking on such a complex idea?

King Monkey wishes you all the best in such an epic endevour:)

I've always got new ideas poping into my head all of the time. At the moment, I'm working on the story for my Japanese learning RPG while figuring out this PB mapping system when I have free time (which is almost never). Hopefully, I can get a better job that pays more and doesn't work me as hard sometime so I can work on these things.

As for the battle system, I think I might do it similar to Fallout with a console system style control to it. That way, you can enter and exit battle at any time and kill anyone you want without it having to load a separate screen for the battle system and then reloading the map and other crap. As much as I love my JRPGs, I prefer my western style battle systems. I never played a JRPG for hundreds of hours like I have with Daggerfall, Morrowind, Gothic, Planescape: Torment, Shadowrun, and Fallout 2. I'd rather play a character that I have complete control of.

If someone gives me a better idea, I'll go for it. If a bunch of people prefer something else, I might just do multiple battle systems. Who knows? I just need to get the programming experience under my belt before I attempt anything like this. I really want it, though. It only a game like this that a developer wants to make to play for himself.

[Makeii Runoru]

I think in the prospective of big projects, it's important to know how to take small steps and not indulge the project in its entirety. As with artwork, what you see in your mind might not come out the way you want it to on the canvas. If you build up from square one, you can refine your art by tweaking what you didn't like before.

[Bustaballs]

That's exactly how it'll be done. I'll design it and program it piece by piece. The graphics will just use a very simple and repetitive tile set until some good artists come along and contribute.

[Makeii Runoru]

I'm trying my luck out with Paint.NET. I find that it's a pretty powerful graphics-editing program that mimicks a lite version of Photoshop. To me, it contains almost everything I would need to devleop tile-based graphics, large bitmaps, and even graphics that require alpha-blending.