Features for a new RPG

Discuss the development of other free/open-source games, as well as other games in general.

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Roots
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Post by Roots »

Good to hear you got it working. :)

I actually like Allacrost Battle Theme better than the Fight theme. I think the fight theme is good, but it's too slow. When I'm in a battle I want to feel pumped. :P
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
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Elvish_Pillager
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Post by Elvish_Pillager »

Roots wrote:I actually like Allacrost Battle Theme better than the Fight theme. I think the fight theme is good, but it's too slow. When I'm in a battle I want to feel pumped. :P
It's not harsh enough to be a battle, though.
It's all fun and games until someone loses a lawsuit. Oh, and by the way, sending me private messages won't work. :/ If you must contact me, there's an e-mail address listed on the website in my profile.
Roots
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Post by Roots »

Phew. I'm finally back to a state where I can work on the game code seriously again now that classes are out (still have work though). A heck of a lot has been getting done both by myself and others, but I've again re-discovered just how difficult game programming is. Even though the core of the map exploration code is done, there are still refinements and features to add and as I am furiously writing and re-writing parts of this code I keep thinking "Wait, but in this special situation, this wouldn't work. So we need to add something like this, this, or this so that this will work properly, but at the same time this would make that harder to handle, so I need to write code to handle both this and that in a mutally exclusive way so everything works right." :shock:

Well ok that's an exaggeration of what's going through my mind, but you get the idea. The latest issues I've been working on are handling multi-story houses because objects only "existed" on one height level, so I had to implement multiple levels to take care of that (which wasn't too difficult). And another problem I've been tackling tonight is a piece of the map that you can travel both over and under (like a bridge). Currently there's no way to properly handle that in the existing code base, so I had to implement some new data structures just to handle that one special case (but it looks like it will work pretty well for us).

I wonder if this is a natural process in game design or a lack of my own foresight into think of these situations beforehand. I've actually tried to do a fair amount of planning before coding, but typically I've found that that never works well because things are so intricate and complicated I really can't "understand" the problem until I actually start writing the code to solve it, ya know?


Ok, just blabbin' for now. Expect something good to pop on our site in a few weeks here. The wheels are in motion. 8)
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
Eldmannen
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Post by Eldmannen »

Sounds very interesting, tell us if you have a website or any screenshots or any concept art or any code out or something...
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Jetrel
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Post by Jetrel »

Roots wrote:Phew. I'm finally back to a state where I can work on the game code seriously again now that classes are out (still have work though). A heck of a lot has been getting done both by myself and others, but I've again re-discovered just how difficult game programming is. Even though the core of the map exploration code is done, there are still refinements and features to add and as I am furiously writing and re-writing parts of this code I keep thinking "Wait, but in this special situation, this wouldn't work. So we need to add something like this, this, or this so that this will work properly, but at the same time this would make that harder to handle, so I need to write code to handle both this and that in a mutally exclusive way so everything works right." :shock:

Well ok that's an exaggeration of what's going through my mind, but you get the idea. The latest issues I've been working on are handling multi-story houses because objects only "existed" on one height level, so I had to implement multiple levels to take care of that (which wasn't too difficult). And another problem I've been tackling tonight is a piece of the map that you can travel both over and under (like a bridge). Currently there's no way to properly handle that in the existing code base, so I had to implement some new data structures just to handle that one special case (but it looks like it will work pretty well for us).

I wonder if this is a natural process in game design or a lack of my own foresight into think of these situations beforehand. I've actually tried to do a fair amount of planning before coding, but typically I've found that that never works well because things are so intricate and complicated I really can't "understand" the problem until I actually start writing the code to solve it, ya know?
Hmm. Overplanning was the death of my own Projects 0 and 1. (lack of any salient skill at art was the death of project 2, which is why I am here).
In retrospect, some of the [censored] I was trying to plan for beforehand was absolutely ridiculous. I have piles of notes - easily almost a hundred pages (many redundant) detailing the layout of sprite sheets, rotation planning, etc.

Reality works more along the lines of ... actually writing some code.
I think you're a heck of a lot more "on the right path" than I was.
Roots wrote:Ok, just blabbin' for now. Expect something good to pop on our site in a few weeks here. The wheels are in motion. 8)
I'm looking forward to it.
Roots
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Post by Roots »

Eldmannen wrote:Sounds very interesting, tell us if you have a website or any screenshots or any concept art or any code out or something...
The website link is in my sig. :) We do have some screenshots out, but they are old and were made with a very limited amount of artwork done, so you can expect that things will look better. 8) And all of our code is publically available under the GPL. Well just as an easy reference for you, here's a list of URLs for you to check out


Main Site
http://www.allacrost.org/

Prologue text to the game
http://www.allacrost.org/index.php?story-prologue

Artwork
http://www.allacrost.org/index.php?multimedia-art

Screenshots
http://www.allacrost.org/index.php?multimedia-screen

Music
http://www.allacrost.org/index.php?multimedia-music

Forum
http://www.allacrost.org/forum/

Sourceforge paage
http://sourceforge.net/projects/allacrost/

Browsable CVS repository
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/a ... module_00/



Jetryl wrote: Hmm. Overplanning was the death of my own Projects 0 and 1. (lack of any salient skill at art was the death of project 2, which is why I am here).
In retrospect, some of the [censored] I was trying to plan for beforehand was absolutely ridiculous. I have piles of notes - easily almost a hundred pages (many redundant) detailing the layout of sprite sheets, rotation planning, etc.

Reality works more along the lines of ... actually writing some code.
I think you're a heck of a lot more "on the right path" than I was.

Haha, I know exactly what you mean. At first we did way too much planning too. In fact I said the exact same thing that you just did a few days ago in this thread here regarding what I've learned over the past year.


Oh yeah, the project is a year old now. :mrgreen:
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
NightBlade
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Post by NightBlade »

wow who did all the art work? they look great!
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scott
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Post by scott »

A year with no releases? What happened to release early and often?

Are there any instructions for compiling? I checked out module_01 and will type 'make'. Is there anything special one needs to know (besides have SDL installed)?
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Roots
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Post by Roots »

NightBlade wrote:wow who did all the art work? they look great!
The artwork available on the site was done by 3 different artists. I'm glad you like them. :D Don't forget to check out the music too. And if the music samples don't impress you, I think the samples our composers are working on right now definitely will. :)

scott wrote:A year with no releases? What happened to release early and often?
Yeah, well it's hard when everyone on our team works full-time or goes to school (or in my case, both). If I had 40 hours a week to devote to my project, we would have had a release a long time ago. I know about the release early/often mentality, but honestly that's not what we're shooting for here. We're not just trying to create software here, we're trying to create an experience for the player, and I just can't see that happening by releasing parts of the game that are highly incomplete or rather shoddy.

scott wrote:Are there any instructions for compiling? I checked out module_01 and will type 'make'. Is there anything special one needs to know (besides have SDL installed)?

First of all, module_01 contains obsolete code. We hired a new guy last year and as soon as he got CVS access, he completely messed up everything in module_01 (without permission) which made us kind of angry. module_01 is going to be wiped clean eventually. module_00 is the one you want to look at and it's where the most recent code is. There's a makefile that comes with module_00 and as long as you satisfy all dependencies, typing make should compile it for you.

However, the code is mostly there right now for others to view rather than to play. Our CVS repository only contains code if you might notice, and it doesn't contain the graphics, music, data files, etc. that you'd need to actually run the game. But right now the in-game maps, etc. are only randomly generated maps for testing purposes. We have a setup with autoconf/automake (the standard GNU way of compiling applications) that works, but it needs a little refinement before it's ready to commit.
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
scott
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Post by scott »

ok, well good luck then. I guess I'll check back later.
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Roots
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Post by Roots »

scott wrote:ok, well good luck then. I guess I'll check back later.
Thanks. I've been working on the code all morning, although I probably should be working on a conference paper that's due in a week. :roll: If you register at a member of our forums then you'll get an e-mail whenever something "big" is released.... ;)
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
NightBlade
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Post by NightBlade »

Are you considering adding online PvP features? It could increase the popularity of the game :D



P.S. as for that guy that messed up moudle_01, you should kick him out of the team for good.
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Roots
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Post by Roots »

NightBlade wrote:Are you considering adding online PvP features? It could increase the popularity of the game :D
Not at the moment, no. I think that trying to factor in online capabilities at this point in the game is a very bad idea, and we're definitely not trying to turn this into a MMORPG. I know it will make it more popular, but it would be a huge amount of additional work to add something like that to the engine and we have enough to do as it is. :)


NightBlade wrote:P.S. as for that guy that messed up moudle_01, you should kick him out of the team for good.
We alerady did, but not because of that. Mostly because he did absolutely no work for 4 months, which was a great setback for us because he was responsible for a critical piece of the game's code. :evil:
Hero of Allacrost, a 2D open source RPG. Check it out at http://www.allacrost.org.
Dave
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Post by Dave »

Roots wrote:
NightBlade wrote:Are you considering adding online PvP features? It could increase the popularity of the game :D
Not at the moment, no. I think that trying to factor in online capabilities at this point in the game is a very bad idea, and we're definitely not trying to turn this into a MMORPG.
I completely agree.

Someone trying to make a MMORPG when they haven't even made an RPG is the height of insanity. The difference in difficulty level is immense.

David
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Gafgarion
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Post by Gafgarion »

Dave wrote:
Roots wrote: Not at the moment, no. I think that trying to factor in online capabilities at this point in the game is a very bad idea, and we're definitely not trying to turn this into a MMORPG.
I completely agree.

Someone trying to make a MMORPG when they haven't even made an RPG is the height of insanity. The difference in difficulty level is immense.

David
Indeed, check out Sourceforge and look at all the abandoned, dilapidated, quarter-complete MMORPGs made by people far too ambitious for their own good. MMORPGs are a huge undertaking for anyone, especially those without a complete game or two under their belt.
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