Welcome back to the RPG Design series where I try to talk a bit about the work and progress on my game project, the development of the darkish, space -themed computer role-playing game Stellar Conspiracy: Entanglements Of The Marenis Sector (working title).
In the last part I’ve introduced the character design template I’m using and mentioned to post a character example next time which I’m doing hereby while introducing you to Eliza Retinienne, a Gessjanian security systems expert from the planet Shielle, a small world bordering on the fringe of the Suulun Sector which in turn stretches over a large area of the southern galaxy.
Eliza is one of the key characters in the game’s story and one of the characters whom the player is supposed to encounter and who eventually joins the player’s party. She is also supposed to receive her own side-quest in which the player can engage to help her out of the threatening situation she is currently in.
Note that this sheet is basically just here to give an example of how the character design template can be used to shape out a character so I suggest not to look too critically into the details. Things can (and will) still change and also the sheet is not filled out completely, for one reason because some details are irrelevant for this character and for another that I haven’t found any other suitable details for her yet. Either way I hope this gives a good example of how to utilize the template!
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is one of the few FPS games that really impressed me. First, it didn’t feature the same overused WWII theme but a refreshing present day scenario, second, it has a very professional feel to it. The graphics are awesome, the gameplay is perfect and characters and dialog are believable. And third, the story plot is thrilling, there are so many twists and turns to it that make you glee at the screen. CoDMW is full of these jaw-dropping moments. This Moments in Gaming episode shows one of these unexpected moments.
Later in the game the SAS unit around Captain Price is moving forward to the missile base deeply hidden in the Altay Mountains in Russia when suddenly two ICBMs are being launched in close vicinity. This is one of those “I cant believe this just happened!!”-moments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
No One Lives Forever and it’s sequel are two games that I particularly enjoyed playing. Set in a mid-century spy movie theme you are playing Cate Archer, a top secret agent for an English secret service called U.N.I.T.Y. who has to take down the terrorist organization aptly named H.A.R.M.
The two games are very atmospheric and full of 60ties flair, concealed spy gadgets, exotic locations, fast-paced action, insanely dangerous situations and spiked with a good dose of humor. Gladly they don’t take themselves too serious unlike some other games of the genre.
In this video Cate Archer and a ninja named Isako (who is - rather unwillingly – one of the villains henchmen) are fighting it out in ‘No One Lives Forever 2‘ in an impossible showdown taking place in a trailer home which is being hurled away by an approaching tornado and somehow both are getting out of it alive.
I’ve been busy with some audio work recently again and decided to remix the famous Turrican I Title Theme by Chris Huelsbeck. Here it is … I haven’t intentionally made too many changes to the arrangement because I wanted to stick close to the original on the first approach and concentrate on the instrumentation instead which has been completely changed. You can download it too (if you’re into synth music/game tune remixes that is).
(All work done in REAPER. Instruments used: Synth1, V-Station, minimonsta, Nexus, MOTU BPM for drums.)
I’m a southpaw! I do all kinds of things that require a certain degree of eye to hand-coordinated skill with my left hand. This includes using the computer mouse too. So I have the mouse on the left side next to my keyboard with my left hand using the mouse and left part of the keyboard and the right hand using the right side, incl. cursor keys and numeric keyblock.
With a standard keyboard we lefties actually have a slight advantage over right-handers when it comes to playing First-Person-Shooters or third-person-view games since we have a nicely separated block of keys that we can use for controls with the right hand where right-handers would need to use some obnoxious key layouts in the depths of the left side of their keyboard, in particular the notorious WASD keys.
After their last RPG masterpiece release, the Might & Magic 6-Pack, gog.com have now released Realms of Arkania 1+2 and 3. RoA is the English version of what I only knew as Das Schwarze Auge in German back in the 16-bit days of Amiga. If my memory serves me right only the first part of RoA made it to the Amiga while the two followers were only available for DOS.
Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.
So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.
Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.
And back to the game design topic! The part I love most about game design is that you can create worlds full of life, intricacy, intrigue and interesting characters, experimenting with scenarios and situations (that would otherwise probably have negative repercussions in RL™).
As a programmer you’d ever only write your code and if you are happy with it that’s fine but we one-man-game-developer types are more like Jack of all trades who want to create complete worlds … and stories. And then tell those stories by means of the game. And maybe throw a bit (or a large chunk) of dynamics in there again … as programmers.
One extremely satisfying aspect of game design (for games where narrative is important) is the development of characters that should act throughout the game. Creating characters is just as much fun as the other bases! If you do it right and create deep and sympathetic characters people will love them.
And even villains can be sympathetic. In fact they should be! Who likes an antagonist that is completely unsympathetic? Nobody, right? But why should you even like a villain, after all he’s the guy who needs to be defeated? The answer to this is that the guy who is the villain is so only in the context of our story. Maybe he’s not so bad after all in a different context. Or in short: Antagonists also have a life, feelings … but guess what? Now I totally digress! I actually wanted to show you my new and all fresh character template that I came up with to shape out characters for my game.
Here’s just a small tidbit about a new WordPress plugIn named WPTouch I’ve added to Hidden Resource that automatically displays the blog in a mobile-friendly theme on IPhones and Andoid phones. The mobile version is themed in a design similar to Apple’s appstore and it turns out to be a very smooth and slick experience indeed to read posts and comments and also leaving comments. The theme even features selectors to filter posts by tag or category and in fact the whole site feels as if it’s an iPhone app all by itself.
So enjoy reading HDRS on your phone! Oh and if you’re running a WP blog you might want to consider installing the plugin because I might want to rejoice over your site on the phone. Besides installation is as easy as with all WP plugins so there’s virtually no excuse!
Even though I love ActionScript more than my daily meal I’ve recently started to think about if the Flash Platform is actually the right stuff for developing big games. Most Flash game developers write small-scale games for the web which is totally fine and I too like to write a small coffee-break game sometimes but often I’m craving for more! My dream has since long been to design and develop a large-scale role-playing game and I’m usually overflowing from new ideas coming to my mind every day that it’s almost hard to track all of them.
I could go on and make this project an oldschool-style game with 2D graphics like some other indie devs are doing but I feel that going 3D would be the best bet to convey atmosphere and tactical gameplay at the same time (you could use switchable first-person and third-person views). This makes me think if ActionScript is actually sufficient for this but the experience of some of my recent coding tests with Away3D which already start to bog down the CPU with a few hundred polygons on the screen tend to say “no!” to my ambitious plans.
Since this is a desktop game my platform choice is AIR which offers more freedom that the Web Player but there are still many let-downs that make you grind your teeth …
The other day I was playing the Point Lookout Add-on for Fallout 3 and there is this one main quest where you go to inspect an area named Calvert Mansion just to run into a ghoul named Desmond. He seemed very busy trying to defend the mansion against Tribal intruders and without asking me directly he made me help defend the house. At first I thought Desmond seemed to be a cool guy, after all he wears a suit and appeared like some sort of gentleman (as far as a ghoul can appear as a gentleman anyway).
But after we finished bouncing off the intruders and I’ve started a dialogue with him it turned out that he’s not such a gentleman after all. In nearly every second sentence in his dialogue he makes use of the notorious ‘F word’! No exaggeration! After a short while listening to his insults (calling me a moron several times) I got fed up of his overuse of nasty language and started to loathe this guy. Note that it turns out that he’s supposed to be an unlikable character but this could have also been very well transported without the overuse of bad language. … *Spoilers ahead*!
In the last part I’ve introduced the character design template I’m using and mentioned to post a character example next time which I’m doing hereby while introducing you to Eliza Retinienne, a Gessjanian security systems expert from the planet Shielle, a small world bordering on the fringe of the Suulun Sector which in turn stretches over a large area of the southern galaxy.
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