So, I can’t stop myself. I’ve got two current home-grown projects – finishing the new PC version of Inaria and converting Planitia to OpenGL. But I will say that I’ve been able to work on my health as well; my current weight is 363, which is down from my starting weight of 375. I intend to start doing more formal PTFSD entries in the future, probably every Friday.
And what the heck, here’s a screenshot of the current PC version of Inaria:
So I bought Borderlands on Friday and then promptly lost my whole weekend to it.
It’s quite an addictive game. Take a first-person shooter, which I love, and glom RPG elements onto it, which I also love. As you defeat enemies and complete quests, you’ll gain XP and level up, giving you more hitpoints and making you more effective with any weapon you use.
But the thing that will really suck you in about Borderlands is the drops.
Borderlands uses the same drop system popularized by World of Warcraft – it even uses the same color-codes for drops, with weapons with white names being standard, green names being good, blue being superior and purple being epic. Every time you open a gun crate, there’s that palpable excitement – will I finally get that sniper rifle that sets people on fire I’ve been wanting? Or will I find a better shield that also heals me over time? Perhaps I’ll find a grenade modification that causes my grenades to simply teleport to their target.
And while I played it occurred to me that single-character RPGs tend to be very combat-heavy, because the single character needs to be able to fairly easily dispatch three, four, five or even more enemies at a time. The main character of Questron would gain a full hundred hitpoints on every level-up; within about ten levels he could walk into a town, kill all the townspeople, steal everything, kill the guards and walk out. JC Denton of Deus Ex routinely engaged multiple enemies, usually by turning invisble, shielding himself, or just popping their heads off with well-placed rifle shots. Your character in Oblivion gains power ridiculously quickly and becomes both the most skilled swordsman and the most skilled magic-user in the land. And don’t even get me started on Diablo.
If Inaria is going to be a single-character RPG (which it probably will be) then I’ll need to do something similar. That’s not the problem.
The problem is drops. Yes or no?
The pros: It’s a tried-and-true way to continually reward players as they play, instead of only rewarding them when they level. And even if they don’t get something they want, they can sell it for much-needed cash…and every once in a while something will pop up that will make the player really happy.
The cons: The drop system is basically tapping into the part of the brain that likes to gamble. That feels kind of weird to me, especially after working on casino games myself. Secondly, it’s…well, it feels too easy. A drop system would be almost trivial to implement. Take a weapon, put random stats on it. If the stats match what the player wants, the player is happy; if not, it’s vendor trash. Plus…it’s not very retro-RPG-ish.
So once again I’m polling the audience. Thoughts?
Okay, the results were almost perfectly split – about half of the people I talked to or responded to my last post wanted me to keep Inaria a single-character game and the other half wanted me to convert it to a party-based game. So that was helpful.
But in the end I think the thing that’s bugging me about Inaria is that overall, it isn’t deep enough.
From my experience, there are four things the player should be able to do in an RPG:
1. Obtain items they’re not supposed to have,
2. Find out information they’re not supposed to know,
3. Get into places they aren’t supposed to be (usually so they can do either 1 or 2), and
4. Kill anyone who gets in their way.
And in general, the more ways the game provides to do all four things, the better it is. This is why Deus Ex is so revered – in general, when you came up against an obstacle, there were at least two ways around it. Needless to say, Inaria is not nearly so deep. It doesn’t just need better combat. It needs more, period. More weapons and armor, more enemies, more spells, more story. And usable items. It’s wrong of me to say, “Oh, well, it’s only going to be $4.99 so…” Inaria needs to be the best game I can ship by December 1st.
Right now Inaria is a single-player, top-down, single-character RPG.
It’s that last feature that’s bugging me. When was the last time you played a top-down RPG that only allowed you to control one character?
I think the combat in Inaria is its greatest weakness and I need to do something about it. There are really only two options:
Option 1: Expand the current single-character combat. Make ranged combat more effective and add more spells and abilities.
Pros: Pretty easy to do.
Cons: Still only have one character to control, which means there just aren’t that many tactical options. Players will probably just build up a single ability and use that.
Option 2: Add more characters for the character to control. In non-combat mode, the other characters just follow the lead character. In combat mode, each character is controlled individually.
Pros: Tactical options! Different characters can have different abilities and be individually controlled.
Cons: A huge change to the design of the game, and an invitation to feature creep.
My personal deadline for this project is December 1. On that date, Inaria should go on sale. In order for that to happen I must first:
1. Finish the new main plotline of the game. Right now the game has a beginning, but not a real end. This really just involves doing a little custom coding on the final boss.
2. Fix all the bugs that have popped up as I’ve moved the game from the iPhone back to the PC.
3. Add more sound effects. This is dirt simple, DrPetter’s SFXR is stupendous in this regard.
4. Add music. Which I guess I’ll have to compose myself. I’ve no idea if I can do it or not.
5. Create a new website for ViridianGames.com that serves as a web store. The layout I want is a header, a left sidebar with buttons and a right pane that changes based on what button you press. Not sure how to do this without creating a full page for each button; there’s probably something I can do with php or css or xyz to make the right pane dynamic; if anyone knows how to, a quick clue would be helpful.
6. Set up the actual purchasing system. Dreamhost has one that’s free with my webspace; I’ll start with that one.
Can I do all this and effectively do a complete redesign on the game? I don’t know. Would it be worth it? That’s what I’m asking.
I had a responsibility that I had to discharge before I could have the time necessary to start on my “Make A Game and Sell One Copy by the End of October” thingy. (Needless to say I’ve already lost the competition; those Ludum Dare guys are ruthless!)
So the game is going to be Inaria. I’ve got the improved version I was making for the iPhone; since I don’t have the hardware necessary to finish that version it’s going to come back to the PC and be my first…commmercial…game! DUNH-DUNH-DUUUNH!
So, I’ve got nine days to finish Inaria and get it up and running. Dreamhost has a free “e-business” web package that I will probably use at first until I inevitably discover that it doesn’t fit my needs and I have to try something else.
Get ready to journey through a new Inaria!
Behold!
“But Viridian!” I hear you exclaim. (My god, you exclaim loud. Keep it down, will ya?) “This is just the same Inaria that you’ve been peddling for years now!”
Ah, but it is not. For this version of Inaria was compiled using the NetBeans IDE and the Cygwin compiler platform. And since the source does not call any Windows libraries, that means I could very easily make a Linux version.
If Linux didn’t hate me.
So why’d I do this? Well, I had an interview recently, and the company is using NetBeans as their IDE so I figured I’d get familiar with it. It’s actually quite good – similar enough to Visual Studio that I could figure things out quick. And it’s got one nice feature – hold CTRL and mouse over an include directive and it’ll tell you the path of the file you’re including (or tell you that it cannot find it). Nice.
More good stuff tomorrow, including a CHALLENGE! (For me, not for you. Sorry.)
So.
I’m looking at my SVN repository.
I’m supposed to be working on Zeta.
But instead I open the Inaria project. See, back before I started working for Stardock I was making an iPhone version of Inaria. I had greatly expanded the game, with new maps and NPCs and…well, everything. I didn’t get a chance to finish it before I lost access to the Mac Mini I used for Mac development, and I started to think that it was a real shame I never got to publish the new version of Inaria.
So I will 🙂 Zeta’s on hold. Yes, I’ll get back to it, but in the end we game programmers are crazy. We have to work on what draws us.
Plus, I think you guys are going to love the new version of Inaria.
Guess who’s an official Apple Developer now?
Go on, guess.
I’ll wait.
But that’s not all. Oh, no, that’s not all.
I’m employed, and have been for the last two weeks. I’m working for a company called Warped Productions, making (of all things) iPhone games.
It’s currently a temporary gig with no benefits, but I have every intent of proving that they cannot get along without me.
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys earlier, but I wanted to clear with my bosses how much I can talk about (which boils down to, yes, talk about Warped and talk about our development process but give no details of the games we’re making).
Now, this is not going to affect Inaria one bit – I made absolutely sure of that before I signed on. Inaria will still be published, and it will be published under the “Viridian Games” label. (Label! Tee hee!) But after Inaria is done I won’t be making any more of my own iPhone games while I’m working for Warped.
And here I have to give huge thanks to Ryan Clark, who convinced me to port Inaria to the iPhone and even lent me a Mac Mini so I could do so. If he hadn’t pushed me in this direction, I wouldn’t have gotten this job.
So Ryan, thank you. Bottom of my heart, man.
Today I registered my sole proprietorship, which means I can now do business using the name “Viridian Games”. Before this it was just the name of my blog, but now it’s the name of my company – something I rarely thought I’d ever have…
Tomorrow I’ll pay the $100 to become an official Apple developer and fax them the registration form. Then I’ll be ready to submit Inaria when it’s done.
I will tell you what I’ve learned over the last eight months – never have a single revenue stream. I wish I’d learned this when I was twenty.
After two stupendous days of work, it’s really starting to come together. Not only do combat, inventory, talking and buying and selling work (along with the graphical enhancements) but I just got MP3 support in for music.
Could this be the week? We’ll see.
