Looking for Game Story
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 12:31
I've been a software engineer for 10-ish years and I've had this itch to build a game since I was a kid. I finally told my wife I would start doing it and now I've made enough progress that I want to ask for help from other people. I've constructed a game engine in AS3 (Adobe Flash) that's decent and is capable of generating a terrain as well as characters if I have graphics. It follows basic rules of physics like not running through walls and such but that's about it. It's not exactly the most advanced engine but it works pretty well as a 2D game engine. I want to make an RPG but I'm horrible with making good ideas. I can code just about anything but my idea of fun isn't the same as everyone else.
The maps really help. Thank you for that. Also, thank you for the additional details. This really helps me.
Since this is a fertile region but adobe would be appropriate should I assume the climate is fertile desert? Similar to Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Amman, or neighboring areas?
By any chance is this similar to Dune? Frank Herbert had some good imagination and it was a desert setting with minimal magical influence, just Spice and some other interesting things. If that's too far off the mark let me know something your story can be related to so I have a frame of reference for Sharm to start making stuff.
When I started first, I had far east chinese/japanese style in mind. But I didnt felt their building style will do good for the story, so I have gone with mostly Anatolian/Turkish (mix of both wooden and adobe buildings) architecture, which can look very mysterious when packed tightly. To be honest I havent read dune books and dont have much idea except for few stories and sandy setting, so I can't say for sure. But I was not imagining any deserts either, may be some pain soil/rocky areas and foresty areas. Towns interior is mostly plain soil with some trees and bushes around. Main streets are paved.
For statues and landmarks, those blue rectangles where supposed to be them. However, it seems like I havent noted anything about them. I distinctly remember empty circles to be wells. Probably one of the statues could be the emperors, another one to be the General Hatrok. There is a filled circle which could be some sort of a fountain.
I found an image that somewhat captures what I think:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RuinsofSardis.jpg
Please ignore the architecture. In addition to this one there would also be a forest and a large mountain to the north.
Trimak represented by a real city
When you say Anatolian/Turkish do you mean Southeasern Turkey? Maybe like Sanliurfa? Would Urfa be a good example city to take architecture and other visual ideas? It is influenced by Eastern peoples (the Mongols controlled the city for a time), it has a similar environment to what you've described (not desert but dry enough adobe is appropriate, mostly soil and some rocky areas with mountain and light forest near by), and it has an economy based in trade and farming. From the detail I've gathered about your story this city seems to somewhat match your idea of how Trimak looks/feels. Please tell me if I'm wrong.
Maybe Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, or another Turkish/Anatolian city would better represent Trimak. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Statues and other significant markings
Mount Nemrut has a lot of interesting statues and possible content we could reproduce or immitate if you think that style would mesh well with the rest of your story. I'm thinking statues for the 5 gods, smaller monuments like the emperors and general Hatrok, and maybe decoration and religious markings.
Religious influences
What sort of religious influence does Trimak feel? Is it mostly one religion or a mixture? Do the religious buildings look like churches, mosques, temples, cathedrals, or something else? Are they prominent and active or have they been somewhat ignored by the people? People as a whole always have some kind of religion they identify with, I'll need to know what that major influence is.
Religious buildings/structures
I know the 5 gods will play a role in this but after 800 years people are bound to replace the old religion with something else. I need to know several things about the religious buildings:
I know this is a lot of detail and some of these questions are hard to answer but I need them answered so we can get the right look and feel.
Stats and number system basis
I'm decently familiar with d20 systems. I noticed you use a 1-100 scale for your rumors table which leads me to believe you're basing this on a d20 system. Is this a campain for D&D? If so is it 2nd, 3rd, 4th edition, Pathfinder, Whitewolf (d10 or d20 system) or something else? Maybe I missed the mark completely but that's the immediate impression I get when I see the table. I can work up a variant d20 system for this game without much problem, that's easy enough and pretty well established so I can take inspiration from many sources.
A little more foresty Urfa would do the trick. We want some dense forest to hide secrets. Kujasa is faithless, even before the temple was razed. They tolarate religious people as long as they mind their own business. But their numbers are a few. Thus any sort of religious activity is done in their homes. This can be observed by fact that Trimak has no religious buildings at all. Statues for five gods could be the items that are needed to transfer the city. Or even one of them could be hidden by the herbalist.
The system is a d20 system, however, it is custom tailored for hand to hand combat. I can translate the ruleset if you like. Also you can check Trouble in Libreland as we have used a similar system there. Its based on block/parry/dodge system which hits are generally devastating but not very often. It is pretty good for table top games to increase the tension. I find it very hard to say "The orc crits and smashes your head with a sledge hammer, you loose 15hp and still healty enough to fight back". You may use any system including the one in here. But there must be abilities and skills to offset the inexistance of any magic/supernatural things. Although there should at least be a basic magic system as if the temple is built, some NPCs will be able to use them.
PS: If you want a preview of what is to come, or may be even try to get google translate to work, I have uploaded Turkish version of the full document. I do some refining as I translate too.
I found a lot of links to Trouble in Libreland. Looks like quite the journey you made getting that game off the ground. I played it for a bit, it's nice. Found the links here on OGA and your source forge link:
sourceforge.net/projects/trinlibr/
If you want to work on this game together (more than just the story) I'm happy to post what I've got on source forge, github, an svn repo, whatever works for you. If you prefer just to contribute the story I'm happy with that too. Either way works. Eventually I'll have to put it somewhere easier to view but that can be between now and the first beta release.
My intention is to put this game on kongregate (GameStop flash games website) and release the source under CC-BY or something similar once it's bug-free and finished. I'm open to a second part or another game in the same universe later.
As for graphics for this game I'll need to have an adobe building set created because I don't see one here on OGA (please show me if I'm wrong). Would you mind picking out some statues that look like the 5 gods, some emperors, and general Hatrok? What do you think about some of the statues and related artifacts on mount Nemrut? I thought they would fit with the story and style you've described so far.
I added dialog with support for menu options. Check the demo for an update.
The nemrut statues feel alright for temple relics. For other statues, I guess desaturating then colorizing standard LPC chars would to the trick, if I get time I will go ahead and do it. The general should be some one in plate armor, where as king might have some civilized garment. I have seen some pixel art adobe architecture but they were tiny and not suitable.
For development, I would like to give a hand but I dont have Flash CS5 and have a little time at hand.
For Kongregate I am perfectly OK with it and I am a regular there as well (with same name).
@ cemkalyoncu
Do you think some of the architecture found in North Nicosia would be appropriate for this game story? Maybe some of these links would clarify what I mean:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicosia_Buyuk_Han_02.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nikozja_kyrenia.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nikozja_polnoc3.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicosia_3_April_2008_09.jpg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NikosiaNord.jpg
Sorry for the stack of links, it's the only way I could visually convey the message.
EDIT
A simple google images search for North Nicosia is probably easier to convey the images I want to show you.
google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=north+nicosia
@ cemkalyoncu (again)
Another question about game content - Are there different races in this story (besides humans)? Are there skeletons, zombies, monsters, or other types of baddies that I should be considering before I start working in a stats system? Any significant considerations otherwise dealing with things not human? Thanks.
Good thing is, I live in Northern Nicosia. The region is way too dry but the architecture is very fitting. Also check this image for placement of buildings and vegetation, not the architecture. Imagine a river instead of sea.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Antalya_-_Yivli_Minar...
There will only be two human races no non-humans. Natives and the barbarians. Barbarians are secretive people that does not talk about their past. But its known that they have migrated from far north. There wont be any sort of supernatural monsters. Giant animals or insects are possible (even there is a quest about it).
Maybe I should ask my question this way - What kind of animals/insects/creatures will the hero of this story encounter (or show during cut scenes, etc.)? Are all the creatures needed in the base LPC set/on OGA/already created somewhere? Should we consider making some new creature graphics for this game?
For humans we are missing axe that would be required, other than that we are covered in that aspect. For wild animals, I should go over all quests to be able to say that. But I know that there are bugs in LPC style.
What kind of axes do we need? 2-handed? single handed? blades on both sides? blade on one side? Battle axe? simple axe? wood axe? throwing axe? All of the above? I'm happy to make some axes but I need more specific details.
EDIT
I've looked through some of the assets on OGA previously and I just looked again. I also looked on makrohn's Universal LPC Spritesheet website. No axes anywhere. Definitely something that should be created and added to OGA at minimum.
Here's the link to the sprite sheet section I checked:
github.com/makrohn/Universal-LPC-spritesheet/tree/master/weapons
Single sided one handed axe fitting to slash animation will do just fine. Details doesnt really matters. They will be the most popular barbarian weapon.
Are you thinking barbarian like this sprite set?
opengameart.org/content/lpc-barbarian-sprite-base
If not this one maybe we can generate a slightly different one. A variant of the base set shouldn't be too difficult to make. We might even use this one and just polish it a bit so it fits the standard sprite assets like armor, weapons, etc.
Looks great, but he is too wide for standard armor. But weapons should work. Good part is that we can leave it as it is and fit him some cloths as some of them would be more civilized. It is quite suitable when fighting they will prefer no armor at all. Also a female variant would be nice.
Hair and moustache only has one way. That might take time to adapt.
I'm happy with working a few assets for one or two non-standard characters but barbarians are a major component of your story, right? Wouldn't it benefit us more if we had a barbarian that fit all our standard assets? Just thinking out loud here.
Their numbers are limited in Trimak, but originally, I was planning to model Quashi village too. So it depends on the size of the game. Also its easy to add an element that barbarians think wearing an armor is an insult to their abilities. This will saves us from the necessity of armors for them.
@cemkalyoncu
If you put the limitation that barbarians can't wear upper body armor that might do the trick. They cannot wear pants as they are. One possible solution might be to chop off the lower half and replace with regular legs when wearing pants, that would ensure all the lower body accessories fit. If they're being covered there's a good chance cutting the sprite in half and playing dress-up doll might work just fine.
By the way, I don't know if you prefer using tiled or something else. We should probably decide on a common format for making levels that I can recreate in the game. I'm making the levels out of tile sets in 32x32 increments similar to the layout tiled uses. If you prefer something else I'm open.
Made some changes to the way dialog is displayed. I decided to use a piece of the boarder image found on the LPC homepage (specifically this one: lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/assets.html#misc). Just chopped out the bottom left corner and it gets rotated around as needed during game play. It draws the sidebars as needed so dialog box size doesn't matter.
I think I can scratch off all the dialog items on my to-do list. If you think of something else that we might need I'm open ears. One nice feature about Flash text fields is they'll take a string of HTML and display it correctly. They'll even take a string of CSS and parse it and allow you to apply it to an HTML string! Pretty nifty features I uncovered when looking through the text field documentation on adobe docs.
I decided to upload a screenshot of my demo just for kicks. Some people will see the wall of text and not bother with a link buried some place within a comment somewhere around the middle of the first page (it can be a bit of a pain to find).
I cannot get used to tiled to be honest and we did our own map editor in Trouble in Libreland, but I guess it would do ok as long as you can handle objects and such. Also I can get some help from others to design the maps.
A low pixel font would go nicely with the border, but I guess it wont be very easy.
If tiled isn't your favorite program let's use something else. I thought it might be helpful only because it roughly fits our needs for a map editor. Maybe just a basic HTML5 drag and drop editor that allowed you to save and open levels as Json would be better? I can roll something simple up pretty quick with jQuery and HTML5 if you want. Maybe you could point me to a program you prefer if not a simple editor in HTML.
If it will take time and Tiled works for you right now, I see no need for change. I will talk with my students who had success with Tiled and may be they will be interested in designing the map. Some of them really likes to contribute. Here is the one that uses tiled:
http://sourceforge.net/p/the-fallen/svn/73/tree/
Maps are designed by another student who also helped designing the map for TiL. When I get the chance I will talk with him about this.
Just wanted to pop in and say it looks really great so far. I laughed at the dialog when I read "you are a sad, sad indivudal if you think..."
@cemkalyoncu
To be honest I've never used tiled to make anything, I just opened it once to see what it looked like and fumbled with it for 5 minutes to see what I could do. I'm not worried about spending a day or two making a light weight map editor, that's pretty easy. One benefit to using JSON is flash can also read it. Flash doesn't natively read the format tiled uses. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
@jeremyW
The guys here at the radio station found that pretty funny too. Thanks.
EDIT
I forgot to ask about a font. If you want to link or upload a font you think would work I'll roll it up either as a font or through adobe somehow. Fonts are not hard to make and use.
Well if you feel it would not be a big deal, I think a custom map editor will serve better.
Search boxy bold in the site for an awesome font.
@cemkalyoncu
Found the font. I'll work that in over the weekend, time permitting.
I decided I should give tiled a quick review before discarding it. It takes a little bit to understand and setup but once you understand how it should work it's not bad. Including setup time I was able to throw the attached image together in about 5 minutes. I can reproduce this in a game in short order because Tiled exports to JSON.
If you want I can send you a map with a tilemap and terrain already setup and you can give it another try. I think Tiled would be easier for me than making an HTML based editor because I don't have to troubleshoot or debug or reinvent that tool.
Turned the boxy bold graphics into a font by hand. Had to make the lowercase letters from scratch since it didn't have any. I also did some slight modifications to a couple characters because they weren't displaying consistently. Let me know if you think this font will work as is or if it needs to be tweeked.
I would attach it for your review here but this site doesn't allow me to attach zip files on discussion threads. I uploaded it as a document here:
http://opengameart.org/content/boxy-bold-truetype-font
EDIT
usr_share was kind enough to make lowercase letters after seeing my True Type font. I've updated my font to include these lowercase letters and fixed some errors.
@cemkalyoncu
Sharm finished the first set of graphics I commissioned her to craft. It's a dungeon elements set. If you're interested in seeing what she made you can find it as one of my uploads. She's working on an adobe building set now, she might make an outdoor decorations set before/during/after the adobe building stuff depending on her schedule and interest level.
Tiled is definitely easier and more useful than I realized at first. I would prefer any contributions to this game to be made using Tiled because I can export to JSON and it's not hard to make a reasonable tileset that we can share. I already made a terrain set for tiled, I'm going to work on some more tilesets wiith existing tiles so we have a consistent set to use. Is that alright with you?
Well if Tiled works well with your engine, no problem there. Dungeon set looks awesome and definitely be useful in many places. Not just as a dungeon but if combined with cavern set it could form the coven, without bones it could be used as stables and barbarian homes.
That's kind of the thoughts I had too. I was thinking in the forest if there's a camp fire scene we now have a camp fire and optionally a boiling pot! If we wanted to make something look old we could also discolor or blanch some furniture and turn it sideways so it looks like it's old and forgotten, then we could add spider webs around to add to the effect.
Would you be willing to give Tiled another try? I'll setup some tilesets we can share and I'll send you a Tiled save file that has everything setup so all you have to do is read the documentation on mapeditor.org (assuming you haven't already). I found making a game map with Tiled was ridiculously easy, maybe it was just me.
Dont worry about Tiled and me, designing a map is not a biggie. Just make sure that you can handle everything tiled throws at you. I have sent an email to someone who is good at map design. I am waiting for his answer.
Check the demo and tell me if that's what you had in mind for the game font. I can invert colors or do whatever works for you. It's a white outline on a black background right now because if I do black background and white text nothing shows up (the letters are transparent with a black outline).
EDIT
Added a screen shot.
I think making it white with black border would look better. But is that possible, I dont know that part. If TTF causes issues, you can do a trick: two fonts, one is just the outline, second is the font itself.
I don't think that style of font is suited for more than small amounts of text, it calls too much attention to itself. I'd go with one that has a softer look and higher pixel count than that, though I do like the idea of it being pixelated instead of vector.
We use bitmap fonts in Frogatto & Friends, it's nice to have a custom look.
One problem, though, is that adding support (specifically, fontsheets) for new languages can get pretty tiresome, if you plan on adding translation support.
Also, I second Sharm's opinion: that font is a good fit for titles, but not at all for longer bodies of text.
@cemkalyoncu
I like the font and it looks cool but I don't know if the style matches the rest of the game. I've been messing with the font, tweeking how it displays, and in general trying to get it to look right for the game but I don't know if it's going to work for this. I tried inverting colors and using tricks to get it to display certain ways but no matter what I do it doesn't seem to fit. If you want, I can send you all the fonts installed on my machine and you can pick one, or alternatively you can send me one that you like and I'll embed it.
Original was looking good too. May be overall text size could be smaller.
I'm not going to post every iteration of the demo to my website but I'll post screenshots for prototyping purposes. Here's 5 shots with smaller font going up to the same size font as the last screenshot.
@cemkalyoncu
I know you're working hard and I appreciate your efforts. I have to ask, mainly because I want to read the story, have you managed to translate any more of the game story? We are taking up space in a writer's forum so this discussion should probably have something about writing occasionally...
I recall it's not a complete story but it's still interesting and you still put a lot of work into writing. It's a good basis to make a game. We can figure out a plot along the way without too much trouble once we have more of the details hammered out and a little more graphics work done.
I can take whatever graphics work, maps in Tiled, and story you come up with and work it all together into a game, I'm sure of that. I just need a little more to work on to keep me engaged.
@anyone else
If you have ideas, suggestions, other game ideas, etc. please let me know! You can make a comment here, send me a message on OGA, or use the private message form on my website to send me an email. I promise I don't bite and I'm happy to get feedback.
I totally forgot about writers forum thingy, may be an admin can move the topic? I have uploaded the amount I have translated. To be honest it not much, but I dont have much time recently (its 2am right now in here and I will get up at 6). But I am trying to get some people to help me in translation. I will try to allocate some more time tomorrow.
To make things easier, here is the link:
http://darkgaze.org/kujasa/dm/
Updated the document with little bit of translation.
I have taken some help for translation and some more is finished. He doesnt have much time either but 2x a little time makes a little more.
Cem, you just made me smile. I know exactly how you feel about having very little time. I worked 11 hours today and I'm working part of tomorrow (Saturday) too. I think the only one not working herself to death here is Sharm. We should really take a lesson from her and not work ourselves so hard, then we might have time for more interesting and important things like eating dinner with our families and working on our projects!
Thank you for more story work, I really do appreciate that.
Heh, that's only because I have health issues that get significantly worse when I work too hard. If I didn't I'd be a certifiable workaholic.
You still work so fast and you make such quality! I would never guess you had any trouble at all.
Hi all,
I didn't want to hijack this thread, but @Sharm do you think it would interest you to do a potrait ?
See http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/valyria-tear-character-portraits-request - as Bertram shared on the thread itself he's also open to pay a little if somebody is willing to work on it. If need be please let me know and I can share his email id and you can connect with him.
My interest in this is as a gamer I want to play it and I have found the game enjoyable and with the inclusion of all the LPC graphics that you are doing William Thompson that would be better.
Till l8er.
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