One of the things I like that TurboSquid does is they have this quality/certification checklist. This is useful for finding high quality game-ready assets. I think OGA could benefit from having expert moderators being able to mark games as "Certified Game Ready".
How this might work on OGA.
Each art section (on the forums) has a public list of quality checks required to be Certified Game Ready
Uploaders could click a button to request Certification, if they think their model is good enough
Expert mods get an email to check this asset, and approve/reject Certification
Search can be limited to Certified Game Ready art.
Example standard we might have on art.
Overall: general high quality, something we'd actually see in a game.
3D: diffuse/normal/spec maps as needed, clean geometry (outfacing normals, no duplicate facets, etc), normalized loc/rot/scale, origin at 0,0,0. Models meant for movement need appropriate rigging. (here we can actually refer to existing open standard instead of writing our own)
Sprite Sheets: frame position and timing data as needed, minimal expected animations represented (e.g. a character only standing might not qualify as game-ready).
Tile Sets: correct full permutations represented for e.g. walls/corners. Tile sizes (optional offsets, etc) specified.
Well Flare is built to be an Action RPG and nothing more. Combat is the main gameplay and always will be. Story-heavy games require branching dialog and should be built in another engine.
I say this because Flare has always been about small, controlled scope. Otherwise it's almost impossible to actually finish and engine and make a game using it. Flare is already 3.5 years old, and even slight additions in scope threaten to expand the project by years. Consider, for example, that FreeDroid's dialog engine alone is about 10k lines of code -- nearly a third of the size of all of Flare. Flare gets a lot done in a tiny amount of code because of its focused purpose.
Combat is central to the Action RPG genre, but there are certainly ways to make it less violent. Imagine a cartoony game in Flare where you're a wizard kid shooting a bubble wand at tiny monsters, and instead of dying the monsters turn into candy.
Or to make the enemies really deserving of violence. Undead and demons are easy. Natural beasts less so, as they're mostly acting territorially. Sentient humanoids are really questionable unless they're actively part of some larger evil plot (e.g. they're at war, slaughtering humans). I don't like the idea of actual human enemies at all, and I don't think I'm a mature enough writer to have an effective human villain.
With Wandercall I have a story designed that most, if not all, of the enemies are obvious evil. Where they aren't obvious evil, they're metaphysical -- personal demons instead of literal demons.
Once we have final official game text, we probably will use a system like that. As we get closer to version 1.0 of the engine we may start using it for the engine text at least.
We have a temporary solution with Gems: gems retain 100% of their price when selling, so players should buy gems and store those in their stash.
Long term we are considering converting gold to a stackable item that goes in a regular item slot. If we do that, moving gold to the stash will automatically work.
One of the things I like that TurboSquid does is they have this quality/certification checklist. This is useful for finding high quality game-ready assets. I think OGA could benefit from having expert moderators being able to mark games as "Certified Game Ready".
How this might work on OGA.
Example standard we might have on art.
Overall: general high quality, something we'd actually see in a game.
3D: diffuse/normal/spec maps as needed, clean geometry (outfacing normals, no duplicate facets, etc), normalized loc/rot/scale, origin at 0,0,0. Models meant for movement need appropriate rigging. (here we can actually refer to existing open standard instead of writing our own)
Sprite Sheets: frame position and timing data as needed, minimal expected animations represented (e.g. a character only standing might not qualify as game-ready).
Tile Sets: correct full permutations represented for e.g. walls/corners. Tile sizes (optional offsets, etc) specified.
casimps1: ooh, this is fun. Clever game idea!
(edit) and I'm not very good at it, but it's fun to watch the Minotaurs just wreck shit!
Well Flare is built to be an Action RPG and nothing more. Combat is the main gameplay and always will be. Story-heavy games require branching dialog and should be built in another engine.
I say this because Flare has always been about small, controlled scope. Otherwise it's almost impossible to actually finish and engine and make a game using it. Flare is already 3.5 years old, and even slight additions in scope threaten to expand the project by years. Consider, for example, that FreeDroid's dialog engine alone is about 10k lines of code -- nearly a third of the size of all of Flare. Flare gets a lot done in a tiny amount of code because of its focused purpose.
Combat is central to the Action RPG genre, but there are certainly ways to make it less violent. Imagine a cartoony game in Flare where you're a wizard kid shooting a bubble wand at tiny monsters, and instead of dying the monsters turn into candy.
Or to make the enemies really deserving of violence. Undead and demons are easy. Natural beasts less so, as they're mostly acting territorially. Sentient humanoids are really questionable unless they're actively part of some larger evil plot (e.g. they're at war, slaughtering humans). I don't like the idea of actual human enemies at all, and I don't think I'm a mature enough writer to have an effective human villain.
With Wandercall I have a story designed that most, if not all, of the enemies are obvious evil. Where they aren't obvious evil, they're metaphysical -- personal demons instead of literal demons.
Once we have final official game text, we probably will use a system like that. As we get closer to version 1.0 of the engine we may start using it for the engine text at least.
Are you trying to add gold storage to the Stash?
If so I'd suggest skipping this feature for now.
We have a temporary solution with Gems: gems retain 100% of their price when selling, so players should buy gems and store those in their stash.
Long term we are considering converting gold to a stackable item that goes in a regular item slot. If we do that, moving gold to the stash will automatically work.
menu->inv->currency is the actual amount of gold that the hero has.
You should ignore stats->currency, it is only used in unusual situations and will probably be refactored.
Incidentally, I think the terms of the WTFPL allow us to host it here under CC0.
IOS is unlikely. We like the GPL but the App Store does not.
The main mobile platform we're going to target soon is the GCW-Zero. Once we have it working great there it will be easier to port to other places.
Ooh good catch. We'll even add this to the 0.18.1 bugfix mini release.
Are you on GitHub? If so, you can send this patch in and I'd accept it there. The main repo is at:
http://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine
If you're not on GitHub, we can add the feature manually (and add you to the Credits, of course).
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