I am sitting down to design out a game that has been just millin around in my head for months now. The design has been on and off, mostly because when I realize I have no artist I loose inerest, as my own art runnin around on the screen doesnt interest me... But there are some design issues for this game (synopsis coming up) that I just cannot seem to come to a good solution for. Basically I want to create a game I think would be fun, and that would be a game that is a deathmatch arena game of mages, with different specializations runnin around and casting spells at eachother...since spells can fizzle this is represented by a spell cast system that is similar to black and whites mouse gesture system to represent the fizzling.... I would like the mages to run around casting spells and gaining experience to cast more powerful spells...perhaps I would like them to have stats...remember though this is an action game so the stats would be gained perhaps by what kind of spells you cast (again i dunno on this end) and the stats would help you to perhaps, cast more spells faster, take more damage, run faster etc...sorta like simplefied RPG built for action. The thing is, since its a DM Arena game how should they gain experience? if they kill other mages (who then respawn at level 1) they get experience, but if there is someone just waxing up they can gain many levels while most people remain low level, becoming even that much harder to kill...how to solve this? *Change what gains XP *Add NPC resovoirs of enemies that respawn to give XP, this would be similar to Warcraft 3''s creeping. *Create a mod where when someone gets so many levels above everyone else they become the hunted archmage, sorta like smear the queer. *Make some grand unifying level cap in a creative way(dont know how to do this). The game view will either be top down 2d action scroller, sorta like a smash TV view...or it will be a FPS (*lol* for it to become that I will have to find more than just myself to work on this project.) So anythoughts? helps? ideas? would be great since I hate working in a "box" -Shane

A solution to the high level killer would be to make getting higher levels much harder than the previous level. This would make him gain each level slower as he becomes higher level, giving time perhaps for others to level up.

Also you should do something like a bounty system, where the longer someone remains unkilled the higher a bounty they receive. This could be an incententive for the lower levels to gang up and kill him for the experience or to gain good experience from some camper.

Thats my 2 cents!

Thats what i was saying with the smear the queer system, but the bounty makes the incentive all that much sweeter. Thanks.

Graphically perhaps showing how much health a charactrer has could be nice, so those other mages know who to gain up on if they soo choose.

I think for the first version, since i have to do whats within my means...I would like to do a tiled engine of sorts, that scales the tiles in and out to reveal more or less of the scrolling playing field depending upon whose around (cannot think off hand of a game that does this to demonstrate what im talking about, perhaps the cloest game is samuri showdown, how it scales in and out to show more or less of the screen by how far apart the players are.

-Shane

I totally get it, though I've never seen it done in 2D (though I suppose it could be done) I think you're describing something like smash brothers (the zoom in/out system), if you've ever played that, for either N64 or Gamecube. If you have played it, am I understanding correctly?

EDIT: Speaking of gesture recognition... I'm familiar with it, but how do you do it? The only way I could think of is make a crude representation of the gesture with a few rectangles and check to see if the mouse hits certain "check points" within those rectangles within a given amount of time. Is there a better way of doing it?

[edited by - Peon on January 21, 2003 9:34:47 PM]

There are several ways, the way I am doing it is more how they probably do it on say a palm pilots graffiti thingy. (The short short version) You get the points and normalize them, then do a quick little check to see if they are closed to the normalized values of the gesture, and u get a threshold for a match and return the best match.

There are other ways to do it, the gesture system is the only thing I have working...and only thanks to someone who sent me his way of doing it (i dont have his name now, but will have to get his name to put him in the credits ) but it works out farily well,and the nice thing is, the software he sent me had the gesture recognization and a gesture creation thing, that would store to a list the values for gestures, and i could assign several near gestures to one gesture, say the number one, i could go through and draw the number one several ways, and store those and the computer will then match your gesture against all those (So there is some lead way to the gesturing...makes it more accurate)

And yes i played smash brothers melee. again I have nailed down how to do the graphics, honestly if I were to start working on this now, it would take place in a single screen with no scrolling top down animation...until i get more time to work on the tile engine and get some actual artists....

I was thinking about using the Programming Role Playing games in Direct X book (great book) to hack one of the demos to attach in the gesture system (I think its some sort of chars demo) but unfortuantly I dont have any ability to do graphics in 3d .x animations. I have truespace 4.1 but apparently I cannot figure out how to do the animations for a .x file for that...and in general its hairy stuff, so thats stopping me from using the game core of that book for this game...so it looks like ill be using the game core from Tricks of the windows game programing guru''s (but ive got the engine running 800x600 16bit with some extra functons like an alpha blending, thats used only in very specialized effects)...

wow okay enough of my babbling.

-Shane
p.s. does this game sound fun at all? i hate once again designing in a box, so i like to hear more suggestions to further the fun of this game...oh and if theres any artists out there...that would be nice