Hi, being new here(In fact I'm posting this minutes after registering), I figured the first thing I should do is talk about the game we(My partner and myself) are hoping to eventually create. First I must say that both my partner, and myself are relatively new to game development. We have decided that I would be the artist and he would be the programmer for the most part, but of course would discuss everything and only use things we both agree on. Anyway, I'd rather not bore you with all the annoying details of our situation, so instead I'll simply get on with explaining the game. The idea for this game was originally inspired by sidescrolling games such as Castlevania and Super Metroid, as well as games like Phantasy Star Online. The game is essentially a sidescrolling action game, but combines that with RPG elements such as various statistics, weapon and armor equippables, and numerous items. Players would start by selecting from one of three classes, Fighter, Ranger, or Caster, each with different styles of play. After choosing a class, they would be able to customize their character's appearance by selecting hairstyle, hair color, face type, skin color, and clothin color. Colors would be chosen via an RGB slider similar to the one in Phantasy Star Online, allowing the player to use any color imaginable. The gameplay would depend on the class chosen: Fighters-Can perform combos with close-ranger melee weapons and guard against enemy attacks. The fighter is a close-range character and will have difficulty attacking distant enemies, such as those that can fly high above him/her. Rangers-Can aim their weapon in all directions(Similar to Contra and other shooters) and perform a double jump. Rangers are somewhat lacking in the defense department, so close range fighting can be very dangerous. Casters-When standing still, can produce a targetting reticle to target any single enemy on screen, or the general area for area of effect spells. Casters also have a weak melee weapon for times when standing still is a bad idea(Numerous enemies), but they can not perform combos as the fighter can. All characters can advance in level, increasing their abilities, as well as find different weapons(All which have unique graphics) and armor to improve certain values further. Another aspect inspired by Phantasy Star online is the multiplayer, which supports up to four players at one time. The multiplayer game is the same as the single player, except that enemies are harder depending on the number of players(In all difficulty settings). The game's environments are all connected, with the exception of the games one and only town, which acts as a hub for buying and selling items, or taking quests from the guild. When you reach a new area, usually by defeating the boss of the previous area, you can return to this area instantly from town, rather than having to travel all the way back. Each level is full of secrets to find, and items found are randomized with some items appearing more often than others, allowing for a sort of collection aspect found quite often in games like this(Phantasy Star Online, Shining Soul 2). So thats basically the idea behind this game, currently there is no story as it focuses primarily on gameplay, which I've been told is quite good. Keep in mind, this is only an idea, a concept. I just found this site today and it has helped me understand a few things and how we can get started with programming and the like, so I'll pass this information on to my partner, as he is the programmer of our two-man team, and we'll see what happens from there. I'll admit, this is quite an ambitious game for a two-man virtual team who have almost no experience, but we will definately try our best. Right now this is only a hobby, though we would like to get into the gaming industry if at all possible. Any comments or thoughts on this project are greatly appreciated, as it may be full of flaws due to the simple fact that the entire idea was conceived in the better part of an hour. Thanks for reading.

Sounds like an interesting premise. In my opinion, however, a game isn't made by armour, weapons and spells. My personal recommendation would be to really focus hard on the actual underlying gameplay. Buying weapons and casting spells is all well and good, but it's how the player slays the dragon or rescues the damsel in distress that defines the game itself.

You might want to brainstorm with your friend, and hammer out all the little details of how your engine will work (tile-/vector-based?), what your control scheme will be etc.

Again, it sounds like a really cool game idea. Having worked on a few sidescrollers before, though, I've found the fundamental basics are what matter the most.

Hope this'll help when it comes to the serious design stage, and good luck :)

It's an interesting idea (though I support all of Tim's reservations): it reminds me of a game called Cadash in the arcade and for the Sega Genesis (in a fairly neutered form). Also, a platformer with improvement in is an old idea, and recalls Metroid (as you've said inspired you, and an extremely fine inspiration it is too) and the later Wonderboy games. Certainly Google for Cadash - it's the closest thing to what you describe.

The next two paragraphs are intended as constructive criticism, and you may ignore them if you wish!

Firstly, flaws with the idea as it's presented now. The character classes are clearly useful as a group, but is it badly unbalanced if you're on your own? The Fighter will be very weak against flying enemies (and also fast creatures with ranged attacks); the Ranger will have a double jump, but this can't be used for critical movement (because other classes couldn't finish the game) so it's just a way of exploring certain areas; the Caster will either be able to blow things away, or they will reach him and overwhelm him. Also, will the screen get cluttered with four people playing at once? Will the characters be too small?

Second, flaws with the scale of the idea. This is a big game, even with two people, especially if you aren't doing this full-time, and if you have no experience it's going to kill you. I would advise (and lots of other people will agree) that this is too big for a first game. Although the idea is too interesting to just let it die, you probably need to file it and get the hang of stuff like cloning Tetris and so on, doing ever more ambitious things until you feel you can tackle this. If you wade right into this idea, you won't finish it, but if you do smaller stuff first, you'll get the knowledge you need and you'll feel like you're making progress.

Good luck, though.

Alright, first off, I might not have explained it well enough, but as you said this idea has been used before, this I know. The improvement was not really the innovation, just something to make it more interesting, the multiplayer with different gameplay styles for different classes was intended to be the unique part, most games use characters that generally play the same way, either run up and hit the enemy or fire off guns in all directions, basically what this game does is combine those two and improve on them. The ranger's double jump is something we've been thinking on for a while, originally he had a dodge roll attack, but we weren't really sure about that, I probably should have said his ability was undecided.... The classes and their unbalances are being thought on, we know we want all of them to have different gameplay styles but we're not entirely sure about how to make them balanced as well. I don't think the screen will get flooded, players are not forced to stay on the same screen as the other players like most games, and the characters are large enough to show off what you've created and small enough to leave room for other things. We are going to start small first, but this is what we'll be leading up to, and after this we've got a lot more games planned. We used a program called "RPGmaker2000," for a while, it sucked, and we wanted to move on to bigger things...every game idea we've had has yet to be used. Just as soon as we, or rather he(Since he's the programmer), gets the hang of this programming language(We're using C++), we'll start making all kinds of games. The game I've explained here is supposed to be sort of like an online game, you'll connect to other players to play, but the controls are going to be designed to be similar to the Gameboy Advance controls, not that we're going to try to get it on the GBA, we just think the controls are best suited for it. I'll take what you guys said into consideration and try and fix the flaws, then edit this post with the new description. Thanks.

The guild? What kind of guild, a quester's guild or something? Maybe you could expand on this...

Say you can talk to various hero-type NPC's in town. Maybe in an inn, maybe in this guild itself. You can then pick 2 NPC's besides yourself to go into a level. (You could include a system of deciding whether the NPC's want to ally with you or not -- reputation, your level relative to theirs, etc.) Then, within the level, you can switch between yourself and each NPC at any time to get past various obstacles (or have some kind of waystation where you can do this). If you make a way to instantly exit a level to head back to town (or simply make it possible to go backwards), it wouldn't be too annoying if you happened to pick guys who couldn't get through that level.

This way, part of your play strategy would be making sure that guys you need to use are high enough level to survive the stuff in the level you need to get through at the moment. You can also make a wide variety of terrain puzzles, allowing the player to get through them with more than 1 combination of characters.

Just an idea. :)

i do not want to discourage you (i think the game sounds neat, and there is a horrible lack of 2D sidescroller type games since everyone wants to focus on 3D graphics instead of good gameplay), but you aren't ready to make this game yet. it will probably take years for your partner to "get the hang of" c++, i mean it isn't so hard to understand the basics of the language, but it takes a long time to get good enough to put together a game of any complexity.

even if you were to use visual basic (which is a much easier language to program in) you'd still have to go through the beginner stages: making a program that just displays something lame ("hello world!"), writing a guess-the-number game, tic-tac-toe, tetris, etc etc etc. don't give up, but expect to spend a long time learning and practicing before you can actually make this game.

in order to keep your inspiration alive during this sometimes tedious learning phase, you could design your game idea completely (you should do this anyway, since many projects that fail do so because they weren't planned in enough detail beforehand). work out the details of every character, every single enemy, every single level, every single item, every detail of the combat, etc. basically, by the time you are done writing this design, a complete stranger should be able to make a game after reading it, and come up with something very close to what you imagined in the first place. then you'll have a guide for when you are ready to begin coding and making art.

and check out the "for beginners" section and articles here at gamedev, and make use of the forums. it is THE resource for this kind of thing.

good luck.

I get what you're saying, but he's an incredibly fast learner, and is very good at understanding technical stuff like this. I'm not, which is why I'm just the art guy(Well, and because I can draw fairly well), and we probably will TRY to jump right into it, and if it works, great, if not, we'll try going a bit slower, but not too slow. I doubt it'll take him over a year to learn the language, as I said he's really good at this kind of stuff. As for planning, I've nearly got a fourth of the game design finished, several levels already completely mapped out with pen and paper, character designs, roughly 20 different weapons for each character(And there will be many, many more), around 20 enemies, a few bosses, hidden secrets...it's safe to say that I'm fairly obsessed with this game right now, all of these designs came within 2 hours, and all of them have names(All subject to change before implementing them in the game)...I've even got a few graphics drawn up.... By the way, all graphics will be done in MSpaint, but don't be discouraged, I am the self-proclaimed god of MSpaint. Both my partner and my self could be considered writers(Not published, of course), so if there is a story you can expect it to be at least decent.

There will be no NPCs that will join you, it's either alone, or with a group of human controlled players...NPCs are annoying, and probably a bitch to program.

Well, I didn't mean NPC's in the sense of "guys that wander around behind you shooting bad guys". The only guy you'd see on screen would be the one you were currently playing. The NPC's were just an excuse to let you switch back and forth to use different abilities in different situations. But ok, if you don't wanna do it, it's not like it's my game or anything hehe. I just think it'd be neat is all.