hi, i am working on a 2D action style online RPG. the game is futuristic, gritty cyberpunk style ala Shadowrun. anyway, i have been thinking a little more about the design lately, and would like your opinions on something. i want the player to be able to customize and make his player to be as unique as possible from other players. i think this is very important in a virtual world and i think a major aspect of this is the physical appearence of the characters. so, i want to make it so players can be as customizable as possible (read: how much art i can get an artist to make [smile]). now, let me explain how i want the art to be done. basically you would be able to create a base character, and then different outfits (armor, clothes, etc) could be equipped, and this would physically effect what your character looks like. (e.g. the clothes would be drawn over your character sprite). now, im not looking for the greatest art in the world here. im satisfied with 5 frame cycles and 4 directions. i could even go lower on the frame count even. im really looking for quantity and customization over quality. anyway, i dont have much money, and im not expecting anyone to be willing to make a lot of art for the game. now heres the problem: i want different races to be in the game. races such as Orc, Troll, Elf, etc. now, if i put different races in the game, this would mean N times more the amount of art needed, where N is the number of races i have. however, what i could do, is make all races the exact same dimension, and just make their base character to appear different. this way all the different outfits and stuff would fit and work right with all the different races. anyway, what do you all think about this? will it look crappy to have all these different races which were the same size? should i just stick with humans only? also, i have to mention another thing thats kind of related to this. the game is not level based, but skill based. you can mix and match any skills you want. i want the skill system to be very generic, so you dont have to throw away your character if you wanted to learn different skills and make a completely different style character (e.g. switch from gunner to mage). now, with that in mind, what do you think about bonuses based on race? e.g. an elf has +10 "dex" and a troll has +10 "strength"? do you think this would hurt the "genericness" of the system im going for? i mean, if you picked one race, it would kind of be wastefull if you ever wanted to switch to different skills that werent effected by the bonus your race had. however bonuses kind of give more meaning to the different races. thanks for any help.

I see that you're trying to do something a la Ultima Online here.

There are some points you should consider:
1) if you're making all the races the same, then all your characters will look the same. Green skin over white skin doesn't count.
2) If you're doing the races different in size/proportion you could get away with less art if you're making requirements for armors, such as, let's say the uber power armor that gives +500 to strength can only be worn by trolls. And since they are of a certain constitution (bulkier) you would need to create the armor ONLY for the troll race.
3) Run-time generation of sprites can save you millions of hours of artwork crafting (I'm exagerating here, but you get the point). For example, create a "blank" armor that has a generic color. Let's say greys between indices 1-20 in the palette (you should use indexed sprites, it makes them smaller/easier to control) with stripes of colors between 21-23. Having this information in place you could give the armor different colors for the base and stripes, so it could look different on every character. And VOILA! 1000 armor pieces instead of one. If you do this with 10-20 armor pieces you could have a variety that anybody would envy. The only thing you would need in this case is an item editor that would save the parameters, instead of the whole sprite, and a piece of code for generating colors.
4) Expanding on point 3 you could go one step further and allow the player to dye his clothes/eqipment where possible. For example a store-bought kevlar vest could be dyed, but a military grade SWAT vest with a badge and stuff couldn't.

And this way you could go for 8 or even 16 positions instead of 4.

Regarding the other problem, if you want to put more races than one it would be natural that they have some unique abilities, even in the form of stat bonus. Otherwise, a human would be as strong as a troll or as dextrous as an elf.. and that's really strange and even defeats the purpose to even work on different races as a developer.
What you're aiming here is not something generic, but flexible. And it is normal for a human that only fires the rifle all his life to become an excellent rifleman. Yet, an elf with the same amount of training should have a good chance to win a quick draw between them two.

And, as a last note you should remember that customization and variety is of utmost importance in a RPG, let alone a MMORPG. The player needs to feel he's playing a role. How can he be playing a role when he has 20 clones of himself on the screen ?

Hope it helped

[Edited by - Vaipa- on January 12, 2005 1:07:13 AM]

also four directions can be reduced if you mirror left right, up and down for the art.

Idle curiousity, but when you say 2D action oriented, is that Isometric 2D(angled view), or top down?

In any event, mirroring character sprites is a good way to save on using sprites yes, but it depends on the appearance of the sprite, as sometimes it can become really apparent that your doing it. An example would be a character who has a really huge datajack implanted into the left side of his head, and it looks like he has two because the image would be mirrored. Or if a character was holding a gun in his left hand, he would become magically ambidextrous.

*EDIT* Incidentally, if your making a game based of off Shadowrun, you may want to read about some of the idea's we bounced around Here.

He wouldnt need different textures for different directions if he was doing a top down :-p. But filla, that is an interesting thing to consider, i dont know how much youve worked on your engine, but a top down style (see crimsonland) is relatively easy to create and still can be interesting, it would eliminate your need for a new sprite for every direction and make choosing where to overlay the new armor/clothes/whatever very very simple, then you could separate out legs/torso animations, and it all meshes together pretty well, but the race thing is still a problem, in some cases you could probably just scale the "add on" so that it would fit the orc instead of a human, that sort of thing

hope that helps
-Dan

As a point of reference, when i refer to "Top Down", i mean in such games like Final Fantasy, The Legend Of Zelda, and other such games where you see his front/back and sides. Not direct overhead views in games like SmashTV and Notrium, where you only see his head and shoulders.

[Edited by - Gyrthok on January 12, 2005 7:14:08 PM]

Quote:

Original post by graveyard filla hi, i am working on a 2D action style online RPG. the game is futuristic, gritty cyberpunk style ala Shadowrun. anyway, i have been thinking a little more about the design lately, and would like your opinions on something. i want the player to be able to customize and make his player to be as unique as possible from other players. i think this is very important in a virtual world and i think a major aspect of this is the physical appearence of the characters. so, i want to make it so players can be as customizable as possible (read: how much art i can get an artist to make [smile]). now, let me explain how i want the art to be done. basically you would be able to create a base character, and then different outfits (armor, clothes, etc) could be equipped, and this would physically effect what your character looks like. (e.g. the clothes would be drawn over your character sprite). now, im not looking for the greatest art in the world here. im satisfied with 5 frame cycles and 4 directions. i could even go lower on the frame count even. im really looking for quantity and customization over quality. anyway, i dont have much money, and im not expecting anyone to be willing to make a lot of art for the game. now heres the problem: i want different races to be in the game. races such as Orc, Troll, Elf, etc. now, if i put different races in the game, this would mean N times more the amount of art needed, where N is the number of races i have. however, what i could do, is make all races the exact same dimension, and just make their base character to appear different. this way all the different outfits and stuff would fit and work right with all the different races. anyway, what do you all think about this? will it look crappy to have all these different races which were the same size? should i just stick with humans only? also, i have to mention another thing thats kind of related to this. the game is not level based, but skill based. you can mix and match any skills you want. i want the skill system to be very generic, so you dont have to throw away your character if you wanted to learn different skills and make a completely different style character (e.g. switch from gunner to mage). now, with that in mind, what do you think about bonuses based on race? e.g. an elf has +10 "dex" and a troll has +10 "strength"? do you think this would hurt the "genericness" of the system im going for? i mean, if you picked one race, it would kind of be wastefull if you ever wanted to switch to different skills that werent effected by the bonus your race had. however bonuses kind of give more meaning to the different races. thanks for any help.

Does the character start to "lose" his old skills which he/she does not use? If not, it seems like that in your game one character could easily become a-jack-of-all-trades.. Which isn't too fun regarding team play. A healer-warrior-blacksmith-miner-mage who can make himself new weapons, use his two-handed sword of ass kicking +5 while throwing fireballs at the dragon and healing himself at the same time would pretty much kill any teamplay.

In my opinion, characters shouldn't be TOO generic. A troll shouldn't be a good mage because he can never achieve the same intellectual level than a human, for example. This doesn't mean that the troll couldn't practice magic. He would just be stuck on the lower spell levels and would advance much more slowly in magic (as his intelligence/learning capacity is quite low).

Imho humans should be a generic race which can advance in any skill. Then other classes could specialize just to specific skill set. And by specializing I mean that they can advance much easier in that class.

Ok, end of post. I hope I made some sense.

hi guys,

thanks for the replies. yes, the game is top down, but NOT 100% overhead.. it is top down console style RPG ala Final Fantasy 3 or Shadowrun for the genesis. and yes, there WILL be a skill cap (and furthermore, there are stats, which skills use in their forumalas, e.g. strength will help with close range combat, "dex" will help with gun combat), making it difficult to be a "jack of all trades".

im going to be releasing a demo pretty soon. its not much, but its a basic core engine (maps,buildings, chat, PvP combat, death, character / account creation, logins). i also have a full featured level editor, MySQL database, etc.. its 9 months worth of work and im really proud of it. im mainly releasing the demo so i can start looking for artists though, its not going to be really playable or anything.

thanks again for any more ideas (*rubs hands* and im gunna start digging into that Shadowrun thread).

btw, for those who havent guessed by now, yes, the game is very heavily Shadowrun and Ultima Online inspired. im going for an actiony style MORPG, which encourages PvP combat through a gang / drug dealer system, and a job system (ala Shadowrun "runs"). note: NOT a MMORPG. i simply cannot afford to pay 100+ dollars a month for bandwith. but if i get a good user base, i could eventually create "premium accounts", charge players a monthly fee, and then get a nice, dedicated server to run the game on. (hence making it more "massive").

Not sure what the reqs for your graphics are going to be but another option is to use palletized graphics and cycle the pallet to get more "colors" to represent different items with the same base graphic. I believe Ultima Online uses that option.

yes, and Vaipa- touched on this as well. the whole "dye tub" system was very clever. they also used this system for choosing skin tones.

im a little worried about bandwith usage for this though. character customization will already add a decent amount of bandwith, if i restrict it so that there is only 256 different outfits (or less), which is what i plan on doing, then this is 1 byte for each piece of your body, and about 4 bytes for the entire character total (head, chest, legs, arms).

if i add modulation to the game, e.g. colorize different clothes / armor / skin, then this adds another 2 bytes to each clothing piece. now you might think "2 bytes, who cares", however, in an online game, 2 bytes adds up FAST.

it might be worth it though. im still not really sure how good of a connection i have. i plan on putting togeather a machine and running it as a dedicated server on my cable connection.