Hi, I’m a master student at DTU and doing my final project. My project is called “Effective Sculpting in a Game Engine”. I had an idea of a FPS where the player could manipulate the terrain or the objects in the world in an effective way using voxels.

I was wondering if you guys in here could help me get some ideas for the game.

okay.... so do I get this right: you are expected to create the game AND this additional system your project seems to actually be about?

(Sculpting in a game engine? Voxel terrain makes sense, but the project title is highly misleading as most people will not think about Voxel Terrain Systems, but about somebody misunderstanding what a game engine is... or creating a sculpting tool inside a game engine, which might actually be a quite nice tool for the engines asset store :) )

That sound either like a) an awful lot to ask a single student to create during a project or b) you are setting quite high targets for a school project... which can be fine, by the way, but it is usually better to aim lower and use the additional time to polish the result, instead of having to hand in an unfinished AND unpolished result.

Personally, I would give 2 advices:

1) Your project seems to be about the Voxel System / Terrain and Object deformation and not about the game itself. Concentrate on that, as it will most probably what will count towards your end score most.

2) I guess you will have about 3-6 months to finish the project. Part of that time will be used for documentation (some say around half of the time should be used for that, but that is general advice for university projects and might not apply in your case).... so you might have 1.5-4.5 months to complete your game. You will need to make sure the Voxel System that the project seems to be about is as polished as possible, so expect to spend at LEAST half of the time on that. Which will leave you with about 1-2 months for the rest of the game... with reserve, testing, planning and all, lets say you have about 1 month to build the game itself (with the voxel system already done and dusted before)

Make sure you can finish the game you planned in 1 month. this means either a very simple game, or a very small slice of a bigger game.

just an idea for a 'game'

You've probably seen the documentaries about wormholes and gravity fieldss in space where they have a surface and the gravity object distorts the flat field and a ball travelling across that field is drawn/deflected by the slopes, etc...

Game would be the player sliding the gravity objects either on a trajectory (moving and going off the 'board' on the otherside or staying and rebounding or somesuch) or by simple player placement to progressively build a contour that will get the projectile 'ball' into some destination target (the gravity fields modifying the projectiles course). Maybe slowly moving target hole or such variations when a stationary one is too easy)

The concept of the game objective is pretty simple, and the movement of the 'ball' through the warped gravity field surface is not particularly difficult. That leaves your graphics and 'terrain' deformations (possibly dynamic) to be done

Are you familiar with A Tale In The Desert's sculpture system? Basically, the sculpture base is a craftable object, and when you place it on the ground it defines a 'fishtank' of game space into which the owner can load any other item they are carrying around in their inventory. So people used sheep, rabbits, fish, clay jugs, gems, bundles of fresh or dried grass, buckets of mud, carts of ore, etc. One of my favorites I saw in the game was a rollercoaster where sheep were riding ore carts on a track of grass. Many people wished the sculpture system would grow additional features, like the ability to procedurally recolor pieces.

Thank you all for your answers. I really appreciate it. As Gian-Reto mentioned the focus is on the terrain/object manipulation. My intention is to make it in unreal engine or Unity3d. The problem now is what the main problem is.

As it is a master project, new ideas should be presented to a given set of problems. The idea is to be able to manipulate every single object in a game. One example is Battlefield where the player can shoot the surroundings, but in a more detailed way. However, I have difficulty defining the problem for this solution, as this is always hard when designing a game.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say "Effective Sculpting in a Game Engine"?

There are games out there that allow for content creation in game. For instance the Cube2 engine is an FPS engine which has a built in cube-ish based multi-user level editor. Players can create levels together, even while switching between editing and the primary game. This is a sculpting system, in effect.

Or... of course... there's minecraft. The whole point of the game is, more or less, sculpting. It's also voxel based as well as an FPS style game.

A little more obscure is a game called Starmade. This is, effectively, Minecraft in space, but many of the individual blocks serve a purpose in the effectiveness of starships which the players build (and, the players build amazingly complex ships in both function and design).

Furthermore, there's "games"(?) like Secondlife (or OpenSim if you want the open source version). At it's core, it has a full terrain building system and object creation (using the manipulation of PRIMitives). While the game is rather dated, it's content creation ability is quite nice.

If you're looking for games ideas, these are games you could look into and get inspiration from... not sure if they'd be considered "effective" (though, their players generally feel they are).

Thank you all for your answers. I really appreciate it. As Gian-Reto mentioned the focus is on the terrain/object manipulation. My intention is to make it in unreal engine or Unity3d. The problem now is what the main problem is.

As it is a master project, new ideas should be presented to a given set of problems. The idea is to be able to manipulate every single object in a game. One example is Battlefield where the player can shoot the surroundings, but in a more detailed way. However, I have difficulty defining the problem for this solution, as this is always hard when designing a game.

Okay... so we have a focus here.

Potentially you already have a solution to the problem, a good idea how to implement it, or at least you can (and should) develop this "solution" first...

What you need now is a little bit of "fluff", a problem to solve.

Voxel Terrain has been done to death, true. Might or might not be enough for a master thesis, don't know what the minimum requirements are there. Creation of every object out of voxels has been done before, though I have never seen a system that achieved a quite realistic look outside of terrain (by realistic I mean, non-minecraft-blocky, but with smoothing between the voxels)... seeing how you could only achieve rather simple objects this way without going CRAZY with your Voxel resolution, that might not be such a good idea.

When we leave Voxel solutions, we enter pretty well known land. Simpler destruction or building systems have been done to death (See Obisidans comment, Secondlife)... there might still be potential, though you might need to think long and hard.

Another route might be to take your Voxelsystem into a new direction. Instead of just letting players shoot up levels (which can be influence gameplay quite a lot, but more often than not, is mostly visual), or construct vanity items (SL for example), how about making your game revolve around your Voxelsystem the way Portal revolves around the, well, portals?

- for example add a puzzle element to your game, to solve the puzzle you have to use your awesome-tool-of-creation-and-destruction-MKII(TM) to change the landscape and objects in the game.

- You need to dig for hidden treasures with your voxelinator(TM).... or a mundane shovel :P

- You need to build awesome fortifications out of voxels to use in some kind of strategics battles where the right placement of fortifications you can pretty much shape yourself, as well as where you dug trenches and where you built earth walls will decide how your defenders will fare

And so on.... I think there is a lot you can do with voxels beside just dynamic destruction. If you like to stay with a shooter, why not create some kind of hybrid? Like a shooter where you can create your own defensive structures! create walls, bunkers, maybe even place turrets, just don't get shot up while digging :)

One thought, building on Gian-Reto's suggestion above: perhaps have a "voxel gun" that sprays voxels in the direction indicated (perhaps affected by gravity); when they hit another voxel, they "freeze" in place, allowing the player to build up bridges and walls. The catch, however, is that the "voxel gun" doesn't create voxels ex nihilo: it only has what reserves that the player provides provide by "digging" voxels from other features in the level; thus in order to build something up the player has to destroy something first. Perhaps further, the "gun" might have a maximum storage capacity, meaning that in order to keep digging the player is required to empty the gun's reserves by firing it somewhere.

This might be especially good in a "traversal" puzzle game--that is, a game in which the puzzles revolve around getting from point A to point B. Imagine something like A Story About My Uncle, but in which, instead of leaps and swings, the player traverses by destroying the platforms about and beneath them in order to reach new destinations--with the potential threat of painting themselves into a corner by removing the wrong chunk of ground and leaving nothing to which to attach new terrain.

Helle everyone

My project will be about mesh modelling. The idea is a game where the player can cut, pick, and shoot objects as he pleases. Right now i have the solution ready, but not a problem. Do you guys in here have a problem this could solve? Im thinking making games react more natural. A game where the player can change the enviroment.

Hope some of you have some ideas. Thank you

Well, to make this all make sense in a game, you need to come up with WHY the player would need / want to change the environment.

The system you are talking about is far to performance intensive and, actually, headline-grabbing (done before, I know, still pretty rare in games) to actually waste it on a sideline role like the unimaginitive "player shoots building, building shows battle damage", without that damage having some gameplay role.

Lets grab some examples of how similar systems have been used before with gameplay effects:

- Spintires: while you drive through the mud, it actually deforms (more or less) physically, and your tires will react to that mud physically.... if you dig a "hole" in the mud with your tire, your vehicle will get stuck.

- BF4: you manage to do enough damage... a building collapses, changing the whole level geometry and thus how the level plays... haven't seen that one in action, but sounded very exciting, if quite taxing on the hardware.

- Worms: quite old and 2D, but still had quite cool landscape deformation capabilities. Sometimes you could only reach an enemy by blasting away parts of the level, sometimes you had to be very careful NOT blasting away part of the level to not endanger your own worms.

for these examples, lets see the players motivation:

- Spintires: the player actually don't want to change the level, but it is unavoidable for him. if he has to drive trhough mud, every action he does in the mud will change it, potentially getting the vehicle closer to being completly stuck. The players motivation thus is to drive through the mude with as little changes to its geometry as possible.

- BF4: As far as I understood it, the only motivation in blasting up the level until the geometry changes is to change how the level is played. That might lead to a more benefical gameplay for some builds, or might just freshen up the expierience.

- Worms: Blasting away parts of the level played an important tactical role. having many meters of solid ground between you and your opponent was the best way to protect your worm from being blown up, and slowly chipping away the solid ground around a concentration of opposing worms might have opened up the possibility of a very powerful chain reaction in later turns.

You could of course also just use it to make things look cool. Have the hero dispose of rocks by punching them to pieces with his fists.... it will not really show off your system as much as it could though, the same could be achieved with traditional means....

I think if you really want to show it off, you need to

a) make it centerpiece of the expierience, thus make sure it has a deep impact on gameplay

b) make sure you ahcieve an effect with it that is hard to achieve with a Voxel system or traditional means (like precut geometry replacing a blown up mesh)

c) make sure the player has a motivation to use the mesh changing capabilities, or prevent it from happening.

Of course, some kind of avatar or object creation system might be a possibility...