That's another one of my problems, your industry has forgotten us and therefore has no respect at all for who we actually were to you and your own history. We were literally your "founding fathers".

preaching to the choir here.

the PC was not even invented until the year i graduated high school.

i designed my first game at age 5 or 6 or so.

i was raised on avalon hill and Simulation Pubications Inc (SPI) games. we used to take 2 copies of panzer blitz and two copies of panzer leader and put them all together and have 4 people play.

the summer between 8th and 9th grades i discovered dungeon and dragons. spent about one year as a player, and about 6 years as DM and ref. everyone always wanted to play in my world.

i was the president of the wargame club my junior and senior years in high school - no one else wanted the job, so they asked me to do it. <g>.

in 1982 i started writing my first text based D&D game - in basic, on a sperry rand PC w 64K of ram, dos 2.11, 2 360K floppies, and a CGA card (a rather high end PC for the time).

i take it your rube system is a set of AI rules for controlling a side in a tabletop game. i can see how making rules then simply following them would make it possible to make one side play against another.

Rube, effectively acting from the future, re-choreographs what would happen based on the combination of the player's actions and the AI ships actions into what the player expects to see... and not the broken mess that is actually taking place.

i get it - rube is simply look ahead cheating orchestrating the battle. similar to apochIQ's "staging" of battles in the X series of games.

as a hard core gamer, i would prefer to see emergent vs staged behavior.

FYI, my big claim to fame is i wrote SIMTrek, the world first star trek flight sim.

Show me a twisting, turning dogfight. You can't. Because you can't do that. If you could, we'd all be playing space ship games where the ships actually fight back.

you can't because i haven't finished SIMSpace v8.0 yet! <g>.

SIMTrek / SIMSpace has featured true 3d maneuvering combat since 1995 or so.

That's another one of my problems, your industry has forgotten us and therefore has no respect at all for who we actually were to you and your own history. We were literally your "founding fathers".

preaching to the choir here.

the PC was not even invented until the year i graduated high school.

i designed my first game at age 5 or 6 or so.

i was raised on avalon hill and Simulation Pubications Inc (SPI) games. we used to take 2 copies of panzer blitz and two copies of panzer leader and put them all together and have 4 people play.

the summer between 8th and 9th grades i discovered dungeon and dragons. spent about one year as a player, and about 6 years as DM and ref. everyone always wanted to play in my world.

i was the president of the wargame club my junior and senior years in high school - no one else wanted the job, so they asked me to do it. <g>.

in 1982 i started writing my first text based D&D game - in basic, on a sperry rand PC w 64K of ram, dos 2.11, 2 360K floppies, and a CGA card (a rather high end PC for the time).

i take it your rube system is a set of AI rules for controlling a side in a tabletop game. i can see how making rules then simply following them would make it possible to make one side play against another.

I'm gonna throw an example here about the "game industry that has forgotten you".

Romero, Carmack & Co used to be avid D&D players. There's a lot of material in "Masters of Doom" about that.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?28837-John-Romero-Doom-was-directly-inspired-by-a-D-amp-D-session

How exactly has the industry "forgotten" that fact when it's written in black and white in probably the most well-known book about a videogame phenomenon(Masters of Doom)?

This is really straying away from what I was hoping to find out. I really would like to know if anyone out there can think of any way I could actually wind up getting to make my games without having to find a way to raise millions of dollars to do it. Because I know I can't do that.

rule zero: you want anything done at all, you have to do it your god damned self!

get a PC, get an internet connection, download some tools, start learning, start doing. IE do it yourself. that's what i did.

about the only other way is to get a job with a game company and work your way up to the point where you get to decide what the company makes next - if that's even possible.

kickstarter / private funding etc to pay to farm out the work is the only other way.

you should be aware that look ahead cheating and orchestrating battles have both been done before. depending on how its handled, look ahead cheating can often be considered an undesirable game feature. players like to have a level playing field. AI that cheats is often considered BS AI - "This game sucks! they couldn't even write AI that can play without cheating!".

FYI, my big claim to fame is i wrote SIMTrek, the world first star trek flight sim.

My claim to fame is having read through this thread. (This is obviously a sad attempt at humour btw)

In reading this thread two things become readily apparent to me:

1.) Kavik Kang -- You talk too much.

By this, I mean you endeavour to explain things to a degree of complexity that really isn't needed most of the time. This is not intended as an insult I assure you. If someone has a query to a particular point, answer it simply and with brevity don't digress it into a broader scope encompassing more than what was the basic query.

2.) This thread is about:

But I still really would like to get advice about what I might do to actually get to make my games,

Everything that wanders off from this is rather pointless as it doesn't go to what this thread is actually concerned with.

-----------------

I began "designing games" when I was 7 years old. My parents got me a children's game called "Payday". But I didn't have anyone to play it with, my brother was only 2. But that wasn't a problem, because Payday could play itself. So I would just play Payday against it's built-in "AI". At 7, that's how I saw it. I kept doing this throughout my childhood with many different children's games like Payday. Then when I was 13, I think, maybe 14, Axis & Allies came out. Once I had played that a few times, I applied my "board game AI" to Axis & Allies. This was very, very challenging. It was simple with children's games, but making Axis & Allies play itself was an entirely different matter. It took months. Russia is easy, they were playing themselves almost immediately. America was hard. England was even more difficult... and Japan. Japan took a very long time to work out. In the end, I could either pick a nation and play Axis & Allies against my own "board game AI", or I could not even play at all, and just watch my "board game AI" control all five nations. This "Axis & Allies" version of my "Board Game AI" is a fundamental component of "Rube", and how I make games.

My advice: You have been so focused on the video game industry that you have forgotten your roots. What is to stop you from establishing proof of concept utilising existing board games or developing your own based on your current designs. This is not a level of technology that you are incapable of as demonstrated by the above quote and there are more than sufficient examples of board games that have been licensed into video games. Successfully selling a board game would also raise the possibilty of self-financing your video game developments. To be quite blunt, there is a huge market out there for board games.

/advice

Edit (amendment)

But now, as you see, I did get the answer I was looking for. I'm going to do what JBAdams suggested and make a prototype of the cold war game as a board game. Apparently that would be an acceptable prototype, he says it's even been done that way before. That works great for me, I know exactly how to do that. That is easy. I am probably 6 months away from having a complete version since I can't work on it 10 hours a day to do it in three months from where I already am, but I can definitely do that. So that is what I am going to do.

Possibly due to the late hour I didn't read this correctly and so my advice is actually somewhat behind the times. Best of luck with development of board game.

You all know the original Romulan ship from the TOS episode Balance of Terror, the "submarine movie" episode. And you remember it's very powerful weapon, that traveled relatively slowly and "loses power with range". This is a "6th grade level math"-type space combat ACM question... Is this weapon balanced in a general sense, or is there a fatal flaw that must be corrected to avoid a serious game killing balance issue?

before i became a game developer, i was an aerospace and defense engineer. when you start to look at star trek from a technical combat point of view, you quickly discover that generous amount of literary freedom were exercised when it came to things like visual and weapon ranges. one of the real challenges of writing a Star Trek style capital ship space combat flight sim is resolving these inconsistencies into believable combat mechanics. well - that and getting the AI autopilot to fly to a precise point, when it can turn at perhaps 5 degrees per second, but can fly at about 1000x the speed of light- its all about not overshooting the target - without having to creep up on it.

when you start to look at star trek from a technical combat point of view,

I'd imagine any war in a star-trek style environment would be ended by massive lead spears with solar sails accelerating for hundreds of light years, smashing planets in a single blow. Or saboteurs sneaking/assembling Micro WMD's onto ships/planets. Wouldn't make for a very compelling game.

I'd imagine any war in a star-trek style environment would be ended by massive lead spears with solar sails accelerating for hundreds of light years, smashing planets in a single blow. Or saboteurs sneaking/assembling Micro WMD's onto ships/planets. Wouldn't make for a very compelling game.

being limited to sub-light speeds, solar sails would be way too easy to take out.

Star Trek doesn't have a whole lot of WMDs, as i recall, unless you count big black clouds trying to eat the earth type of stuff. i sort of recall some guy with a grain of explosive in his neck that took out about half a ship - but i may be mistaken.

Transporters should be able to screen out any WMDs, holding the offender in stasis in the transporter buffers while the threat is nullified.

So physically carrying a WMD past any security scanners to the target would be the only viable means of delivery.

Kavik Kang:

pick one of your games, and do a pen and paper prototype.

keep the scope as small as possible, just test the core mechanics of your "RUBE" system. here i'm assuming RUBE is a specific type of AI - apparently one that looks ahead and stages things.

i personally prefer robust AI and emergent behavior to "rigging" things but that's neither here nor there. however, a "rigged" AI would possibly be a negative selling point in my book - and perhaps for other players as well. The trick is to make any rigging or cheating not noticeable. And for gods sake don't advertise it! AI that has to resort to cheating is traditionally considered a design flaw, not a feature. FYI i have yet to try X-com's staged battles (written by gamedev member ApochIQ) . i don't know if they are immersion breakers or not. probably not. i had never even heard of staged battles in Xcom until Apoch mentioned it in a post here. knowing Apoch, odds are Xcom gets it right - IE staged, but believable. and yes, combat in decent freespace is a total joke - like flying a shulltecraft. i swear they seem to only fly at about 40 mph! artificially low speeds, artificially high turn rates, different turn rates for different axes of rotation, etc. the "match speed" feature is a dead giveaway that this is not like wing commander, star trek, star wars, battlestar galactica, or any other semi-believable "space fighter" game. and yes, i did a space fighter game too back in the day.

then pick a programming language and do a computerized version of your pen and paper prototype. just the bare bones minimum necessary.

neither the pen and paper or the first computerized prototypes will be used for much more than proof of concept. its possible the first PC prototype could evolve into the first released title.

once you've done that, it should be much clearer what the next step should be (which game, which features, etc to tackle next).

eventually you'll reach "critical mass" where you have enough game and features implemented so that its starting to look like a real game.

if you have zero coding experience and keep the graphics simple, you could get there (critical mass) in 2 years, working on it part/half time.

but its still a long haul from "critical mass" to "gone gold". add 6 months to a year for spit and polish. if you go over a year, creeping featuritis may be an issue.

so if you start now, you could be on steam early access in perhaps a soon as 2-3 years.

Star Trek doesn't have a whole lot of WMDs

Sure it does - photon torpedoes have explosive yields in the megatons, if not higher. The Romulans use nukes and that plasma weapon in "Balance of Terror." Then there's the ships themselves. Warp-capable starships run on matter/anti-matter and carry enough antimatter to explode plenty well if it all went up at once - AND they can travel faster than light (warp) and at relativistic speeds (impulse). I imagine the USS Enterprise could probably sterilize the surface of an Earth-like planet if it really wanted to, even if only by crashing into it as a pure kinetic impactor. Failing that, one could probably build a "planet cracker" ship that was nothing but a lead bullet with a warp drive attached to it.

Successfully selling a board game would also raise the possibilty of self-financing your video game developments. To be quite blunt, there is a huge market out there for board games.

This this this. A lot of my coworkers play board games. Most of my friends play board games of some form or another. An ex-girlfriend of mine LOVED Twilight Imperium and had all the expansions. I like pen-and-paper wargames, though I do have trouble finding people with the time to play the big 4X games. We're millennials and we DO play board games. Make a board game with your ideas and you'll find no shortage of interest for it. I'm a huge sucker for tabletop naval fleet combat games and space games in particular. :)