Hello there! First of all i don't know if this is the right section for this.. 

Ok so i need a little help with an idea. I have always been fascinated by open world games where i could explore the world freely and i would love to create a game like that but sadly it is rather impossible for a sole dev. So could you help me by giving me an alternative that would be easier to achieve and would give.. i don't know.. 'the same experience' in a way. For example i loved The Forest and it isn't very complicated having no set quests or side quests, you don't get to create a character etc. I have looked into other categories of games like platformers and such, but nothing attracts me like a nice world to explore. 

Btw i love designing terrain/world and creating a story if that's of any help. 

I know this is kind of vague, but i hope you can help and save me from wasting a huge amount of time by starting something i can't finish

Thanks in advance 

5 hours ago, Avocadoo said:

but sadly it is rather impossible for a sole dev.

What is impossible is a AAA game open world. You could make a lower quality open world.

Something like Don't Starve and Minecraft is possible for most people. But you could also create huge universes, lots of solo developers make space games because it's small in content but has huge worlds.

Some extremely large linear games are also impossible for a solo developer. It's all about scale.

I've heard the term "walking simulator" thrown around... maybe thats what you're after.

But like Scouting Ninja said if you limit your scope or use tricks you could do an open world yourself.  By tricks I mean things like procedural generation, and things that are variations of each other.  In the case of the latter the point would be to model 10 characters with 10 variations of each instead of a hundred models.

Thanks for the answers, i can see your point. I have a question: since the world i want to create isn't going to be so big and i love to design terrain i am thinking of creating the world manually. How much or rather what aspects of the game should be 'procedural generated'? Stuff like monster camp locations maybe? 

12 hours ago, Avocadoo said:

How much or rather what aspects of the game should be 'procedural generated'? Stuff like monster camp locations maybe?

Warning! Procedural generation has flaws, just remember it is noise and noise doesn't make sense. Sometimes making patters from the noise takes longer than doing things by hand. Warning!

There is no way to estimate, I can say around 30%-60% is my estimate, because you will need to do hundreds of thousands of tests to see what works as procedural and what as hand made.

Often you will combine them. For example design parts of the monster camps like: Bedding zone, feeding zone etc. then you will stitch these procedurally so each camp looks unique.

You could also go for some Super Mario Odyssey kind of terrain that is a sized but open level per world where the bounds are surrounded by emptyness

Depending or your level design you could also use high cliff walls (like in the forest level) !WARNING SPOILER

This would lead to the feeling of beeing open world with some edge cases. You could describe that with a world that is made from islands (as Spellforce 1 did) connected by some kind of transport (like a portal or Ship) so a player can travel through the world and you have to design just single level maps

On 1/14/2018 at 4:50 PM, Scouting Ninja said:

Warning! Procedural generation has flaws, just remember it is noise and noise doesn't make sense. Sometimes making patters from the noise takes longer than doing things by hand. Warning!

Procedural generation can also be from grammers and rule sets.