Hum, this is the first post of this devblog.
Hopefully, the first of a long series…
Well, I presume I should explain what this is all about.
Basically, me and a friend wanted to make a video game (actually I wanted to and I dragged him along!). So one night, we sat around a table, a piece of paper, and two cups of tea (English people like tea!) and talked about what we wanted our game to be.
Quickly tons of ideas burst out of our brains. At first they were quite random, confused, but they slowly moved toward some kind of an huge-adventure-survival-open-world game. The action would be set up on a huge island that the player could explore as its will, and the story would unwrap as he makes choices. The island would have lots of different areas from arid plains to snowing mountains and underground caverns flowing with lava, but also cities and castles that the player might have to conquer or defend. Some areas would require puzzle solving, others would need to jump and run on difficult platforms. There would be thousands of monsters to fight, and even more NPCs to talk to. The player would be able to craft his own weapons, his own vehicles, to modify the world and build his own castles, make its own army… Oh, and all this would take place in a MMO. (for Massive Multi-player Orgy!)
In short, we designed the perfect video-game!
After that, we went to bed, a big smile on the face, we were happy with what we’ve done…
On the next day, I started thinking about how I was going to program all this. None of us has any particular artistic talent, so the world will be voxel-based. (Yes “voxels”, you know, it’s when you make everything out of small cubes! It’s much easier for level and character design, and it’s much easier to program!) Anyway, as I was thinking about it, I started to see how huge the game (too huge!) we wanted to make was.
I asked my friend how much time we have, he replied “6 to 8 months”.
Well..
We might have been too ambitious!
I think what is important when you make video-games (and especially when you make them on your own) is to have a playable version as soon as possible. So, even if you can’t finish it the way you wanted it, you’ll still have something to play with. So I choose a component of our massive game that I really like and that I think I can develop in a reasonable time: the defence of a castle.
Here’s the basic idea: you are given a castle, and you have to defend it against endless waves of enemies. In some way, it is similar to all those tower-defence games were the player tries to “stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass” (wikipedia!), except your own characters will have to set traps and fight the enemies. And he will be helped by others players through an on-screen co-op. And because we are aiming for a voxel-based world, the enemies will be able to destroy castle walls and the player will have to repair/build the castle to keep it standing. This way, we will develop a fun and potentially complex (with lots of different enemy and weapon types with different abilities) game that would be a first step toward our huge-hypothetical-ideal-game.
I will use this blog to keep a track of the development of the game.
There will be post of all kinds: boring development description (like this one!), sweet gameplay videos, programming tutorials…
I hope you’ll like it!
See you around!
Nick
