I’ve had the idea for a while to do a proper real time, real world empire building game. The easiest way to describe it would be Real Time Civilisation. I had a few ideas about it, the resolution of the map was going to be way higher and cities would take up multiple squares as they got larger. Then I had a brainwave.

A gridless real time civilisation which is to scale on a real sized world.

I’m not sure if this has been done before, I’ve seen a few tech demos involving worlds in a similar fashion, but nothing involving the kind of flexibility of scale that I want to attempt. Cites are at best around 100 kilometres wide on a world 40 thousand kilometres in circumfrence. When you think about that kind of scale in a computer game it’s crazy. The player would have to zoom in a long way to even be able to see cities at all, and even furthur in to be able to see people. But I think it’s possible.

It’s an idea that will take a lot of work and discovering technologies to store, display and work with data on that scale. I’d have to go with a gridless terrain map that covers a sphere. I have a few ideas in mind, but I’ll share them later.

My main focus is still the RPG, progress it at about 10%. Engine is working great, but now there’s the game code and models to work on. Stay tuned.

Before I start with this post I need to cite inspiration. http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=56

So anyways, after reading Sean’s gameplay mechanics I wanted to play some of them and even make a couple, but it wasn’t until he recently posted the White Noise gameplay mechanic was I compelled to make one using them, and thus Static is born.

This whole game, aside from the intro, is going to be in white noise, also known as TV static. It’s a game that won’t get high acclaim for it’s graphics of course, but the limitation is going to make it interesting, as all of the enemies, backgrounds and platforms have to fit in to being made of static. Even more, I can’t use borders or edges to show shape. The only place I’ve lightened this is with projectiles, the protaganist’s projectiles are white and the enemies are black, just for identification purposes. As for gameplay, I’m just going for the straight forward platform shooter, ala megaman. It’s fast paced gameplay and single unit protagonist should work well with the white noise graphics.

Add this onto Wizards, Anonius and Fireworks Factory, I have enough projects to last me until christmas.

As you probably know, two of the biggest things on the web right now are Multiplayer Games and Social Networking Sites. As you might not know, Facebook released F8, their developer library for the Facebook Platform as they call it. This allows anyone with knowledge in how to make a dynamic website using php or similar to create an application on their site which interfaces with Facebook. Of course as soon as I heard out about it, I knew I had to make a game for it, and not just any game, but the viral game to end all games. Well not really.

Anyone who has been on Facebook will probably have noticed the number of viral games going around that are rather lame, even the best of them is rather shallow in terms of what you can do, it’s all about clicking to increase numbers, or worse yet, annoying friends to earn numbers. I have another idea, which I’ve had for a while but which Facebook gives me the opportunity to create without having to worry about getting people to play it, I’m hoping the viral aspect of Facebook will do it for me.

The idea is this: A deep, easy to play, passive, cooperative, social RPG.

What a mouthful. The actually design however is very different. Creating a character just like many other games, race and class. The difference is the 3 tier design.

First tier is your Class. The player of course can pick from a number of classes and you can change your class at any time outside of a dungeon/quest chain. Base classes anyone can go at any time, but the higher classes, which I don’t have a name for yet, have particular prerequisites. Even rarer are Hero Classes which have some obscure prerequisites, but also unique abilities. Classes can’t be leveled up, which is where the next two tiers come into it.

Second tier is Abilities. Abilities are raised by gaining Ability Points (AP) from adventuring. Each class has two abilities, one major and one minor, and each ability has a lesser ability associated with it, except for base abilities. Eg: Fire magic will branch from Elemental magic which will branch from Attack magic, or similar. There will be many base abilities, I hope to create about 8-10, which will lead on to 20-30 second level abilities which in turn will have 100 or more third level and hero abilities associated with them. What makes the system unique, and perhaps a little tricky, is that you never level up a class, you only level up it’s associated abilities. The Hero Classes will have Hero Abilities, but this will come much later. Someone will have to be playing for at least 50 days before they see one of these. Probably longer.

Teir 3 is Skills. Skills come from classes and have ability prerequisites. Skills are raised using Skill Points(SP) gained from adventuring. The skills you can choose to learn come directly from the class you currently are. The mundane skills will have straightforward prerequisites, but some of the more obscure skills come from even stranger prerequisites and from non-class abilities. Skills are the primary way to increase power. You choose a number of skills to go adventuring with, and this is what is calculated to work out your power. The skills you equip directly determine your current power level for adventuring, which also determines the size of the challenge you can face and how much reward you get from such challenges.

How skills factor into playing the game I don’t know yet. I do know that a variety of skills will be needed to overcome the greater challenges, and they directly play a specific part in any of the adventures that occur. Adventures should be applicable to the characters current skills, and the types of skills along with their power determine their reward. As all of the challenges occur automatically, activated skills aren’t an option.

The hardest parts for me right now are working out all the maths behind the entire game, and figuring out how to stop really powerful players from getting even more powerful faster. They should be rewarded for playing so long, but not become untouchable.

As the game progresses it will be open for playing on Facebook, and until then I’ll be posting game idea and game design tips on here. Also, if anyone has a name for the game, I’d be grateful. Right now it’s using my psuedo RPG name: Anonius. Which it will probably be when it’s released.

For the past week I’ve been playing a game called Dwarf Fortress. It is a game where you play the role of a group of dwarves sent to a cliff face to survive and make something of yourself, whatever that may be.

The amazing thing about the game is how deep it is, on the surface it looks like a simple text based game, then you get into it and you are wondering what all the symbols mean and how to make your dwarves do things you need them to do. 2days of reading the wiki later and you are finally ready to spend the next hour losing your first fort to stupid mistakes. You can do almost anything in this game and it’s viable in some way. The graphics may be simple but behind them is a game more complex than The Sims or Sim City or almost anything I have played. You don’t so much control your dwarves as just assign jobs to them and hope they go about the business swiftly. Of course there are ways you can ensure that this happens, but without much direct control. I would suggest anyone who enjoys playing deep and interesting games to give this one a try.

Now the main reason why I’m talking about this game in particular is that I would like to take the idea furthur. What if you were a human outpost in rugged territory surrounded by enemies, could you survive? What about elves in their vastly forested landscape, could you protect yourselves from the orcs nearby without losing too many trees to their devestation or your own industry? Just the number of environments and challenges would be boggling, all with the complexity that runs Dwarf Fortress. This is a topic I intend to explore as time goes by, what kind of gameplay complexity enriches the experience, past fun and into pure amazement.

With the processing power of computers increasing, game complexity has been decreasing, while graphics have been improving. I’m going to try the opposite and see how complex a game I can make, lets see what happens.