So, I say we all agree on pixelated, 2d Isometric graphics. 
Low-res, low colour art like that isn’t as hard as you’d think. Practically anyone (especially people here) could turn out art similar to that once you know a few basics and a bit of practice. There’s only so many combinations of pixels after all. 
That said, if we’re going for something like that I’d be happy to contribute towards the art side as well (even if it’s just placeholder stuff that might get replaced eventually).
You may want to consider pixelated, 3D isometric graphics. That is, sprites have (limited) z coordinates as well. This allows for layers of sprites, such as books on tables, birds flying over buildings, and the like.
The graphics style isn’t a decision that has to be 100% correct now though. It ought to be trivial to replace an isometric sprite view with 3D rendered view in the future should you change your minds.
I worked on a game where the people were made of 14 cubes each, with the head as one, forearm as one, etc. This looked fine, and I could pump out textures really easily because none of them were wrapped at all, they were just placed flat on the side of the box. I was able to put in tons of facial expressions that way, and it really looked rather funny (which was my goal). But this was fora spoof RPG, not a game like this. Just saying it doesn’t have to look soulless that way at all.
I don’t think pixel art is necessarily going to be less work than just drawing higher res 2D pictures. I guess if it’s really low res there is a difference, but otherwise I haven’t noticed any personally. I actually find it a bit more difficult to make quality pixel art.
Either way I don’t think it’s incredibly important, other than the fact that most of our time should be spent coding rather than doing artwork.
Even though flattening 3D pictures looks sort of blurry, I think it might a good idea to go this route. With programs like Poser we can pump out sprites incredibly easily, and they’ll look pretty fluid, too.
Ew ew ew no no no. >:( 
I’m willing to conceed that primative-based characters can work in certain cases (Boom Blox springs to mind) but using something like Poser to “pump out” generic animation sequences is the quickest way to turn people off. Contrary to what Disney likes to make people think, good animation is not about fluid movement, it’s about weight and momentum. Contrast the usual bland Poser rubbish with the stunning wakfu animation which has a great sense of weight as well as characters with great visual appeal.
I agree wholeheartedly that Poser animations are completely and totally soulless. With some quick Photoshop effects and perhaps using cell shading, it will be passable. Now please keep in mind that I’m proposing this as placeholder art, not at all as permanent art. I just think we can get more out more quickly if we do it this way. I’m looking for passable speed rather than quality.
Ah I see, I thought you were proposing that as a permenant solution. Anyway, I think I’ve sidetracked the discussion a bit too much with graphics stuff rather than gameplay. :-X
Well it’s not like too many other people are talking about anything else, anyway.
Back to implementation, I think a good goal to start with is to have main one screen where you can do a bunch of stuff. Put in NPCs that have simple quests (move to the bottom of the screen, move back up, whatever) and some resources like fruits, trees, etc. And also code a rudimentary version of the house.
Yes, I’m definitely thinking on the smaller scale that you and Riven mentioned, rather than the more epic world/exploration ideas.
Personally I’d like to go for something that’s similar to Animal Crossing at it’s core (small random village, random villagers, house) but expanded so instead of being just another villager you’re more like the village founder/mayor. So you’d be in charge of landscaping the village (clearing scrub land, marking areas for buildings, planting trees) as well as the farming aspects. I’d like it so that a player can basically start with nothing but bare scrub land and eventually completely transform it into a vibrant and busy village.
Thoughts?
Well there are kind of two options:
- The world is built by the player from bare land. The player places the forests, beaches, houses, …
- The world is given by the game and the player can explore it. You learn to know where the caves are and which animals lurk where. You learn where the dangerous places are and only return with your weapons at hand.
Personally I think that option 2) would allow the game to have a lot more personality. There would be places and people that you would discover that you could really become fond of. I think it’d be cool if you discover a cave with a bunch of freaky animals that bite you - “I wonder what else lives in this world?”.
This kind of exploration and discovery doesn’t really hapen in 1) as you know what everything is - you made it. Do we want this kind of discovery? (I do, but you?)
I just like the idea of the game world being given so that the player can explore it. It doesn’t have to be gigantic and the player can definately still have an input on how his house is laid out etc… but I think the “natural” element (trees, beaches, caves, mountains, creatures) of the game should be given (even if you go buy an axe and cut a few trees down, or kill off a particular species of animal).
I would like to ask the question: How much personality/ traditional adventure game elements should we have in the game? IE how much story and conversation should we have? (Probably very little story and if any it should be told through the artwork and conversations). I think good conversation between NCPs is a must for all the errands/ jobs (which is the main part of the game if I am not mistaken?).
It is of course very possible (certain) that I am imagining a game totally different to everyone else so… thats my opinion… any more?..
Sounds like a graphical MUD
Hmm, it certainly sounds like you’re imagining a very different game from me. AC and Harvest Moon aren’t about exploration or story, and they’re certainly not about weapons and killing off animals.
I thought we were starting from an AC/sandbox style of game, is everyone thinking of a more traditional RPG game now?
I was very much in mind of it being a sandbox, where you could do a large variety of jobs. Some of these might involve killing animals - for skins or something, but combat/level/exp etc wasn’t what I thought this idea was about.
Kev
Yes I don’t think the whole RPG magic points/ experience/ levels are for this game although you could have a very basic health points thing for the people, animals and monsters to see for example… whether they need to be healed in some way.
Use a gun/ sword to kill an animal just as you would use a spade to dig for treasure, a fishing rod to fish with and a torch to brighten a dark cave. Just objects you can use to explore and for your job.
The “Sandbox” element to the game is… well for me it would be that the world is a living world where you can just go explore, talk to the strange and wonderful people you find and get your self a job (Maybe you can even get by without a job in this world - You may end up in jail if you steal though ! (*)). Then you can spend the money that you earn on a variety of other fun things you can do in the world (and to buy food).
(*) Just gave me an awesome idea for a job - police officer. Catch criminal NPCs who steal items/objects belonging to other NPCs, stick em in jail !
My remark about the mud was just in response to the note above I have never played Animal Crossing or Harvest moon, so just basically ignore my views on what I sandbox this should be. I’m pretty clueless.
I don’t think you guys are too separate in your ideas. It seems to me that (eventually) the best thing to have would be a combination of the 1 and 2 that irreversible_kev posted above. Essentially, it will be most interesting to have a giant starting world, but the player should really be able to modify it in absolutely any way they want, given a variety of tools. A certain super spade could make new cave openings, for instance. And a net object allows you to capture absolutely any animal you see in the wild, then allowing you to potentially populate your own land with this type of animal. So you might go exploring some crazy cave that has a weird Batboy in it, and then you can capture it, and given you have a Batgirl (unless we want everything to be asexual, which I could see the advantage of), you can start a population of them in your own local cave that you build yourself.
So basically this will make completing a lot of the jobs easier (say you need to get some Batboy milk for a mission - originally it’s ultra-rare but because of your cave zoo you can get it easily), and also gives the player the enjoyable task of creating their own zoo and having the sort of Pokemon gotta catch em all element, in a way. So rather than just have cows and chickens, the player can theoretically domesticate any animal they find given they have the right food, equipment, and environment for the animal to live.
But all this mentioned, once again it comes back to the fact that really what we need to focus on is creating a world that is incredibly modular and very very easy to add on to. Because once we have that engine working, we can easily pump out a gigantic world built upon the same tools that the player will be able to use.
The purpose of doing that is so that the whole world is treated with the same sandbox properties. If we built the world before we did the sandbox stuff or even while we did it, then undoubtedly there would be a lot of special cases (“why can’t I mine that rock?” “why is that tree out of reach” etc.). So it makes sense to me that we establish the tools and the rules, and then from there think about making an extensive world using them, and only them.
I agree with Demonpants. Should we now think about what kind of rules govern the game’s world? Some concrete examples would be useful when evaluating how the world would work.
I’m thinking that we could do everything if pretty much all of it falls into two base classes.
Job - Describes any specific thing you can do. Has prerequisites and potential rewards.
Resource - Any collectible item. So, even an Animal would probably be a type of Resource.
Any Entity can give you a Job, but Resources can only be given as the rewards for a Job. A Resource is a subclass of an Entity (so you can drop it and make it exist in the World, etc.). So, a Resource can even give a job.
Every timestep, all relevant Entity’s loop through their jobs to see if the job’s starting prerequisites are met. Probably any Entity that exists in the world can check its jobs based upon distance from the player. The player’s Resources should also check their jobs, and they should do it every timestep. This is important for tools, which are also resources. So a sickle’s job activates if the player is standing on some tall grass and is pressing the action button.
Pros:
- Incredibly simple and completely modular.
- We could probably make every part of the game with it.
- Should be very easy for multiple programmers to work together on.
- Infinitely expandable.
Cons: - Will result in a lot of classes that are subclasses of Resource and Job.
- Will also have the potential to be incredibly slow; if we have too many entities with a lot of possible jobs and the prerequisite checks are complex, it could be unacceptably laggy.
- More difficult to follow: instead of saying “if I press space and my current tool is a shovel, cut some grass,” there is instead this sort of overly intricate job organization going on.
So really overall I think the big pro of this is that we can do anything with it very simply, and the big con is that it gets pretty convoluted and is almost always an indirect way of doing things. However, because the point of this game is to allow the user to do anything and because we’re only going to very loosely organized, I think the evils of the approach are more than acceptable. Thoughts on that?
Examples:
Job: Cut grass with a sickle
Given by
- The Sickle resource contains this Job.
Requirements - Requires a sickle resource.
- Requires that the player be standing on top of some tall grass.
- Requires that the user press the action button.
Results - Gives the player a grass resource.
- Changes the Entity below the player’s feet to short grass.
Job: Catching an animal
Given by
- An Animal running around the map gives this Job.
Requirements - Requires a net resource.
- Requires that the player is nearby the giver of this job (i.e. the animal).
- Requires that the user press the action button.
Results - Gives the player a Squirrel resource (or whatever).
- Reduces the player’s net count by one.
Job: Digging a cave
Given by
- The super shovel resource contains this Job.
Requirements - Requires a super shovel resource.
- Requires that the player is standing on earth that can be dug out.
- Requires that the user press the action button.
Results - Creates a hole that is a link to new area.
Job: Sit in a chair
Given by
- Any Chair Entity.
Requirements - Requires that the Player collides with giver of this job (i.e. the Chair).
Results - Plays the player’s sitting down animation and moves them onto the chair.
In hindsight, it might make more sense to use Event instead of Job, but that’s unimportant at the moment. Really though we can do anything with them, including bad stuff (like walking on a certain tile causes a rockfall), so I think it’s a good way to go.
Thoughts?
Oh, and a lot of these could have the same result done with multiple methods of implementing them.
Like for example the Tall Grass entity could be the one who gives you the cut grass Job, but only if you have a sickle and are colliding with the grass. The disadvantage to that implementation is that it’s more costly (every single grass object is doing its own check) and that you need a different job for each tool, so the number of jobs being checked increase exponentially.
Similarly the catch an animal job could probably be confined to the Net resource, and it only works if you’re nearby any animal. The disadvantage of doing it that way is that animals that can’t be caught have no way of telling the Net that this is the case, unless we hard code that into the Net object for every single animal that can’t be caught.
I think you could argue either way, but I think that generally it makes most sense for the tool to be the one doing the job, because that will be a lot cheaper if we’ve got tons of animals or grass or whatever on the screen. I don’t think it should be confined to tools, however, because then we lose a huge amount of potential (like having switches you can step on, or maybe just a random key combination at a specific location, etc.). But, I think we need to give serious thought to the best way to implement each of these jobs before we do so.
Also check out our page on the Wiki:
http://code.google.com/p/mark-562/wiki/sandbox?ts=1232496955&updated=sandbox
Go ahead and add to it, please. Also modify what’s there if you want, although I think it makes more sense to put I don’t like this - Demonpants next to something rather than outright deleting it.