Viridian Games

In the wake of my article on getting started in game programming, I have been taking my own advice and doing some learning. In particular I am getting more familiar with Direct3D. While I’ve known the basics for a while, I want to become a more advanced 3D programmer and I also need to learn vertex and pixel shaders. So I’m working my way through Frank Luna’s Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0. I mentioned this book earlier but I really can’t say enough about it. As far as I’m concerned this is the book to get if you want to learn Direct3D.

Plus, with sections on terrain rendering, particle systems and picking, this book could have been subtitled “How to Program Planitia”.

So, no work will be done on Planitia for a bit while I work my way through this book. I’m currently on page 60 of 376. I am hoping to get through the book by the end of this week, though that will take some serious work.

Okay, Planitia. Here’s the basic design I am visualizing.

You’re a god. Your people worship you. You gain mana from their worship, and how quickly you gain mana is dependent on how many of them there are. There are three things you can do with your mana:

• Raise and lower the land. This will give your villagers more space to expand.
• Spend it to teach your villagers new things, like how to build new buildings or how to do certain tasks better.
• Cast spells that either help your villagers or impede your enemy’s villagers.

I was not planning on including direct control of your villagers (though this could change). This would result in a very Populous-style game.

The only problem is that if the base game is growing your civilization with no direct control over your villagers, that’s not really a game. it’s a software toy. To make it a game, there are two options.

The first is to give the player external, computer-enforced goals, like “create 50 villagers” or “generate 1000 mana” or “expand your village to this size”. Since the actual game play will be pretty simple, this may not make for a very fun game.

So we get to the second option. The one where you build up your village so that you can destroy all who oppose you, burn the bodies, salt the earth, collect their souls to offer to your dark god, etc, etc. Option two would probably be more fun. Option two requires either multiplayer or a half-decent AI. Both would be hard to do in 40 hours. So we’d end up with a game with very simple gameplay, but you can play skirmish against the computer and/or multiplayer with someone else over the net.

Thoughts?

When you know more about what it is you like about these games specifically, then a design will start to form.
- Dave Shramek, in a previous comment

Actually, what I liked about those games were the little coherent computerized worlds that they presented. Just about all of these games had wonderful little touches that made them feel more real. Powermonger had the birds that would fly around - useless from a game perspective, but a wonderful little detail. In Syndicate Wars, you can have your agents jump in a car, which you can then drive around the street. You can even have them take the monorail if the city you’re in has one. And of course, there’s the fact that you can blow up every building in the city if you try hard enough.

And now that I’m thinking about this, I remember a short story I wrote in high school about a king who rules a fantasy world where everthing anyone ever roleplays in this world actually happens. The king has a magical miniature diorama of the entire world that he can use to watch as the various adventures unfold, and doing so is his favorite pastime. I think I might identify with the king just a bit

But that sounds more like a tech demo than a game, so I’m still thinking.

One thing I have come up with, though, is a title for…whatever it is. I’m calling it Planitia, which is the Latin word for “plain” (as in”grassland”, not “unattractive”).

So I need a game design based around a heightfield/billboard engine.

First, let’s be explicit. What do I mean by a heightfield/billboard engine?

I mean a base world defined by terrain, and that terrain defined by a heightfield. Other models may sit on top of this heightfield, but the heightfield is the “ground” of the world.

Units in this world will be done with billboarded sprites. A “billboarded” sprite is one that is actually rendered as a 3D object, but is always rotated so that it faces the player.

Lots and lots and lots of games have been made with this system, and some of them have been truly great, like…

Populous (It counts, although you couldn’t rotate the map):

Powermonger

Dungeon Keeper

Syndicate Wars

Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter

You can see that this engine style lends itself to real-time games with strategic elements (although none of the above are “real-time strategy” games as that phrase is defined today).

I definitely want my game to be real-time. I want the player to have buildings and units. I want the game to be fantasy-themed or mythology-themed. I also want the player to be able to raise and lower terrain, and I want that to be an actual game mechanic. But I’m not sure if I want the player to be able to directly control units. And I’m not sure if I want resource gathering.

Standard real-time-strategy: The player has direct control over resource gathering, building creation, unit creation and unit direction.

Populous: There are no resources. The player has indirect control over building creation and unit creation, and unit direction.

Powermonger: Some resources can be gathered directly. Others simply control what you can build in each city. The player has indirect control over building and unit creation, direct control over special item creation, and direct control over his army (but not villagers).

Dungeon Keeper: The player has direct control over buildings, resource gathering and resource collecting units, but only indirect control over fighting unit creation and direction.

Syndicate: Syndicate is more of an action game than a real-time strategy game.

Myth: There are no resources. There are no buildings. The player has direct control over his units.

Notice that Powermonger and Dungeon Keeper are practically mirrors - in Powermonger, the player indirectly controls the creation of his army, but directly controls the army itself. In Dungeon Keeper, the player has more direct control over the creation of his army (though not total control) but has little control over the army itself (he can drop his monsters directly over the enemy, but if they don’t want to fight they’ll just walk away).

Hmmm…this is going to take some pondering.

I posted a link to my last blogpost on the Gibbage Forums.

I have since learned not to ask Brit gamers if they want someone to make a Dungeon Keeper clone. Just assume that the answer is ‘yes’.

I think a Dungeon Keeper-style game will be a good way to break into 3D, and once its done the engine will be easily adaptable to more complex 3D games like Inaria 3D, so Dungeon Keeper in 40 hours is the winner!

Okay, time to figure out exactly what I’m going to do next. I feel that I’ve got three options:

1. Star Revolution Redux. Finish Star Revolution, but with fewer features. The ground combat will be cut because it will require the most resources. Trade and alien interaction would be abstracted to menus. Players would land on planets solely to mine them or capture lifeforms. The game would then feature space combat (based on the combat prototype I’ve already written), contact with alien races, mining and trading. The game probably won’t be 3D. This isn’t too bad, but it’s only about 50% of the game I wanted to make…

2. Inaria 3D. Ryan really wants this, and honestly, so do I. But Inaria 3D would have pretty much all the problems of my original design for Star Revolution. However, it might be possible to work something up using sprites from another 3D game like Final Fantasy Tactics. A possibility, but it’ll be hard.

3. I’ve had this irrational desire to make a game in the style of Dungeon Keeper. This could very well make a very good first 3D project because of the simplicity of the 3D involved - Dungeon Keeper was actually a 2D game that was simply presented in a 3D manner.

4. One of the other projects I was considering after Inaria got finished. From these I’d probably pick either the simple real-time strategy game or the simple Master of Orion-style game. These probably wouldn’t be 3D.

In any event, no matter what I pick, I am going to be limiting myself to 40 hours again. Why? Because that actually worked. By embracing that limitation, I actually made a game (a pretty crappy game, but a game).

So, thoughts?

Sorry about the lack of posts. We’re crunching at Aspyr as we move towards our first playable.

And I’m back on caffeine. Which means my diet is kaput. My energy level was just too low without caffeine to survive a crunch. And that low energy level is also why I haven’t been posting, and why I haven’t touched Star Revolution since I posted the combat demo.

Star Revolution is supposed to be done by the end of July. That simply is no longer possible, if it ever was in the first place. Star Revolution was a mistake; it’s just too big for me to do by myself. I am abandoning it (temporarily; I do want to make this game eventually).

Which means I need a new project. Something I can do on my own while surrounded by screaming children, which means something closer to the original Inaria in scope.

Any suggestions?

See?

A 3D sphere for a planet, and 2D blits for the UI. The most basic tech that I needed to add has been completed, but I still can’t start working on stuff specific to Star Revolution yet. Inaria suffered because I didn’t have a state machine system in my framework, so I’m going to add one. Plus, the entire code could use a rework and cleanup. So while I’m going to be working diligently on Star Revolution, I probably won’t have anything new to show for a while. Hopefully I’ll be able to burn through this busywork and get to the fun stuff, where stuff blows up soon.

Here are the rules for my Space RPG Project (I am going with the title Star Revolution, based on Sol’s suggestion):

1. I am free to use any code I’ve already written in this project. This includes my framework and any other code from Inaria or my previous projects.

2. The game must be completed by April 30th, since I intend to do three of these projects this year.

3. This game will have sound and will feature procedurally-created planets, since I need to learn how to do that. I’ll be using FMOD for sound, it’s teh awesome and I’ve used it before.

4. This game will not use the SDL. Instead, I will be using OpenGL. This is both to learn the API better and because…

5. This game will feature 3D entities in the game world - the planets and ships will be 3D. But because 3D content creation takes so long and because I can’t simply grab pictures of aliens off the web…

6. Only programming and design will count against my forty hours - creating 3D entities and other artwork will not. Otherwise, there’d be no way for me to get the project done in the required time.

Yes, I could probably use 2D-only graphics and grab alien art out of Starflight, but I was going over the technical requirements of the game and honestly…it’s not that different from Inaria. The procedurally-generated planets were the only real difference; otherwise this game is just “Inaria in Space”. I wouldn’t learn enough from making Space Inaria, so I added the new requirements. I don’t think I’m cheating that much; if this were a “real” project, all of that art would simply be handed to me by an artist instead.

So that’s the nature of the current game. Wish me luck!

First, I’d like to thank everyone who voted!

The results:

1 vote for a Platformer
1 vote for a Shoot-Em-Up
1 vote for a 3D Shooting Gallery
2 votes for a Civilization clone
2 votes for “Inverse Pac-Man, where you control the ghosts”
5 votes for an RTS
6 votes for a Starflight/Star Control 2 clone

And since that was my personal favorite of the suggestions, I will allow the vote to stand. My next game will be an outer-space RPG and combat game. I’m currently going with the title Star Sea, but that might change if I can think of something cooler. The title must have “Star” or “Stars” in it.

Before I can start on the game, though, my framework needs a lot of work. It may be a week or two before my first real update.