Khaiy

All three of your ideas sound like they would work to me, especially the idea of traps (though they could devolve into being just another damage delivery system).

 

I would also throw in that you could have enemies with significant amounts of HP, or mixed companies that include enemies on whom pure physical damage would not be very effective without a utility spell involved. You could also include goals beyond just killing enemies: use spell X on an enemy for a chance at getting a special item, or spell Y to influence the story or have some impact on a later battle (illness, bad luck, madness, etc.).

 

On a broader design level, what kind of emphasis do you want utility spells to have? Dealing damage is something that can be applied against all enemies in all battles and so it gets a lot of emphasis. Support spells are just that: support. They aren't intended to be a main feature of your force but instead supplement your other characters, and they consequently are of limited usefulness. Do you want to require, explicitly or implicitly, that players have a utility spellcaster in every battle?

 

SRPGs tend to be focused on killing enemies in the field, but that often isn't the only element-- do you have any notable mechanics outside of battle that spells might be able to influence?

You are correct about Torn City, at least as of several years ago. When I played I enjoyed the pace of character progression and the continuous unlocking of new game features that came along with it. These included new activities and play mechanics, not just new mission locations, provided by ongoing additions from the dev team. You can be as social as you'd like, but you're never forced to it. For players interested in doing so, you can cooperate with others for greater rewards. And you are exposed to some risks, but you're not in danger of having your character be wiped out.

For your game, my preferred approach would be to deemphasize historical realism relative to your other design goals and increase potential competition between players. I would aim for countries made up of regions and regions made up of cities, towns, etc. Players in these towns can amass resources in order to increase their influence at this level, with the implications that players with similar clout can vie for control (or cooperate).

Players with more power at the city level can meaningfully participate in a similar system for influence over the region, and at the regional level players can do the same for the country. Players who don't want to participate in the struggle for political influence can play as simple peasant farmers, chandlers, craftsman or whatever. Political aspirants need to maintain support from enough of these to keep their own stations secure, which they can do with gifts, formation of groups, promises of work and wealth for them by choosing public works, and so on.

Mechanics that support these sorts of things allow for the correct mood (feudal arrangements that balance individual ambition with pacifying underlings and mollifying superiors) while not forcing anyone to participate in more than running their farm or producing their goods if they don't want to.

The flip side of this is that more powerful players might make their underlings' prospects worse, but this would increase the risk of someone else taking power. My idea is that it gives context to the work of the lowest-power players while allowing those who want to have governing positions to make consequential choices.

There would need to be other play elements as well, but at a minimum players could aspire to rewards and try to avoid consequences.

Let's forget about everything that was said for a moment. Do you, as a player, find this kingdom oriented goal gameplay appealing? Do you find it more appealing that a goal centred around your individual assets/achievements/power?
 
Personally, the descripton of A Tale in the Desert put me off. I didn't make me want to play it...

I don't play Tale in the Desert for the same reason. However:

I'll be brutally honest. With the constraints that you most want to maintain on the game, I have a hard time finding the individual character goal approach appealing. It comes back to the issue you created this thread to address: there isn't much to do. If I want to play a peasant character (or a noble or king or anything else), what is there for me to achieve, ever? Amassing wealth would feel kind of hollow if I could just as easily have chosen a noble character instead of a peasant. Maybe I could put together a cool collection of stuff, but if we're observing historical realism how much of a variety of stuff can I accumulate? If I want to show off my accomplishments compared with other players or amass power I can use to change the play experience for others, how can I ever catch up to to players who started before me if there is never a server reset?

I could go on. But the main point is that under the current design, the only interactions I can really imagine having with the game will never change from what I would experience in the first five minutes of play. The maximum development my character can achieve is to be marginally better than he was at the beginning. In the framework that you've laid out so far kingdom level goals allow for individual tasks to have meaning, and for different kingdoms to be distinct from each other in meaningful ways. I don't know that it would be enough to be the whole attraction but I might at least be willing to play.

I'm not saying that it can't be done, but without seriously compromising on some of your core design ideas I don't know what my character could be that would bring me back to play more than a couple of hours. Kingdom level goals allow for some expanded options without compromising on your core design goals while keeping the game as a historical sim. Alternately, if it were a game from a different genre (casual smartphone game, collection of minigames, or something else) I might not mind the current crop of options. In fact, if your game were like Torn City I might enjoy it a lot. I don't know if the mission-based setup would mesh with what you're envisioning, but it keeps a lot of the elements you have now.

Are there any things that you wish you could do in the game but currently can't?

For cooperative elements you might consider looking at A Tale in the Desert, which has a collaborative setup for players and little if any competitive aspects.

As you've laid it out, you want a continuous server for all players as they contribute bit by bit to the glory of their kingdom. In this case the goal isn't players developing their characters but each one finding a way to add something to everyone else's work. Players would probably need some way to distinguish their own contributions from those of others, but most of the focus on the works they build together.

If this is a decent read of your intent, then you need to design kingdom-level works for players to work on. It's all well and good for players to make bricks or do whatever else they do in exchange for payment, but what are the bricks for? Or the payment, for that matter? But if one section of the kingdom is building a cathedral that needs 10,000 bricks, every stamina point that brickmakers invest has purpose and works towards a specific goal. And if that same cathedral needs 20,000 units of labor to complete, that adds something for players not engaged in brickmaking to do. Artists can invest their labor to make the cathedral more beautiful or prestigious.

If you have a kingdom-level goal structure, that opens up lots of possibilities for players. Kings can decide which projects the kingdom should undertake, and allocate money for paying workers or buying materials. Religious leaders and their groups can try to get their favored projects built. Individual players can produce wares in hopes that someone will buy them, contribute to a specific project, or lobby the king to build something that uses what they produce. Maybe as players amass wealth they can afford to build their own things, for their own purposes.

Individual assets might no be very important. What would they do? War without conquest or loot sounds similarly unimportant. And while you can keep "medieval mood", historical realism may not be doable.

What I meant for commoners having a different play experience is that they might have a game like Vampires Live (or any similar games), like you see for iPhone/Android. These have a play style that sounds like what commoners in your game are already doing, and they attract plenty of players. If you were to follow that pattern you wouldn't need a ton of new mechanics, and you would have a much more focused goal for creating any new content or play elements you want.

Otherwise, expanding activitites available for commoners will involve making nontrivial changes to your design. It's not a problem of not having enough variables to work with-- the variables your game uses are the ones designed to satisfy the activities you wanted to include. New activities suggest at least the possibility of needing new variables, and the list of variables that could be included in your game but currently are not is functionally infinite.

What constraints do you want in determining what these new activities are? If I suggest a magic system, that would be a new activity, but that isn't helpful if you don't want magic. What mechanics are you willing to add? Are your testers giving any suggestions on what they'd like to do? Do you have any strong feelings about what you'd like the play experience to be for commoners? Are kings generally satisfied with their play experiences, and could any similar elements be added for commoner players?

Hmm, from what I remember of your previous posts for this game it sounds pretty true to your original design. I also recall that you were pretty opposed to changing your design at all. Is that still the case? I'm asking because adding in new features might have an outsized impact existing ones.

With that in mind, how much are you willing to let commoners do? They may need more ability to impact city policies, or to interact with other players beyond trading. The game might change a lot of the peasantry matters for more than toil.

As you're describing it, the game for commoners sounds a lot like a casual RPG, the kind with action points that regenerate every hour or day. There's generally not a lot of depth to those games, but they can still be fun and many are popular. Would you be OK with commoners have a very different interaction with the game than noble players?

At a glance, I notice several things:

-Each statement needs a semicolon (;) after it
-Not having semicolons will screw up the rest of your code that comes after where it ought to be
-Individual variables cannot be separate words like "lazarus revolver"
-The variable types in the code are not declared

I suspect that there are more issues as well, but it's hard to say for certain what they would be based on this fragment of code alone. If you post more code I'll be able to help you more, and I don't want to make guesses about what you're doing based on this alone. But from what's already here, I think that you may want to spend some more time practicing C# syntax before tackling something game-sized.

I think it's unlikely that you're following Ron Penton's book correctly, given that code formatted as above will never compile in C#. As a good general rule, remember that errors aren't random. They always represent problems in your underlying code, and they contain highly relevant information (even if the relevance isn't clear).

That looks awesome! What's happening to the party's faces in the pic with the Beholder?

Honestly, it doesn't really matter if you're starting from no experience. I like C#, very easy to pick up, others like Java and Python. All have a good selection of libraries that you can use to get to game-making (relatively) quickly. I personally recommend C# with SFML, but I hear great things about Python and PyGame.

No matter which language you pick, you won't have to do any switching around. You can make a game in any language.

I don't have any game industry experience, but I have had collaborations with non-game projects.

I think that the approach you're describing is a bit too fragmented and independant to work for collaborative writing for the reasons you described.

I would think that you want someone in charge of the writing team who can assign tasks appropriately and return them if necessary. Writers are given things to write, but they don't need to work in solitude; if there's a continuity question, the writer should ask rather than guess and produce unusable copy. If there's any issue with what's been written, then it's up to the person in charge to notice and have it fixed.

Regular group writing sessions can be useful because a lot of people in reviewing work and in planning future writing, so everyone's on the same page (sorry for the pun). Templates and guidelines can help as well in maintaining "voice" of characters.

I think it's similar to hand-drawn animation. The artisis have models to reference and specific purposes for each assignment they're given. Then there's a director (or some similar role) who reviews the work and makes sure it fits together. Any contribution which doesn't fit correctly is re-done.

This link is a good starting place for more information.

Any language you pick will be fine for making games. It's a decision that a lot of people worry about, but it truly is not that important. I like C#, I've found it to be easy to learn and very flexible. Other people recommend Python as good for  beginners, and Java is popular as well. But if you have any strong feelings towards some particular language, you don't have to worry about it not meeting your needs.

Regardless of what language you choose and what books you read, remember that you won't be able to develop your skills very far by just following written instructions. You need to branch out and experiment on your own as you learn more about how to use the language you've chosen.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question correctly, so if this doesn't answer it please let me know.

There are differences between C# and Java, but there's no reason you can't make a decent (or better) 2D game with either. For putting graphics on the screen it's easier to use an existing library or set of libraries compared with rolling your own code, and in that respect XNA is quite nice. It's pretty easy to use, and gives you a lot of options as far as scaling, rotating, transforming, coloring, really anything you'd need for a 2D game. But there are other libraries that would also help you do those things, both for C# and Java.

If you'd like to learn C#, there's no reason not to. If you're already skilled in Java it won't be all that difficult to pick up and C# is said to be similar to Java in a lot of ways. But you don't have to use C# to achieve your stated goals. Unfortunately I don't have any Java recommendations for libraries (I don't use it myself), but someone here will be able to suggest something.

As for your concerns about "basic" graphics, the style/detail/quality of the art assets you use doesn't have much to do with the programming language or libraries you choose. They all can put images on the screen, but if you aren't satisfied with the graphics you're using in the first place they won't change to become something you like more. You can get other graphics by practicing your pixel art skills (using a program like Gimp), hiring an artist, or visiting sites with free art like OpenGameArt.

You remind me a bit of myself when I first started learning about computer programming. That makes me think that you might be subject to one of the biggest mistakes that I made as well: programming, for a beginner, has a lot less to do with understanding things that you can find in books and internet tutorials than you may think.

At its core, computer programming is about solving problems, and that isn't something that you will develop by trying to memorize the minutia of your chosen language and design approaches without trying to apply your knowledge. I would suggest that you start working on some (very) small projects now, using what you've already learned. That will help you to cement your skills and suggest things that you can learn more about.

As you find problems that you don't already know how to solve, you can experiment or do some research on possible approaches. When you've solved the problem you'll have improved your skills and seen how programming works in practice for that situation.

I like simon's suggestions, and I would also recommend something like a text-based game interface or, if you'd like a challenge, a graphical menu interface using a library like SDL or SFML. Those projects will be very educational and will also give you some code that you can use to build a game later on.

I think that keeping track of different game elements would be do-able. Since you wouldn't be doing anything graphics-wise with most of them, it wouldn't be all that resource intensive to track and update various NPC's and groups. Other games have done similar things. Right now the one that comes to my mind is X3, but there are definitely others as well.

The King/Queen bit seems more difficult to me. It isn't very simple to combine two distinct types of gameplay (RPG vs. 4x) while keeping them separate from each other, having both be polished and deep enough to be fun, and appealing to players who want only one genre or the other. I'm sure it's possible, but that sounds like a much more complicated game to design and create.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "swapped with every other part", but games like Deus Ex, FF7, FF8, and Kingdom Hearts come to mind. Of course, these may not meet your goal of "totally modifiable", but that scope isn't really practical; games will always have to introduce some constraints.