MaelmDev

• Treasure (chests) : Computers with datacaches that can contain ingame info, plot background, or downloadable 'patches' and 'mods' for your digital weaponry?
• Deities and worship : Replace 'deities' with charismatic CEOs, 'worship' with Apple fanboys, and organized religion with corporations? The effects are better biomods for those closer to the CEO.
• A relatively small population : Gene plagues, ftw.
• medieval social structure : The "fuedal system: serve the local baron, he owns all the land you live on" is replaced by the "corporate system: employed by the local corporation CEO."

Your bolt weapons sound like they'd kill or incapacitate in one hit. Then again, arrows do that as well, in real life, but not in games. Well, swords would kill or incapacitate in one hit IRL also - but games have conditioned us to 'twenty sword blows or thirty arrows to kill', but have also conditioned us to '3 gun shots to kill'. With current videogame conditioning, you'll have to fight against the immersion-break that a railgun won't just kill someone in one hit.

Hmm...the mega-corporation thing could work well, provided I don't come across as a complete libertarian bigot.  Possibly the idea of corporations evolving into kingdoms?

 

Not only can I provide you with ideas, but I can recommend some games for you to play to see what's been done out there. Some of my favorites.

 

Mass Effect. I know the ending and the DLC release schedule both caught a lot of flack, even after the free DLC they released for it, but the experience was amazing, from start too finish. This game has a lot of attention for a reason. Play them.

 

Knights of the Old Republic. KOTOR is typically pretty inexpensive on Steam and similar services, and the MMORPG version is free-to-play...at least the part you're interested in (playing through as a character in an sci fantasy rpg). I really enjoyed KOTOR and for a few months after it launched I had a great time with the MMO.

 

Each of these games has large monsters and some reskinning of "magic" (Biotics and the Force) and fit your other criteria very well.

Thanks for the recommendations, but I'm not aiming to create this level of science fiction, and the games are quite dissimilar to the roguelike genre.

 

 

 

Perhaps I should have specified that I'm not aiming for full-blown galactic civilization science fiction.  It's still high fantasy in terms of being set on a parallel Earth.

I would avoid trying to find a solution that works for massive mirrors in one fell swoop, and split up large mirrors into smaller, simpler surfaces that can get away with texture coordinate distortion for curvature.

I would separate the vertex buffer itself from the vertex attributes.  This will decouple the vertex buffer from a program, and allow you to spread attributes across multiple buffers.

Try to work out what features you want to implement before anything else.  Start with general ideas and work your way down to specific features and requirements.  Once you have all of your features in a list, you can start to design your architecture to implement these features, making sure to find solutions to dependencies between them. (this can be the hardest part!)

 

Don't bother with any pseudo-code after you've finished the architecture, as you've got all the elements needed to begin coding the actual game.  When you do this, make sure to always write code that doesn't depend on a feature you haven't implemented yet.  This should help you keep your game testable and cut down the amount of coding you need to do in between new builds, which will keep you motivated.

I would use an additive rather than a modulative approach to animation layering. Each frame, the skeleton will be reset to the bind pose. Then, the whole skeleton will be transformed by the lower-body animation pose. You can then transform the skeleton by additional poses to add on a shooting animation, a waving animation, and so on. In this way, the upper-body animations won't affect the root bone as long as the pose keeps the root static.