The first of those games is a project with the working title MaxwellGame. This game revolves around a knight named Maxwell (thank you, captain obvious) and his adventures with his brother Zelig. This project started years ago as a make-believe type game that my friend Corey and I used to imagine. Since then the stories involving Maxwell and his brother Zelig have only continued to grow. My goal is to re-imagine some of Maxwell's adventures into a J-RPG styled game with a continuous world. This is an idea that has stuck with me for the entire length of this project's creation; I wanted the world that players were immersing themselves into to feel seemless. I will attempt to explain that in a later journal when I have some media to demonstrate this with.
One thing that inspired me during the early brainstorming process of this game was a hatred I had accumulated over the years of playing video games. Imagine for a second that you're playing a game where you are a soldier that is in the middle of a large scale war, and oops! your sword just broke because the "durability" dropped down to zero. Or maybe you wanted to replace the shield in your left hand with another sword and dual wield them like a badass. Well, from the looks of the game art it would appear that there are quite a few swords laying across this battlefield ripe for the picking. But wait, there's this problem: it's just art. No programmers took the time to add any sort of interactivity to that art, so now that art will just sit there until the end of time serving no purpose but to look pretty.
In MaxwellGame I plan to minimize that wherever possible. If you walk out into a battlefield and there are swords on the ground, you will be able to pick them up. If you are in town and you see a shield laying against a house, you can take it. Any weapons should be kept behind the counter until the player wishes to purchase them.
What about my second game idea? I'm glad you asked! It's actually a modified form of one of Maxwell's stories. When I was growing up, Maxwell was my persona for almost any adventure I went on. Most of the adventures tended to belong to one of three timelines. Maxwell's past world, Maxwell's future world #1 and Maxwell's future world #2. Future world #1 was the first that I created although it doesn't actually fit in with the other two timelines and is better thought of as another universe. It is for this reason I am choosing to branch that universe off from being a part of Maxwell's stories and replacing the reoccurring characters with new ones to form the basis of The Future World Project. I intend for this to be a collaborative project in which I will attempt to provide some of the main story points and then allow others to create the game with me. Very few details of the story are up on the forum but I feel that I should include the link to that forum anyways after discussing the project.
As for technology, WynterStorm is being developed in C++ with SDL for events/windowing and OpenGL for graphics, though is not limited to either technically as the base graphics/core classes are designed to be pluggable. I wish to target Mac OS, Windows and Linux and then will see about targeting iOS and other platforms once either game is farther along in development. The engine uses some of Trefall's Property/Components code but it has been modified to remove dependencies on ClanLib.
Further engine technology will be discussed in another journal as the code matures.
Thank you for your time,
-Wynter Woods
