What was I thinking! I can't make a post without giving away a least some cryptic song lyrics. Since I went a little into the explosion of the sun during the Astral Invasion/Fallen Angel Rising era of the PDU in the Space Hockey document, this seems very appropriate and yet not too much of a spoiler...

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The feel of movement of the ships is the key to making a top-down arcade game like this truly addictive.

This sentence appears nearly at the end of the doc. Up to this point i assumed it is a 3D game with cockpit perspective. I'd need to start reading everything again because this changes everything.

So i suggest you introduce this at the very beginning. Screen illustrations would also help a lot - does not need to be art.

I assume you talk about a game where every player sees the entire playfield - so all ships, goals and puck. Controls like Asteroids? So very old school? (I'm a bit worried people nowadays may be resistant against this type of controls because 3D and first / third person perspective solved the issue of linking orientation to the player so well. Asteroids needs practice to get this right.)

I don't play sports games, but i should be able to understand the design doc which is not really the case yet. I also miss that super important thing of how does the player control the ship. Keyboard / mouse / gamepad / analog stick?

Keyboard and gamepad are "equal but different" control methods in this type of game, based on Star Control and Subspace players.  There are things you can do with a gamepad you can't do with the keyboard, and vice-versa.  The Subspace community existed for a very long time, I was there from the earliest days for almost a decade.  So I have experience from Subspace to rely on for understanding how certain aspects like some of the ones you are mentioning work.

I moved the notes to the end of the document and the stuff about gamepad control is at the end because of that.  There were remaining notes like that because I didn't want to clutter it with details.  That was obviously a detail that I should have found a way of mentioning at the beginning though, you are right.

10 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I moved the notes to the end of the document

Found it (Initially skipped that final section - assumed it is more about open / optional ideas for the game). I see you also adress my worries about fixed camera angle there with good argumentation 

Note that although i'm over 40 i don't not know Subspace, Star Control or Nintendo Ice Hockey. You should not assume your audience even knows Asteroids well enough (probably younger programmers looking for a project to work on).

2D Topdown, fixed camera angle, D-Pad controls... some keywords like that at the introduction are really necessary to shape the vision for the game.

(What i still wonder about is: Is camera centered to playfield or to your own ship showing only partial playfield? The information may be there but just to give feedback on early questions that arise to the reader.)

That is all very good advice.

The camera can be done either way in this type of game.  My top down games are like Subspace, and most games like this, that center the camera on the player's own ship.  I think this is better in a lot of ways.  If the camera is centered on the play area it is a lot harder to aim and have a sense of speed and direction.  With the camera centered on the player, the entire screen acts like the "funnel" used to aim guns in a jet fighter's HUD.  You don't even look at your ship, the entire screen serves as your movement and aiming cues so your attention is entirely on the target.  With the camera focused on the playing field you have to pay more attention to your own ship than the target just to aim, and even then your aim is usually off

Centering the view on the player also allows for radar and shooting things BVR (off-screen), and it is a very satisfying feeling to hit things off screen just guessing by radar.

Actually, Joe, since you've been so helpful... I've already run into a few issues in thinking about how to actually put together a group of people to make this as an indie game.  I don't plan to start doing that until after the holidays.  I have no experience doing this in an era when it is a thing people actually do, haha, but I've already run into a problem with it maybe you have some advice about.

I already got one e-mail from someone wanting to help, a programmer with no experience making games but would like too.  I am not ready to start trying to do that yet anyway, but it immediately felt wrong to draw some 20-something aspiring programmer into my world of endless failure thinking this might be a way to actually get somewhere.  I know how to make games, I don't know how to get a game made.  I don't want to waste one of the best years of someone's lives thinking they are getting somewhere when I don't know how to get them there.

So it really feels unethical too me to even do this unless I first find a programmer who has a lot more experience in the industry than I do, and feel as though that programmer and I could almost do this by ourselves.  Am I just from the wrong generation to "get the indie thing", because I really feel like this is wrong to do to people of this age without my knowing that I can actually do it.

First, i would be happy if i could spend some time on my own game ideas, but that's impossible. Contributing to another project is no option for the same reason. (I work on technology that will be interesting for the game industry, but i need more time than expected and i'm already risking financial issues...)

That said, creating a video game means a big risk, a high probability of failure, high probability of having no success. Learning from failure is an important part of game development. If your game fails at any point, your inexperienced programmer won experience and that's the only reward that is for sure.

The good thing is that your game is easy to code. A beginner should be capable of this. You also don't need to spend too much effort on content creation (none for a working prototype). Ideal conditions. Totally doable with just one programmer. But you need patience. Every programmer underestimates the amount of necessary time. If someone asks me how long do you need for this, i answer him twice the time that i think - inaccurate. Better programmers than me have the same issue.

What you definitively need is an agreement of what happens with the project if he decides to quit before it's done. He should be ok with you keeping the code to continue with somebody else. Discussion and Handshake may be enough for this if it's an unpaid hobby project - contract otherwise. (At that point it may be a bit harder to continue, depending on how messy the code is. A second programmer would improve this - they would start to make the code more readable to each other)

I know it is not the type of person that I am likely to find, but when I start this I think I am going to give myself the first 2-3 months to try and find a programmer with at least more experience in your industry than I have.  I think that would make this far more likely to actually happen, and I really don't want to involved people who are at the exact moment in their lives when they should be establishing something real for themselves.  It's an exponential thing, 18-24 is where you most likely either succeed in your career or not and I really don't feel right about drawing people of that age group into this.

Game design is the same way with where you think you are.  When you think you are getting close to being finished with a first draft design doc, that probably means you are almost half way there:-)  So I had already adopted Scotty's philosophy of always doubling the time you think it will take in estimates like that.  "How else do you expect me to maintain my reputation as a miracle worker."

I was thinking 2 programmers, 1 artist, and maybe someone to do sound/audio would be all that was needed to make Space Hockey.  Does that sound about right too you?

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

I was thinking 2 programmers, 1 artist, and maybe someone to do sound/audio would be all that was needed to make Space Hockey.  Does that sound about right too you?

Sounds right to me, but note that i'm no part of game industry either. I have released two indie games made entirely on my own, so i lack game related team experience as well.

A programmer is usually capable to create 'programmer art' that can act as a placeholder, so you don't need artists from the start. Also a working prototype could be done in spare time as a hobby project, limiting the risk to destroy careers

Usually a working prototype can be done quickly and then you see if it's fun and how people like it. We say the last 10% of work take 90% of time - this is very true. So polishing details should be postponed and in your case this includes graphics. (It's hard to decide for a visual style for this kind of game: Retro look with pixel art or realistic 3D ships / simple star field in the background or some kind of sports arena. How to include some eye candy to attract people. etc.)

Yes, I was aware of programmer art... I have my own term "programmer game design" I based on that, but people don't like it when I say things like that;-)

I think I'm going to try to find the thing I probably can't find (you see why I usually fail at the "git 'er done" side of things?) and try to find someone with experience making games.  Experience having "shipped" indie games is practically as good as at an established developer in my book.  I don't feel right drawing young people into this unless I have confidence that it really is already something "real" to involve them with.  The only way it is "real" is if a programmer who is actually capable of doing it is involved.

So after New Year's, which gives me time to find indie forums and do a lot of reading and stuff like that, I'll try it (the way I always wind up doing) in the way that initially gives me the least chance of success... finding a programmer who could almost do it themselves if they wanted too.  This is why I usually never get off the ground to begin with;-)

36 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Yes, I was aware of programmer art... I have my own term "programmer game design" I based on that, but people don't like it when I say things like that;-)

Haha, yeah - people don't like it and they don't even honor the entertaining factor of an offending person, someone putting established industry into question, or claiming he knows this or that better. Those guys end up with negative reputation, get banned, topics get locked.

This is sad, because games are about exactly that: Entertainment. And also because everyone agrees there is a need for new ideas and new directions. It's just games, so nothing serious - even if we make (or at least try to make) a living out of it.

(But note that the days where programmers made games are totally over - there is no more programmer game design. Today there are just many many cooks failing miserably at imitating Hollywood, mostly )

I wish you luck in finding the experienced guy(s) you want - they are all busy - you'll need money. That's why i point out the alternative, although and of course you're right with your concerns.

One of the most well-known sayings of the hobbyist game industry was...

"Game design is a benevolent dictatorship ruled by an iron fist."

Of course, back then the designer had usually founded and owned the company.  I've always realized that they are very different worlds, and a designer in the computer game industry would never have the same type of power and authority that most hobbyist era designers had.  But there was a lot more to learn from our methods then they had imagined.  In the early days they did not think that we knew anything that was relevant to the "entirely new thing" they were doing.  They re-invented the wheel on game design, both the knowledge and the process.  They are still a very, very long way to catching back up to where we already were when they first got started.

I don't have any money to pay a programmer, that's why I said I wasn't likely to find one.  But that's the only option for me.  As soon as that person sent me that e-mail I realized that I wasn't going to be willing to draw young people into this unless I believed there was something real to draw them into.  It isn't real without a programmer who can actually do it, and understands how much work it will be going into it because they have done it before.  If that means I just fail in yet another attempt at this, that is fine.  I'm not going to distract a 22-year-old during one of the most important years of their lives over something that won't get them anywhere.

City of Love is cryptically cool, but I thought it would be more appropriate if the very last PDU song/"movie" revealed on the blog was something from the last game of the chronological timeline.  So here is a key song from early in the story of Fallen Angel Rising...

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ship lineup.

Wow, that shocked me. This whole time I was envisioning some kind of Hokey game played by people in space.

You should mention somewhere at the start that it's a hokey game played with spaceships.

I am interested in helping. However can only do so part time; so first I need to know if you are willing to accept part time workers.