As you get further into development, you will find other things eat up your time (not specifying the map format, which likely your coder will do his own way, completely disregarding this conversation anyway :P)

On my projects, the main sinks of time tend to be (order may vary):

1) Designing the game as you go.
What do characters look like? What items are in the game? How many baddies are there? (Not simply the game story, which most people come up with well in advance)

No matter how much I work on this ahead of time, there is still alot of figuring it out as I go.

2) Interface... How do you want the user to interact with the game?
Gamepads? Bindable keys?
Will there be menus?

3) Multiplayer?

4) Art! .. stupid details like what is the ground texture going to look like? What kind of lighting will I use?
How should I make weapon/item models (or sprites)?

Anyway, just trying to tease out some real delay-causing obstacles, or project killers.

- Jacob

Oh, as far as the game content goes, I am moving in full-gear. The creative portion of the game is no worries; I have my storyline, characters, weapons, enemies, and all of that jazz down. I have concept sketches of all the stations, rooms and corridors, I drew up floor plans, etc.

I'm working on an interface for communicating with terminals scattered about (think Doom 3, only a dialog screen will appear like the old days).

Basically, everything on my end I'm confident about, I just want to gather up as much useful information for my buddy as I can before he dives into this.

Thanks for the helpful information thus far, guys.

If we help, do we get custom made avatars? :D

Haha, that or I'll incorporate your names into the game in some way. Anyone up for being a lowly scientist killed off by an infestation? =O

Yeah, my account has secret powers granted behind it.

Anyway, I've collected as much information as I can on the required portions of the game for Matt (programmer) that he isn't familiar with. I've created a handsome list of reading material covering:

1. Portal systems
2. Reading and converting Worldcraft .MAP formats
3. Loading and rendering MD2 models

I have no doubt that he can tackle it; Matt's now a 2nd year student at MIT, and him and I have created quite a few games prior to this (mostly 2D, but also a raycasting game). I'm just trying to gather as much useful reading as I can so he can familarize himself with these concepts.

What else am I missing? A texture system won't be a big deal, as that will be covered in the Worldcraft documents I've found. I'm not familiar with lighting in OpenGL (dynamic lighting, that is), so I'll try and find some information on such.



Take that image, minimalize the amount of geometry (there won't be rigorous amounts of piping and 'useless' artifacts, etc), and change the camera to an overhead position with a dynamic field of view. This is what we're hoping to achieve. As far as the graphics and models go, that's not an issue, I'm working on it now. I'm just concerned with what's required to get it to render.

Can you guys think of anything I haven't thought of yet? Assume the programmer is capable of learning what you need him to.

Quote:Original post by Nemesis2k2
One thing I think your buddy will have to be familiar with is shaders.

Nonsense. If more people focused on gameplay rather than the latest bleeding-edge whizz-bang effect, we might actually get some games with new and interesting gameplay, rather than the same re-hashed stuff. Thats even more true for small indie/hobby stuff, where you don't have nearly as many resources and man power.

One method I used when I started my current game was to just keep the graphics as simple-yet-functional until I actually had some gameplay. Then you can actually find out if your game idea is fun. Only when you've got something worth playing you can start adding graphics.