Quote:Original post by markm Sounds like something the DOOM or QUAKE engine was made for?
Maybe just hack the art to make it zombies instead of whatever monsters they have by default, then start hacking in more weapons and such and the achievements or whatever?
There might already be level editors and weapon creation editors and such already out there for something like that too.
Have you done level creation and weapon creation before, so as to have a real sense of how easy or hard such things are to do?
I really really do not like having to risk seeming discouraging but the reality tends to be that some people end up finding even really really simple stuff like making a Battle for Wesnoth scenario difficult to do let alone some of the much much more challenging things they'd like to do.
Maybe you could even plot and storyboard your game as a Battle for Wesnoth scenario to have an actual playable plotline and storyline storyboard first before worrying about getting cinematographers in to see about rendering it in ever more glorious gory detail?
Yea i have done all of the above except work with that engine, i have made some small 2d games, never been uploaded, but yea i want to jump right into it, if anyone is willing to help, just pm and ill find something for you to do, beginner or not, i will find something. I would do the Battle for Wesnoth thing, but im really hopping to make something off this, and yea
Wesnoth has plenty of zombiemania already, go ahead and use something different. :)
(Different from using Wesnoth I mean, not different from using zombies!)
And I only meant Wesnoth as storyboarding not as product. I'd believe in people's "ideas" for game storylines more if I saw a Wesnoth campaign of them than when they are just an idea post they haven't even enough faith in themselves to storyboard.
Quote:Original post by markm Wesnoth has plenty of zombiemania already, go ahead and use something different. :)
(Different from using Wesnoth I mean, not different from using zombies!)
And I only meant Wesnoth as storyboarding not as product. I'd believe in people's "ideas" for game storylines more if I saw a Wesnoth campaign of them than when they are just an idea post they haven't even enough faith in themselves to storyboard.
What would you suggest? i am using source sdk? is there anything that is that free? haha
People are paying money for Wesnoth on one of the phone app store platforms.
The customers on such platforms are it seems predominantly more likely to blow a few bucks for a running game right now than they are to follow up the license notifications about what being GNU licensed gives them in the way of rights, such as the right to the source code of the port to that type of phone platform. The guy who did the port is making enough money that once he started giving some of it to the Wesnoth project hiring was able to be done to get some of the no fun to do stuff done that needed doing on the mainline project.
So it would technically be feasible to grab that source code, rename the entire program Battle for Brains (tm ;)) or whatever, gory up the GUI etc etc, toss in zombiemania campaigns, and sell it not as more campaigns for the Battle for Wesnoth engine they might (if into princes princesses dragons necromancers etc type fantasy genre) already have bought but, rather, as a whole new turn based strategy game for zombies and those who love them...
Not to mention no one has yet taken the cowboys (nor the ninjas as far as I know) from the "Internet Meme Era" and matched them up against zombies in a campaign...
People are paying money for Wesnoth on one of the phone app store platforms.
The customers on such platforms are it seems predominantly more likely to blow a few bucks for a running game right now than they are to follow up the license notifications about what being GNU licensed gives them in the way of rights, such as the right to the source code of the port to that type of phone platform. The guy who did the port is making enough money that once he started giving some of it to the Wesnoth project hiring was able to be done to get some of the no fun to do stuff done that needed doing on the mainline project.
So it would technically be feasible to grab that source code, rename the entire program Battle for Brains (tm ;)) or whatever, gory up the GUI etc etc, toss in zombiemania campaigns, and sell it not as more campaigns for the Battle for Wesnoth engine they might (if into princes princesses dragons necromancers etc type fantasy genre) already have bought but, rather, as a whole new turn based strategy game for zombies and those who love them...
Not to mention no one has yet taken the cowboys (nor the ninjas as far as I know) from the "Internet Meme Era" and matched them up against zombies in a campaign...
I reallly like that idea, would you be willing to join the cause??
I have (being zombie myself hahaha???) been up I don't know how many hours, so although I know some things that should be done as fast as possible (since some unscrupoulous commercial operator has probably already starting running with our idea between my last post and yours (if unscrupulous operators around here are as on the ball as they are on adult website developer forums, anyway)) I am kind of in ought to be sleeping mode not much competent for actually doing practical things until sleep has happened.
We need to know which phone platform Wesnoth was ported to so as to plug that into a Help Wanted template and also to compare it against the phone platform one of today's Help wanted posters wants people to develop for and can do the whole getting licensed with the app store thing as well as obtain any development kits doing phone platform compiling and such might require.
We need the compiling for that phone platform capability, however one usually does that. (Cross-platform compiler? Or what? How does one compile for that platform? Is there a free open source compiler that can do it?)
Because it is a good enough idea that programmers capable for porting Wesnoth to more different phone platforms might also be interested we want to dicker with that aforementioned poster anyway even if the current platform Wesnoth is already ported to isn't the one he is posting about, in case he might find the idea of doing the whole licensing thing with more different phone platforms something his skills suit him to and that interests him.
The Battle for Brains need not be the only genre skin we could make for the Wesnoth engine, so in luring artists into doing GNU licensed art assets such as skins we can wave carrot genre skin possibilities as possibly in the future too. (What's up, wabbit? Hahahah not quite but whatever is to stick for the artist as carrot is to wabbits, kind of idea. ("Wanna do a your favourite genre one if this works?")
More doubtless, but time is of the essence if the competition is already running with our idea... Guess I'll try on Wesnoth forums to track down what phone system that port was to... I think maybe Wesnoth was iPhone and Freeciv's port in progress is, I do recall, Android.
We need to know how much of a hack the port actually amounts to, for example did the guy have to change all the art assets to fit better on a tiny screen?
Pixel art tends to degrade badly if shrunk, so I am hoping he didn't have to do that, it'd really properly need having artists re-do them for the new size in many cases or result in shoddy sprites.
Lets remember his does sell though, so whatever he did, customers did find it buyable.
Skins for phone version though might need to be separate from those for PC (and Mac if its on the list which it likely is) version.
I do recall though that the guy did *something* to the campaigns he ported, otherwise they would not have been "ported", they would have simply run, just like on desktop/laptop machines. So we need to figure out what adjustments have to be made when moving a campaign between computer and phone type platforms.
(Someone might need to buy his port to find where he put its source, but maybe it is out in the open someplace not needing buying his app to get the source. Comparison of the campaigns in his source should show us what kinds of changes were done.)
Goal of Help Wanted will maybe be not only the direct goal of we need this this and this but also more general goal of we want to assimilate into our team anyone who otherwise might go build the same wheels in a different shop:
------------------------------------------------------------- The Battle for YOUR genre -------------------------------------------------------------
Name of project = The Battle for YOUR genre.
Name of team = The Battle for YOUR GENRE team.
Initial sub-project: The Battle for Brains.
The Battle for Brains is a multi-platform turn-based zombiemanic strategy game and storyboarding engine, etc, FOR _____ APP STORE phone platform, PCs running PC operating systems (the usual suspects), [and Macs? can't recall offhand].
Initial game / storyboard: Rebirth Community.
Rebirth community is a campaign for the Battle for Brains engine, the initial showcase mainline story, etc...
Team:
Engine core: The Battle for Wesnoth team, http://www.wesnoth.org/
Optional planetary engine core: The Freeciv team, http://www.freeciv.org/
(Rebirth Community is located on a planet, correct?)
Engine core port to _____: guy who ported Wesnoth to phone platform.
Gory skin for program: maybe YOU if YOU are the artist we need!
YOUR GENRE skin for program: maybe YOU if YOU are the artist we need!
EVEN MORE AWESOME gory and hapless protagonist and victim sprites than the ones we already have: maybe YOU if YOU are a sprite-artist whose work is good enough to mix with our gorgeous existing arsenal of sprites!
YOUR GENRE sprites: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
ZOMBILICIOUS STORYTELLING IMAGE PANES: maybe YOU if your art can cut the rotting flesh, uh I mean the mustard.
YOUR GENRE campaigns and storyboards: maybe YOU if you have what it takes!
ZOMBIELICIOUS, HAPLESS, HELPLESS and HEROIC portraits: maybe YOU if your art is up to the job!
YOUR GENRE portraits: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
BRAIN-EATING, soulful and soulless, haunting and rousing, etc etc music and sounds: maybe YOU if YOU can demonstrate what zombielicious sounds like!
YOUR GENRE music and sounds: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
Etc...
Rebirth Community, initially conceived as a First Person Shooter, will be storyboarded using the Battle for Brains engine, resulting in a fully playable Battle for Brains campaign.
If Rebirth Community goes onward onto an FPS engine from there, as originally conceived, then maybe YOUR GENRE campaign will be able to make that leap too if YOU have what it takes...
...Something like that, but fixed up to match template.
The actual campaign probably ought not mention the engine directly, so it can be run on any Battle for [genre] engine without something said inside the campaign referring to some differently skinned version of the engine.
Thus it can be developed as a Battle for Wesnoth campaign using normal Battle for Wesnoth tools, then run through whatever the porting of a campaign to the phone entails once it is ready.
If it does make money, a portion of the proceeds should probably be given toward the mainline Battle for Wesnoth development. Similarly quite likely a portion should be earmarked for building up the Battle for Brains arsenal of stuff useful for a fan community to build their own scenarios and campaigns for Battle for Brains. Possibly this would include forums, an add-ons server specifically for Battle for Brains add-ons, whatever.
By the way I remembered that although not precisely the actual Internet Meme cowboys since I made some adjustments such as removing their knock-back special and I did not use the entire "faction", there is a scenario featuring Blighty (as in Captain Bligh ;)) faction riflemen marines etc facing zombies in the "Mutiny in 1626" add-on.
It happened because there were no units representing brainwashed cultists running around converting people to their cult so I simply used zombies, which already naturally in Wesnoth turn what they kill into zombies, to represent the cultists running around converting people.
There are any number of people on the Wesnoth forums writing campaigns for Wesnoth who would probably drool at the prospect of publishing their campaign as an iPhone app, and the current port of Wesnoth guy hasn't even included all the "mainline" campaigns in his offering yet let alone even hinted at providing an outlet for all that enthusiasm.
So there might well be, just from the Wesnoth forums, plenty of demand for publish their campaign on a phone platform services.
Naturally, "some" (hahahaha) of them won't have a budget... ;) :)
But hey, who knows, maybe some of them will...
Most of them tend to be writing for the Wesnoth world, "Irdya", even if their stories of Irdya never get adopted into the "mainline" timeline of Irdya.
It would probably be good to flesh out more about the "mainline" campaign(s) of Battle for Brains. For example would a campaign featuring a necromancer who conjures zombies fit? How about if it also featured knights and a princess?
Etc., because the hope of getting their campaign onto the iPhone by getting it included in the Battle for Brains' mainline might attract people who might not be looking to write stuff that more obviously fits into the same universe let alone the same timeline as Rebirth Community.
A lure toward setting up a budget and paying people to do stuff could be that of becoming the mainline campaign of a whole new genre in the Battle for [genre] series, so anything that doesn't fit Battle for Brains we can suggest "they" try to find someone interested in putting together a budget and having the Battle for YOUR GENRE team set them up as mainline in yet another Battle for [genre] engine... not just any someone mind you, but someone who, once being the mainline campaign of the "new" engine, will be willing to accept "their" campaign as also being "mainline" in that [genre].
***Note check whether the current port lets people play "multiplayer" via the existing Wesnoth multiplayer server. Suppose it turns out that people are buying his for that capability not for the campaigns?!?! We'd have to run a multiplayer server. Who would pay hosting and bandwidth for that and why would they do so?
[Edited by - markm on December 20, 2010 9:33:19 PM]
Quote:Original post by markm I have (being zombie myself hahaha???) been up I don't know how many hours, so although I know some things that should be done as fast as possible (since some unscrupoulous commercial operator has probably already starting running with our idea between my last post and yours (if unscrupulous operators around here are as on the ball as they are on adult website developer forums, anyway)) I am kind of in ought to be sleeping mode not much competent for actually doing practical things until sleep has happened.
We need to know which phone platform Wesnoth was ported to so as to plug that into a Help Wanted template and also to compare it against the phone platform one of today's Help wanted posters wants people to develop for and can do the whole getting licensed with the app store thing as well as obtain any development kits doing phone platform compiling and such might require.
We need the compiling for that phone platform capability, however one usually does that. (Cross-platform compiler? Or what? How does one compile for that platform? Is there a free open source compiler that can do it?)
Because it is a good enough idea that programmers capable for porting Wesnoth to more different phone platforms might also be interested we want to dicker with that aforementioned poster anyway even if the current platform Wesnoth is already ported to isn't the one he is posting about, in case he might find the idea of doing the whole licensing thing with more different phone platforms something his skills suit him to and that interests him.
The Battle for Brains need not be the only genre skin we could make for the Wesnoth engine, so in luring artists into doing GNU licensed art assets such as skins we can wave carrot genre skin possibilities as possibly in the future too. (What's up, wabbit? Hahahah not quite but whatever is to stick for the artist as carrot is to wabbits, kind of idea. ("Wanna do a your favourite genre one if this works?")
More doubtless, but time is of the essence if the competition is already running with our idea... Guess I'll try on Wesnoth forums to track down what phone system that port was to... I think maybe Wesnoth was iPhone and Freeciv's port in progress is, I do recall, Android.
We need to know how much of a hack the port actually amounts to, for example did the guy have to change all the art assets to fit better on a tiny screen?
Pixel art tends to degrade badly if shrunk, so I am hoping he didn't have to do that, it'd really properly need having artists re-do them for the new size in many cases or result in shoddy sprites.
Lets remember his does sell though, so whatever he did, customers did find it buyable.
Skins for phone version though might need to be separate from those for PC (and Mac if its on the list which it likely is) version.
I do recall though that the guy did *something* to the campaigns he ported, otherwise they would not have been "ported", they would have simply run, just like on desktop/laptop machines. So we need to figure out what adjustments have to be made when moving a campaign between computer and phone type platforms.
(Someone might need to buy his port to find where he put its source, but maybe it is out in the open someplace not needing buying his app to get the source. Comparison of the campaigns in his source should show us what kinds of changes were done.)
Goal of Help Wanted will maybe be not only the direct goal of we need this this and this but also more general goal of we want to assimilate into our team anyone who otherwise might go build the same wheels in a different shop:
------------------------------------------------------------- The Battle for YOUR genre -------------------------------------------------------------
Name of project = The Battle for YOUR genre.
Name of team = The Battle for YOUR GENRE team.
Initial sub-project: The Battle for Brains.
The Battle for Brains is a multi-platform turn-based zombiemanic strategy game and storyboarding engine, etc, FOR _____ APP STORE phone platform, PCs running PC operating systems (the usual suspects), [and Macs? can't recall offhand].
Initial game / storyboard: Rebirth Community.
Rebirth community is a campaign for the Battle for Brains engine, the initial showcase mainline story, etc...
Team:
Engine core: The Battle for Wesnoth team, http://www.wesnoth.org/
Optional planetary engine core: The Freeciv team, http://www.freeciv.org/
(Rebirth Community is located on a planet, correct?)
Engine core port to _____: guy who ported Wesnoth to phone platform.
Gory skin for program: maybe YOU if YOU are the artist we need!
YOUR GENRE skin for program: maybe YOU if YOU are the artist we need!
EVEN MORE AWESOME gory and hapless protagonist and victim sprites than the ones we already have: maybe YOU if YOU are a sprite-artist whose work is good enough to mix with our gorgeous existing arsenal of sprites!
YOUR GENRE sprites: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
ZOMBILICIOUS STORYTELLING IMAGE PANES: maybe YOU if your art can cut the rotting flesh, uh I mean the mustard.
YOUR GENRE campaigns and storyboards: maybe YOU if you have what it takes!
ZOMBIELICIOUS, HAPLESS, HELPLESS and HEROIC portraits: maybe YOU if your art is up to the job!
YOUR GENRE portraits: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
BRAIN-EATING, soulful and soulless, haunting and rousing, etc etc music and sounds: maybe YOU if YOU can demonstrate what zombielicious sounds like!
YOUR GENRE music and sounds: maybe YOU if YOU have what it takes!
Etc...
Rebirth Community, initially conceived as a First Person Shooter, will be storyboarded using the Battle for Brains engine, resulting in a fully playable Battle for Brains campaign.
If Rebirth Community goes onward onto an FPS engine from there, as originally conceived, then maybe YOUR GENRE campaign will be able to make that leap too if YOU have what it takes...
...Something like that, but fixed up to match template.
The actual campaign probably ought not mention the engine directly, so it can be run on any Battle for [genre] engine without something said inside the campaign referring to some differently skinned version of the engine.
Thus it can be developed as a Battle for Wesnoth campaign using normal Battle for Wesnoth tools, then run through whatever the porting of a campaign to the phone entails once it is ready.
If it does make money, a portion of the proceeds should probably be given toward the mainline Battle for Wesnoth development. Similarly quite likely a portion should be earmarked for building up the Battle for Brains arsenal of stuff useful for a fan community to build their own scenarios and campaigns for Battle for Brains. Possibly this would include forums, an add-ons server specifically for Battle for Brains add-ons, whatever.
By the way I remembered that although not precisely the actual Internet Meme cowboys since I made some adjustments such as removing their knock-back special and I did not use the entire "faction", there is a scenario featuring Blighty (as in Captain Bligh ;)) faction riflemen marines etc facing zombies in the "Mutiny in 1626" add-on.
It happened because there were no units representing brainwashed cultists running around converting people to their cult so I simply used zombies, which already naturally in Wesnoth turn what they kill into zombies, to represent the cultists running around converting people.
There are any number of people on the Wesnoth forums writing campaigns for Wesnoth who would probably drool at the prospect of publishing their campaign as an iPhone app, and the current port of Wesnoth guy hasn't even included all the "mainline" campaigns in his offering yet let alone even hinted at providing an outlet for all that enthusiasm.
So there might well be, just from the Wesnoth forums, plenty of demand for publish their campaign on a phone platform services.
Naturally, "some" (hahahaha) of them won't have a budget... ;) :)
But hey, who knows, maybe some of them will...
Most of them tend to be writing for the Wesnoth world, "Irdya", even if their stories of Irdya never get adopted into the "mainline" timeline of Irdya.
It would probably be good to flesh out more about the "mainline" campaign(s) of Battle for Brains. For example would a campaign featuring a necromancer who conjures zombies fit? How about if it also featured knights and a princess?
Etc., because the hope of getting their campaign onto the iPhone by getting it included in the Battle for Brains' mainline might attract people who might not be looking to write stuff that more obviously fits into the same universe let alone the same timeline as Rebirth Community.
A lure toward setting up a budget and paying people to do stuff could be that of becoming the mainline campaign of a whole new genre in the Battle for [genre] series, so anything that doesn't fit Battle for Brains we can suggest "they" try to find someone interested in putting together a budget and having the Battle for YOUR GENRE team set them up as mainline in yet another Battle for [genre] engine... not just any someone mind you, but someone who, once being the mainline campaign of the "new" engine, will be willing to accept "their" campaign as also being "mainline" in that [genre].
***Note check whether the current port lets people play "multiplayer" via the existing Wesnoth multiplayer server. Suppose it turns out that people are buying his for that capability not for the campaigns?!?! We'd have to run a multiplayer server. Who would pay hosting and bandwidth for that and why would they do so?
Mark,i am currently taking all of this in, and am really loving this feedback, if you could, email me so we could set up a more real time conversations to get things moving on the ball, i really like the wesnoth idea, there is a pixel artist that is free on the help forums we could get, and i know how to code in mostly every language in some form or another. So i would really love your take on the idea, we could really his this off, when you read this, try to make this forum on the dll so no one will be taking our idea, mostly yours influenced by me. So yea, any time im free for 3 weeks so i could really get a lot done, email me at Yesman538@gmail.com from there we can really make this pan out to be a very interesting development.
I really live free civ as an engine, it seems that battle for wesnoth might be a little sketchy since there is someone already producing something off the game, as in story boarding, the game is a run and gun type game, so making a storyline for a multiplayer run and gun would be hard with a turn based as wesnoth or anything else. Am i correct or ? again i have made some 2d games, but nothing 3d that is what i was working toward. So story boarding might gain support and help with the developing for it which would be great, just need to know what i should start sketching out so i can put up some inquires? Like i said i have 3 web developers, that can help make my website; once they see something developing that is. 2 story board people, which would help with the overall story board i guess. 1 developer, which is yours truly so with knowing this, what should i start doing and looking for?
Come to think of it mark, this would be an amazing 2d side scroller. I have read your other posts and see that you are into the simplistic engines, and how ingenious they tend to be. Well this as a side scroller would be so simple and would allow a clear representation to what the game is meant to be, if you agree, please comment back.
I had been about to write that I am not even sure what a run and gun is but whatever it you should find out what engines are available to do it.
I was concerned though with how do you kust kind of draw a game in something like that? An artist could, sure, the UDK artist wrote at lesat one whole game for the UDK just using graphical scripting language. But he can draw, I saw pictures of cool townscapes he did and such.
I do townscapes in "Gridarta for Crossfire" map-editor, dropping which house sprite I want onto which square of the map I want it on.
Now if one had the UDK head graphic artist dude's work to drag and drop the houses or something, great. But if the UDK doesn't come with "all the usual suspects" of sprite, oops.
Usual suspects for town I guess would be the ones you see on those "generate a town for an RPG" websites or, back in pencil and paper era, on the lists of which building you get when you roll what number on how many dice.
Usual suspects for monsters would be the original D&D monsters maybe plus what was added in Greyhawk, the first supplement. Then subtract all the Gygaxian ones that don't really exist in the literature outside of their copyright or trademark or whatever. And maybe correct some liberties they took like describing a Lammasu from an ancient bestiary and calling it a displacer beast then taking the label lhammasu and applying it to what prett much seemed to be a sphinx.
Its just nice, especially for prototyping, to have standard stuff right there. I dunno if professional graphic artists and designers use "Letraset" anymore but chances are they do use fonts. Its the same kind of idea, the standard vocabulary of the genres. (For romance you'd probably have standard swoon, gosh, oh gosh, etc emoticon images for depicting the standard emotions the genre runs on.
A nice thing with Freeciv is the ability the players have of choosing which of several tilesets they prefer, some quite abstract or symbolic others more toward realistic.
How do you do stuff like that in 3D ?
On the other hand, Google has an ever growing library somewhere of free models you can grab and use for anything. So maybe getting familiar with what is in that collection would be useful. Along with getting familiar with what 3D engines there are. *Game* engines. I know the DOOM engine was released as source code but not sure what else was so far.
I don't like the UDK because excluding people who use Indie (Indy? Makes me think Indy 500...) operating systems seems a bad way to appeal to Indie culture... Oh hi guys we are screwing a whole bunch of you from the get go, but we do hope you like our game...
There is a side-scroller campaign for Wesnoth amazingly, it wasn't very good last time I loked but it shows how one could go about doing it.
Still turn based though.
What side scroller engines are available. I guess googling "GNU side scroller" and "GNU run and gun" is in order...
