My first question is what should I put on my RPG engine? I do want it to have 3D graphics but what other things should I put? Also where can I find websites that have tutorials for better engine creating? My second question is should I design the game first or make the engine? (Designing I mean writing it out getting all the ideas and everything else)

First of all you need to know what you want the game to do.
Once you have all your priorities you should develop your engine.

First of all know what you want to program have all your ideas together.

Also don''t jump in at the deep end - bad idea

Erick: "First of all you need to know what you want the game to do."
What do you mean?
Erick: "First of all know what you want to program have all your ideas together."
This was unclear to me also.

Whoops sorry man

What I am getting at, is that you must first know what the game is going to be about, level data, enemies & npc''s ( AI ) once you have all the info and design - Program the engine to supplememnt the design.

Hope this is clearer

Thanks, that was more clear.

You can start working on the engine slowly, but I would get almost all of your design stuff down first. This will give you a better feel about what you need to put into the game (what type of skills/magic you plan to have, what your characters should look like, how your land, etc should look). Most truly crappy games are created because the designers spend too much time coding, and too little actually figuring out what they want to have in the game, so their games feel very hollow.

A good thing to remember is: WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN!!! I don''t know how many times I''ve had a great idea about a procedure or something, and said "nah, I''ll remember that" just to find out weeks later that I couldn''t remember anything. It may seem like a pain, but even if you write it on a napkin and keep it in your wallet, these ideas will help you make a more complete game than the standard "push it to the screen" fare.

-Chris

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Chris Rouillard
Software Engineer
crouilla@hotmail.com