Inspiration from Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators

Recently I didn't do a lot of programming...guess I was taking break, but now I am ready to get back into it I think.

But time was not wholly wasted, because I went back and play a little Space Rangers 2, and got some new game inspirations. |0| To describe the idea in full, I have dissect my view on the pros and cons of the SR2 gameplay:

Pros:

• Freedom and Open World, but still Entertaining - a lot of open type of games are extremely boring, such as Oblivion (a lot of people will disagree, but I just find it boring for some reason) and quite a lot of those free MMORPG. This game gives player a lot of freedom but is surprisingly entertaining and addictive. Perhaps it's because it presents an achievable Meta objective: solving the Dominators problem and save the galaxy.
• Sci-fi Space Opera Adventure/Comedy - It's a rare genre in game...perhaps a lot more games should be made in this area.
• Some interesting Combat Idea - during combat players can call other ships around the area for joint attack. Also player can go with fleets to attack Dominators, to defend and liberate systems etc. It's like participating in the grand opera and have small dungeon crawls in the same game. Other games also attempted similar things before but in my opinion this game seems to have a major break through in this area, although there are still possible improvements.

Cons:

• Combat Could be Boring - not much to do for players during combat. The player of course still has to decide which targets to attack and whether to run away. But it seems the combat could be more exciting.
• A lot of Traveling - a lot of flying around between planets, which take times, during which players don't do much. For more casual game market this can be detrimental because a lot of times players want to have the most enjoyment in a short period of time. While traveling player can relax and take it easy, too much of it make the more enjoyable parts of the game far in between. It will make the player feel they have to invest a lot of time and "labor" in one session to enjoy the game.
• Some of the Mini-Game - some of the text mini-game is just a bit too tedious. The worst one is the one in which the player has to read a lot, and it does not help when the font is tiny.

So taking this into account, I think it's possible to make a new game but retaining some of the pros of SR2:

1. Open space and freedom of action like SR2
2. Better convoy / strike group supports: The player can forms convoy with cargo ship, warship and fighter crafts to do trade or transportation mission. Or they can follow fleets to engage enemies. The elements is present in SR2 but it seems more user friendliness on this feature might be very possible.
3. Space Sim combat: Use Freespace 2 type of combat instead, but with a greater variety of ships which the player can command, ie larger vassals.
4. Faster travel for travelling between planet and star systems: Have a time speed adjustable button, like in x-com, to speed up the time in long travel. Use a more abstract maps with 2D icons overlay 3D star system scape etc. This can look potentially very cool if done right, making the player feeling like they are really planing operations etc. When the player meet hostile forces and need to engage in combat etc, the game will lock onto normal time and zoom in to player's "cockpit" and let the player fight, or escape the field.
5. Scrape Some of the Mini-game: scrape the 3D ground RTS portion of the game IMO is probably a good idea. Put the efforts instead on the space combat. Keep some of the more interesting mini-games. Present the text game in a more interesting way with shorter text etc, perhaps.

The game might sound ambitious and might seems difficult to make (due to expense might go up geometrically because of combined randomness in SR2 gameplay system and the required 3D engine). However, I think with the power of computer still increasing...it might not be out of question in a few years.

Picking and Thoughts on Titan Quest

This weekend I attempted to implement the mouse function back into the editor. Of course the first thing to do is change the OpenGL picking setup, and of course it didn't work properly. I didn't tried too much because I was busy with other stuff and didn't spend a lot of time on it, but right now it's effecting the performance, and might not even pick the right spot. If possible I should develop some sort of module ore class to handle this picking things more easily so next time I need it I can just plug it in. It may or may not be possible...will have to see.

One thing that distracted me from game development is me playing Titan Quest trying to entertain myself. But now I think about it...what a waste of time, haha... But hey sometimes one has to relax. I did come up with some interesting thoughts about APRG genre though. It seems to me on PC the only successful ARPG is Diablo series. Even some developers break off from Blizzard, forming their own companies, they still can't best Diablo in my opinion, even with new technologies. Different gimmicks, skill trees, stories, different amount of side quests etc etc have been tried in different games, and a lot of them sound more impressive than Diablo, but still, it can't be beat in my opinion. At least Diablo gave me more enjoyable time than the others. After playing Titan Quest, here is few of my observation on making good ARPG (obviously my opinions might have high probability of being incorrect, since so many others have failed to beat Diablo):

1. Fine tuning of level of difficulties and type of challenge: ARPG should be simple, dumb but not too dumb I think. It means that control of the character should be simple. The difficulty should be easy, but not to the point of dumbness. The games should offer player some challenge but not to the point of frustrations (die often, heavy punishment on death which include long reroute after death, long loading time after death etc)...Another way to say it might be it should be convenient for player to die, but rewarding to stay alive and kill a bunch of monsters,...I think.
2. Look Good: This sounds shallow but I think it's extremely important for ARPG to have everything look extremely good and cool in the game. This actually a bit related to point 1's reward aspect as well. I highly doubt any player will feel good if he gain a knife with +200 attack but looks like a banana. With a bad look, number and stats don't matter. It would be nice to make the player feel his character has become more powerful by the look of the equipments, statures and the attacks. Actually I think that's one of the problem with Titan Quest: equipments look blend and better equipment don't look that different or better. Titan Quest's expansion Immortal Throne did a much better job in my opinion. The armor etc actually make your character look nice. Few ARPG try to make the attack looks different when level up (except more varieties of skills) but I think that's actually one cool thing that can be done. The enemy also need to look nice, and they have to look better and better as the player progress, because it gives player more satisfaction when the players destroy them. If every enemies look like Tofu of course no one will get any satisfaction out of it, even if you make the Tofu extremely hard to kill. Blizzard's Diablo I think, actually did a good job in this area. The only exception to this "Look Good" rule might be some "need help" NPC since it might be better to make them look sorry to trigger player's sympathies.
3. Varieties: This kind of games need varieties...whether it's in the environment, type of enemies, quests, story etc. Anything that can shock and ow the players would be nice. But in my opinion it doesn't mean "a lot of" side quests. Because usually a lot of side quests means a lot of blend side quests. Plus, people are lazy, and might just ignore the side quests, or frustrated by it. It might be better...to force the varieties onto the player, challenge them visually and mentally rather than give them a bunch of similar challenges.

That's my thought so far. In general I think the expansion Immortal Throne is done much better than Titan Quest, it shows that the company did learn something. Unfortunately I heard the developer Iron Lore is closing now.
Another thing that makes me wonder is...Consoles should be the better platforms for this type of ARPG. I knew a few from the SNES etc. But consoles offer more possibilities with the control etc in my opinion. Yea, puzzling, how come not a lot of developers attempted ARPG on consoles.

Some Ideas

I am still developing the upgraded tile editor system, but looks like it's going to take a while since I don't have much time each day to work on it.

But here I will just post some game ideas:

• The background story I thought of would be typical: Some adversary (crazy AI or alien or...) has control of a space fortress (either taken over from human or constructed themselves). The fortress is constructed on and within a satellite or an asteroid (to give player different terrain to look at). The adversary is moving it slowly toward earth after the hyper space jump into the solar system. The earth's space fleets attempted to destroy it and fought with the fortress and its battle groups, but lost. Now the fleet is mostly disabled. The earth is attempting to re-muster the remain of the fleet to make a last stand before the fortress reaches to firing distance of its main cannons. In the mean time, the earth government hire the mercenaries to land on the fortress and attempt to neutralize or weaken it, that's where the player comes in. Now I know this sounds a bit like Star Wars or whatever other sci-fi and fantasy stories...but hey, what other kinds of story can get the players to save the day by shooting everything up in their path?
• When the game starts, the player will land on the drop zone. Drop zone will be the combination of town, save point, and way point in other RPG games. In drop zone, player can communicate with NPC like CODEC in MGS, save progress, buy/sell, revive henchmen and transport to another drop zone. The story behind drop zone would be that the player locate and secure an area safe enough for drop ships to come in, sometimes by defeating mini-bosses. The drop ships will bring necessary reinforcement and material to establish temporary base and up links.
• The quests would be something like the following: destroy fortress engine, destroy enemy main cannons, sabotage enemy fleets harbors and fighters hangers, destroy the core...etc. The player will travel through the fortress to their targets and establishing drop zone in the process. Obviously I can't actually do this with my current resource but if this is actually going to be a fully game, it would be something like that. Maybe in between add in some stories and drama of course, haha...

Starship Troopers After thoughts

Another interesting thing worth mentioning is I read the sci-fi military classic Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. Of course it's much better than the movie, haha....It's a controversial book, and I can see why some people might dislike some of the ideas in the book. Some ideas seem plausible, but because it's so different you wonder if it's actually good to think that way. Nevertheless the book has some very interesting ideas about politics and military.
What's important here though is it might give me some new ideas about my games etc.