So, you know those sleepless nights when you have thoughts flying around your head, trying to pull off a decent imitation of TIE fighters?
That was last night in a nutshell. So in the interests of getting to sleep sometime before 8AM, I turned my PC back on, opened Notepad++, and started typing.Here are select fragments that I actually like, pertaining to my idea:
MULTIROGUE–=====–Base genre: Roguelike—-The idea is to present a multiplayer persistent world, akin to a region from Dwarf Fortress. The world presented is a simple field with trees. The players must construct some defenses, and start to dig. For about 30 layers, everything is 'safe', disregarding natural hazards; you'll find ores, caves and gems. After 30 levels, the dungeon levels begin, going down 70 levels. These are going to be balanced specifically with the idea that a group/community must clear them out.At the same time, each player can develop a specific skillset; a blacksmith will be invaluable to the other players, and will be able to make some high level weaponry, tools and armor later into the game.Cooks will be able to use basic plants and ingredients to make healthy meals that the other players use to restore their health and stamina.Other skill groups will encompass something akin to Dwarf Fortresses' selection; farmers, fishermen, carpenters, fletchers, miners, etc.—-The game itself will be 'realtime', meaning that time progresses independantly of one players actions, similarly to TomeNET or DF. Monsters and other Actors will move according to their speed levels.—-Communication will be a concern. A traditional chat would take up too much space on the screen; a separate screen that is accessed by pressing a key (Maybe 'm', or 'j', for journal), would bring up all the latest messages, and the status bar at the bottom of the display would show the most recent message.Otherwise, TeamSpeak or a similar VoIP chat program would work wonders.—-World regions should perhaps be fixed in any early attempts. The server will have to store a copy of the world, and provide the world seed to all clients. All clients will then have to generate a local copy of the world for themselves. From there, the server will only send important updates; those mostly pertaining to what the other players are doing. A full world, like the kind Dwarf Fortress creates, would be great if the number of players could be increased; perhaps in a situation where at least several hundred players were participating; this could lead to interesting world/lore building, feuds and wars between different settlements, trade, etc.But for first experiments, a single 'region' would be best to experiment with.
I'd play and, call me picky, but I'm not too keen on non-graphical GUIs
Well, I am planning a pretty flexible system for rendering; you can 'plug' in another render module. Of course, drawing all the sprites and tiles will make the game take another <insert arbitrary number of months/years here> to complete. :P
So is it like an MMO nethack?
Or a MUD?Either way, nice.Somewhat, yes. Just with the ability to craft things, construct things, etc.
I find the idea of creating your own weapons or armor, naming them, etc, has a certain appeal to it; especially in a game of this type.This would be awesome, dwarf fortress teamwork!
It sounds interesting, but how hard would it really be to make tiles? :/I'll put it this way. I don't want my game looking like NetHack or TOME 4. I'd make tiles with smoothly animated sprites. Think the old LoZ games.