PGD Annual 2007 - Questions to AthenaOfDelphi

[cairnswm]

Having read through your comments there seemed to be two that you thought pretty much perfect (from a documentation point of view I mean) - Cool - I was one of them

[Ñuño Martínez]

As I said somewhere I have not a lot of time, so quick: thanks to the judges for share theirs thoughts with us.

I agree there are great games here. Good luck for everybody.

[rtf]

3F
Genres : Action (Red)/Building and Management (Cyan)
Quite a lots of thought gone into this. The action part sounds like some classic Atari 8-bit games 'Sea Dragon' and 'Nautilus', they were both great fun so I'm quite looking forward to playing the game. My only concern comes from your comments about the operation of the port aspect of the game. My take on it is that building and management implies you have full control over the choices (within boundaries governed by say available technology), but part of your document makes it sound like the port will be a guided set of choices that you must work through to open up new action levels. If it is guided and there is a strict order in which things occur then I would question whether its a multigenre title (For example, if action level 1 opens option A in the port... option A opens action level 2 and so on) because actually, you as the player have no choice at all in that case. Also, based on the genre definition of 'City Building', there is a certain implication that your choices have implications for your 'citizens' which in-turn has an impact on the game.

I like that "lots of thought went into this" bit. The truth is that I decided to enter at 12:00 midnight the day of submission and wrote my design doc in about an hour. :lol: So I don't know exactly how the port/building system will work out. But to clarify, it will NOT be strictly linear. Examples of scenarios I might include:

-A friend asks you to lend him money to open a business. If you have earned the money at that point in the game, the option to give him money appears. Doing so opens a new location later, while refusing or being unable means that he tries to earn the money himself, leading to a mission where you have to rescue him.

-You are doing an escort mission for the government. You fail the mission. This does not end the game, but instead means that you cannot access government facilities or equipment later on.

One thing I would like to try is to never completely punish the player for their "big decisions." Failing the government mission might open up black market/criminal missions and bring about another path.

That style of gameplay is more like "adventure" or even "interactive movie" since it's mostly about dialogue trees, but I may also do something with numbers in it, which I'm sure is what most people think of as "city-building." But I don't really have ideas there...yet. The idea of opening new locations is what led me to think of "building" as the genre, but I'd like to focus on people more than numbers, so maybe I was thinking of the wrong genre

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Thanks for providing that information rtf, I'll take that into consideration at the appropriate point in the competition.

[DGL-luke]

If I may Comment on the review of my (and my team's, of course) project, MechaChess:

I actually didn't know about BattleChess or "Archon", resp. that the concept of mixing chess and action had ever been implemented. I will research on this, maybe there are a few good ideas to steal ;-)

I always wanted to make a game like Mechwarrior or Earthsiege 2, now I just had to search for another genre, and "Chess" came to my mind suddenly while reading the genre list up and down.
So making the mech simulation as sophisticated as possible is one of our declared goals(a teammate already asked me, "are we programmers now or are we engineers?!").
(Of course we need to keep it low a little bit... there should still be some action in it after all)

We know we're a little bit in-between on genres, but we just put it all into the design doc. I didn't see any penalties for not implementing an additionally announced genre. ;-)

[3_of_8]

Well, I'm the lead programmer of MechaChess. I do know the simulation part and the action part might overlap. At the moment, I'm still coding the basic engine and the chess part, so I don't know what the simulation part will be like.

If we have enough time, I will do something like individual equipment and something like tuning. We'll try to do the mechs' behaviour as realistic as we can. I don't know if this justifies the genre "Simulation", but the contest description didn't say anything specific about it and so we just added the simulation part, cause the worst thing to happen was that the simulation part wouldn't be accepted as an own genre and we wouldn't get the 5 extra points.

So, if it will be accepted, it's fine. Otherwise it's not a big thing, too.

Good luck to all of you others.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I'm of that age that remembers games like Archon (it was released in 1983) and Battlechess.

You are quite right, you won't lose points directly if you don't achieve the simulation genre, providing of course you achieve the minimum requirement of two genre colours.

[3_of_8]

Don't worry, we will.

At least if that OpenGL stuff won't kill me before we finish it. D'oh!

EDIT: By the way, these games are older than I and my fellow programmer DGL-Luke are. 1983, that's 8 years older than I am. :lol:

[savage]

EDIT: By the way, these games are older than I and my fellow programmer DGL-Luke are. 1983, that's 8 years older than I am. :lol:

Man that makes me feel OLD. I was 15 in 1983.

[Huehnerschaender]

Dom, you ARE old

I was "only" 11 in 1983