Innovation; What could you do?

[WILL]

What do you think you can do in a single year, (365 days) if pushed (that is if you're the type that needs to be) to do something leading to bleeding edge? Or at the very least to try something new and maybe interesting in a game project?

What kind of motivation do you feel would warrant this kind of a project? Could you do this in a long running competition of sorts?

I ask this because I'm curious just how many innovative thinking people there are in this community. I know there is a few that I have seen, but is there more and if so what kinds of innovations are you guys really interested in?

[dazappa]

I don't think I'd be able to push out bleeding-edge graphics (I have my own cartoony style, if I'm making the graphics myself), I think AI, Story telling, and Level Design would be my strong suits in this poll. A lot of games have been doing poorly in these areas IMO as well.

As for a year long competition, I really wouldn't encourage that for PGD. Going for a year means you will have to have a _huge_ base of entrants, who are working in teams.

To be honest, I wouldn't even bother joining a year long competition. The most I'd consider is 3mo, although I might eventually start work on an RPG idea I've had that could easily take a year.

[Incoming tangent]
Given a year to fiddle though, I would love to explore 3d in Pascal. Fact is, I've already done a lot of research in this department, and there are absolutely _no_ good FPC-compatible cross platform (win/lin at the very least) libs, headers, conversions, etc available. GLScene is the only slightly useable lib I've found so far, and that is really limited to drawing 3d textured models. No advanced lighting, physics, or 80% of the demos even compile, and the 20% that do pretty much require you to patch them up. It's quite sad really.

There's just not a lot happening in the Pascal gaming world. Andorra's lacking, buggy in places, but it's the only decent enough 2d lib I've found. Heck, the main things lacking so far for me are 1) Patched up pixel perfect collisions [because apparently it doesn't work on all video cards] 2) Regressions in code (eg: can no longer switch to FS mode while game is running) 3) No easy way to do pre-rendering 4) No easy way to capture the game screen.

After a long conversation on the Lazarus forums, I found someone who had made a graphics lib that could handle the type of prerendering I want (with alpha blending PNGs), but it's slow, involves saving the images and reloading them on top of the length of time it takes to generate the images.

To be honest, it's annoyingly hard to create any type of game with FPC. I've had to stitch together elements to do anything, (Andorra for graphics + SDL for sound). SDL in itself is even too lacking.

Sad state of affairs. Someone needs to step up and create some shiny new working, relatively complete engines, or patch up the old ones. *Sigh* [/end of random tangent]

[alexione]

Working as lead programmer in game development company, I have to handle daily with almost all parts of game development (including, for example, knowledge of some tips&tricks for 3D and image processing software artists use). On the other hand, I have 9 months daughter :-) as well second job for which I work at home. I could probably help with any programming task, but given spare time I have, I wouldn't be able to commit to anything which requires lots of time. That's why I voted UI & Controls.

[chronozphere]

I'd also go for shiny graphics. I always found this an interesting part of gamedevelopment. I've learned alot during the last years and I would like to take it to the next level and make something cutting edge.
However, I think I would also spend some time on audio programming. I've got some experience with OpenAL and I could easily add some more stuff to my audio module (chorus, reverb, echo etc).
Things like userinterfaces aren't a lot of work IMHO. If your game is not too complex, you can easily make a good UI for it that works intuitively.

@Dazappa: Yeah, cross-platform gamedevelopment is still quite hard at this stage. I feel GLScene is a tad too big to "just port" to another platform. There are other good projects that are maintained by individuals, who sometimes release a new version. Getting their engines work on Linux/mac is still a big task.
At the moment, I'm trying to get my own engine work on Linux. My goal is to have an OpenGL 3.x + SDL engine working on both windows and linux. So far, I'm stuck with OpenGL2.1 because the latest SDL release doesn't support OpenGL 3.x contexts. I did make my code forward compatible, so swapping to OpenGL 3.x wouldn't be too much of a problem.
I also know that Luuk van Venrooi is still working hard on his engine and demo's. He has a lot of experience with advanced rendering techniques. If we, and some other people, join forces, we could make a great framework. Like I said, I allready have a working audio module that can be used. Don't worry, There is still hope and potentional left in this community. :)

[JSoftware]

I've always enjoyed programming visuals the most, and frankly I think it's the bearing force behind games. I'm not talking state-of-the-art shaders, but just interesting graphics. Since I have no talent at all in this, I've been thinking alot about runtime generated graphics

Audio is really good for ambient and provoking a sort of emotional response in the player, but it's very hard as a programmer to create the sort of quality here that can do that. Work in this area would probably be my second priority

[GordonShumway]

For me it would depend on how you plan to implement it. Is it single person only? Would we be grouped in teams? Would the final project have to be a complete 'game' or just a proof of concept demo app? The motivation for such a feat should be equally huge, like lots of money or a potential publishing deal... Something like that.

Some innovations that I would like to see:

(I know this isn't a category and it wasn't mentioned but I'm bringing it up anyway.)
Development tools... Engine agnostic development tools. There are a few really good examples of these types of tools but they are few and far between. MilkShape 3D and the COLLADA format comes to mind. There is huge room for improvement in both Content and Development pipelines and melding the two together.

Ideas... Indie developers IMO are sinking fast into the major studio mentality of 'change game name and hit the compile button.' Or even worse the Hollywood style 'Same thing different name game.' Here are a few examples... just a few.

"I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" <- If you can't come up with a better name I'm not playing.
"Zombies vs Plants"
"Zombie Apocalypse"
"Zombie Estate"
"Zombie Hunter"
Do you sense a theme???
Seriously I could go on... and I won't even get started on Ninja games... C'mon creativity, fun, controls these are where an indie developer can actually compete with AAA studios. Tetris anyone? Tetris was made by a Russian Engineer... Engineers are boring people (He seems nice though), NORMAL people should do even better... (Just a thought.)

Better maintenance on Graphics (and others like OpenAL, Physics, etc) API header conversions (I don't want to complain too much here because there are genuinely talented people who donate their time to give us what we have already. Thank you guys... and gals :D )

More Pascal oriented materials and examples. That's self explanatory.

(All of the things I've mentioned are available for just about every language EXCEPT pascal which is sad. Java, C++, C, C#, Basic variants etc., but little to nothing on Pascal.)

As for what I would work on... well, I don't know there are many many areas that could use a good swift kick in the seat of the pants with the mighty boot of ingenuity. So I would have to do some real thinking on that... Hmmm.

P.S. The original MS-DOS version of Tetris was written in...? PASCAL! :D

[WILL]

Thanks for your responses so far. I think it's great that you are all giving this some serious thought and giving great answers. A year is a long time so with that kind of time-frame you would be looking at a potentially large project, or at least other large projects that others would be able to create in the case of a competition.

I've actually been thinking quite a bit about the PGD Annual lately. (Yeah I just couldn't go without mentioning it huh? ;)) A lot of people tell us that they wouldn't do a full year long competition, but I can't help thinking... well wouldn't a year actually give you that much more time, which so many people call on for not having, to make an entry. Which in a way makes me scratch my head, "you're complaining that we're giving you MORE time to make an entry for the competition???" There has to be some kind of mentality towards a year versus a 3-month period that you guys put your minds into that make a full year undo-able. I know when I say "a full year" I don't mean "a full year where ALL your free time is thrown into your project from start until finish" I'm thinking more of "give yourself a schedule with whatever things you have to do and want to do and within that maybe take a solid couple of months here and there or whatever else time you have to work on your game, not necessarily a solid push for a long full year, but the more the merrier and you actually will have that time that you said you didn't the last couple of years you said that you'd compete, but didn't because of time..." Wow I guess that might come out a rant that little bit there, but it's something of an anomaly that Ive found here at PGD and I just had to bring it up and ask whats up with that? Are there actually other reasons? Because I wouldn't never expect anyone to work on a project like that for a full year.

As far as the innovation side of things; I like to see that people can see where improvement can be made. I'm a bit surprised to see that there are a few that think there can still be some visual innovations as there have been so much done in the last 5 - 10 years, but I do love surprises sometimes. ;)

I'd like to see more innovation in the Pascal scene, it's what makes us unique from other communities I believe. I think there should be some kind of venue to celebrate or reward such things in the future. What do you guys think about that?

[GordonShumway]

Actually I agree with Will. I wouldn't think about a 3 month project. I would conversely consider joining a year long competition. After all life happens and I think I could actually finish something that would at least be show worthy in that time frame.

[farcodev]

I should do something in user interface area and story telling, but since i working on an already long project i have no more spare time (i dev even on my job breaks). For this time the dev goes well and a beta will be done for 2011, after about 5 years of dev in a seven years range, with 2 tries and fails... At last the third one is the good one, it's the last one anyway ;)

The problem is that i don't think that the developers base growth. It's more like it's the same one since 10 years, shrinking year after year. So people take age, have many changes in life and it's reflected in the community.
Of course there's good libs yet in Delphi world like GLScene, which have been updated many times these months for lazarus/fpc support and even OpenCL and CUDA, Vampyre and the come back of GR32 which have a good and active community these times.
In fact we lack of a usable 3d engine w/ full features like ogre and it's a pain in the **s.
The only thing i don't want is to finish by dev w/ Prism on Visual Studio only for have access to new libs...(damn .NET :no:)

[dazappa]

There's always going to be troubles with competitions, can't avoid it. For me, last year's wasn't timed well. There was ample time, but I had none to spare to work on a project. Having a year to work on something will likely cause me to work on it for 1 month total of the year, getting distracted with other stuff for the rest of the time. I'm going to need a stricter deadline, and 3mo is strict enough for me to buckle down and actually get some work done.

But man, I can think of various visual styles, but I don't think I would call anything I can think of "innovative" in the graphics department. Unique, sure. I'm more interested in creating a unique storyline with a challenging AI to match.

[Colin]

strange i clicked on artifical intelligence, just as i clicked submit it selected graphics :no: :S :o

anyways, since atm i am working on a UAV my focus this year and next probably will be purely AI, right now it's all about object avoidance, weight balancing (such as picking up an object on string, moving around and keeping the UAV straight without moving off course) and the most interesting i will be working on more recently is evasion on incoming collisions. so yeah i think AI is where i'd say there is alot to be done, too many robots (and game characters) that are stupid, which are unrealistic, alot of developers concentrate too much on graphics and so on and forget that the AI is an important part of the whole gameplay.

-Colin

[farcodev]

graphics seems to do all these years, when you look on gamers forums it's a bit sad.

[Rodrigo Robles]

User Interface and controls is the focus of the game player. It's proved by the raise of the Wii console, Project Natal and other that are getting popularity and attention by the great media.
Playability is where we should focus. Because this we still play old emulated games. We will like a good playability with bad graphics, music and sound, but not the opposite.