I'm trying not to be too hyped up as I'm writing this...
A couple of close friends and I are gathering forces to make our very own video game without any of the corporate issues that tend to strangle development teams. Because strangling creativity is stupid. Cutting features due to deadlines is stupid. Because most games seemed to be designed to be played once; and that's stupid. So yeah, that's the big reveal: A video game.
The coolest part of it all: I'm at the helm.
So we're essentially building the video game I've been planning since I was in high school (if not before then). A dream project. The guys liked my pitch and the fact that I have years worth of design documents in hand really convinced them to go with it... that and the really, really crude prototype helped. So the idea is to build it, test it, fix it and repeat that process until it's golden. Production is where we feel most comfortable at.
My game is an role playing game and the mission statement is to essentially rectify what I believe is fundamentally flawed in RPGs. Cocky? Yeah, it sure sounds like it but I came up with something really cool. You think that's crazy, the more ambitious part of the project is that we want this to truly be worthy of the tag "next-gen" but not in the shallow "lets make prettier images" kind of way; we're talking next-gen game mechanics.
It seems like the trend is to either look back and make "homage" to the classic games or just make a game as lean as you can and polish it as much as possible. What? It's another run-of-the-mill game? No worries, we'll write a really cool story to draw the players in. NO! That's bad! While I'm all "if it worked back then, it should work today"; that's not next-gen! The guys and I are very frustrated with this and the previously-mentioned prototype and our current build are giving us hope.
I won't write on this blog with day-to-day updates of our progress but I just wanted to share a little bit on the four major game mechanic milestones that we have planned:
- World building
- NPC/Monster AI
- Combat
- Story
These milestones are independent from one another because we want each one of them to stand on their own in case one of them fails... like "oh shit, we can't do this; now what?" kind of scenario. If one of these four milestones fail, then the whole "next-gen" thing is pretty much dead, but at least we'll have a good game on our hands regardless. Yes, I've labeled world building and story as game mechanics. That's intentional.
We've been working on world building since august 2013. While we basically achieved what I initially had in mind within the first month (c'mon man, I came up with some of this stuff in 1998), we've drastically been improving; adding more and more detail. That's what's great about working in a team of passionate people; they take your thing that you've been dreaming of and then they go "let's make this better!" and they deliver. I fully expect world building to take the entirety of the year to complete... we are making an RPG after all.
NPC and Monster AI will most likely take another year as well... but that's just me throwing numbers out of my ass at this point.
I'm projecting a prototype reveal in the summer of 2014 at which point I'll gradually talk more and more about the game. I actually wanted to do this for Christmas 2013 but we've made so many improvements that it makes more sense to simply wait.
Just for you guys: here's a sneak peak of what the december build looks like:
Kick-starter? No plans for it; the idea right now is to take our time and get it right. The moment you involve money into this, project goals tend to skew a little. I'm personally backing a few other games and the idea of adding "yet another game in the kick-starter list" for other folks kind of disgusts me.
Hey, would you look at that? A decent log entry although I probably shared too much. Oh well.
