Re: [pygame] Buried In Game Ideas

[kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 10:27 pm, Ethan Glasser-Camp wrote:
> I can't play your demo because I'm running Linux. But I like games
> where you can explore and discover things. I'm not sure procedurally
> generating them is the way to go, though. It reminds me of Daggerfall,
> which was sort of fun, but dungeon crawls could take days of real time
> with little to no rewards.

Oops. When I've got battery power and a proper Net connection I'll send
the source. Nothing worth keeping proprietary here. 8)

I found Daggerfall's dungeons dull because they were all the same.
I once argued (at <www.rpgamer.com/editor/2001/q3/070601ks.html>) that
random dungeons are boring because they're repetitive, there's no overall
organization (like a central gadget the dungeon is built around), and
there's no ability to share specific information with other players. Doing
procedural generation does solve problem 3, but I'm not sure about 1 and
2. In the awesome game Disgaea, I actually liked the random dungeons
because there were significant layout variations, and several different
things to do there. For an island theme and problem 1 and 2, one option
would be to have several _types_ of dungeon: caves, shipwrecks, underwater
reefs etc..

On Tue, May 29, 2007 10:41 pm, Laura Creighton wrote:
> One thing that has worked when you have built a lot of nice
> world to explore, but no particular reason for gamers to _want_ to explore
> it, is to build some sort of commerce system when you earn
> gold/credits/conch shells for transporting things from places where they
> are common to places where they are rare.
>
> Then you need to build something useful to spend your gold/credits/conch
> shells on.  Better boats springs to mind, but of course the possibilities
> are endless.
>
>
> Laura's .02 euros

Whoa, those are relatively valuable thoughts!

Commerce is a good idea. I've been wondering about how to have some kind
of larger-scale organization to the world, though. My "zones" represent 1
km^2 areas, and they're generated randomly relatively to each other. So
it's fairly likely that if I did the commerce system now, Shiny Widgets
might cost 1 conch on one island and 100 on the next island over. If I had
some kind of larger-scale arrangement of islands (which would also get me
away from the grid seen at
<http://kschnee.xepher.net/pics/061025skygold2.jpg> but open up dull ocean
areas), I could say that Shiny Widgets are cheap throughout a large
region.

I released a "sailing demo" earlier. Depending on the ship's scale
relative to the graphics, sailing around with progressively cooler ships
could be fun.

Quick question before this battery runs out: what would you want to be
able to do in a village in this primitive island world, if the village is
abstracted as a menu but the individual random tribesmen have names and
hopefully some kind of individual personality? What mechanics?

Kris