Coming from Twitter as suggested my @jmonkeyengine, I am willing to share some info about a little project I have been working on. Right now I am still ironing out some details in the story, but I really want to reveal some of the key gameplay elements that may appeal to some people.
Please let me introduce myself first. 
My name is Michael âgw0rdâ Lerch. I also go by other names such as AOD_KidDeath or simply KidDeath. I am a freelance writer and intermediate level programmer. Iâm currently 22 years old and unemployed. The project has been my full-time âjobâ for the past 3 months. Gaming is my passion and game development is my dream. I have been a gamer for 19 years. Star Wars: Tie Fighter was the first game I played at 3 years old.
Now to the fun stuff!
// Story
Something will go here soon! I just wanted to add this section here so I can write a proper synopsis for the game.
// Gameplay
Graphics - 2D Isometric tile-based open world with 3D elements. Your home will have up to 3 floors!
True RPG - It wonât be difficult to pick up, but itâs definitely not going to be something that veterans to the RPG genre will loathe. Remember when games like Baldurâs Gate punished you for being weak? Now clean up the interface, update the graphics and replace the story with something original (NOT saying Baldurâs Gate wasnât original).
Crafting - You know how in Ultima Online you could build a house, add furniture and decorate it with various things? Well, I do and I have all intentions of having a system just like that⌠except, a little different. You see, you will have to go out and chop down trees and/or mine various ore to use to make various objects. Your house, furniture, some weapons, armor, etc. Oh, letâs not forget harvesting ingredients to make your own potions, food, etc. How does this get tricky? Well, how would you feel if you were minding your own business chopping down a tree or two when suddenly youâre ambushed by bandits or other creatures? When it comes to multiplayer, your friends could turn against you during your tree chopping endeavors!
Random item drops - Yep, I said it. Random item drops. Every RPG has it, but the question is, can you craft it? Yes you can! But getting the materials to craft that axe, sword or armor can be very dangerous.
Difficulty - Easy, Hard, Brutal. Easy is for a newbie, of course. Hard is for the seasoned veteran. Brutal, well letâs just say you may want to hold on to your butts because if you die. You die. End of game, no loading from a previous save. New character.
Dynamic Time and Weather - Self-explanatory really⌠but thereâs a twist! Some creatures may be stronger at certain times of the day.
Multiplayer - Definitely planned but since Iâm not super experienced with network programming, I am going to wait until someone more experienced in that field comes in and does it right. There will also be absolutely without a doubt, LAN support.
Mods - Of course! I will personally make sure that it has full mod support. Why? Because it will be FREE! More information will come soon as I research more into various tools provided by the jMonkey team and this here lovely community.
Any thoughts or questions? Feel free to ask. (:
Well, how would you feel if you were minding your own business chopping down a tree or two when suddenly youâre ambushed by bandits or other creatures? When it comes to multiplayer, your friends could turn against you during your tree chopping endeavors!
if it happens frequently, It will get annoying like in Din's curse. I go in a dungeon after 1 min and 6 sec "village raid. go back". I go shop, the shopkeeper dies by a random event before i finish pressing the "buy button". Fu i want time to do shopkeeping.
MultiplayerMaking a lan game has the same difficulty as a network game. It is only 1 extra line of code. You will still have to transfer data between computers.
if it happens frequently, It will get annoying like in Din's curse. I go in a dungeon after 1 min and 6 sec "village raid. go back". I go shop, the shopkeeper dies by a random event before i finish pressing the "buy button". Fu i want time to do shopkeeping.
It won't happen too terribly much, just enough to keep things pacing. It would be balanced so things don't get repetitive or overly boring.
Making a lan game has the same difficulty as a network game. It is only 1 extra line of code. You will still have to transfer data between computers.
While that may be true, some people just flat out deny support to such a feature.
Lan is acutally easier, as you normally play with freinds on lan, you can leave many stuff of anti cheat protection out, wich makes it easyer to programm. Also due to the lower security you can do more logic on the client. (aka money managering and buying stuff, in a mmo you need the server to verify each of this)
EmpirePhoenix said:
Lan is acutally easier, as you normally play with freinds on lan, you can leave many stuff of anti cheat protection out, wich makes it easyer to programm. Also due to the lower security you can do more logic on the client. (aka money managering and buying stuff, in a mmo you need the server to verify each of this)
No matter what you do people will find a way to cheat. It even happens in games like Minecraft, Terraria, Zombie Driver, AudioSurf, etc. There will definitely be a balance of security and stability, without sacrificing anything in gameplay.
Minecraft is a poor example because it nearly completely trusts the client.
Empireâs point is that when you play on a LAN with your friends then you presumably know them and that they arenât running a hacked client. It definitely simplifies an architecture to make this assumption. The only downside is that it makes the architecture completely unsuitable for online play as even someone with only the most basic knowledge could trivially cheat your game. Itâs a trade off.
If you want to have a game that works on the internet then you need to be concerned with cheating. There may always be back doors in that you forget to close that allow certain isolated exploits but at least clients wonât be able to issue the âkill all playersâ command, etcâŚ
(And for the record, the above is not such an outlandish idea. For example, a ânaiveâ approach to a game based on an Entity System is to let the client modify the Entity System directly and just shuttle the data over the network. In that case you have a nearly infinite number of holes to close and/or server validation to do to make sure some hacked client doesnât set everyoneâs health to 0 or change all non-player objects into dragons, etc.)
I dont understand why preventing cheating is important. I think its better to give the anti-cheating job to the players and let them do the hard job.
- Players can cheat anytime with no restriction, (even the menus have cheat button).
- By giving players the right to ban others, they can remove any potential threat, and everyone will be happy. This way they can remove problems like gankers, cheaters, as well as banning anyone you donât like for X,Y,Z reason.
Unless the gankers and cheaters ban you first!
Some people donât like to play games where theyâve been playing by the rules for weeks and someone logs in and wipes out their progress in 2 seconds. Some players will rage quit and never return.
Though what you describe is sort of making cheating part of the game, I guess.
Actually all the games you named are games that were not designed with hacked clients in mind, as you usually play terraria or minecraft singleplayer or on a own server with a few friends.
@pspeed
If they ban you its the same action as if you ban them, you just remove their existance from your local version of the world and they can no longer affect your world.
So to solve the problem that someone may wipe your progress before you press the ban button, a system to revert player actions will be needed.
Now explain me how that concept would work for like Wow, I cheat myself lvl89 before anyone ever sees me, and say yeah I played a lot alone. Now they can either ban me without a real reason(as they cant know i cheated) or they let my cheat slip through.
Or a wallhack in cs, it would be far worse if the game would not be designd with cheaters in mind.
â you only get player locations send if the player is in your ~visible area
â also the game tries to check if I modify the material with one thats translucent
Your conect of removing them from local world ONLY works if you have something similar to minecraft or terraria. In every shooter that concept is failing, same for every MMO
I suggest you play gta san andreas with multiplayer mod, then you see the doom that causes.
â one ban vote every 10 seconds
â most of the players is annoyed by and just ignores them so noone ever gets banned
â to play you need at least to cheat yourself godmode, else you will just randomly die if someone presses the red button
â and then there was that cheat knive to kill godcheated players (no joke)
Anti-cheats, as a programmer, is your job.
That is, unless you donât give a crap about your players (possible fund givers). In that case, I can guarantee you you wonât see many players coming back to your game and I can also tell you that any other iteration of any game you might put out will have one or more strikes at the start because youâll be known as âThe developer that doesnât care about his game, his playersâŚâ and thatâs a stigma I would hate to have.
@EmpirePhoenix :
Level up hack : nobody will detect you / ban you for your level up cheat. However you can say that the game out of generocity saved you from countless hours of grinding and you can use those hours in real life. Also note that your âlevel upâ cheat doesnt reduce the freedom of the other users, you just deal more dmg, so ?
You can consider this is as a âfeatureâ (/irony) because players after using lv 99999 cheat will deal 999999999damage and wont have any reason to continue playing since they kill everything in 1 hit, and will get bored quickly. So what is the outcome ? Divine Justice : He no longer has a reason to continue playing because he got bored and stops playing video games. This is good because he got âauto-bored/auto-banned himselfâ for his cheating actions, so âthe laws of natureâ auto-balanced the problem. Nature always finds a way to fix things itself, why not let it do its job ?
Extra advantages :
- It offers players a way to cure their video game addiction (no other game can do that without cheats).
- It permantly stops hackers forever. A hacker got what he wanted so he no longer has to cheat.
- allows cheat group rules : a team can agree to use zero gravity cheat.
So you can say the whole system is âPsychological anti-cheatingâ.
@tralala
That only works for SP. Besides, Thatâs just sad to see developers condoning and approving of that kind of behavior. A game should be balanced and fair for everyone. Not give an edge to âcleverâ people that found a way to bypass limitations. Thatâs the best way to alienate your player base.
You canât just say âOh hackers will grow bored of it and quit.â They donât do that.
What if you have PvP? Thatâs an entire whole can of slimy worms.
Internal development builds will have cheats to help test certain aspects of the game. Release builds will have cheats completely stripped from the game. I know that some people will do their best to find ways around the system, but my philosophy is to have faith in the community. I agree 110% that most people will not cheat if the game is balanced and fun.
Anyways, I have been crafting an update to the âTrue RPGâ system that I would like some opinions on. I started playing Darkfall Online today and noticed that they donât necessarily have player levels but instead rely more on skills. If you use a bow more than a sword, your skill in using the bow will be higher than that of a sword. What I am thinking about doing (and I seriously want input on this) is utilizing a system like this. If you want to use a âhigh levelâ spell, you have to meet the requirements to use it; eg. Use âdestructionâ spells to gain enough skill points in that area to use a more powerful (idk) fireball spell.
If you think itâs a great idea and/or needs improvement, please let me know. If you think itâs a terrible idea and should stick with the original True RPG elements, definitely let me know.
All I want is for this game to be unique, fun and easy to get into without dumbing it down.
gw0rd said:
I agree 110% that most people will not cheat if the game is balanced and fun.
I don't know about you but I raise my eyebrow at this statement. I mean even though say a team based FPS game is technically fair and balanced throughout its history people have made bots and hacks to make sure that no matter where they shoot they get an instant head shot. The rage that usually accompanies the line "HAX!!!!!" in a chat room is not done simply because they lost. But because they lost to someone that wanted to be better without having the skill to do so. Hacking a game to do stuff it's not meant to do is probably the single largest headache for game devs of large games out there even if the game is super easy and extremely balanced there's bound to be at least 1 jackass that wants to "pwn" someone without doing it properly. Another good example is the concept of Gold Farmers. Back when I played Final Fantasy Online when it first came out a big deal was that people had figured out how to make a bot to go out and auto kill creatures all day long for gold. Then they'd sell it (illegally) to people that wanted 2000 Gold without working for it (thus cheating and breaking their Eula). Its nice to say people won't do it... But they will.
For game play you should take a peak at Guild Wars. Rather neat in its RPG elements. You can level... BUT the maximum level was fairly easy to reach. So like Darkfall a lot of a players skill is based on what skills someone has and the ones they choose to use. I rather enjoyed a lot of the elements of Guild Wars in how it was able to isolate "instances" as well so you don't get crowding around big bosses. Anyways just my 2 cents.
Well, this isnât going to be a MMO. Iâm thinking about 4-8 player multiplayer. Iâve played GW and love its system⌠so I think what I can do is a system like Diablo 2. Not every player will be in the same act, so the game can be instanced in some ways.
gw0rd said:
Well, this isn't going to be a MMO.
This is so refreshing that I thought it deserved a comment. :)
re: skill versus experience, I too prefer a skill-based model. It reminds me of the old RuneQuest pen-paper role playing system. (/me showing my age) You had like a fifty skills you could build through use... and certain categories of them would automatically go up with a stat increase. So, for example, if your dexterity went up then you might automatically be a little better at climbing.
Though in RuneQuest, you only got an opportunity to increase a skill when you used it in a situation the game master felt was "stressful" in some way... you'd get a little check. Then when you had down time you could roll for an increase. This prevents the Oblivion style "running and jumping everywhere you go" stat maxing but is hard to do in an actual game, I think.
Edit: oh, and you could also specifically train things up... so there was a way to increase without putting yourself in danger all the time. :)
This prevents the Oblivion style "running and jumping everywhere you go" stat maxing but is hard to do in an actual game, I think.
Heh. Oddly enough this is exactly why I use cheat codes in that game. :P I beat it once normally then just went "ennnh fark it" every time since.
thecyberbob said:
Heh. Oddly enough this is exactly why I use cheat codes in that game. :P I beat it once normally then just went "ennnh fark it" every time since.
The only cheat code I used was saying "Yay, I won." and putting it away before even finishing it. ;) I also do that with coin tosses... just shout "heads" and then put the coin right down on heads. It really cuts a lot of useless toil out of life. :)
;) ;) ;)