Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hey guys, I’m new to the forums.

I have a question for all you experience game developers. If you aren’t an actual game dev but would like to post, go for it.

Without further ado:

Me and about 6 other people have gotten together go ahead and make a game. We have all the necessary people for the job. We’ve discussed what makes a game good and what doesn’t. What really grabs us by the balls and makes us squirm, so we have a general idea of the direction we want to go.

The goal is to make a point and click mystery horror/psychological thriller. Kind of like Scratches; If you haven’t played Scratches, then shame on you!

So as we’re all so newbish and have no formal education for when it comes to designing a game, how would we start?

Here’s what we’re going to try and do: Discuss story ideas. Block out a single room so we can test out several game mechanics. Such as picking up items, opening and closing doors, journal entries etc. This will help us get used to the engine we will be using (Dagon).
Once we’ve got an idea of how to code it all and design, we’d go ahead with all the modelling. After the modelling, music and sfx will be created.

This is as far as we’ve got with ideas. Are we on the right track? Are we missing something very important?

I’m happy to discuss many different methods when it comes to games design. Cheers.

Advie - 12 November 2012 04:38 AM

I m not anything but a musician and composer and willing to help

but there all a lots of games Devs right here Steve Ince, Martin Gantefohr, VinceTwelve, Agustín Cordes Simon_ASA,Go To Hell Dave and many others as well… and they are all from their posts seem to be very nice and helpful people.

Good Luck

Thanks Advie, I’ve been talking to Agustin but he’s a little busy. If you stumble across any threads like this, be sure to send me a link. Saves people repeating themselves!

Advie - 12 November 2012 04:49 AM

ok there Pyke and here had few articles to help new AG developers:

http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/900/#12155

Fantastic! Thank you!

jhetfield21 - 12 November 2012 10:10 AM

as far as coding goes i’d recommend GameCodingComplete by Mike McShaffry.I’m like you in a way…had some programming education but general not games related.i have only one game project i’ve worked on but the architecture was kinda rigid.If you don’t want to make the engine yourselves specifically then you’re welcome to use AGS since it’s the first game or you can talk with Agustin Cordes and see if you can use his Dagon engine which is to be released as complete free and open source.some devs have already started using it.if your game is to be completely 3D you probably can’t use AGS,so talk to Agustin.There’s always Unity,Vissionaire(the one Pyke uses for STASIS),and Wintermute(which is rather cheap and has been used for Deponia at least by Daedalic).

Luckily I have some experienced coders working with me. So I won’t have to do much, if any!
Yeah we’re decided on using the Dagon engine. Alsready spoke to Agustin and Dagon is free to use for commercial purposes, just as long as we don’t sell his and his teams ideas as our own.

If Dagon doesn’t quite cut it, we’re thinking of using the Unity engine, like you mentioned. I’ve heard of wintermute but don’t know much on it. We’re gonna give Dagon a whack and see what we can do. =]

Thanks for the reply.

jhetfield21 - 12 November 2012 10:16 AM

great!sounds like you have a good team.it’s gonna be a lot easier than my trying.from what i’ve seen the engine is easy to use and quite fast.hope it works for you.

Hope it all goes well haha. If we ever make something, I’ll be sure to post up demos on this website for people to test and such.

Would I be to forward as to ask/see what you’re working on?

jhetfield21 - 12 November 2012 10:37 AM

not at all,i’m basically trying to migrate McShaffry’s Event-based engine architecture from 3D games to 2D adventures since i really like the idea(the architecture) and it seems much more flexible than some others i’ve heard of.it’s easy to understand in a macro level but i’m still trying to figure out some of the micro connections between components.it’s still very early and it’s not gonna be ready any time soon.but i’m gonna try using it on a game project i did for a course where i didn’t really like the architecture given to us.it was the standard serial one and it got kinda messy at one point.too many dependencies between components.so i’m gonna try converting that to the event based architecture to get a hang on the concept and then try it out for an adventure only engine.plus i want to try out some things like custom allocators(stack preferably) and portability.as i said though there’s a long way to go.

It sounds complex to say the least ;] Good luck on your project and I hope it goes somewhere!

jhetfield21 - 12 November 2012 10:51 AM

Thanks…Good luck to you guys too!!

If you missed it, be sure to check out David Perry’s Game Design:A Brainstorming Toolbox.

When you need to discuss things you know what to do!

I’ll get right on it! Thanks again ;]