And so it begins
First post. Posterity stands back in hushed awe.
The game, as yet unnamed, is a project that has been rumbling around in my brain for several years now. It’s one of several, but it seems to combine a set of technologies I want to learn and is open to a phased delivery of game elements that makes it the most attractive to start working on right now.
The game is a strategy RPG, and as such has two roots of influence.
RPG
I think my first CRPG experience was Alternate Reality on the C64. I imagine that I played other CRPGs before Alternate Reality, but it is certainly my earliest memory of an RPG computer game. My seminal experience then was of a fairly plot-free game that involved getting a job and having to go to sleep, elements of characterisation realism that have fallen out of favour. In a similar vein, Alter Ego was a favourite, an RPG of almost pure character building. On then to Ultima, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, all great games, but with far less emphasis on character and far more on plot and combat. I have dabbled with JRPGs, but without much appreciation, and tried various MMORPGs before succumbing to the inevitable tedium of the grind (although I am currently still playing WoW after several months). Only the Bethesda approach of Daggerfall and Morrowind seems to echo that early experience with Alternate Reality – the character-centred RPG.
Strategy
It’s not even worth listing all the games that would have to come onto this list, except to illustrate what I consider to be the two extremes of interest from the perspective of the role of the player:
The puppet-master – UFO-Enemy Unknown or the traditional hex-based games from the likes of SSL. Games where you have absolute control over your units.
The planner/order-giver – Populous or RTSs with standing orders, Dungeon Keeper. Games where your units have innate behaviour of their own and aren’t completely dumb. Clearly this mode has its own continuum of control.
At some point, the WWW appeared, and then the web-games. At first they were of no real interest to me, looking very much like the old Play-By-Mail games and in some instances being exactly that. Then we started to see games with shorter tick cycles and play modes allowing people to dip in and out. I played a few, one worth noting being Hyperiums. I was impressed by the scale of the game, and the number of players, and the community aspect, but ultimately bored by the mechanical nature of it all. Strategy came down to adding together the number of units that would arrive at a certain place at a certain time. It was a dry, clockwork universe — clearly there were plenty of people who liked it that way, but I found it disappointing. I also struggled with the 2 hour game ticks, which seemed both too long to provide a sense of interaction and too short to allow “once a day after lunch” gaming.
And so the game concept started forming. I wanted a game that provided a richer world, a world where things happened outside of player control a world with its own agenda. I wanted a game that would allow me to all but demote myself to an observer if I wanted, but that would also allow me to play in an interactive mode if I so wished. I wanted the vast conflicts that Hyperiums could support, but I also wanted the character-based gameplay of the RPGs I remember most fondly. And I wanted this all to be open to the biggest audience I could manage, so it had to be web-based.
I thought about how I could achieve this and to my surprise it seemed possible and worth trying… and so I am and this is the blog about the attempt. I’m blogging in order to record my thinking and progress. It’s a private blog for now, but I will try to write it as if it’s for an audience, as I will open it up if and when the game goes public. Over the next few posts I’ll start to lay out the game design ideas and and start to discuss progress… hopefully.
