Incline SHELTER update thread

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Aww :D . Fascinating stuff :D . I like the new armour :D .

 

[Davaris]

@Wunderpurps

I don't know if its like that, but what I will say, is you can't go in doing something you don't care about and expect to make money, as the people that do make money in indie games, are at the top of their game.

This guy is one of the few that makes a good living and gives you an idea of what it is like in this post:
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2011/1 ... o-keep-up/

On the other hand, spending a lot of your own money to make a big game you love is nuts as well, because it might not sell. Its better to use other people's money if you can and something like Kickstarter, is the only way I know of doing that. Plus if you fail to raise the money using Kickstarter, the game most likely wouldn't have sold anyway.

 

[Wunderpurps]

That's why I said money you don't mind losing forever because if you are just doing it to make money obviously you have had some sort of stroke or something.

Maybe you can make some money off of a really great casual idea but the raw amount of knowhow and talent needed to make even an incredibly shit fallout clone singlehandedly is nothing to scoff at and you'd probably be an eminently employable person who'd be better off working on a more sane project if money is what you're after.

I've played cliffski's games and he is very good or as people here seem to say good for what it is, but these are very simple games really. Even that is a huge undertaking for a regular person to undertake as an unpaid project, though.

I think there's money to be made in these kinds of games but it's not easy money, it's only going to be wrested out with immense effort, bloody nails digging in the cold ground to try and make software that would cost you millions to develop in a software house by yourself, then somehow scrape together enough artwork to make something acceptable by the masses. All before you even get to content.

But once you get there and have a game released then if you did things in the right manner you'll have the tools to crank out a "slam dunk" very easily. If you are really clever it can be a slam dunk that has a completely different game system because you made tools to allow that. If you make some money off the first game it will be easy to hire people to make things like better artwork, and even writing and voice acting.

But mostly of course these projects are just pipe dreams. Not to be offensive to the OP but when he talks about stuff like not being able to figure out who's in combat in turn based combat because it's an open world so it must be rtwp, or when he has an idea like funding crazy fly by night game scheme with another crazy game scheme, I have to think this is one of them. Not to mention how it turns out with dead state that all the tools that should have been started day one are just now in the works.

So I won't hold my breath. After all what great hero could do such things? Could such a chosen one exist? [Cue jesus christ superstar theme]

EDIT: kickstarter is an interesting idea, though. Maybe more as something when you are almost done and need some money to pay off some of the massive debts you incurred by working on some game for 4 years than something to truly start you off, though.

 

[shihonage]

what I will say, is you can't go in doing something you don't care about and expect to make money

I agree. However that is not the case here.

I am surprised however at games like "No Time To Explain", because I have trouble understanding how any rational adult could "care" about creating something like that. It's just simplistic crap, made to attract by capitalizing on nostalgia and wackiness. It's an exercise in programming growth, perhaps.

But it's not actually meant to be a "game", just an experimental "gigglecrap" you buy for 5 bucks and forget about half an hour later.

Monsterland is a game. Meant to be played, as opposed to being some kind of statement or an "experience", or using the player as a guinea pig.

But mostly of course these projects are just pipe dreams. Not to be offensive to the OP but when he talks about stuff like not being able to figure out who's in combat in turn based combat because it's an open world so it must be rtwp, or when he has an idea like funding crazy fly by night game scheme with another crazy game scheme, I have to think this is one of them. Not to mention how it turns out with dead state that all the tools that should have been started day one are just now in the works.

Skepticism is understandable. However, a few minor and major corrections are in order:

• PwRT isn't the same as RTwP (there's a reason I arrived at that specific mode, and that is, it completely excludes twitch reflexes). Last time I checked, there was a thread around here where "character skill over player skill" was one of the highest (if not the highest) vote in favor of turn-based combat.To me, a large part of that is "exclusion of twitch skill".
  
• The reason for discarding turn-based mode originated with the ambitious idea of having the entire world (1.5k entities) active at once. Fallout didn't have to deal with it. When you aggroed someone in the settlement, you just aggroed the entire settlement. But what do you do when there's no real "borders"? Do you freeze all 1.5k entities and wait for their turn? No? Okay, let's make an effective radius then, right? So we determined the initial combatants in the area, roughly, but outside that area the world continues to run in realtime?
  
  What if during your combat, some stranger wanders "off the world map" into the middle of town? Should he become part of combat? Is it fair? When does his turn come? How do you determine someone's turn when number of combatants can increase at any moment?
  
  Let's say we freeze the rest of the world outside of this isolated area. But what happens when one combatant approaches someone "on the edge", and that person activates, and then so does another close to them, in a chain reaction? Do you wait for all of these unintentionally activated to have their turns?
  
  Most important difference, however, between Fallout and early Shelter design, one that completely broke my head, was that with this scheme, the engine has to keep track of, determine and separate MULTIPLE turn-based combat encounters. Because the whole reason for a semi-emergent world meant that it had to be active when you're not there, and so you would visit another town and see some dead rats at the entrance, and that's because they were killed by the guards separately, in parallel, while you're not even there.
  
  Multiple turn-based combat encounters, each with dynamic scope. That's when I gave up.
  
• The above idea, though working, turned out to have no advantages. Random encounter system became really uninteresting, because most of the time you stumbled onto something mundane. So I went back to Fallout approach, and removed "aliveness" from the world map, and put in "set piece" encounters. Technically, TB combat is possible now, but I'm not sure if I'll go through with it.
  
• If you've seen the videos, you can't really compare Shelter to Dead State. It becomes painfully obvious that I am proficient at what I'm doing, and just how much the game is already capable of. Given a couple of weeks of uninterrupted work time, I could make an alpha demo of Shelter with several quests and a couple settlements, and, though glitchy, it would work passably satisfying all the basic requirements of a Fallout game. You can even save and load. This is the game's state. However, I cannot legally do that until I write a fucking FO:T graphics extractor (I have the info, but that is a losing road in the end), or have non-stolen graphics, which is what's proceeding right now.
  
  Dead State... I won't speak ill of it, but most people have no idea of the effort this kind of shit takes, and sadly, most of the Codex doesn't understand just how much of it I already accomplished. Not until the alpha demo is out. And I do have a tool that I spent a fucking year developing, that takes care of dialogue, stat checks, quest sequentiality, out-of-orderness, and a bunch of other shit that takes forever to script by hand.
  
• My schemes are never crazy. I didn't start Monsterland from scratch. I merely revived a product of love that remained in freeze for many years, and cleaned it up. I have about 40-minute demo of Monsterland thats play-ready right now, but it has a couple of quirks still, plus it should coincide with release of full version, so I'm hesitant to open that door just yet.
  
• About KICKSTARTER. I think I would get massive Shelter funding once I release an alpha that would prove that it's real. Before that, I don't really feel like starting a Kickstarter based on screenshots and videos. It's not the kind of door you can open twice.

 

[Wunderpurps]

Skepticism is understandable. However, a few minor and major corrections are in order:

• PwRT isn't the same as RTwP

• 
  It's good you mentioned skepticism before this. In BG you could set all sorts of rules up to make it less twitchy as well but I found it was a PITA. So I won't come out and say you are wrong here but on the other hand you also can't say you are right. How can you say you have this revolutionary system everyone will love? Maybe. And maybe it's just you. Maybe it's a third thing some will love and others hate, that seems more likely
  
  

  [*] The reason for discarding turn-based mode originated with the ambitious idea of having the entire world (1.5k entities) active at once.

  
  The reason that this makes me skeptical is it's a system or represnting the world you devised yourself, one which basically makes no sense and is a bad way of doing things to be frank. So you've caused yourself a big problem by making a very complex system that doesn't capture what you're going for, from your own admission, when you realize you can't do what you intended. So by definition the basic representation and data structures of the game are wrong, because you need to design those to accomplish your goals not to capture some esoteric ideals.
  
  Then you make comments to people in other threads like "I have this thing I made up where an animation triggers an event and it's very handy!". You know, a feature that exists probably in every game engine ever made.
  
  Now sorry I know that's really harsh criticism, but making even one game is a huge task. If you are considering making ANOTHER one well I think any hope you had of success (which is hard even for several dedicated people) is going to fly out the window.
  
  

  [*] If you've seen the videos, you can't really compare Shelter to Dead State. It becomes painfully obvious that I am proficient at what I'm doing, and just how much the game is already capable of.

  I didn't mean to compare them to you, sorry for the implication. Now to be fair I actually don't think that Brian is incompetent. If nothing else he worked on a good RPG and to be on one of those projects at least you know he has a stellar work ethic which I think counts for a huge amount. But I think that a 2013 date is not in the cards in light of his recent post.
  
  

  Given a couple of weeks of uninterrupted work time, I could make an alpha demo of Shelter with several quests and a couple settlements, and, though glitchy, it would work passably satisfying all the basic requirements of a Fallout game.

  Well you could ALMOST do that starting from scratch with any game engine in a few weeks to be honest. The problem is that a rough mockup and demo of a game is not a game, and it's not even half a game or even a quarter of a game.
  
  It's really hard to judge from outside where you are at, but then in some ways it's probably harder to judge from inside a project where you are at. Since it's all 2D the content is even more of an extra bitch so even if you were just making a fallout mod you could spend an enormous amount of time. In fact if Tim Cain is to be believed the coding that was NOT content creation like scripting of triggers and whatnot was only one year. So since probably 15 - 20 man years went into fallout then you can see you might have quite a lot of work to do even once all your tools and stuff are made.
  
  

  You can even save and load. This is the game's state. However, I cannot legally do that until I write a fucking FO:T graphics extractor (I have the info, but that is a losing road in the end), or have non-stolen graphics, which is what's proceeding right now.
  
  Dead State... I won't speak ill of it, but most people have no idea of the effort this kind of shit takes, and sadly, most of the Codex doesn't understand just how much of it I already accomplished. Not until the alpha demo is out. And I do have a tool that I spent a fucking year developing, that takes care of dialogue, stat checks, quest sequentiality, out-of-orderness, and a bunch of other shit that takes forever to script by hand.
  
  [*] My schemes are never crazy. I didn't start Monsterland from scratch. I merely revived a product of love that remained in freeze for many years, and cleaned it up. I have about 40-minute demo of Monsterland thats play-ready right now, but it has a couple of quirks still, plus it should coincide with release of full version, so I'm hesitant to open that door just yet.
  
  [*] About KICKSTARTER. I think I would get massive Shelter funding once I release an alpha that would prove that it's real. Before that, I don't really feel like starting a Kickstarter based on screenshots and videos. It's not the kind of door you can open twice.

Well, I don't know. If monsterland is almost done then I guess it's another story. I do wish you luck in your project and I only said anything because it would be a shame to see someone take a left turn into a bus, and sorry again I know some of my criticism is fairly harsh but it's not meant to simply bash your balls. It would be great to have some cool games though looking in here I guess I won't be the first to say that I'd really like some turn-based combat instead (or really I probably won't even look at the demo to be honest).

 

[shihonage]

At first I started writing this serious reply, and then all the factual mistakes, childish naivete, and temporal slip-ups in your post came together to make me recognize a very peculiar and yet familiar combination of neuroses.

The PM you sent me on NMA forums was the same way - surprisingly coherent on the surface.

While I'm glad that your meds have given some lucidity to how you express yourself, you still have a long way to go in repairing your view of the world and people in general.

But even between the NMA PM and this post, I see some progress in lucidity. I'm rooting for you, Prosper.

Just don't waste my time with your anonymous trolls, mmkay? That's not cool. And it gets your current incarnation put on my ignore list.

 

[Davaris]

[*] About KICKSTARTER. I think I would get massive Shelter funding once I release an alpha that would prove that it's real. Before that, I don't really feel like starting a Kickstarter based on screenshots and videos. It's not the kind of door you can open twice.
[/list]

I have decided I am thinking about Kickstarter backwards. I saw someone suggest you build up a following first and then use Kickstarter to raise the money you need. Other successful devs I know of, started out making free games, built up an enormous community and only then did they start making commercial games. Amaranth productions did it and the Drftmoon people are following the same path.

Just don't waste my time with your anonymous trolls, mmkay? That's not cool. And it gets your current incarnation put on my ignore list.

Prosper... lol

 

[DwarvenFood]

double brofists for my bro shihonage - Achievement unlocked: <insert some funny line about prosper and stuff> - not feeling creative today.

 

[Wunderpurps]

I have never pmed you (or I think anyone) in my life.

I guess this means I can't join your dev team? I was going to suggest we go take your idea to the next level and go full retard and make every player represented by the game of life thing, then use genetic algorithms to build exciting interactions between game units. Like one would want to buy swords so another would put together a sword shop. So then ANOTHER would then go searching for iron to make the swords to sell in the shop then we'd let it evolve and stuff and call it radiant something. We'd use foxels (faux voxels like minecraft) for the graphics. Oh man we would've been rich.

We could have entered a dance contest to win the money we need for funding the game. Or maybe we could have had a bake sale.

It would have been hard to figure out how to make combat work or who's in it but fuck it stupid details like that don't matter for creating softwares.

 

[Wunderpurps]

One last try, just in case you aren't totally immune to common sense.

How do I figure out if someone is in combat?

First off how does fallout determine if someone is in combat?

According to you everyone in an area is in combat. Neat. Except civillians I guess.

But maybe there is something they have, like a data structure or something to store who's in combat.

Maybe, just maybe the enemies tend to be in groups or parties of some sort, and if you then attack one the whole group goes hostile. Maybe there's some list or array that stores all this. Maybe there's like events that happen, and you handle the events for every character in the game every round and if certain things happen a group goes hostile. Such as you accidentally shot someone in the eye. Or you are talking to some guy and pick the FUCK YOU option and then his group gets added to hostile group and combat mode ensues.

Man this is amazing stuff, cutting edge.

Maybe you also need to figure out the line of site for everyone around the players, and entering or exiting LOS might even set a flag or fire a trigger. In fact maybe it's completely impossible to have meaningfull AI of any kind of you don't do this and the other things I mentioned, and really a lot more along the same lines.

But it's certainly easier to go with real time. Big companies don't do it just for fun. Unfortunately it means your game will pretty much be a waste of time to develop however, since anyone who's satisfied with games like that has a million games to choose from.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

I think I would get massive Shelter funding once I release an alpha that would prove that it's real.

I hope you're right

look at the shit that gets funded

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/774 ... ideogame-c
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2pp ... -of-mojang

 

[shihonage]

Looks terrible indeed!

 

[shihonage]

I responded to your civil PM, but then I saw this post. My ignore list consists largely of Prosper now.

 

[Wunderpurps]

So are you talking to yourself or to me, the guy who still never PMed you?

You went to the nah nah nah not listening phase quicker than anyone I have ever seen.

 

[Jaesun]

So are you talking to yourself or to me, the guy who still never PMed you?

You went to the nah nah nah not listening phase quicker than anyone I have ever seen.

Is there a problem Bryce? Might want to seek some professional help.

 

[Wunderpurps]

So are you talking to yourself or to me, the guy who still never PMed you?

You went to the nah nah nah not listening phase quicker than anyone I have ever seen.

Is there a problem Bryce? Might want to seek some professional help.

Someone needs some proffessional help here but my vote is for you two.

 

[Surf Solar]

Why don't you just go fuck yourself and don't litter this thread with that bullshit?

 

[Wunderpurps]

Why don't you just go fuck yourself and don't litter this thread with that bullshit?

Litter like yours?

 

[shihonage]

Prosper double posts for double authenticity.

 

[DwarvenFood]

pff they stealing your title
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ce-a-live-game-of-zombie-horror?ref=spotlight

 

[shihonage]

It was also a Julianne Moore film in 2010, and before that, another gay film.

The "Shelter" namespace is getting crowded. It's time to rename it to something radically different, like "Underground Bunker" of some sort.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Bulwarks of the Dying Earth

 

[DwarvenFood]

Cleveland's Last Stand

 

[Davaris]

It was also a Julianne Moore film in 2010, and before that, another gay film.

The "Shelter" namespace is getting crowded. It's time to rename it to something radically different, like "Underground Bunker" of some sort.

By the time you finish it, all those other ones will be forgotten. Shelter is a good name.

 

[shihonage]

"Shelter" name doesn't really make sense anymore.

I placed the game's setting on another planet, so that Bethesda/Interplay doesn't sue me (as the rest of the game is already HEAVILY inspired by Fallout in design), and it's not post-nuclear.

More like a mix of Firefly outer planets and the "Inhabited Island".

Of course, so little of the setting has been implemented into actual gameplay (most of it was engine/content tools work), that it could be altered to take place on Earth and have you come out of an actual nuclear shelter...

... but that would be unoriginal and sue-adjacent.

I mean... that would be frighteningly close to just repeating Fallout 1.

But yes, I'm keeping the name anyway, though it doesn't make any literal sense.