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PARPG - a nuclear winter RPG moving towards a 2nd techdemo

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
What is PARPG?:
PARPG is the working title of an isometric open source roleplaying game based on a post-apocalyptic setting. The project is currently still in its early planning stages. It will be a hommage to the golden age of RPGs of the late 90's and early postmillenium years. Main source of inspiration will be the Fallout series but also other classics of the genre, e.g. Arcanum and Planescape: Torment.

There are no fancy screenshots in this announcement so in case you're just looking for the eyecandy don't be disappointed: there is none at this stage of development.

The vapourware trap:
You've seen such announcements prolly over a dozen times before and the vast majority of them might have turned out as vapourware in the long run. There is no guarantee that PARPG might not suffer from the same tragic issues however I'm trying to explain why this project has a better chance of succeeding than some others that you've seen in the past.

My main source of confidence is my prior experience in the field of open source development. I was one of the founders of the open source game engine project FIFE and worked on the project over the course of three full years from 2005-2008. While working on FIFE I learnt a fair share about project management in general; but also about public relations, developer recruitment, maintenance of development-related infrastructure (SVN, Trac, Wiki) and software engineering in particular. This development background will hopefully help the PARPG project to succeed in the long run.

I know that it's impossible to remove doubts about the future development of the project at this moment. Some might still know me from my involvement in FIFE and I can hopefully convince the ones who don't know me yet with solid progress over the course of the next months.

Technical framework:
There is no final decision about all details of the technical framework of PARPG yet. What can be said is that the majority of the game-related code will be written in Python. Python - the 2.5x brach of it for now - was chosen as it features an easy to adopt clean syntax (yes, we are aware of the whitespace complaints), comes with a large standard library and seems to be well suited for easy and fast prototyping of game concepts. We might need to mix in some C or C++ in case time-critical code turns out to be too slow in Python.

The most important decision besides the programming language of choice is the question which engine to use for PARPG. FIFE might be well-suited for the task, however I'm not a programmer so I won't try to enforce any decision in this direction. One of the key principles of the project is subsidiarity: leave the important decisions to the departments that understand them. Therefore we'll sit together with interested programmers later to see what kind of choices we have (FIFE, GemRB, custom engine based on libraries like pyglet, etc.) and decide about it once we feel like having a clearer picture of what we want to achieve and what kind of technical framework would be needed for this purpose.

Setting, gameplay, key design elements:
The game is to be set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout. Key elements include:
* Cold war in the past ending with an atomic war with no winners.
* Collapse of society as we know it.
* Hardship to survive in a radiated environment, between bands of highway men, mutants and other deviant forces.
* Irony and parody of the cold war and the retro 50's vision of the future.

The exact setting is yet to be defined. There are numerous interesting locations to be picked. The game could be set in a snow-covered world, or in a more temperate climate or perhaps in a desert as the original Fallout. It could include successors to the remains of the Soviet Union (ever wondered how soviet vaults would look like?), remains of other allied nations or anything else, interesting enough to fit this setting. The final decision would be on a community of skilled people with imagination, in which great ideas would hopefully evolve.

Gameplay is planned to be a combination of meaningful, well-written dialogue and turn-based combat. The player would have multiple progress paths through the game and not all would include combat. The combat itself would be turn-based and include various tactics to overcome your foes.

Everything else besides that is up to the people who are attracted by the points outlined above, have experience in the relevant fields and would like to get involved in PARPG development. A compiled list of key design elements as well as important remarks about the project philosophy can be found at the PARPG wiki.

What is done:
So what is done so far? A couple of things: I've set up the basic infrastructure for the project (blog, forums, SVN, Trac, wiki) and I've started to outline the concept at the wiki. I might need three additional weeks to flesh out the remaining details that are currently flying around in my head but haven't been written down yet. Once these steps are tackled, I'll start to try to recruit developers for the other development departments: writing, gameplay, programming and graphics. Audio / music is not a top priority at the moment so we could get started without any developer in this field though having a composer or an audio engineer on the team is surely a nice plus.

What's still left to take care of:
A couple of things are unfinished business at the moment. I'm still waiting for a final decision from sourceforge if my hosting plea gets accepted. Hopefully they'll get back to me in the next couple of days. Furthermore there are a bunch of wiki articles left to flesh out. I'm not totally sure what kind of essential information is still missing before actual recruitment can start but that's why decided to announce the project at this early stage of development.

The purpose of this announcement:
I'm posting this announcement on a couple of forums where I'm either actively contributing or at least lurking on a regular basis. Hopefully there are community members out there who would like to provide early feedback. The best part of it is that there is still a lot of things to decide so your informed opinion can make a real difference.

Feel free to sign up at the forums, take a peek into the project wiki, visit the development blog or simply join the project's IRC channel. All kind of early feedback concerning the game (development) concept outlined at the project wiki is really appreciated.

Contributions:
Last but not least one final word about contributions: the project is still in its planning phase. That means I'm still busy writing down my ideas to convince other developers to join the effort. Once concepts are properly outlined - which will be hopefully around the end of February - official recruitment can start. The contribution policy is: power to the people who understand what they're doing and who don't mind spending some time on doing so. That means that although all kind of feedback is appreciated and will be taken into account, decision making will happen among the developers of the revelant department who invested their time into the project. We prefer the rule of decisions based on informed discussion over the rule of decisions by simple majority vote.

If you would like to know more about the next steps of PARPG development beyond the developers recruitment phase, feel free to check out the roadmap article at the wiki.
 

Forest Dweller

Smoking Dicks
Joined
Oct 29, 2008
Messages
12,196
Re: PARPG - a post-apocalyptic RPG in early planning stages

mvBarracuda said:
Setting, gameplay, key design elements:
The game is to be set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout. Key elements include:
* Cold war in the past ending with an atomic war with no winners.
* Collapse of society as we know it.
* Hardship to survive in a radiated environment, between bands of highway men, mutants and other deviant forces.
* Irony and parody of the cold war and the retro 50's vision of the future.

The exact setting is yet to be defined. There are numerous interesting locations to be picked. The game could be set in a snow-covered world, or in a more temperate climate or perhaps in a desert as the original Fallout. It could include successors to the remains of the Soviet Union (ever wondered how soviet vaults would look like?), remains of other allied nations or anything else, interesting enough to fit this setting. The final decision would be on a community of skilled people with imagination, in which great ideas would hopefully evolve.
So...how exactly will it be DIFFERENT from Fallout?
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
Will it have psi? Katana's? If not then its not an rpg.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
So...how exactly will it be DIFFERENT from Fallout?

This.

What I'm really waiting for is a DIFFERENT take on PA than Fallout. Why do we have to have mutants? or bandits? or the retro 50's? There are lots of other ways PA can be interesting.
 

MisterStone

Arcane
Joined
Apr 1, 2006
Messages
9,422
Sounds great, but does the setting have to be quite so close to Fallout? Of course FO is a great game and all, but the whole 50s kitch ironic take on the Cold War would seem a bit derivative outside of that series... maybe you should go with a more 1980s theme or something. :cool:
 

Perfect Fool

Scholar
Joined
Jan 26, 2009
Messages
168
Location
Wessex
Why have a post apocalyptic setting following a nuclear war? Why not have one following a viral epidemic, an almost world killing meteor impact or some other form of global catastrophe?

Why not have a futuristic/cybernetic level tech based society that collapses? A steampunk alternative world that falls? A medieval society hit by a meteor that turns out to be an enormous colony ship from a race of sentient space vaginas, some of which survive the impact with their psionic powers, then use those powers to enslave surviving men around the world?

There's lots of options for a post apocalyptic setting, rather than redoing Fallout.
 

Andhaira

Arcane
Joined
Nov 25, 2007
Messages
1,868,966
Why not add aliens into the mix? Say there WAS a nuclear war, but it was earth vs aliens!

Imagine the possiblities and scope.
 

ghostdog

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
11,079
Yep, what you described sounds exactly like fallout, which is not a bad thing of course since we would all love to play another fallout, but as many people have said if you are looking to make a game that stands on it's own you may not want to do something that feels like a fallout mod. Other than that I'm sure that all fallout fans, including me, are interested in this.

Anyway good luck with the project.
 

Kingston

Arcane
Joined
Jan 13, 2007
Messages
4,392
Location
I lack the wit to put something hilarious here
A community-run freeware game certainly sounds like a nice idea. It's worked for games like Battle For Wesnoth and even commercial games with lots of modding potential e.g. Garry's Mod.

I hope there'll be reasonably-easy-to-use editors for quests and such, as you're more likely to get contributors that way.
 

jagged-jimmy

Prophet
Joined
Jan 25, 2008
Messages
1,550
Location
Freeside
Codex 2012
FIFE should've stick to making a highly customizable Fallout games/ mods like first intended. That way FIFE would be a very successfull part of the Fallout-community. The way it is today its a ongoing project for everyone and his dog and noone really cares a lot, sadly. Better stay niche and bring some joy where its needed then make another 2D engine.

(Yea you can throw some projects on me and i know them and you can say, i can build Fallout games with FIFE... but you get the point, i am speaking about a whole purpose/ user-friendly fallout mod maker with tutorials and stuff like that)
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Roundhouse reply session :)

@ Dicksmoker:
PARPG will be different to Fallout in a number of aspects:
* Custom ruleset. We can't go with a SPECIAL copy simply because of legal issues. However that gives us the chance to come up with something different and to better balance the skills though missing balance in Fallout was often more a question of quests geared towards specific skills than the fault of the ruleset itself.
* Different subsetting. Both Age of Decadence and Fallout are post-apoc RPGs however they're quite different settings-wise nevertheless. I'm open to all kind of settings suggestions and the current community interest is more leaning towards a snowy PA world than to a Fallout desert wasteland.
* Custom engine. PARPG won't utilize the Fallout engine and won't be limited by it therefore. That also means that gameplay could vastly vary to Fallout though I haven't made up my mind about the topic yet. My plan is to try to attract interested and experienced developers who would like to contribute in the field that they know best. So while all other departments will surely provide quite some useful feedback concerning setting, story, dialogue writing or gameplay mechanics, the developers of the relevant departments will make the final calls in these fields.

Concerning the number of key elements borrowed from Fallout: this was only a personal suggestion though I gave the wrong impression that these would be decisions set in stone. I'll contribute to the discussion with my personal suggestions but the majority of the setting, story and gameplay-related decisions aren't made yet and will be left to the people who understand these fields best.

@ AndhairaX I:
No plans for something along these lines at the moment. These whole mobsters and jap. mafia with katanas encounters around New Reno weren't my favourite memories of Fallout 2.

@ Tigranes, MisterStone & Perfect Fool:
As said above: this would be my personal preference but it's not set in stone. I'll reword the paragraph in future announcements on other forums as it's heavily misleading indeed.

@ AndhairaX II:
No plans for any aliens from my side but let's see what the to be found writing department has in mind.

@ Kingston:
The plan is to be pretty open to all kind of community suggestions. The way the AOD forums work is definately a role model for PARPG development in this aspect. I know that you prolly don't mind but there is a difference between freeware and open source software and although this project will be free of charge, I want to underline its open source nature.

Thanks for the feedback :) It's really appreciated.
 

Forest Dweller

Smoking Dicks
Joined
Oct 29, 2008
Messages
12,196
mvBarracuda said:
@ Dicksmoker:
PARPG will be different to Fallout in a number of aspects:
Cosmetics.
Sorry, couldn't resist.

Anyway, I'd say any of the suggestions by Perfect Fool would be better than a nuclear holocaust. Or if you do nuclear holocaust, at LEAST make the technology level prior to the crisis something more realistic instead of what people in the fifties would imagine it to be.
 

larpingdude16

Scholar
Joined
Feb 8, 2009
Messages
141
Location
Mushroom Kingdom
thumbs_up.gif
 

hiver

Guest
Well, a really noble effort. Ive bookmarked the forum link if that means anything.
As most here i cant help with anything tangible, unfortunately, but as most here i can make crazy suggestions and even crazier objections any time.

So, a couple of things.
Cold war between just two forces/powers seems a bit simple and not really interesting. Especially old Soviet/US conflict. Its all to well known and overused already.
Maybe the appealing of Fallout setting is also due to the fact that it avoided this. I would suggest involving other sides, countries and people in a background story of how nuclear war came about - if you end deciding on that as a cause of apocalypse. Splitting the world only into US and Soviet areas of influence will be kind of insulting. But of course you dont have to pay attention to that.


Also a meteor/steroid strike that one of the sides initiated which prompted others to go Nuclear on their ass would be nice too. With addition of failing to break asteroid apart so its pieces hit the whole globe more or less.

Maybe some basic virus like life form was in that asteroid so it could play a part of biological warfare too.
Or as catalyst of environmental change in some parts of the world.
Read "Chaga" by Ian MacDonald as inspiration. "Evolution shore" in the US i believe.
It doesnt preclude frozen snowy environment or radiation as a factor at all. It could work with both if necessary.

If its going to be PA then you should work on making world seem empty, right? So there should not be any large amounts of "gangs" roaming around.

In terms of combat... any plans for non-lethal combat to be a part of it?

And there was a thread at iron towers about unannounced Sci Fi project that has some similar characteristics. Any connection to that?
 

The_scorpion

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 10, 2006
Messages
1,056
mvBarracuda said:
@ Dicksmoker:
PARPG will be different to Fallout in a number of aspects:
* Custom ruleset. We can't go with a SPECIAL copy simply because of legal issues. However that gives us the chance to come up with something different and to better balance the skills though missing balance in Fallout was often more a question of quests geared towards specific skills than the fault of the ruleset itself.
* Different subsetting. Both Age of Decadence and Fallout are post-apoc RPGs however they're quite different settings-wise nevertheless. I'm open to all kind of settings suggestions and the current community interest is more leaning towards a snowy PA world than to a Fallout desert wasteland.
* Custom engine. PARPG won't utilize the Fallout engine and won't be limited by it therefore. That also means that gameplay could vastly vary to Fallout though I haven't made up my mind about the topic yet. My plan is to try to attract interested and experienced developers who would like to contribute in the field that they know best. So while all other departments will surely provide quite some useful feedback concerning setting, story, dialogue writing or gameplay mechanics, the developers of the relevant departments will make the final calls in these fields.


*ruleset
I hope you don't rule out party-based gameplay by picking a ruleset that is geared only toward a single alter ego character.

*subsetting
I don't think you should pick a definite detailed setting early on. See what your artists can do. There can be almost unlimited variations of post-apoc scenarios, don't limit yourself to snow because it can grow tiresome for players and limiting for artists.


heads up either way
 

mvBarracuda

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
478
Thanks for the suggestions, I've added a link to the wiki so that writers can take the feedback from this thread into account.

hiver said:
In terms of combat... any plans for non-lethal combat to be a part of it?
Any games that feature this kind of combat in an entertaining way? I've no set opinion on the topic so this is another case for the mysterious to be found gameplay department.

hiver said:
And there was a thread at iron towers about unannounced Sci Fi project that has some similar characteristics. Any connection to that?
Nope, no relation at all. I'm an avid fan of ITS's work and I'm looking forward to Age of decadence and lurk their forums but that's about it.

The_scorpion said:
*ruleset
I hope you don't rule out party-based gameplay by picking a ruleset that is geared only toward a single alter ego character.
No plans for lone wolf gameplay. The most appealing option is a single PC but with additional support by various NPCs which you can recruit in the course of the game. Fallout and Arcanum are good examples how this could work. Party interaction in PS:T was pretty nice however I would prefer if you can't completely control your party NPCs (e.g. in combat) simply because they should act as individuals and not as marionettes of the PC.

I wouldn't object to a customizable party either, as found in DungeonMaster or the Realms of Arkania series (these are the party-based games I played). The whole topic needs further discussion; what can be said at the moment is that one single lone wolf player character is the only option I wouldn't support.
 

BethesdaLove

Arbiter
Joined
Aug 7, 2008
Messages
1,998
It also has a name already: Dead in Uterus.
 

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