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

[shihonage]

The techdemo is quite impressive in terms of accomplishment. I saw basic dialogue and point-click inventory, at least. Don't know if the sample quest made it through, because the thing runs choppy on my work Dell machine and it's hard to click where I want to click.

 

[zenbitz]

The dialog for the quests (2) are complete... however we never did implement certain critical things... like transferriing items from NPC<->PC (critical quest items) or finding critical quest items, or the trivial crafting which is necessary.

They work, though, if you know the API and can "set" the various bits via the console...

Someone was going to implement this, but we just decided to ship. I never got the map done properly either.

I will probably hack the inventory/object system just enough to make the quests work so everyone can read my stupid dialog.

 

[mvBarracuda]

Techdemo 1 youtube teaser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaVqYqA5Vv0

 

[Melcar]

Really hope to see more of this project in the future. I'm starving for good Linux games that aren't fucking shooters.

 

[mvBarracuda]

I didn't intially post it in here, but we're currently workng to get the project back on the track and we're (slowly) moving towards a 2nd techdemo release.

We'll be mostly focusing on improving the engine at this point as there is too much functionality missing at this point to add new content; especially the content pipeline and tools aren't fleshed out yet.

Anyway, for all still interested in the project:
http://blog.parpg.net/2010/11/the-parpg ... xperience/

I'll post another little update at the blog this week, covering our plans and the way towards techdemo 2.

 

[mvBarracuda]

And here's the news update:
http://blog.parpg.net/2010/11/parpg-pic ... cre-blues/

And a sneak peek of the new notebook GUI concept:

 

[Elwro]

Looks great!

 

[ghostdog]

Looks great!

 

[Derper]

Looks great!

 

[mvBarracuda]

Ohh well, better than no feedback at all

 

[grotsnik]

mvBarracuda - sorry if this is somewhere obvious in your forums and I skimmed over it, but...what *exactly* is the difference between Co-ordination and Reflexes? Your wiki says one is for 'fast' reactions and one is for 'slow'. How does that work?

It's just that your character sheet with very high co-ordination and very low reflexes seems...kind of strange. You usually think of the two as being mutually inclusive.

 

[lisac2k]

Could we possibly learn about the exact milestones features for tech_v0.2 before the next blog update? The first techdemo from March '10 looks good, the progress is noticable.

Is Sirren still with you?

 

[mvBarracuda]

mvBarracuda - sorry if this is somewhere obvious in your forums and I skimmed over it, but...what *exactly* is the difference between Co-ordination and Reflexes? Your wiki says one is for 'fast' reactions and one is for 'slow'. How does that work?

It's just that your character sheet with very high co-ordination and very low reflexes seems...kind of strange. You usually think of the two as being mutually inclusive.

I'm not familiar with the nitty gritty details either. Zenbitz designed the vast majority of the game mechnanics. He's registered here at rpgpcodex as well, I'll give him a pointer to reply to this thread when he finds the time for it.

Could we possibly learn about the exact milestones for tech_v0.2 before the next blog update? The first techdemo from March '10 looks good, the progress is noticable.

Is Sirren still with you?

Techdemo 2 is one milestone. We try to follow the new one release per milestone principle for our next releases. For details see.
http://wiki.parpg.net/Roadmap#General_remarks

I've mailed Sirren about 3 weeks ago and asked if he still has some animations that are shown at our wiki gallery but never found their way into our Subversion repository. Unfortunately he didn't reply to the email yet, I'll prolly nag him with another email soon

 

[SimpleComplexity]

Good thing it is winter now, this should help you with the recruitment.
Actually you should only develop this game during the winter.

 

[lisac2k]

Techdemo 2 is one milestone. We try to follow the new one release per milestone principle for our next releases. For details see.
http://wiki.parpg.net/Roadmap#General_remarks

Sorry, I meant features instead of milestone (and have corrected it in my post above). I hate speed typing while multitasking, it just begs for such mistakes. Anyway, thanks for the link, everything is explained there p. well.

Too bad to hear about Sirren went MIA. He did some nice characters there, no doubt.

 

[Jack]

And here's the news update:
http://blog.parpg.net/2010/11/parpg-pic ... cre-blues/

And a sneak peek of the new notebook GUI concept:

That looks great.

 

[mvBarracuda]

Techdemo 2 is one milestone. We try to follow the new one release per milestone principle for our next releases. For details see.
http://wiki.parpg.net/Roadmap#General_remarks

Sorry, I meant features instead of milestone (and have corrected it in my post above). I hate speed typing while multitasking, it just begs for such mistakes. Anyway, thanks for the link, everything is explained there p. well.

We'll focus on the dialogue engine (documenting and extending it, for details read the blog post) and implementing support for primary character stats and character descriptions.

 

[zenbitz]

mvBarracuda - sorry if this is somewhere obvious in your forums and I skimmed over it, but...what *exactly* is the difference between Co-ordination and Reflexes? Your wiki says one is for 'fast' reactions and one is for 'slow'. How does that work?

It's just that your character sheet with very high co-ordination and very low reflexes seems...kind of strange. You usually think of the two as being mutually inclusive.

HAHA good point. It's not totally nailed down yet and might even change. I think I separated them because I PERSONALLY am the kind of person that has decent reflexes but mediocre coordination.

Let's see what I wrote on the wiki (for those less industrious than yourself)

=== Coordination (CO) ===

(Alternate: Dexterity to prevent clash with Charisma) Coordination is the primary stat for physical skills, it represents "slow and deliberate" actions and as such is analogous to FT as RF is to strength.

=== Reflexes (RF) ===

Reflexes determine a characters "fast" reaction speed, it affects physical skills and tasks where speed is of the essence.

Right, so you don't need good reflexes to be good at say, Knitting (you laugh, but it's a COLD post apocalpyse world... knitting could be the difference between life and death!), but you do need coordination.

In terms of combat skills - a Sniper doesn't need good reflexes, but a Fencer does. So various weapons skills might have a BASE value that depend on some combination of Coordination and Reflexes in different proportions.

The secondary stat "First action phase" aka "Initiative" depends on reflexes (not coordination). The secondary stat "Aim" is a derivative of Coordination (not reflexes). (Both also depend to a lesser degree on PErception)

Keep in mind that while I have jotted down a skill list, I haven't yet bothered to work out which stats are the primary for each.

If this seems needlessly complicated - yeah, well, that's why you have a computer.

Also - note that in the bogus example which is totally meaningless - a 9 is not that much different from a 24 ... on a 1-100 scale.

 

[grotsnik]

Stuff.

Hum, fair enough. I do think that could potentially get quite fiddly, just 'cos making that fast/slow distinction invites situational pedantry (for instance, let's say your Sniper is ambushed and has to defend themselves at close quarters. Does that count as 'fast' reflex-based shooting combat? Or does their gun become a melee weapon, dependent on reflexes in the same way as if they were a Fencer? At any rate, they're definitely not aiming 'slowly' any more, right? So at what distance does a Sniper stop aiming with expert calculation and start shooting wildly trying to keep the lunatic with an axe away from him?) but as you say...yeah, plenty of time to work through the implementation.

Thanks a lot for the answer.

 

[zenbitz]

That's not how I see it working. If you want to do something in some situation, that is a "task". Typically, a task is just a skill - but it might be a series of sub tasks.

In certain cases, primary or secondary stats can "substitute" for skills.

If you sniper is ambushed - there is some task on how he responds to being ambushed. That's probably reflex/perception based. IF he gets to shoot - then his "sniper" based skills are not really of much use. Although he can use a gun - if someone is wrestling you HTH, you can't AIM at him. So his "quick pistol" or whatever skill would be what skill he needs to use (or something like "pistol at short range, while engaged"

The way I would have aiming work is that it takes "extra" actions to aim at someone... and if anything happens to you before you shoot, then you wasted your aim.

 

[mvBarracuda]

PARPG now features a planet site:
http://planet.parpg.net/

Tracking the project progress has never been easier!

 

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to a short PARPG news update.

If you've watched our wiki closely over the last four weeks, you might have realized that the PARPG team has been researching Agile software development in general and Scrum as one Agile framework in special. When we had our first stab at the project from early 2009 until early 2010, we ran into a couple of issues we couldn't really cope with back then:
* Lack of focus on actual development goals
* Lack of agreed upon development guidelines and processes
* Lack of communication and coordination between the different development departments

After qubodup recommended a Scrum book to me, I checked it out over the last year's Christmas holidays. I started to realize that Scrum could help us to stay focused, have an agreed upon process and ensure that developers actually communicate with each other.

As part of going Agile, we'll have our first sprint priorization meeting at Friday, 4th of February, 11PM UTC±0 at our new sprint IRC channel #parpg-sprint. The channel will be used for strict on topic sprint discussion in the future. If community members would like to attend the sprint priorization meeting, they're welcome to do so. This said: discussion will be restricted to PARPG developers to keep the meeting as productive as possible.

As we subscribe to the philosophy, that a news update without something fancy to look at isn't a good news update, there you go. Gaspard worked on some environment concept art:


Check out the full news update at the PARPG blog: http://blog.parpg.net/2011/01/parpg-goes-agile/

 

[ecliptic]

Purrrty.

 

[thesheeep]

Impressive that you managed to come so far without any nice form of project management.

 

[mvBarracuda]

Impressive that you managed to come so far without any nice form of project management.

To be fair: not having a very formal process doesn't say that there weren't semi-working informal processes that we followed.

It's just that these processes had their drawbacks that contributed to the initial downfall of the project in early 2010. It wouldn't be worth reviving this project if we wouldn't try to improve what went wrong initially.