Game learning experience

[Reap3r]

Dear Greenies,

Lately I got a bit motivation to make a game. I have chosen this sub-forum as I see this won't fit in other sub-forums. I have done some research and I am now trying to choose a game-engine and have come across these:
Unity 3D
Irrlicht
GameCore

As these have tutorials and a huge community I have naturally chosen these but I feel that I should look a bit further but that might be just a hunch.
My aim for now is to make a room or a 25mx25m land fighting a skeleton. From there on I will expand, my goal eventually is to create:
(Warning: Long wall of text with alot of ideas not formulated properly.)

You are falling down from the sky, you have no idea why but you somehow crash unharmed.

By looking around you see alot of Jungle, you have no idea why you were falling from the sky,

neither do you know who you are.

 

In this game, there are creature's 10 metre's tall, which will occasionally hunt players or animals who are in their sight, escaping one is a hard task, defeating one will be near impossible, even if you have decent gear. 

 

Even if you lose the creature, there are smaller predators which will stalk you or hunt you. Once your character shows a weakpoint or stands still for no reason it will attack from it's hiding spot, there are even groups of these creatures hunting players, players will also spawn with nothing but a cloth. To gain items players must either go dig, find metal ore and try to refine it if they know how....

 

Most knowledge is in the dungeons and doing a dungeon is a hard and vital task. Dungeons can go from 5 minutes long to 2 hours. All dungeons are clearable. Dungeons can also include enemies or beings of the other world. If a player is in a dungeon wtih a being of the other world it is advisable to try to get out of the dungeon as fast as possible. Beings of the other world are not defeatable by fighting them, you need to solve the dungeon as fast as possible to get out of their hands. Dungeons can also sometimes include a boss which means fighting them is even MORE intense then regular battles. The rewards of a dungeon can be books with recipes/knowledge how to make items/stuff but they can also include weapons, armor and accessory for your character. Dungeons are also the only way to gain a "Legendary" Weapon which are the most rare weapons ever. 

 

The battles in this game are very intense as you have a bleed out system, so you need to somehow stelp the bleeding on your wounds. Enemy AI in this game is very complex and adjusts to the situation, so if it is hunting with a group, it will do group combos, to try to take down the player faster and more effectively.  Players can also battle other players and as this gear in this game is rare/uncommon, there will be mostly battles over gear.

 

This game will scream: You should die, you shouldn't exist...so please die. 

This game will be 10% gear, 90% skill. The graphics in this game at maximum should be comparable to skyrim with alot of mods, ultimate graphics setting should be only be able to run with 2-4 GTX 680S-690S and the graphics of ultimate will constantly improve. 

 

The game world will be a mix between EVE/Minecraft, it wil continu to expand by other players if your not there and everything you do, can affect everyone around you. Players will be able to create castles, towns, cities, guilds but they will be able to destroy it, raid it, plunder it everything. This game realism is high. I am not sure yet if I want to make it a MMO or serverlike minecraft.

 

There will be plenty of enemies/monsters in this game but there will be no Human, so only the players are the humans. 

 

The player in this game is human, to know more about his past and to survive he is killing, doing dungeons and creating civilization. In dungeons players will also find books telling about past of humans and how the extinction happened.

 

Deep later, as a expansion, demon's will start increasing in huge amounts and will attack players/towns/cities/civilzation more aggressive as time proceeds, it will come in huger waves. And players will need to work together instead of killing each other or they will lose everything. Demons will also infest other monsters making them demonic. This ofcourse will be a expansion and will be added later in the game when it is running good.

 

Crafting system in this game is very complex and this will require you to go do dungeons to learn in the books what you exactly need to do to temper the metal well, and how to shape it up well, it will also tell you what items you will need. 

A player can ofcourse try without reading these books but there's a huge chance he will fail. Players can also find books of prototypes of weapons which will be a tier below legendaries but they will be hard to create as they will require rare materials which you would need to gather of everything. 

 

If people would like to join on this learning experience I will gladly accept them as the more, the merrier.
So which engine is good to start on?

Edited December 26, 2012 by Reap3r

[Clavus]

I'm learning to use Unity right now. It's a pretty great engine.

Your game idea is way too ambitious for a first project though

[Reap3r]

well people need dreams

For now I will just try to make a successful 25 metre x 25 metre map with monsters where the player can be in combat with. After that....I can start working my way towards my dream.

Edit: Guess I will learn how to use Unity then.

Edited November 30, 2012 by Reap3r

[Dr.Minky]

Unity

If youre starting with a big project like that then I'd recommend splitting it down into lots of smaller games and then combining them together. In your description alone there are several little game you could create without diving straight into making such a huge project, for example the farming aspect or the building aspect of the fighting could all be taken piece by piece and then put together later on

I can help with games design, and Im a sound designer but I wont say that I'll do that for you unless you actually get into making it - that's quite time consuming

Edited November 30, 2012 by Dr.Minky

[Chikennugget1]

I've started learning game programming with Slick2D, a Java library (yeah, I'm oldschool, 2D games ).

I don't really have time/motivation to work on this a lot though.

I've heared about Unity 3D, it seems it's one of the best engines for 3D Games plus companies are often looking for people who knows it, I think that's the best choice.

Edited November 30, 2012 by Chikennugget1

[Reap3r]

after some hours of following tutorials, using cheat sheets and frustations created by the fact that a single undercase letter can ruin your whole game, I present to you, my first game.

I tend to use the first person and picking up stuff in my main game.

Would be nice if people could give critism where I could improve, though I know THERES alot to improve.

Edit1: First level you need to get on top a sandstone monolith, there are boxes spreaded out across the map but you better hurry or something will come...

Edit2: Sorry! Fixed it

Edited December 2, 2012 by Reap3r

[MrZunz]

after some hours of following tutorials, using cheat sheets and frustations created by the fact that a single undercase letter can ruin your whole game, I present to you, my first game.

I tend to use the first person and picking up stuff in my main game.

Would be nice if people could give critism where I could improve, though I know THERES alot to improve.

Edit1: First level you need to get on top a sandstone monolith, there are boxes spreaded out across the map but you better hurry or something will come...

Error at launch:

There should be 'Bizarre Puzzler_Data'

folder next to the executable

[Reap3r]

Got rid of some bugs and made the gameplay a bit better.

Could also anyone tell me a good guide on making the mouse locked? preferable in C#

Edited December 3, 2012 by Reap3r

[Mayco]

I tried it real quick, I didn't manage to stack the boxes and didn't wait for "something" to appear. I'll try once I have more time.

Still, every kind of game is a good start. Like with most other programming projects: It's mostly the experience you gain that counts.

I'm quite fluent in C# so I messed around in Unity a bit, but unfortunately I haven't had enough time to really dive into it.

Last but not least, a quick Google session said you should put "Screen.lockCursor = true;" in your void Update() method. Sounds like it should work.

[Reap3r]

Mayco, if it only was that easy

I updated my game concept as suggested by Minky, Minky also suggested a nice cool soundtrack for the first level, so it is a bit better. As for the "thing", it is currently on a bug. So sometimes it will appear if your luck actually, scrap that. You will be very unlucky if it is around, a tip: if music ends, it will attack.

I also made the monolith a bit better and cleaned up some unnecessary things, so file size is less. I think I will make this one of the dungeons.

Edit1: I also want to know from you guys, is it better to work in C# or Java,

Unity forums are telling me, C is hard to understand but will get you further then Java, while Java will be easy but it will get harder if you want it more complexer

Edit2: I also want to know if C# and javascript are compatible with each other, as most tutorials are in Javascript.

bizarre Puzzler v.4.zip

Edited December 24, 2012 by Reap3r

[Mayco]

Personally I started by learning C#, and I don't think JavaScript is a lot different syntax wise. I personally like C# more but that's probably because I'm biased. If you're developing an application from scratch you should consider C# only works on Windows. In the case of Unity: I wouldn't know what the benefits are of JavaScript over C#. Thanks to Mono it runs on all platforms so the platform dependency is not something you have to worry about.

C# and JavaScript are not natively compatible with eachother, but an engine like Unity probably supports JavaScript for different reasons (like some C++ engines support Lua). Both languages have their (dis)advantages.