The Ultima Game Developer Series
Created Worlds
Creating a game is a big task, and can be overwhelming for a single developer or small team. In this ongoing series of posts, I’d like to introduce different concepts, and explore how they shape the game that you make. After all, the goal is to make the best game possible, so here are my thoughts on a variety of subjects.
New articles will be written and added as they occur to me, and as I have time to flesh them out. If anyone has any suggestions for new topics, please post here and I’ll try to get to them as soon as possible.
There are the articles released so far for Ultima Game Developers:
- Engines
- A Seamless, Dual-Scale, or Leveled World?
- Full Day-and-Night Cycles
- Skills
- Magic
- Crafting
- Morality
- NPC Schedules
- Milestones
- Symbolism
- Conversation Trees
- Hardware and Software Requirements for Game Development
- Testing Requirements for Game Development
- A Game Developer Skillset
- Legality of Fan Games
Many thanks to WTF Dragon for his announcement of this series on Ultima Codex, and for hosting and maintaining Codex, the Digital Lycaeum, and the Codex.
Project Scope and “Milestone” Management is another important aspect that a developer should consider.
Plan reasonably big at the outset, and then cut different parts that prove too difficult and time-consuming to complete. Of course, you have to determine which aspects are integral to the mod and which can be cut.
For instance, at this stage, much of Ultima IX’s cities and maps can easily be rebuilt and/or expanded with limited additional tool development and with all NPCs having at least a basic schedule. However, new NPCs may have to be cut out due to the high degree of executable hacking and understanding required to allow for new usecode.
Another consideration is that developers need to focus on making steps toward completion of core mod components before spending too much time down an extra feature that could lead the project into limbo.
FW’s main focus right now is completion of Terrain and Object editing tools and a Full Trigger Editor; tools to import and edit art assets (like models, speech, and audio) is too much of an extra feature at the moment and may be worked on at a later date.
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Anyway, I think that gets across what I am referring to. Feel free to use any of that information including the examples.
Good point, Iceblade. It got me thinking, so I put a post together about Milestones.
http://lycaeum.ultimaaiera.com/posts/milestones/
Please add to it with your experiences!
Sorry for the absence; I’ve been moving for the last month or so, and have been without Internet except at work. I’m planning to start up some of these posts again next week, following Extra Life. However, I’ll probably be taking a break again in November for NaNoWriMo.
If anyone has any good ideas for new topics, please let me know!
I’ve added Conversation Trees, and am in the process of writing another, which should be up soon.
Added the first half of the “Hardware and Software Requirements for Game Development” topic. I’m splitting the other half into its own article, for Testing requirements.
I got bored today and finished up “Testing Requirements for Game Development” as well.
Another post up, “A Game Developer Skillset”.
Did you ever get around to discussing the legality of fan games? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangame#Legal_issues it can be expressed with “there usually isn’t any. At least, not unless the copyright holders sign off on it and they usually don’t. But they don’t usually assert their rights either”
I havn’t got it posted yet; things kind of fell apart over the holidays and I’m just getting up and running again. I have it all but complete, I just need some time to get back to it.
This is finally up. Sorry for the delay.
This article is the last in the series, for now. If anyone has more ideas, let me know and I’ll look into adding on. Until then, I’ll be starting on my series over the upcoming weeks: Reconciling the Past.
http://lycaeum.ultimaaiera.com/reconciling-the-past/