Rinseworld

I’ve got my lovely laptop back. I’ve got Visual Studio installed. I’ve got my old code I was playing around with.

I’ve decided to write a game again.

I’ve never finished a game but that doesn’t really bother me, its the discovery and problem solving I enjoy, not the endless content creation (and I’m a rubbish artist). I’m a hobbyist, not an indie developer.

So what’s this game about? I don’t know for certain. It’s going to be 2d, because that’s easier to program. It’s going to be set in space, because I like science fiction. It’s going to have a nice early 1990s feel to it, in graphics, plot and style. Beyond that I’m not really sure, I’m going to wait and see what happens.

I have an idea of walking around your ship while it flies through space, I think I’ll start with that.

I’ve worked out a few of the influences I’m drawing on for the design of this game idea.

UFO: Enemy Unknown (X-COM: UFO Defense in the US)

Still my favourite game of all time. I’ve made sure I’ve had a copy of this game since it was released, as I inevitably go back to it multiple times a year. I think the tactial combat in my game will be heavily influenced by UFO:Enemy Unknown, tactical enough to really think about your options, random enough to have things happen over which the player has no control and nice and easy to implement! The graphics style of this game is also a big influence.

Frontier: Elite II

I got to Elite too late to appreciate it despite its ancient graphics; Frontier, however, was pretty enough to make it that little bit more accessible. I had great fun being naughty in Frontier, taking off without permission and trying to get away from the cobra pursuit ships was my favourite way to pass 5 minutes. The scope of the Elite series and level of abstraction were both spot on, I thought, and will try to include similar ideas in this game.

Fallout

As I was thinking about the combat system of the game, I started to think about how the player would move around outside of combat. I was thinking about how in D&D you can move freely and then when an encounter starts everyone rolls initiative and it turns into a turn-based affair. I realised this is much how Fallout works, my game will be a free-moving grid-based RPG that becomes a turn based tactical game when an encounter happens. Spaceship encounters would probably work different to encounters on foot, but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.

Traveller

Traveller is a pen and paper RPG that’s  been around for donkeys years. I’ve never actually played it, but my father had all the first edition books and I used to browse through them all looking at all the tables and pictures. It didn’t mean anything to me, I was far too young to understand any of the rules, but I still got a feel of the world. I recently bought a new version of the core rulebook but have yet to read it; my game group are in the middle of a D&D session at the moment, maybe when we’ve finished that campaign arc I’ll prototype my game ideas in the Traveller rule system.

Blake’s 7

There’s a real magic to the 70′s British science fiction shows. I wasn’t around the first time this series was shown, but I caught up on satellite channels in my youth. This series felt like real high fantasy science fiction but with a gritty realism you didn’t see in shows like Doctor Who. Sure, Blake’s 7 suffered from all of the low budget problems those early shows had (wobbly sets, spaceships on string, etc.) but the human-centric, dystopian storyline made for a really dark and gripping series. Incidentally, Survivors is another gritty series from that era I would recommend, also written by Terry Nation, that man had skillz.