mdgunn

Did a simple robot head. Could instead be a golem head or something if different setting. Just another test prop. Added to repo in models/robots.

Yeah, good point. Would be good to be fun even if you made it.

Another couple of island tests. This a purposefully artificially rounded one with some unnaturally regular structures underneath and hidden entrance.

As far as sci-fi fantasy possibilities. I would also include into this steampunk and alternate histories. For example World War Robot, Steam Boy etc, as well as thousands of years in the future. Far future suggest possibilities for more magic like settings approaching traditional fantasy. Numenera I think is supposed to be millions years in the future but the planet has had 9 successive civilizations with the current one having access to tech but not necessarily the means to produce all of it (essentially rare classic RPG weapons/magic). The main point would be that the environment could be various settings that could exhibit a mix of history, fantasy and sci-fi in whatever way we can agree on. The Numenera type of setting means low complexity (low poly) buildings (e.g. stone/concrete/future plastic or alloy) are quite reasonable but high tech/magic items can exist but might be something you hold in your hand. A useful benefit here is that if you can create a small sphere in 3D then you can call it whatever weapon/item you want and have it do anything. Whose to say it just cause we can't model good stuff .... I'm sure some of us can. Whatever the type of settings (steampunk alternate history or far-future) I saw it being somewhat post-apocalyptic but 'in a good way'. The bad stuff has mostly passed but threats exist (tech may wake up - weapons may be active - buildings may collapse etc.). This means there is a backdrop of civilisation and history to create a setting but we don't have to populate it make it functional or even fully complete (half a structure might have got blown up or never finished). This is why I see some sort of future fantasy as giving us a lot of scope from something historical through to something approaching traditional RPG, whilst perhaps avoiding some of the cliches.

i was thinking that if we could split game into mini-game like I was saying (with 1 or a few key mechanics), e.g. between island flight, cave section, island exploration etc. then we may be able to have enough sections that everyone can effectively own this section. Others can input to other peoples but each person can effectively own something and have majority say on the direction. We may still need to be able to collectively vote or decide if we as a whole think something needs to be done a certain way. At some future point we may have some tricky time tying different things together but I hope that if we minimise mechanics and don't duplicate this is at least more practical. If we minimise mechanics and prototype early then we may be able to know that a different mini-game offers something we could use later while working on other things (e.g. inventory or AI).

Yeah sounds like you're on similar lines. EDIT: Many OLD/fantasy things can be similar to sci-fi things so it may appeal to people if they see the possibilities. For example a robot and golem can be almost the same thing and you could model just a turret head as a maze hazard and it doesn't have to even look human or be a complete thing. Creature like things (human or animal) gives something in the world that suggest life and backstory even if it doesn't even move or be a complete thing. If they are also mechanical and not pretending to be exactly a real thing then this gives us some options to reduce work (e.g. make a sound effect for a cat like thing, or make just half of it). Old tech may reactivate or have defensive measures protecting something of importance. Could be just a hovering orb which would be much easier to create and have minimal animation and minimal AI but be within theme rather than having to be a dumb zombie because decent AI would likely be a major time sink and probably have flaws. Maybe when our bad robot orb AI messes up at least part of you might imagine it's malfunctioned due to age and not just dev skill Many sci-fi or ancient constructions (e.g. medieval or stone-age) are often traditionally gemetric and simple in construction. You can have simple constructions like a glowing obelisk or disc-like portal gate or some simple structure for a flight machine. Sci-fi or stone age tech often very geometric.The great thing is that they in a 'future fantasy' (not sure what the right term is really) setting OLD stuff is also the NEW STUFF. The mysterious tech stuff of hidden magical power. One thing to mention is that usually this magic stuff should ideally have some explainable scientific effect, for example e.g. anti-grav is the reason things levitate rather than 'cause magic says so'. So maybe you spray a cloud of metal eating nano robots rather than you 'magically summon a metal armour devouring slime cube from some ethereal realm'. It isn't necessary to stick to this scientific explanation approach but I think it's a nice way to have magic and power without having to basically lean HARD on tired RPG tropes. Not saying traditional RPG is bad but I do think there are so many games that just tread out the same old thing in some shallow world. "OK so the wizard has a fire spell and an ice spell, check. OK guys wizard is done. Game 50% complete." At the same time I'll be happy if we get ANYTHING solid working but I'd like to avoid some cliches on the way if we can.

Yeah I realise all this massive dump of stuff probably makes it seem like we try to make a crazy ambitious game, but really I mention so many touch points so we can each try to find just a few things to bring to the table but ultimately keep everything as stripped back as possible and focused on a few specific things. Games like ICO and Journey still took ages to make, and realistically we can't expect to make something anything like any of them but by focusing on games that at least are more stripped back we have a better chance than trying to make something than with many, many mechanics that are ultimately probably unsatisfying and shallow. I suppose many people also hate Journey and ICO type games but hopefully they can get a feel for things from the pictures and can identify with some of the other references. Not suggesting we try to replicate Journey or ICO and I'm definitely NOT suggesting we try to put everything from all of these games into one UBER GAME (mwahahahaa!). Hopefully the images in PInterest and posted above have at least one or 2 things people can identify with but also have a general coherence that we could use to as the foundation for a theme which is not too generic. I suppose many of the images could be said to be very 'cliched' but I hope not so cliched as your typical fantasy or sci-fi. Hopefully by pulling aspects out of multiple sources the end result is less cliched than if we just try to think of some 'new cool story'. I imagine that on later reflection the 'new cool story' may end up more full of cliches than drawing inspiration from numerous proven interesting sources.... ...unless of course one or more of us have a published track record of publishing genuinely original and ground breaking literature or ideas (if there is such a thing)? I'm old and grumpy, comes with the territory! I welcome others to put together an inspiration board. Don't want to force my concept on others but AM very keen to try to find a way to keep things stripped back yet practical for numerous people to find something they can identify with and contribute to.

!!!!MASSIVE POST WARNING!!!! I have put together a Pinterest board of images which I think together may suggest a possible theme and feel for the game. EDIT: Just remembered the game Journey. I think this is also shares much of what I mention here. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/gunn0636/game-inspiration/ I've also posted some images to the end of this post. My main idea is one of sci-fi fantasy along the lines of Numenera crossed with Skyward Sword. See here if you're unfamiliar: https://www.montecookgames.com/new-to-numenera/ I DO NOT mean make the game exactly like numenera but rather than I see a theme along those lines as giving us possibilities to make the game EASIER to get done AND allow many possibilities, without it falling too hard into a generic RPG guff. Kinda the point of numenera is to make it easier to construct your own world while avoiding generic tropes while sort of using them as a reference point to build on top of. The idea of numera - remember I'm not saying DO numenera but leverage some of these concepts - is that it a future world that has been ravaged numerous times and so there is a hidden future tech around (acting like magic) but that the world in general has something of a fantasy/medieval feel to life (a bit like star wars and Tatooine but much more mysterious). NOTE: I'm not saying come up with some killer back story. Actually the opposite. Think ICO/Shadow of the Collossus where the game is ripped back to bare minimum of story and explanation but exploration and mechanics let you feel like you are living and surviving in the world. A 'future fantasy setting' could work well as it gives you a good excuse for a relatively empty world (in our section of the world) but which has interesting stuff in it but for reasons which don't necessarily need to make 100% sense or be part of some interlinked back story. Other areas of inspiration that I have considered which could inform the feel of the game and also might suggest mechanics are as follows: ## Games - Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword - Journey - Nier Automata - The Witness - Ico/Shadow of the Colossus/The Last Guardia - Mario Odyssey/Galaxy ## Movies - Laputa - Steam Boy ## Art/Books/RPG - Jack Vance - Dying Earth - Monte Cook - Numenera - Gerard Trignac - Simon Stalenhag - Tales of the Flood/Tales of the Loop - Ashley Wood - World War Robot - Others (seee Pinterest link ) NOTE: Again I'm not saying make a game that has all these things in. I'm suggesting the opposite that these series of reference may suggest a starting point to pick just 1 thing for theme or mechanic inspiration to start moving forward without getting too bogged down in back story/character because many of these references (not all) have an element of mystery but also possibility and open endedness. We can tie many different things into hopefully a coherent whole. Initially each person might try to find something inspirational from the general feel of things presented and come up with essentially a mini-game that has 1 - just one interesting mechanic inplace. This would be in their own map and could be just CSG based. We then build from there. Examples could include: - Flying section - someone showed plane game - which could be later used to fly between islands. - Climbing puzzle section - climbing towers or decending the floating island to reach cave entrance - Cave/maze section - in bowels of island there may be cave/maze to explore/fight/puzzle. You get something down there that you need to access other island via tower or something (a type of magic/tech key to tower). - Island exploration - simple tasks possible fighting - e.g. avoid old partly immobilised robots (e.g. head section is turning turret). I have some more ideas of how we can tie things together but this is way long already so I'll cut it here.

Added super basic material library so we have some simple control over colours and colour pallette for simple material application in Leadwerks.

Not very good yet. Just a start.

An island test. The feature detail is not right scale yet. This will take some time to settle on I think. Also I think with structures in place it would counteract what your brain is trying to guess at. Still just a test but maybe something to use in prototyping. There may well be ways to get this much more efficient (e.g. custom physics mesh, mesh reduction etc) so if performance is bad then it can probably be improved. Added to repo in maps/Test/MapSize/terrain_island.map Deleted some of the other test maps that were taking up space.

I'm not an artist but I work as a web developer so in general I understand 2D and 3D graphics apps and can usually do something reasonable I think. You can check out my Leadwerk games to maybe get a feel for things https://www.leadwerks.com/community/profile/13600-mdgunn/?tab=field_core_pfield_34

I think we should think carefully about third person and even needing a character, at this stage. I think it is one of those things where you are potentially opening yourself up to a lot of extra work. Don't get me wrong, nice to see some of the things that have come out so far but I would urge against pursing these things too far at this stage. Game mechanics and some sort of unique and interesting theme is the thing that I'd like to see some meat on the bones of at the minute. Would really like to avoid this game being to wander around a low poly map as generic cute wizard doing generic cute wizard things. I'd rather wander around some CSG brushes with no character (first-person) as long as there is something interesting to do there. I'd suggest keep the theme loose and abstract and be just enough to drive some mechanics, but not get hung up on being a story quest. Instead let mechanics and combination of mechanics allow you to sort of live it instead.

Just another test. Not in the repo. Size is about 10240cm square in LW size.

See previous answer about CSG map. that textured map is in no way supposed to be testing size.

Oh yeah I think that map probably is too big too. This one was more to test a natural look and texturing. The other CSG ones of fixed named size (in the repository) were the ones intended more to test size. There are about 6 I think. I can do a couple couple more..of these type more a bit smaller to see if they are still successful at a smaller size and it may be necessary to try to do an island one and prove it can be limited to an area. The previous white one was a version of something exported from LW taken to blender, made 'terrain-like' based on CSG brought in and then exported out. That one was more to prove a possible work flow. There are really 3 questions here which I'm looking at; 1) What is the right size (my CSG simple circle area maps). 2) What is the workflow for transforming something of the right size to an interesting map (the blender export import maps I did). 3) Different techniques to produce and texture a low poly map (this last one - which is yes to big). All maps are currently in the repo though better naming might help clear up what is what.

Another example. Added a few files to repo.....they are getting a bit big already.

Think it should be based around standard LW character controller heights though I think we have some custom controller in place and not sure if that is standard height.

Added some simple test files for map size to bitbucket in Maps/TestFiles/MapSize. Added some simple CSG shape maps of various power of 2 sizes. Also added import and export sample to blender. CSG->Export to OBJ->Import to blender->Export as FBX->Add physics Shape->Add Back to original map CSG exported from. This may not be what was expected. If not let me know.

Flat land? You mean some basic shape without worrying about it being so natural?

Think that even in a small terrain you can get a decent level of exploring done. Big maps sound like the wrong place to start. Start as small as possible and when things don't fit get bigger, glue them together etc. Need to be mostly modular so there are a number of small bits rather than large map, I would think. The Witness is another reference point I find interesting. The terrain is relatively small but is very different and each different bit is really VERY VERY tiny......and it took them something like 4 years to complete. It has a nice low poly-ish art style though.

I've been been playing around with brushes recently redoing q2dm1 map from Quake2. I find brushes the limitations of brushes interesting. Leadwerks doesn't have many tools but you kind still get something done You can always export them anyway as long as you haven't spent ages texturing them all. You could do better than what I have below they are just me messing around.

I know Blender a bit. Decimate may lead to some less pleasing triangles as it's just brute force trying to reduce triangles. Shrinkwrap probably better option as I just did here as a quick test..... The low subdivision terrain on the right is deformed by shrinkwrapping to the higher division sculpted one on the left. You get more pleasing 'strips' of triangles. Depends which look you like.

At a guess I'd imagine you could do a low-poly terrain in Blender by taking any higher poly mesh (e.g. LW output, Worldmachine etc.), getting a lower poly subdivided triangulated plain and using a shrinkwrap modifier against the higher poly terrain to pull the low poly to the high poly shape. That would be my guess I'd guess that WorldMachine might give you good control out of the specifics out output resolution as well.

Been trying to reach a conclusion on this. Overall Third person, low-poly, world puzzle/exploration possibly mosters/enemies appeals a lot to me and is something LW is most closely set up for out of the box. I think to work we'd have to have a super limited scope and feature set as it's also a genre in which you can REALLY REALLY kill your idea if you get ambitious. I'm not much of a VR head (though I own a PSVR and have hooked it to Leadwerks briefly) but I'd like to have kept the door open for a VR mode but not at the expense of the project. Tower defense would probably be my second choice. Sounds very doable (I think) but I imagine balancing issues could occupy much time. I've tried to plan out a few games a bit before so have about practical limitations a bit before. I think we have to be brutally about limiting scope and features. I think it would be smart to try to make a game that 1 person COULD make alone (maybe if they had more time than each of us might be able to supply) and then hopefully we end up with a finished game, or a game less people than now could finish if it comes to that. Gotta be brutally realistic. My suggestion would be something similar in scope to The Atlas Cube https://store.steampowered.com/app/252550/Qbeh1_The_Atlas_Cube/ I once did some prototyping of such a game that was to be a combination of this and aspects of another game called 'Against The Wall' that I put money into in a kickstarter about 6 years ago that never got finished by the developer (NOT ME). This is a screenshot from the game I started making in Leadwerks. I usually set up a Trello board or do a very rough document with some game ideas but in this case I'm not sure I did (or I haven't located the doc yet). The screen above is an in-engine LW shot overlayed with a logo in PS. The basic idea was that there would be a few different towers, maybe designed around a theme, such as the bird one in the picture. This way you're also sort of climbing a creature (which could even be allowed to mechanically move) so gets some strong character or life into the game in a cheap way. As it's a tower/temple it doesn't have to actually MOVE anywhere, speak to you, have convincing AI etc. You'd be able to move blocks or place blocks in certain places to allow progress through the tower and there might be multiple routes. E.g. move a stone to climb the wall or move a stone to enter a partially accessible corridor inside. So it had defined but limited mechanics (others may unfold during game) so that the player can understand what they need to do and combine mechanics rather than being 'key fetch quest' or difficult adventure quests where you combine obscure objects. Not necessarily suggesting we make this game. Part of me wants to make it myself but then I suppose part of me would like to just play something like this anyway so it would be nice to have something made in LW like this. Maybe if others have some ideas of games they have wanted to make and have done parts or and might have screenshots or docs for then this might help settle on a project. Maybe someone even has a half done project. Not getting the project done would probably be my No.1 concern. If someone has a solid vision or a partially executed idea already then I think we have a boost on getting the thing finished and avoiding paralysis by committee. There are probably down sides to taking on someone else's idea especially if it's a good one and it actually becomes commercially viable and things get complicated.