ID:151897
 Oct 31 2008, 12:59 am
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I'm thinking of making a single-player RPG, with a storyline that lasts the usual amount of time. About a week to a week 'n a half. I'm sure the use of lists to make the storyline valid is possible..But with cutscenes, tons of places, and the storyline..Well I'm worried the game will be too large, and I know if the game is great than people wont mind that (E.G.:Naruto GOA). But anyways it'll probably be under production for just as long as maybe 6-8 months.
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Oct 31 2008, 1:30 am
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Kaioken
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Of course it's possible... it's quite of a no-brainer question. =P You can make large multiplayer RPGs, single-players ones are even easier and allow you to do things that would be less feasible in a multiplayer game, resource wise.
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Yeah, thats completely possible, there already are single player games.
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Go for it!
Of course Single player games are possible and the very nature of an RPG is to immerse the playr in their role which is probably a whole lot easier in a single player game as opposed to multiplayer games. A game can never be to large in my opinion provided your talking about gameplay etc. and not filesize, it lets players find things they don't expect and have fun exploring (one of the reasons I like these open ended space games). 6-8 months is a nice length of time make sure you stick to making it. | |
Choka wrote:
I'm thinking of making a single-player RPG, with a storyline that lasts the usual amount of time. About a week to a week 'n a half. Might be better to put that in terms of "hours of gameplay", because one man's week-and-a-half is another man's two-day sleepless marathon. =) I'm sure the use of lists to make the storyline valid is possible..But with cutscenes, tons of places, and the storyline..Well I'm worried the game will be too large, and I know if the game is great than people wont mind that (E.G.:Naruto GOA). But anyways it'll probably be under production for just as long as maybe 6-8 months. BYOND has a terrible problem, and it's that because it handles everything so transparently, people don't tend to catch on that it is limited like any other development environment. Just like an industry-standard RPG of that length, you can't and shouldn't try loading the whole game at once. For a large game, you'll have to separate the game content into packages and load it dynamically from the hard drive on demand based on what's necessary. Oblivion, for instance, loads data like crazy just about every single second while you're walking through the wilderness. It's all about caching. Granted, Oblivion has more trouble because everything is huge 3D models and textures, but on the other hand it also has full use of your hard drive's swap space and RAM. BYOND loads lighter things, but imposes some harder restrictions. | |
The last part I don't know if this is what you were implying or if what I am saying is the exact same thing. But what about doing seperate sections. For instance, Final Fantasy 8 wasn't nearly small enough to fit one story into the PS1 and it had I think 4-8 discs. I could do that right?
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Somewhat along those lines, but in that case, splitting it up into multiple discs would be like making 4 or 5 different BYOND .dmbs and distributing them all together in a .zip.
In my case, I was suggesting keeping only one .dmb, and then loading your game content as necessary. Bear in mind that loading game content dynamically is, in my opinion, very difficult in BYOND, particularly if you want to involve scripting. The multi-DMB option might be easier, but it'd also be kludgy, just like hot-swapping the CDs was in the PlayStation. =) | |
But also what could I use to keep players from skipping to other parts of the game? Would it read their current save file? And what would happen if I added more variables. Would there be runtime errors?
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Choka wrote:
The last part I don't know if this is what you were implying or if what I am saying is the exact same thing. But what about doing seperate sections. For instance, Final Fantasy 8 wasn't nearly small enough to fit one story into the PS1 and it had I think 4-8 discs. I could do that right? 4 discs. Choka wrote: But also what could I use to keep players from skipping to other parts of the game? Would it read their current save file? And what would happen if I added more variables. Would there be runtime errors? Well, I don't know about whether if there'd be run-times, but I think I can help with the other two :D Give each player a variable that helps the game track their progress overall, perhaps just "uptosection" or something. Add one to this variable every time they complete a section. At the beginning of each (except the very first, obviously) section, check if they're actually up to or beyond that point yet. If yes, let them continue, if not notify them and maybe boot them out, or just make it impossible to go anywhere. At the end, check if they've already done that section, if not, adjust the variable to reflect that they've done it, if yes, do nothing. On reading the save files, I think as long as you point it to the right location, it'll be able to read it. I think the only reason you don't get other games reading each others save-files is because of all the different variables. And that came out longer than I anticipated but I hope it helps :D | |