Designing the Game

What's the two outfits that every kid uses for Halloween? Ninja and pirate. Right? Right. If you don't agree, you were a lame kid. Pirates and ninjas are awesome. Both have a LOT of cool stuff, although I, personally, would call myself a pirate. Land ho!!! Anyways. I was at a friend's house today and he was playing Ninja Gaiden for the NES. And it came to me, like in a vision. I have played tons of ninja games before. But why not pirate??? As far as I can remember, I never played a game as a pirate. You see where I'm going with this?

That's right matey, let's get that bottle of rum, fill up an angry, bearded pirate with that precious liquid, and make him conquer an Island from the hands of the Spanish Empire! ...think about it...

Will here. This class is going to be the defining thing about this semester, and we are going to kick it's bloody ass from here to Quake 4. An RPG is also something I would love to do, but the amount of effort required seems a bit too high. And thanks for volunteering me for writing duty. Bitch. Actually, if we do an RPG, I would love to take some writing duties. I thought maybe we could also recruit Sal to help with art and writing, regardless of our project. He's an English major, after all, so it's not like he has anything else to do. I had also been considering some sort of RTS, since it would allow us to craft the sort of complexity and depth of gameplay that an RPG would provide without needing to put the effort into actually writing a 20 hour script.

I have to say, I'm a wee bit against an action game, only because it seems like a bit of a cop-out. Every dork who ever said "hey, I want to make a computer game!" started by making some crappy FPS. So unless we could come up with one hell of a killer concept, I don't think I'd be real happy with a shooter. It's too eay to make a decent shooter without making a truly fantastic one, and the genre is so saturated that I'd rather not make just another decent one.

The other option would be to go the we-are-just-crazy-amateurs-who-want-to-have-fun route. I was thinking of a game based on Penny Arcade. Like you would be Div on a search for the world's best bottle of Jack Daniels, and you would have to battle Claw Shrimp, or something. Or Salad Master, or any of PA's other throwaway game ideas that are meant as satire but could actually make really fun games.

It is all still pretty early on, so we have lots of decisions to make and discuss.

~Will out.

Welcome to Designing the Game. This blog's purpose is to document the progress of a certain project in one of my classes. The class is taught in Cornell University, under the Game Design Initiative. CIS300: Introduction to Game Design. I am going to take this course during the Spring of 2005 and I'm pumped about it. Me and a good friend of mine, Will both enrolled in this course, and we're hoping to work in the same group, on the same project.

I have not given much thought to what kind of game I would like to design/develop. I think an RPG would be an awesoe choice. It would, however, involve a lot of writing of the storyline and dialogue. This is fine, Will would have no problem working on such things. I am here mainly to code and gain experience with some form of technical writing. An idea which came to me just a couple of minutes ago, was a nice shoot-em-up, in the stlye where you would be in a helicopter/jet on this screen, constantly moving up, and enemies would pop up all over and your goal would be to destroy them all and then pass each stage's boss. That would be awesome. Come to think of it, there's this game that I always loved for the sega genesis called Thunder Force 3. Woah... It would be so sweet to make a game like that. I have to say, that was a REALLY good game.

Of course, ideas are still flowing around, even more since school has not started yet. But we're gonna have two rather large required books on game design, and all coding is going to be done in C++ using the GameX libraries, which are provided free of charge. Also, if the game's good enough, we might submit it to Hidden Agenda. This site will be updated with the project's progress throughout the course.