2010/12/17

Big Picture: CC, EFF, FSF

Making and playing games are great hobbies. On terms of global importance, though, these things are pretty small.

This week four important individuals became backers of Justin Nichol’s Fantasy Portrait Marathon:

I’m thrilled that their portraits will appear as NPCs in Flare. In return, I support these important organizations and I hope you will as well.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization that creates art content licenses which allow creators to give various permissions to users. These licenses are a valuable part of our remix, mash-up, and sampling culture.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fights for user rights the world over. They focus on issues like internet free speech, privacy, and fair use.

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) promotes computer user freedoms through licenses that grant and protect freedoms, free software development, and campaigns against DRM and software patents.

2010/12/14

Portraits of Giants

I previously mentioned that Justin Nichol is doing a Kickstarter project to make Creative Commons Fantasy Portraits of donors.

The idea is simple: Justin needs tuition for school next semester. He’d rather create art for video games than work at Starbucks. So, donors can pledge some cash and in return get a digital painting of themselves. These paintings will be released under the Free/Libre license CC-BY-SA (and GPL for compatibility with games like Wesnoth) and are designed to fit with the style of FLARE. They will be PC portrait choices or NPCs in the final game (probably displayed during conversations).

Well, only a few days into the Kickstarter we see some interesting names: Joi Ito and Mike Linksvayer — the current President and Vice President of Creative Commons! Somehow they’ve gotten wind of the project and thought it’s a neat idea.

We’re thrilled! And it seems only fitting that giants of the Free/Libre, Copyleft, and Creative Commons community make guest appearances in my free-licensed game. So I joke: what if we ask other people? Stallman, Doctorow, Lessig… I know those guys are busy. It can’t hurt though, right?

Today I get an email response from Lessig that says “done”. Holy hell, Lawrence Lessig has commissioned a fantasy portrait of himself and will appear in my video game! Justin, the artist, is beyond excited too — his portfolio will forever contain commissioned portraits of three giants in copyleft culture. And I’m excited because Lessig — one of my personal heroes — will end up as a literal hero in my video game!

[–Update–]

I also got an email response from Richard Stallman! He admitted he could not donate towards a project that used the term “Open Source” to describe itself, but would gladly participate or give a nod of approval if we instead agreed to use the terms “Free” or “Free/Libre” to describe it. I’ve decided to take it a step further and rebrand the entire project. I’ll be posting more about this later today.

2010/12/10

Refactoring Powers

Once a system is far enough along, any refactoring is daunting. Especially when it involves temporarily breaking code that works well.

I want to define powers in config files. Ideally it should be easy to make new powers similar to existing ones. The config files might get rather long, but them’s the breaks. Time to break down the plan:

  • Create a config file for Shoot
  • Create a new struct to hold power data
  • Copy ini file code to load power data
  • Rework Missile routine to use this Shoot struct
  • Create power config file for Shock
  • Generalize Missile routine to handle common missiles

That should get me pretty far. Once I see the generalization for Missiles it should be simple to adapt the same for the other types.

Harder thought will be required for a power like Vengeance. I’ll figure that part out later…

2010/12/06

Character Creation Screen

Time to lay down my ideas about a character creation screen.

Because of OSARE’s classless system, the Character Creation screen is mostly for cosmetics.

So the choices at Character Creation are:

  • Character Name
  • Character Gender
  • Character Portrait

Note, in the future Gender choice could be changed to Race/Gender choice. Each race-gender combination requires its own base model, own animations, and own equipment layers. At first I plan to only support two base options: human male and female.

The interesting bit will be choosing a Character Portrait. If you think hard back to Diablo 1 (or look at a few screenshots) you’ll see that the hero sprites have these layers:

  • Hero head or helmet
  • Base full-body armor
  • Main hand weapon
  • Off hand item

The other Diablo 1 equipment slots are not shown (two rings and an amulet) on the hero sprites.

OSARE does not have a helmet slot, and the three jewelry slots are replaced with one Artifact slot. Otherwise the display is the same. Instead of the helmet slot, I will be making a set of head choices (e.g. various skin and hair styles). These heads will match the Fantasy Portraits by Justin Nichol.

2010/12/01

Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Marathon

OpenGameArt contributor Justin Nichol is taking pledges towards creating 30 high-quality fantasy portraits. They will be featured in OSARE as PC portrait choices or story-line NPCs. Additionally these portraits will be uploaded to OpenGameArt under CC-BY-SA and GPL licenses. Finally, these pledges will help Justin attend his next semester at Concept Art Academy in Pasadena.

A $50 pledge gets you a fantasy portrait in your likeness! Maybe you’ll even be the first vendor, quest NPC, or villain of OSARE…

2010/11/29

Art To Do

OSARE has a few months of alpha code tasks before it’s time to really focus on more art. However, that new art should trickle in with each release until Beta.

New Enemies
  • Dragonmen with paladin and priest equipment.
  • Elementals with fire and ice main options
  • Wyverns
Enemy Variants
  • Antlion hatchling and queen size variants
  • Skeletal archers and mages
  • Goblin war chiefs and shaman
  • Minotaurs with tribal and armored options
Existing Creatures

I’m on the lookout for existing creatures I can add to osare. If you have an open-licensed creature and want to see it in my game, let me know!

There are plenty more fantasy-standard creatures I’d like in my game. Ogres, dragons, centaurs, gnolls, demons, etc. all deserve a spot in osare.

Tilesets

The Caves are coming in v0.11, but there are plenty more tilesets I want to do.

  • Grassland
  • Town
  • Forest
  • Desert
  • Mountain
  • Tundra
  • Ancient Bridges
  • Temple Interior
  • Coastal
  • Wizard Academy
  • Villain Fortress
Equipment

I want to add hammers and axes, both using Physical requirements. They’ll basically operate the same as swords in my current loot setup. This would make physical weapons much more common than other weapons. That’s okay by me — it’s harder to survive anyway when you have to get into melee range to kill anything.

  • Club (Phys 2)
  • Mace (Phys 3)
  • Hand Axe (Phys 3)
  • Hammer (Phys 4)
  • Axe (Phys 4)
  • Greathammer (Phys 5)
  • Greataxe (Phys 5)

I want to have visual variants on all items. Each weapon/armor should have a mundane, high quality, and epic art version. Maybe a few color variations for each.

2010/11/22

v0.11 Plans

This changes almost daily but it helps me to write things down. The more I write down, the less I have to juggle mentally.

  • four power slots per enemy
  • various power fixes for creature use
  • add slot-based power cooldowns for enemies
  • move all power data to config file

Some things will slip to later releases. It’s easy to forgive creatures for being kinda unintelligent if they have interesting powers.

What this release will allow is an explosion of creature variations. To help with that I hope to include several variations on existing creatures. E.g. I want a skeleton variation that is obviously a spellcaster, and one that is obviously an archer.

I’ll add at least one cave map too. If you’ve played osare as much as I have, you’re ready for a change of scenery.

Timeline? I’ll be traveling this weekend. Hopefully during the down time I’ll get some code done. v0.11 should be ready early December.

Future Timeline

2010 has been the year of OSARE’s alpha development. I released v0.01 on January 1st, 2010. I’ve almost been able to do one release per month. Note that OSARE has been my priority #3 at best: work and girlfriend come first. So I’m pleased with this pace.

OSARE still has big milestones left to go. If I’m only concerned with essential features:

  • Vendors/Merchants
  • NPC Dialog
  • Simple Quest System
  • Title Screen
  • Load Game Screen
  • Character Creation Screen

Glance at the list and you’ll notice that it’s mostly about menus. The core gameplay — the action part of the game — is already near completion. I would love to have those things done by May 2011 (and I think it’s doable). At that point the project might be (gasp!) Beta.

Development will still continue as-needed. It’s important for me to deliver a real game, instead of making tons of game types possible. These things are not going to be a priority. I probably won’t be needing them for my first osare game. Essentially — these features are neat, but distract from the goal of having a great action rpg.

  • Dialog trees
  • Reputation system
  • Crafting system
  • Minigame (e.g. fishing) system
  • Scriptable cutscenes
  • Puzzle style bosses (e.g. Zelda)
  • Pets or hirelings
  • Achievements and unlockables