A lot of people who play games also design them on the side. I’d love to hear stories about any personal projects people are working on, whether they’re tabletop or videogames. I’ll go first!
I’m currently coding my own civilization game in Unity. I wanted a civ game that was more sim-like – sort of like a SimCity that spans 6000 years and covers the entire globe. Since I’m a better designer/coder than artist it’s entirely procedural. No models, no textures – just algorithmically-generated polygons. Terrain is generated using a simple plate tectonics simulation, with a simple global climate model to assign biomes. Here are a couple of screenshots.
Currently I’m working on the economic simulation. You can build cities and connect them with roads, and commerce flows along those roads depending what different cities supply/demand. Here’s a video of some random road traffic from when I first got the traffic system working a few weeks ago. Now I’ve got to tie this system into the economy. This morning I set up the city manager so it constantly calculates the travel costs between cities. It’s a bit of a tricky problem because the player can create/destroy roads/cities at will, and I’m estimating a normal game will have several hundred cities. That means I need to continually update a table of about 100,000 routes without trashing the framerate. I have a coroutine running in the background that processes about 100 routes per frame, so even with a really dense map it only takes a few seconds for the effects of a change to propagate.
Next, is writing the code that uses these travel costs + supply/demand to calculate commodity flows between cities. It’s a pretty simple linear programming problem, but it also requires a bit of finesse to spread the calculations out across multiple frames. Once that is working I can connect it to the traffic code and the little cars driving between the cities will actually represent trade caravans!
I’m involved in a creative writing RP that is mainly erotic-based. My character is a vulpine, an anthropomorphic fox. I’ve written (and am still writing) a language, Vulpani, for that species, and have written most of the canonical information about vulpines, ranging from religion and culture to physiology, psychology and sociology.
Since I started my PhD I’ve had to give up on my game making stuff for time.
I tend to play around with engine tech more than make games anyway, I never use out-of-the-box engines because I like writing my own, which hampers my attempts to do thing like Ludum Dare because I’m doing (perhaps over) twice as much work as people who use Unity or U4.
I do not have the skill or time to make such a game but working at a liquor store gave me and a friend inspiration to make a game based on how brutally hard the life of a can bum is.
In the Can Bum Simulator, you get to choose from a variety of characters who have traits that are mostly negative. The name of the game is to keep your blood alcohol level at a certain high or else everything you do slows down (like being over-encumbered in Skyrim). You must scrounge an open world seeking out empties and bring them to a store that will accept them. You have a certain amount of charisma that goes up or down depending on how long it has been since your last shower. You have to compete with other can bums and avoid inevitable police shakedowns. The game is harsh, like Oregon Trail harsh where you can die for no particular reason whatsoever. And if you win, there’s a big shiny can of Colt 45 waiting for you.
It’s very much a storytelling, writing, interactive adults-only fiction site, played over IRC. (Sex and slavery are involved; it’s in kind of a medieval setting with 23 different races and magic). Dice-rolling is usually restricted to combat between equally-matched opponents (the game has a leveling system), though participants can choose to free-form combat instead.
My main character, Callie, is a level 60 vulpine water mage/ranger who can do neat things like make five elemental servants at once, breathe underwater, fly, turn herself into mist, and so on. She has a rare dragon-like mount. Born with one tail, she’s since been granted four more by her goddess, which is the maximum for vulpine PCs. A former soldier, she now owns her own vulpine cuisine restaurant, and I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of the restaurant RPs than from almost any other source. The restaurant serves casual cuisine not found elsewhere in the game, such as spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, meat skewers, and several types of pie.
It’s a very friendly environment for roleplaying (though the story’s setting is a dangerous place), and I’ve enjoyed it for over 9 years.
I’d link you, but given that it’s an adults-only site, I think the mods would frown on that. If you’re interested in more details, and where to find it, please feel free to PM me. (When it comes to vulpines, I’m the expert; but I’m pretty provincial; outside of vulpines my knowledge is far lesser).
I’ve been working on a game that’s basically Xcom meets the walking dead.
Base management, and building up you characters to take on missions is what is all about (there are also some loot elements in the gameplay loop). Currently using very rudimentary 3D models since I too am no artist.
The world is randomly generated every game, and there are other “communities” which might help, oppose, or eventually join you. Base building includes placing down defense structures, and adding special rooms like an infirmary, communications room, supply storage etc. The plan is to have your base be attacked/raided by zombies and other survivors.
At the pace I’m going, I’m sure to release sometime in 2020, get excite peoples!!
First of all, I’d like to point anyone interested in computer game design towards Scratch, a game development environment created by MIT. It makes it incredibly easy to jump in and make a game: You can get something that works quickly, and then just keep on refining it. For instance, this shooting gallery took me about a half-hour to create, and some of my students did much more elaborate projects.
I’m not presently making any games, but I have been keeping myself occupied lately with 3D design of various nonstandard dice. Every so often, I get a few of them 3D printed.
Oh, and way back in the day, I also wrote a Connect 4 program (I can beat it about 80% of the time, so the AI clearly isn’t all that strong), and a virtual Rubik’s Cube.
