Our next project

[Xesum]

You haven't even played any of these games, have you?

[robocop]

One thing I want to know is, with an apparently international team like yours, how would the legal side of game development work? Would you all move to the same economic area? Otherwise, the issue of all of you getting direct payments and/or royalties for your work would surely be a nightmare! (Maybe I'm wrong, and despite the incidence of unusual accents among you devs, you actually do all live in the same country.)

Also, I wanted to say that having highly developed plot branches is what made Deus Ex great, and The Nameless Mod even better. For me, the rest of it doesn't ultimately matter - forget the game's setting, graphics, gimmicks, even its gameplay to an extent! The possibilities that computer games allow, for you to actually choose the story beyond a few major plot points, have only been briefly touched in media so far: by a few games like DX and TNM, by one or two films like Final Destination 3 (which I've never seen btw, that's hearsay), and by Choose Your Own Adventure books. The latter type produced the vast majority of pieces of media that allowed major changes to the story due to player actions; but you couldn't make many minor changes , due to space restrictions on the book, and patience restrictions from the reader.

What I'm rambling towards is a suggestion for your game: endeavour to remove every last part of the game that takes the player out of the story, even slightly. An excellent way to do this is to keep it as close to real human interaction as posible.

For example, set up your game so that conversations take place in first-person - and moreover, that they don't do some sort of strange semi-pause where you aren't allowed to leave the conversation (ala DX), but instead conversations take place in real-time. If the player wants to respond with one of 3 obvious responses to the other person, then he can press one of 3 buttons binded for that purpose. (The game's UI would make it clear which button gives which answer.) If the player wants to pause the conversation but continue the game, he can press a button that makes him say "Quiet!" or "Look out!", and the conversation can later be restarted from where it left off. If he wants to pause the game to think about his next sentence, then the pause menu shows his list of possible responses, as well as the history of the current conversation.

Furthermore, make it so the player will always have some context-relevant responses, yet he can also (at any time, at any place, and to anyone) say something from a long list of standard sentences, like "You're lying!" or "It's a trap!" or "You're a motherfucker!" or "Excuse me for a moment", in addition to statements like "Yes" or "No". I want to make it clear that the player could even interrupt the conversation by saying something while someone else is speaking, and the conversation log would reflect that, without giving away what would have been said without the interruption. (On a technical note, the latter part obviously couldn't be implemented with syllable-by-syllable interruption or word-by-word interruption, but phrase-by-phrase would work.)

And finally, give every important NPC the ability to form opinions of the player based on his actions to them, and on his reputation. By 'reputation', I mean a record of all decisions he has made that have become public or semi-public knowledge. The record would take the form of an array of several integers, each of which represents a different attribute of a person's personality (eg moral character, perceived combat ability, reliability, social skill, determination etc), which go up for every decision that improves the player's reputation in that attribute, down for decisions that worsen it, and stay the same for unrelated decisions.

There would also be biases for how different people interpret the same action (eg murdering a gangmember always reduces your moral character and increases your perceived combat ability, but while it reduces your reliability for that gang and its allies, it increases your reliability for enemy gangs). The faceless NPCs could also form opinions, but based only on his reputation and their bias, since actions against them wouldn't be recorded person-by-person, only as a group.

The purpose of all this is that, instead of the game world being an inflexible environment with predetermined emotional responses from NPCs, it becomes a game where, depending on your actions, speaking to any character (no matter their importance) could result in anything from getting an immediate marriage proposal to getting shot in the face. Even walking down a street could result in the passers-by huddling around you and cheering for you, or them hurling abuse, bricks, or grenades at you, or them staring at you while whispering and possibly pointing & laughing, or them not noticing you at all. All responses from NPCs are mostly caused by the player's actions, and partly by the plot of the game up to that point.

Now, obviously this would require some pretty robust technology, a fair amount of work, and a pretty good computer on the part of the player. But I don't think it's infeasible. Admittedly, NPCs' opinions of each other would still have to be hard-coded (which isn't much of a problem), and it probably wouldn't leave many CPU cycles for other parts of the game (but that's your intention as devs, right?), but it's possible.

Wow, that took much less time to say in my head...

[Xesum]

Words

Too Long; Didn't read.

I prefer this game idea. (Yes I did read this, I was very bored)

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/noexpne.htm

[robocop]

My thing was too long... but that wasn't?

I didn't even write anything close to a game script, it's just ideas for game functionality. You could at least read the third paragraph, it nicely sums up the rest of my post.

[Xesum]

My thing was too long... but that wasn't?

I didn't even write anything close to a game script, it's just ideas for game functionality. You could at least read the third paragraph, it nicely sums up the rest of my post.

You don't know me very well do you?

Firstly, I'm a sarcastic dickwad that spews out random non sentical lines.

Secondly, I did read your post, I was just making a Sarcastic joke about it's length.

[Jonas]

robocop: Eh... while I enjoyed reading your thoughts on game design, and I will of course keep your opinions in mind as I strive to consider any opinion on games that I happen to come across, I wasn't really looking for suggestions for what the next game should be like, just for what sort of info you would expect to find on a development blog.

We would love to do another TNM but dial it up to 11 (actually TNM already was on 11, so let's say 15 instead), but we don't have the resources to make another TNM, let alone make it from scratch this time. TNM was possible because it was done by 50 people in 7 years. Now we're going to try and make a game with 13 people in 2 years.

What I'm saying is, we're obviously going to do our best to give the game that OTP touch of insanity that you've identified in TNM, but it's going to be on a slightly different level this time, because now we actually want to make some money

Firstly, I'm a sarcastic dickwad that spews out random non sentical lines.

Secondly, I did read your post, I was just making a Sarcastic joke about it's length.

Your problem, Xesum, is that you're desperately unfunny. You know DDL? He sort of sports a "sarcastic bastard" personality too, but he's really intelligent and brilliantly funny, plus he's fundamentally a nice guy and he constantly contributes valuable things to these forums.

You, on the other hand... you just take up space. I'm not going to ban you, because technically you're not doing anything wrong, but I really really hope that you'll stop being bored or at least stop insisting that when you're bored, so should all the rest of us be. Preferably sooner rather than later.

[EER]

One thing I want to know is, with an apparently international team like yours, how would the legal side of game development work? Would you all move to the same economic area? Otherwise, the issue of all of you getting direct payments and/or royalties for your work would surely be a nightmare! (Maybe I'm wrong, and despite the incidence of unusual accents among you devs, you actually do all live in the same country.)

I do not expect nightmares for that, as long as they find a key to distribute the wealth (say ... everybody 1/12th) they could have a central money collection point then distribute through wiretransfer.

There would also be biases for how different people interpret the same action (eg murdering a gangmember always reduces your moral character and increases your perceived combat ability, but while it reduces your reliability for that gang and its allies, it increases your reliability for enemy gangs). The faceless NPCs could also form opinions, but based only on his reputation and their bias, since actions against them wouldn't be recorded person-by-person, only as a group

Sounds like GTA2

And Desperados was brilliant, never played the other cowboy things.

[Jonas]

Call of Juarez and GUN were both excellent games. GUN had a bit of an open-world thing going on, and CoJ had a brilliant dynamic between its two protagonists.

[robocop]

Well Jonas, in an attempt to excuse my highly off-topic earlier post, I'll say: what did you mean by 'technical details' in the OP? Do you mean talking about which bits of technology the game will use, and how much RAM etc it'll need? Those are things I'll only need to know a short while before the game is released.

When you said 'technical details', I somehow interpreted it as 'gameplay details', and the rest is history.

[Jonas]

Development stuff, basically. Programming details, game design theory, polycounts, stuff like that.

[EER]

Development stuff, basically. Programming details, game design theory, polycounts, stuff like that.

Bring that on!

[Hassat Hunter]

My opinion: We are smart enough, so go ahead and throw around the techno-talk .