Blorx's crazy game-making schemes

[Blorx]

I'm not going to bother making a bunch of threads for each of my failed/incomplete attempts so here's a complete list, lmao.

Action-Adventure Project: 1337v4nt4r35

It's going to be retro Atari-age graphics. The story will explain all of that later. But yeah, I intend it to be semi-good and be my first full-length game idea done in C# using the XNA Game Studio. Expect a demo of combat in a month or two.

Story: Basis is laid out. More to be decided.

Current Progress: Story basis finished. Starting area written out, tutorials, dialogue and all, complete with diagrams and lots of annotations.

Text Adventure Project: Sky

Story: Not sure what the actual story's going to be just yet. I'm letting it come to me as I work...I work best that way. So far I've got a basic idea that it's going to involve nine cloud cities and revolve around the ruling council, which consists of a representative from each cloud. I think Cloud Nine may end up being the problematic one, despite the predictability.

Current progress: One room with 2 people to talk to and an incomplete puzzle (searching references to find what I need to do to implement the idea) and another room with nothing but a description.

Survival Horror Project: Dusk to Dawn

Got the idea from an old Game Informer magazine, but morphed it a little. It's basically going to be pretty intense.
Basically, you get tossed into a town. You've got 3 others with you. It starts out looking desolate, but as soon as you walk around, get your bearings and then take refuge in one of the many buildings, you'll notice that there are zombies. Everywhere. You have to survive. You're running out of time. You have to find a weapon. You run into the nearest building and find a dead guy holding a pistol/shotgun. You take it. You fend off the zombies for a while. You're running out of ammo. Suddenly, the radio cuts on. There's another group to the [insert direction here] that has ammo to spare. You have a decision to make the choice. Run through the millions of zombies to get the ammo? Or save time and let the zombies run you down? When you die, you turn into a zombie and chase down the survivors. The game ends when everyone's a zombie or you've gotten to the edge of town. Not sure what happens at the end of town. That was one of the morphed parts.

Story: Described above.

Current Progress: This would be one of the projects I do using XNA if anything. Gotta get my disk to partition and then I've got to decide if it's worth going starting my programming learning over for C#.

*NOTE*: The focus of these games isn't graphics. It's gameplay. Haha.

[Count Roland]

thought you weren't a frigging programmer?

[Blorx]

I've been back and forth on it. I've just never been good at vocab and remembering classes. Boredom strikes every now and then and I go back and make 5-minutes worth of something. Haven't finished anything yet and kinda feel like I should...just a sense of achievement yet to be acquired, ya know?

Not to mention, neither of these projects are incredibly hard and the text adventure, given I find the damn Inform file that tells me how to do what I'm looking for, could be finished in a month or two and have about 6 or 7 hours of gameplay, even on my schedule. The other one would take much longer, but would be incredibly interesting to see come to life.

[Skofo]

Neat ideas! These don't seem too hard to make, especially since they're both text-based. Programming language is not an issue, I think, as pretty much every real programming language can output text, and you don't need the bleeding-edge speed and power of C or C++. Make it in whatever you wish; Python, Perl, Haskell, Javascript, whatever. All of these languages are there for you to use if you want to, there is no "right" language. Perhaps you could even hack up Overgrowth and make it an Overgrowth mod.

[Blorx]

Alright, thanks for the input Skofo.
^^

I do have something for the text adventure but the platformer posed a problem just in terms of what would be easier. Knowing that pretty much any language can handle it effectively just leaves the decision of which one really is easier. The main issue is that the source code is going to be enormous, seeing as I'd have to program a hell of a lot of frames, unless there's a bypass I don't know about.

Currently, the main ones I have my eyes on are Python and REALBasic (I know RB isn't most people's first choice, but it's simple, powerful and easy to port to VisualBasic in the case that I do end up wanting to use the available XNA tools).

[Blorx]

BUMP!
I need help finding a tutorial that can tell me how to group text values for movement and create ASCII collision detection, etc. I can't seem to find anything of the sort. It's odd...

Currently, I'm willing to try C, C++. C#, Python, Basic, or Java.

Any help is appreciated.
xD

EDIT: I'm also currently going over in my head the actual possibility of this project...and may end up resorting to just ASCII art...

[Skofo]

Hm, I'd think that it use a collision detection engine just like anything else, except you don't display it with SDL or OpenGL or any of the usual choices, but you make it type into the console. Like, say that your character just went to coordinate (3, 4) from the top left, you'd probably have to tell it to rewrite line 4, and rewrite that line with " #" (two spaces and your character, so your character falls at the third space which corresponds to your x value). Get it? You could probably write a more complex system if you'd want multi-character animation things.

There aren't many platform game programming game tutorials online in general, it might be a little hard to find an ASCII platform game programming one. But perhaps a tutorial on how to make an old-school roguelike could help you figure out how to draw things.

If you want your game/s to feel like authentic old-school material, I'd write it in C. A lot of old ASCII games like Nethack were written in C.

And yes, many ideas you come up with for a project will get you in over your head. At least from my experience. I've attempted to make, like, what, dozens of games since my first one I made like 5 years ago (a nifty pong clone in Game Maker), and I haven't finished every single one I've started since then. Perhaps you'll have better luck?

Using ASCII art without the game actually being console-based is definitely a good choice. Most likely much easier, too! I know of at least one game that was successful in doing that. http://www.onlinespiele.org/spiel.php?id=10117 The only disadvantage to this is that you'd be missing some old-school authenticity.

[Blorx]

Yeah I've seen that game.
I was more looking to draw things out in ASCII rather than that, but if I fail, I can always go to the ASCII art thing like that game's done. I also intend to put the difficulty factor up but it'll be all about level design.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure yet, I'll have to see what works. The only thing is that I only have programming experience in app apps. Not game apps.
xD

[Blorx]

UPDATE!
I give up on that. As of this moment, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do what I'm trying to do...and I've gone through a few devs to find a way.

However, I'm not giving up completely. Just doing it in ASCII art, rather than in ASCII rendering.

[Skofo]

I know this is a little late, but this may help you: http://www.25lines.com/?p=161

[BunnyWithStick]

Neat!

But why do you randomly teleport whenever you touch some random space?

And why did I die the first time I hit the water, yet I walked OVER it the second time?

[Blorx]

I know this is a little late, but this may help you: http://www.25lines.com/?p=161

actually that does help a bit. Guess it's gonna be in Flash done that way...xD