Yeah, I think that was our downfall. I'd still love to get it done though, the idea was pretty cool.

Maybe an RPG a little smaller in scope, perhaps even a MUD-type game.

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Once my book is completed I'm planning on getting started with some games for Xbox Live Community Games and I'd love to make it a group project, but I'm probably one of maybe 3 here that use C#.

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If we did a standard windows based game, I think it would attract more contributers. Since so many of us seem to enjoy VB (.net probably), it might be worthwhile using that language? But I suppose C++ or C# are realistic possibilities too.

In other thoughts: It would be nice if we could make a 3D game, perhaps with some contribution from Sadistic Penguin and his legendary 3D engines. But on the other hand, 3D is hard because of the modeling needs.

Whatever we make, I'm thinking, RPGs are going to be unrealistically lengthy to make, because such games are typically more content than code.

Perhaps some kind of space game? 3D graphics will be much easier with a space game because of the simpler colour palette and lesser level of detail.

Also we don't all need to be programmers in the project. So if some of us don't know the language of choice, it doesn't matter. I would say from my little games, that my time was distributed like this: maybe 20% was thought & design & working stuff out // 30% graphics // 30% programming // 20% testing & playing.

One of Bryk's game ideas might be nice. I don't want to mention it here in open forum because he told me about it in private. But if he agrees, we could do that. (the blunt one )

Hey man, this would be a group project I would gladly sign up for.

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Most of the time an Xbox 360 project and a Windows Game project are 99% the same code. If you abstract out the input mechanism there's little to no problems getting the same code to run on both platforms. That's part of why I love is so much.


If you know VB.NET you would have no problems using C#. I used VB since the early 90s. I don't anticipate using it for any game development now that I've gotten into XNA Game Studio and C#.


I much prefer 2D, partially for the reason you state here. I can make do with programmer art until the very end. That's hard to do with a 3D game.


I was thinking maybe an old-school MUD where the levels are mostly procedurally generated.


Easier for you perhaps. There was a multiplayer space game I used to play a lot years ago called Subspace that might be pretty cool to do a remake/clone of.


Since my programmer art makes programmer art look good I'd be useless 30% of the time.

Maybe he'll be nice enough to share with me.

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I'm not familiar with this design. Is the product anything like Dungeon Master?.

But with randomly generated dungeon maps, and on line multiplayer play.

I'd be happy to contribute to a game like that. I think I'd enjoy designing the creep AI, and the automated dungeon creator.

I was thinking something like this or this.

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I'm in. I was thinking on building one as well.

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Those are board games! So it's a turn based thing you're thinking of? With squares and dice rolls? Is it something like those pencil'n'paper dungeons and dragons games you had in mind?

For my personal tastes, I've never really enjoyed games like that, although admittedly I have had only a little exposure to them. But they've never done anything for me. Turn based also I'm not generally a big fan of, (unless a game is something like Worms).

I would be up for helping to make a real-time dungeon master kind of dungeon-rpg game, or even a true 3D variation of that, but I'm not very keen on a board game type of game.

I wasn't thinking turn-based specifically, just that type of randomly generated dungeon crawler. It could be (somewhat, depending on the combat system) real time.

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I'm thinking of ultima. Is it anything like that? It is a semi-real-time rpg board game, and with dungeons as part of the game world.

No, this would just be a dungeon crawler. Once you add the world outside the dungeon, the game becomes exponentially more difficult to create.

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But gameplay like one would experience in the dungeons of ultima?

I haven't played an Ultima game in over 15 years or so, so I can't really say as I don't remember what it was like.

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You can always have a tick-based combat system, which maps between the easier mechanics of a turn based system and the real-time movement/etc that is usually desired when doing anything else

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What about a real-time multiplayer Worms-like game. That should be quite easy. I don't recall anything like that has been done before, has it?

So we can have maybe a 4v4 setup, each player with one worm. Principally grenade and missile and gun weaponry, and an assortment of mining tools. No air strikes.

Perhaps platform construction also, which could be lemmings like, ie, steady step by step, either horizontal or sloping.

Each weapon could have a cooldown, and each worm could have a cooldown too, so you couldn't just send out hundreds of missiles (or variety of missiles) in the first few seconds.

I think that would be a good fun strategy game, and rather intense as the game opens because you'd all be running to safe ground, and trying to score pot shots, before digging in and developing your team strategy.

I'd enjoy helping to make that one. I think it's complex enough for a group of perhaps 4-7 people to have input on, yet simple enough for two people to do the bulk of the programming.

Has done a few times, actually, with local, LAN, and IP multiplayer support. Liero has local multiplayer, and I remember there being some remakes of it that supported more.

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Does anyone else have ideas for a group project? Or votes for any of the above ideas?

I've already said, I'm in on the MUD. For a couple reasons;

It can be done.

I was going to build one regardless.

Building an XNA game with Machy seems like something I can learn a lot from.

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If this is going to be a C# (or even just .NET)* MUD, come make chit-chat with me. Having spent the last year+ on an ORPG engine in C#, I have a lot of networking code you might find interesting; specifically, my BitStream and high-performance asynchronous TCP/IP connection manager. Can bash out most of the networking code in about a day this way, leaving the focus mostly on content.

*Any .NET language works since all you need to do is call the assemblies.

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