Peer Game Design

rpgdemon · 04-28-2012, 01:13 AM

Hey y'all.

So, I had a thread like this before that sort of died for a lot of reasons, partially because I didn't want to make any important design decisions, partially because there wasn't enough back and forth dialog for it to be interesting, and partially because I didn't have the time to devote to the project, when it was being worked on. Now, I'm going to be having a summer of not-class, and want something to fill my time with.

With my time, I'm going to be designing a game. This is where you all come in, since you'll be acting as consultants. Consider this somewhat like a weird lets play, I'll be working on the game and doing the bulk of things, but it'll be open to suggestion and all of that fun stuff, which I'll do my best to follow.

So, first things first, I will not be only following suggestions for this game. I'll be combining suggestions with my own input, and my input will win if I want it to. This is mostly to keep things from stagnating, by having a final say involved.

Now, to the design. I've got a lot of ideas, which I'll be happy pursuing, but I figure I ought to see what you all think, before I do so. Is there anything that you REALLY want to see made, that doesn't exist? Say so!

And the first choice of the development process: Should the game be a flash game meant to be played in browser (I'll be developing it using flashDevelop and the flex SDK if anyone's interested), or a downloadable PC game (Which will likely be coded in C#, and take advantage of the XNA library)?

The biggest benefit of a downloadable game for the PC is, it's legitimized. Flash games are illegitimate, for whatever reason, and PC games are not. There are other advantages (XNA is pretty great at some things, plus I have a custom engine to work with, within XNA, that was originally developed for a 360 game that has been put on the back burner), but the biggest one is the legitimization.

The Flash route has the benefit that it's multi-platform, and it's very easy to distribute/get into people's hands to play. There's no installation, there's no worry that it could be a virus, just load a web page, and it's ready to play, no matter what your OS is.

It will be approximately equal amounts of work either way. FlashDevelop is a straight coding environment, so it's not as if I have the weird Flash UI to <Help/Confuse> me. I might have a bit of a leg up with C# and XNA, as I have significant-ish experience working with them (I was part of the development of a game/engine with them), and a pretty solid background in C/C++, which transfers over well enough to C#. I've done a little with actionscript, but not enough to say that I have a great understanding of it. What I've seen though, it should be easy enough to pick up.

I think this post is getting long enough, so, the TL;DR:

.SWF(Flash) or .EXE(PC)?

04-28-2012, 01:13 AM	#1
rpgdemon Not a Taco Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 3,313	Peer Game Design Hey y'all. So, I had a thread like this before that sort of died for a lot of reasons, partially because I didn't want to make any important design decisions, partially because there wasn't enough back and forth dialog for it to be interesting, and partially because I didn't have the time to devote to the project, when it was being worked on. Now, I'm going to be having a summer of not-class, and want something to fill my time with. With my time, I'm going to be designing a game. This is where you all come in, since you'll be acting as consultants. Consider this somewhat like a weird lets play, I'll be working on the game and doing the bulk of things, but it'll be open to suggestion and all of that fun stuff, which I'll do my best to follow. So, first things first, I will not be only following suggestions for this game. I'll be combining suggestions with my own input, and my input will win if I want it to. This is mostly to keep things from stagnating, by having a final say involved. Now, to the design. I've got a lot of ideas, which I'll be happy pursuing, but I figure I ought to see what you all think, before I do so. Is there anything that you REALLY want to see made, that doesn't exist? Say so! And the first choice of the development process: Should the game be a flash game meant to be played in browser (I'll be developing it using flashDevelop and the flex SDK if anyone's interested), or a downloadable PC game (Which will likely be coded in C#, and take advantage of the XNA library)? The biggest benefit of a downloadable game for the PC is, it's legitimized. Flash games are illegitimate, for whatever reason, and PC games are not. There are other advantages (XNA is pretty great at some things, plus I have a custom engine to work with, within XNA, that was originally developed for a 360 game that has been put on the back burner), but the biggest one is the legitimization. The Flash route has the benefit that it's multi-platform, and it's very easy to distribute/get into people's hands to play. There's no installation, there's no worry that it could be a virus, just load a web page, and it's ready to play, no matter what your OS is. It will be approximately equal amounts of work either way. FlashDevelop is a straight coding environment, so it's not as if I have the weird Flash UI to <Help/Confuse> me. I might have a bit of a leg up with C# and XNA, as I have significant-ish experience working with them (I was part of the development of a game/engine with them), and a pretty solid background in C/C++, which transfers over well enough to C#. I've done a little with actionscript, but not enough to say that I have a great understanding of it. What I've seen though, it should be easy enough to pick up. I think this post is getting long enough, so, the TL;DR: .SWF(Flash) or .EXE(PC)? __________________ I did a lot of posting on here as a teenager, and I was pretty awful. Even after I learned, grew up, and came to be on the right side of a lot of important issues, I was still angry, abrasive, and generally increased the amount of hate in the world, in pretty unacceptable ways. On the off chance that someone is taking a trip down memory lane looking through those old threads, I wanted to devote my signature to say directly to you, I'm sorry. Thank you for letting me be better, NPF.