Is this doable? (Not a "can I do this in Unity?" thread, I promise)

???

Anyway, I like how this is sounding more.

So I'm thinking do campfire checkpoints like with Dark Souls and have a camp fire at every dungeon. Camping will be the primary means of healing, maybe throw some resources pick ups (also another mechanic I don't want to bore you with).

The map will be spread out with different dungeons with loot. And three mini bosses that are required to be eliminated to go to the last boss. At the center of the map will be a main city with a shop, a campfire, and a portal. Portals can be opened by reaching them on the map.

Meanwhile the inventory will be kept very trim and include only 3 melee weapon types, 3 ranged weapon types, basic armors and equipment.

And the RPG engine will be very straight forward and easy to understand.

There will be no quests and no dialog trees. NPC's will be kept to a minimum.

 

So given that you are taking out everything that makes an RPG fun, what's left to make people want to play the game?

If it's just a passion project, that's fine too. But I got the impression you wanted more then that out of this.

 

My main objective is to make a GDD for something that I can accomplish. Believe me I'd LOVE to do an intricate story with factions, lore, and setting.

But I also love gratuitous violence with a dark "heavy metal" feel and crimson red blood painted over everything. Like Heretic, Witchaven, Blood, or Hexen.

You know, just something really primal and unapologetic.

But is also open and lets you build your character.

Also, I've always loved the idea of Battle Mages and feel like they don't get enough love. Just walking around bashing things with a mace and blasting them with spells. Too bad there's a game with Battle Mage in the name that just came out. That would have been perfect.

 

Spiderweb Software makes top-down open world RPGs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiderweb_Software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avernum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneforge

Only one developer for the most part too.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/

 

3000 hours in one year means you're averaging 8.2 hours per day. So you'd get no weekends, no holidays, no days off. You certainly won't be doing that and comfortably holding down a job.

Depending on how you reached your 3000 hours figure, it potentially also means no lunch breaks, no time for technical support, no time for businessy activities...

For context, a full-time employee is generally considered to provide somewhere in the vicinity of 1700 to 1800 hours per year, and not all of those will be production hours.

 

I would recommend writing your entire game idea in a Word doc. Then come back the next day and cut 90%, and save that as a new document. Then come back the third day and cut 90% of what you had left at the end of the second day, and save that as a new document. Once you have done that, you will probably still have more scope than you can fit into your allotted time.

Next, look at your heavily cut down idea and try to pick out the one really awesome idea in there. Determine if it would be possible to build a game based only on that. Try to build an MVP that showcases only that core idea. Get feedback from some gamers on that MVP. If the feedback is very positive, commit more time to polishing that core idea.

As an indie, that is pretty much all the time any of us has. None of us get to build Elder Scrolls in our basement during our free time.

 

Pretty much.

Also, I got 3000 hours because I'm currently working that many a year right now.

 

None of us get to build a polished modern Elder Scrolls game but I'm repeatedly running into examples of games that could have been Elder Scrolls titles if the series weren't as polished and was missing things like realistic graphics, voice acting, and so on.

Here's my latest find. It's an open world game by a single developer. Though it definitely isn't a one year project.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/363950/Windscape/

Additionally I have to add Dungeon Architect to the list of possible assets as an alternative dungeon generator. It has some fantastic documentation and appears to have more functionality than Daedalus but it's likewise more expensive. Very likely would choose it over the other. I just didn't remember it until today when I saw it again.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/53895
http://coderespawn.github.io/dungeon-architect-api-doc-unity/
http://coderespawn.github.io/dungeon-architect-user-guide-unity/stage/html/user_guide_1.4.0.html

 

Crappy or really just mediocre stuff can be very fast to made, whatever the scope, that's how tv series get their kick start. Mini movie done in a week end instead of years, reusing places and character ad infinitum, trick like monster/murder/mystery of the week to fill in the variety and unidimensional character that don't evolve but are bigger than life to replace human nuances. Through iteration, people start to get more and more trick to produce better quickly cheaper and now we are in an age where series has stolen the thunder of movie in term of interesting stuff happening, deeper character and deeper story arcs. Which also allowed to explore completely different concept altogether that wouldn't be possible in movie. That sound similar?

Morale of teh story, people who do something will go somewhere in the long term.

 

Does Dungeon Architect have support for multi-floor maps?

 

Yes and no. Dungeon Architect is designed to allow you to swap out the scripts that handle the layout of the dungeon and it does ship with a small variety of them but none of them support multi-floor as far as I'm aware. You'd have to write your own to do it or modify one of the existing ones.

There was a post by the author @AliAkbar about a year ago mentioning he wanted to eventually make a layout script for it.

 

I think I'll just make it on my own.

TBH, I'm a little burnt out with procedural maps at the moment.

Maybe (MAYBE!), I could throw in a random map generator that's accessible in town.

But for now I'm looking at a hub world map with 3 general areas, each area having 8 different dungeons, and then a 4th area after you complete the the 3 that throws everything at you.

I want each of the 32 stages to have a theme and an end point. So, like, some magic McGuffin to have as the end point.

The areas I'm CURRENTLY looking at are:
Forest / Cave - Most of the enemies are animalistic or insect.
Catacombs / Swamp - Most of the enemies are undead.
Volcano / Mountain - Most of the enemies are demonic.
Dark Tower - Every enemy is used.

 

I was confused because I thought he added them recently but then I realized it was dungen

Pro tip for anyone using PGC map generation from the asset store that spawn GO ...
Use proxy GO with a script that fire when the pgc system have finish to work to further customize or run different pgc script or asset on top. It will allow you to unleash bigger power of nested generation.

For example dungen use fixed sized room, using white boxed proxy room, I can then run another pgc inside its bound to get nested dungeon generation ...