Castle Paradox

[Doomhyena]

I have an interesting and somewhat inspired idea for a game, but I'm rather stuck on how to start it. In some of my previous overly-ambitious OHR projects (none of which I ever considered complete enough to be released) I took a rather non-systematic and sloppy approach to giving the game its framework. That meant ALOT of effort and minute details were put into things that I would eventually remove from the game, which ended up being lots of wasted effort. And all of that effort took alot of time, so much time that I got burned out and more or less gave up on it after several months and a few hundred hours of work.

So here's my question: do any of you have any experience with taking a game from its idea phase to its completion, and what was your method on accomplishing that? Did you start out with barebones, non-detailed graphics and text and plotscripts just to get the framework in place, and then flesh everything out afterwards? Or did you fully implement each aspect of the game piece by piece?

My main problem is that almost all of my ideas involve a large but fully interconnected game world... Very different from a linear RPG where you simply go from town A to town B to dungeon C to castle D, and so forth. My ideas run more along the lines of the Metroid games.

[Gizmog1]

I'd start by actually MAKING the game. Take whatever ideas you have, and put them into a game. Play it a coupla times, figure out what could improve on it. Don't bother with graphics so much at first, they waste a lot of time, and usually kill your momentum. Do that last, just make placeholders, and get a feel for what everyone should look like.

[Mike Caron]

Do you have a plot? No? That's ok. Think of a trigger incident, which gets the hero started, while doing the rest of this:

Draw a map of your world. I don't mean a tile-map, I mean take a piece of paper, and draw our your world. It will make things easier for you in an Exploration type game.

Then, figure out what exactly happens everywhere. In metroid, you can't go to place X until you have item Y. So, think of barriers that can be over come by doing something somewhere else. Perhaps a dragon must be slain before that annoying guy will let you through the gate. Maybe a little girl has a letter for her grandma, who will give you a boat. Whatever.

At first, these activities will be confined to a relatively small area. But, as the hero starts solving problems, he or she will gain access to more and more areas, until just about the whole world is accessible.

But, don't go overboard. If the player has to go from point A to point B (which happen to be on opposite sides of the world) more than three times in a row, stop and rethink things.

And, of course, throw in some side quests as well.

While you're doing this, you should be expanding on the trigger incident you came up with before. I can't really give any tips, since I don't know what you'll come up with.

Once you have your map, and your quest chart thingy, now you can start making the game.
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[Doomhyena]

Both very good suggestions... Thank you very much! I started drawing a map already but am a little stuck on event/puzzle/quest ideas, I'll take care of those soon though.

[Setu_Firestorm]

Well, the approach would generally depend on the person making the game.

In my own experiences, though, I would conceive the idea and discuss it with my friend Brian until it was developed enough to work on. Then, I would at least roughly document the major events of the game in order to know what HAS to occur to spill out the story.

After that, there are two things I've tried:
1) Making it up as I go along as long as I'm following the outline of major events. This is good in the respect where you have much more fun making it will generally will result in the player enjoying playing it, or
2) Outlining minor events that lead from major event A to major even B. From my experience, this approach is more organized, but can make the gamemaking process more dull when you're on a set path down to a T.

For the most part, game making is an experience that you will learn things for yourself so you will pick up on what's more or less desirable.
Good luck.
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[Moogle1]

You're making an RPG, right? Two things.

1. Characters are important. Plot isn't. Make the characters interesting.
2. Make the battles interesting, short, or both. If you can't make them interesting, make them short.

If you stick to those two guidelines, you have an excellent shot at making a playable game. You need to worry about story and gameplay, but right now you seem more worried about story, so worry about your characters.
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