The Masters Eye - A game is born....

As I said in the preview this will de the first of many blogs regarding the progress on developing my medieval fantasy RPG The Masters Eye.

First of all a little bit of history. I am walking this earth for many years with the idea to make a large RPG in a medieval fantasy style. And because I have this idea already a long time I know what I want for the different aspects of the game like atmosphere, gameplay and character development. It is not going to be the well-known RPG where you get a next level after you have killed so many beings or solved so many puzzles. No, the character will develop throughout the game just as in real lifebut a lot faster. You have to learn your abilities and practice your abilities to get better. And just as in real life you may be the bad guy or the good guy how? I don't know yet...but it certainly has something to do with your actions and the other beings around in this world will perform accordingly.

So how can I make such a game, I asked myself. First of all you need a good game-engine, so until recently I struggled developing my own 3D-game engine. Unfortunately this took me so long and I almost give up this project completely. At least until April last year (2009). I was on holiday in San Francisco where I visited a bookstoreif I recall correctly it was called Borders and as always when I'm in a bookstore I visited the computer department and at the game design part I stumbled on a book about game design. Browsing through the pages I read about an engine called Torque and this seemed to be the thing I was looking for. I put the book back on the shelf you can't get much extra weight in a plane and promised myself to look for this Torque engine when I was back home in the Netherlands. So back home I did right this. I Googled Torque and found the GarageGames site. Looking at the products and I got a little bit excited, especialy the new T3D engine seems to be promising. And I was lucky, the beta was on a discount prize, so I didn't hesitate long and bought the Pro-version, because I thought that during the development of the game I should be able to modify the engine.

The first steps......

After downloading and installing the engine I browsed through the folders. Hmmmm.... no docs or anything I could use to get me started. Okay, I thought, that's for later concern, let's start playing around. So I spent the first months playing around with the editors, browsing through code and scripts, trying things out. The excitement grew. With this I would be able to make my dream come through, so I started to build my game.

So where are we now?

At this moment I have almost finished porting the things I have to the new B2 version and added the Yack-pack and the new Universal AI starter kit 1.5 to it and got it working. Because I'm not an artist, allthough I try to make some of the things I need myself, I had bought art from DexSoft and BrokeAss. They have really nice models, but the downside of this is that they all are a little bit different from each other, think about the scale, the animations and so. The differences in scales are easy to solve, the animations are another part, so I'm modding the engine in such a way that it is able to use different kinds of animations for the same actions.

Also the inventory system doesn't meet my requirements so I'm building my own inventory system including weapon selecting and armor equipment, magic and more. This new inventory system is for almost 80% done.

The gameplay is also getting to the thing I would like it to be. It has a melee fighting system which I need to improve because of the different animations on the characters, but for now does what it needs to do, you can perform magic (at first not an a high level, because you need to get experience in performing magis or train yourself). There is some interaction with other characters, it is up to the player if he talk to a character or decide to kill it right away.

But how does it look?

The first level, which is more or less a prelude to the real game is growing steadily to it's final form. You are overlooking a sunny valley in the late afternoon sun. In the distance you see a little village. A nice lady is standing nearby and ask you if she could help you. Do you talk to her or do you kill her? Whatever you decide you need to get a place to sleep because it is getting darker and my suggestion is to talk to her first. You can kill her later or not...

The future...

I am planning to blog regularly about this project and I think that the next blog will contain some screenshots.

Till then...
Richard

edit:
continued here.