Plan for Owen Ashcroft
by Owen "WDA" Ashcroft · 05/25/2002 (5:01 pm) · 0 comments
Welcome to my first plan, I suspect of many. Cracked Sphere is a new company name for a "company" that has existed a couple of months. It consists of a group of us that all love to play games and have decided to pool our talen to produce some games we would like to play, but haven't been produced.
We currently have two games, the first has a pretty much complete design, but we don't have access to a suitable engine at the moment so has been shelved, the second, currently codenamed Proj. Immersion is an RTS based on a more realistic concept of war than most popular RTSes (don't expect to be building tank factories in it).
When I have some firm news on Proj. Immersion I will post it, I don't want to spill the beans too much at this point but there are a lot of quite interesting ideas that not currently included in the RTS mould. If it turns out good people should be in for a real suprise!
As for my current opinion and direction I want to see Cracked Sphere go in, FPS is not the direction, as much as I love the genre there are too many people going in too many directions and too many professional developers starting to take risks. There seems little point in an indie developer even going there at the moment. Not unless you have that killer idea, and I have as yet to stumble across many here that do. A lot are you are a hero planning to save the Earth. Or an incredible sci-fi shooter with immersing story. Nice rhetoric..
Real Time Strategies are stagnent, just look at the current crop, they are simply CnC with cool graphics, CnC Generals looks like it could be interesting but I dunno. The most entertaining one I found recently was Three Kingdoms : Fate Of The Dragon, but it was a touch too complex for most people to get quickly, and this was quite a turn off. I'm hoping with our project we can strike a balance between the bland simplicity of CnC are the more complex requirements of 3K:FOTD without making it a bitch to play. My opinion is if you HAVE to read a game manual for most games it's too complex.. So shoot me if you think I'm wrong :)
RPGs, love them, but most people are again aiming at the norm, DON'T ARGHH there are people out there who are PAID to do that, and undoubtedly do it better, try something new, simply look at Morrowind, it's refreshing. No isometric finger-muscle building crap that claims to be an RPG (Diablo, the unspeakable taint on the RPG name), or AD&D with adequate graphics (every Bioware game to date). People should consider, what can I do to immerse the player, make it more enjoyable, give him more options, let him do what he wants to do? Take a risk! Let the big companies churn out the games that fit neatly into the predefined areas, they are good at that.
My opinion is that if you can say, think of X but with Y as well, and maybe a little Z you aren't trying hard enough, anyone can produce a half-assed version of Quake, especially when you have an engine, like Torque, that is already set up to do it.
Still enough ranting about originality, I think enough people have already moaned!
Website will exist as soon as those nice people finish our domain registration.
Owen
We currently have two games, the first has a pretty much complete design, but we don't have access to a suitable engine at the moment so has been shelved, the second, currently codenamed Proj. Immersion is an RTS based on a more realistic concept of war than most popular RTSes (don't expect to be building tank factories in it).
When I have some firm news on Proj. Immersion I will post it, I don't want to spill the beans too much at this point but there are a lot of quite interesting ideas that not currently included in the RTS mould. If it turns out good people should be in for a real suprise!
As for my current opinion and direction I want to see Cracked Sphere go in, FPS is not the direction, as much as I love the genre there are too many people going in too many directions and too many professional developers starting to take risks. There seems little point in an indie developer even going there at the moment. Not unless you have that killer idea, and I have as yet to stumble across many here that do. A lot are you are a hero planning to save the Earth. Or an incredible sci-fi shooter with immersing story. Nice rhetoric..
Real Time Strategies are stagnent, just look at the current crop, they are simply CnC with cool graphics, CnC Generals looks like it could be interesting but I dunno. The most entertaining one I found recently was Three Kingdoms : Fate Of The Dragon, but it was a touch too complex for most people to get quickly, and this was quite a turn off. I'm hoping with our project we can strike a balance between the bland simplicity of CnC are the more complex requirements of 3K:FOTD without making it a bitch to play. My opinion is if you HAVE to read a game manual for most games it's too complex.. So shoot me if you think I'm wrong :)
RPGs, love them, but most people are again aiming at the norm, DON'T ARGHH there are people out there who are PAID to do that, and undoubtedly do it better, try something new, simply look at Morrowind, it's refreshing. No isometric finger-muscle building crap that claims to be an RPG (Diablo, the unspeakable taint on the RPG name), or AD&D with adequate graphics (every Bioware game to date). People should consider, what can I do to immerse the player, make it more enjoyable, give him more options, let him do what he wants to do? Take a risk! Let the big companies churn out the games that fit neatly into the predefined areas, they are good at that.
My opinion is that if you can say, think of X but with Y as well, and maybe a little Z you aren't trying hard enough, anyone can produce a half-assed version of Quake, especially when you have an engine, like Torque, that is already set up to do it.
Still enough ranting about originality, I think enough people have already moaned!
Website will exist as soon as those nice people finish our domain registration.
Owen
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