To hobby devs creating small T3D multiplayer-only games: Consider making it part of Terminal Overload
by Michael Goldener · in General Discussion · 11/21/2014 (11:29 pm) · 3 replies
Terminal Overload (TOL) is a Torque3D-MIT-based project I've been working on for about 10 months now. According to its website, it's "a home-made experimental free and open source multiplayer FPS game", because that's what it is right now, but not what it ultimately wants to be.
See, more importantly, TOL is small, multiplayer-only, and really obscure. This is a problem because without a decent player count, a mp-only game is completely useless, and from my experience with TOL and its closed-source predecessor ROTC: Ethernet, a single small mp-only game has very little chance of attracting and keeping a player base alive that's big enough so that at least a few servers are populated at all times.
But maybe this problem can be overcome by having *multiple* small mp-only games be playable using the same client and sharing the same player community online.
So from the perspective of a player, a future version of TOL could be described as "a collection of small interesting multiplayer-only games" while from the perspective of a developer it could be described as "a way of bringing your multiplayer-only game to an audience without exceeding the means of a single dedicated hobby game developer".
Before even discussing technical details I could use some feedback. Is this potentially interesting to anybody here? Is the whole idea fundamentally flawed? Something else?
Thanks for reading :)
See, more importantly, TOL is small, multiplayer-only, and really obscure. This is a problem because without a decent player count, a mp-only game is completely useless, and from my experience with TOL and its closed-source predecessor ROTC: Ethernet, a single small mp-only game has very little chance of attracting and keeping a player base alive that's big enough so that at least a few servers are populated at all times.
But maybe this problem can be overcome by having *multiple* small mp-only games be playable using the same client and sharing the same player community online.
So from the perspective of a player, a future version of TOL could be described as "a collection of small interesting multiplayer-only games" while from the perspective of a developer it could be described as "a way of bringing your multiplayer-only game to an audience without exceeding the means of a single dedicated hobby game developer".
Before even discussing technical details I could use some feedback. Is this potentially interesting to anybody here? Is the whole idea fundamentally flawed? Something else?
Thanks for reading :)
About the author
#2
The problems I faced were, that Torque was not designed to be modular for multiple games and that I could not find people with similar goals, so I started it my own.
So this would have been easier if your game was designed from the beginning to be a module system of multiple small games, but this way it is very very specific. I played your game, not much yet, but my first impression was immediately that your game is a clone of Tribes like games and later the successor "Legions Overdrive" but with programmer art graphics, not bad but also nothing new and interesting.
The base setting for my game was designed to be realistic, so I spend most time on developing an art style and creating assets, very little time went into scripting. I have a little FPS game now and currently working to get some racing game and later I also planned to have some more abstract gamemodes like yours, but with fancy graphics.
If it is possible to port your gamemode over to my template, I maybe will create art assets, levels, gamemodes etc for it if it turns out to be fun.
But you don't have to, you could just "steal" my assets, since the requirement for assets in my game is CC0 or public domain, I like freedom, just the code stays MIT since I cannot change it to public domain.
So this is just an offer, since I planned my game like that all the time.
01/08/2015 (5:26 am)
This is exactly what my idea was around two years ago and I have my first working version done already, so why don't you make your game part of mine, since it was designed like that from the beginning.The problems I faced were, that Torque was not designed to be modular for multiple games and that I could not find people with similar goals, so I started it my own.
So this would have been easier if your game was designed from the beginning to be a module system of multiple small games, but this way it is very very specific. I played your game, not much yet, but my first impression was immediately that your game is a clone of Tribes like games and later the successor "Legions Overdrive" but with programmer art graphics, not bad but also nothing new and interesting.
The base setting for my game was designed to be realistic, so I spend most time on developing an art style and creating assets, very little time went into scripting. I have a little FPS game now and currently working to get some racing game and later I also planned to have some more abstract gamemodes like yours, but with fancy graphics.
If it is possible to port your gamemode over to my template, I maybe will create art assets, levels, gamemodes etc for it if it turns out to be fun.
But you don't have to, you could just "steal" my assets, since the requirement for assets in my game is CC0 or public domain, I like freedom, just the code stays MIT since I cannot change it to public domain.
So this is just an offer, since I planned my game like that all the time.
#3
Btw, this video explains some of the mechanics that make the game different from other FPSes: youtu.be/SnRJbxadTO4?t=2m24s
01/08/2015 (6:00 am)
Cool. I'm interested. Where can I take a look at your project to get an idea of how you're handling the modularity?Btw, this video explains some of the mechanics that make the game different from other FPSes: youtu.be/SnRJbxadTO4?t=2m24s
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