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Currently, the game industry is at a high point and a low point at the same time. I had this thought when I visited EBGames last week and browsed over the current crop of games.
The industry is at a high point because we have achieved kind-of an apex of technology. Where the graphics, sound, hardware have stabilized to a point that changes are incremental. For instance, in the 80’s we had huge leaps from CGA to EGA to VGA, from PC speaker to Adlib to Roland. The last great hardware innovation was when we made the leap from 2D vector to 3D polygon.
Yet paradoxically we are at a low point at the same time, mainly in terms of creativity and innovation. We’ve become an industry of DOOM-clones, WarCraft clones, racing games. The last great innovative game was ‘The Sims’. The most recent game that I enjoyed playing was ‘Black and White’.
So we are at a crucial crossroads in the entertainment industry timeline. The technology is right there (with the exception of good AI, which is another story). But the creativity and innovation is lacking. The goal is to come up with the next great game idea. We want to capture the magic of King’s Quest and the old sierra games we loved as kids, while at the same time create some new magic of our own. Some sort of hybrid King’s Quest/Space Quest/QFG updated for the 21st century.
Post your ideas and concepts here. I’ll think of some of my own too.
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(re: re: game concepts)
I remember John Carmack said in one of his interviews, he chose to write and maintain the 3D engine used in Quake from scratch to be able to constantly innovate. Peter Molyneux (Black and White) said something to the same effect, “If 3D graphics will be your main selling point, the engine has to be in-house.” I’m in the opposing camp, I believe DirectX provides most of the tools necessary and allows developers the ability to leverage the state of the art hardware video accelerators out there.
But with regards to game creation engine (ex. AGI/SCI, etc.) as opposed to graphics engine, I definitely think we should own the game engine so we are in control of our destiny.
A lot of stuff to learn and write though!
It just occured to me that there were several new game concepts that were developed in the past few years, many quite good. Namely Animal Crossing (gamecube), Black and White (good concept but poor implementation), and Grand Theft Auto. Haven’t tried Syberia yet, heard it’s quite good.
I was downloading some of sierra’s old music from SQ3 and Leisure Suit Larry last night. A decade has passed yet I am still in awe at the quality of the music. It brought back a lot of those sierra memories, and for a second I felt like I was back in another time. I think Ken W wrote about this in one of his posts, the ability to create a cinematic experience to get that special feeling in the game. This is what the newer games are lacking, and what we should aim to create.
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(re: re: re: game concepts) Personally, I think the 1st thing to agree on really has to be ‘what’ to produce… All this talk on whether to choose a bespoke or 3rd party engine is purely ‘noise’ before that is done.
Also, DirectX is not an engine. It’s a set of primitives that you can use to build an ‘engine’ with. Don’t forget that DirectX is *much* more than just a graphics interface – DirectInput for joysticks, DirectPlay for networking/voice and DirectSound for audio (sfx and music).
Maybe Ken has ideas of a web front end, although I’m not exactly excited by that as a realistic option! Hell, could even consider Flash these days?! -
(re: re: re: re: game concepts) your right adam I was not thinking. depending on what we want to do is going to depend and what we can use.
I have been thinking of a adventure game of some type. I think alot of people here enjoy playing them and would love to play one that they helped to build.
But the hardest thing is an adventure game about what ?
well guys submit ideas if you have any I am sure I will be brain storming as well -
(re: re: re: re: re: game concepts)
Been looking at the specs for SCI (Documentation from Sci Studio by Brian Provinciano, http://www.bripro.com), now that’s one good system. I don’t like the lisp-like language that much but a lot of the ideas are sound and ahead of its time.
When trying to think of new adventure/game types, let’s try not to be restricted by our memories of past sierra games. For instance, I wouldn’t want to create a king’s quest or space quest clone. Maybe some place which gives the users the freedom to create their your own worlds in a peer-to-peer environment. Sort of like the ‘world wide web’ of adventure games.
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