The first--the one that I chose--used the gameplay theme of "Shadows", and the aesthetic theme of "Undead". The setting of the game is an undead world--that is, a world that is itself undead. Alas, the Heart of a realm in this world has been twisted by something terrible, something that has further twisted the shadow-beings that people the realm, changing them into violent monsters--all but the player character, saved by the lucky find of a lantern, a shield, and a sword.
But the lantern is a double-edged blade: the monsters that were the player-character's peers are weakened by it, but more easily perceive the player-character, and in the brightness the player-character has no means of recovering health. The lantern can be dimmed, hiding the player-character and allowing them to regenerate--but the monstrous enemies become far more powerful, and are far more difficult to spot. In the dark, only the sounds that they make might give them away...
I'll confess that I'm a little dubious as to whether this really covers the "Shadows" theme: it might be argued that it's more a matter of
darkness than of
shadows--although one might argue in return that the traits seen in the player-character and enemies stem, conceptually at least, from their being shadow-creatures in either light or darkness.
The second concept was more-or-less an action-RPG. The player would have been a creature made of stone--of chunks of ruin, to be precise. In this setting, the ruins of human buildings carried echoes of their past use--the stones of a school might carry knowledge, vitality, and unruliness, for example.
As the player traversed the world, they would encounter further ruins, and have the opportunity to take--or leave--a stone from each. Doing so would incorporate that stone into the player's character, and with it the traits that echo from that ruin. This would take a somewhat "genetic" form: some traits would blend with others of their kind (the resultant value in that trait would be the average of all values of all of the stones that provided it); others would be either dominant or recessive. These traits would then define the player's abilities: speed, health, available attacks, etc.
Some traits would have no direct use in combat, but would instead--perhaps along with combat traits--affect which ending the player received after winning through. (I had some thought of people founding a settlement on the then-quiescent player-character, and the nature of their culture being affected by the traits that the player chose.)
I really liked this idea (and still do), especially in that I feel that it couples the chosen aesthetic and gameplay themes, and uses both fairly clearly and centrally, more than does the first idea above.
However, it also seems likely to be rather more work than the first idea: it has most of the same elements (wander around, attack things, get attacked), but adds on a variety of others (collection, additional abilities, the traits, a separate screen to display the elements of the "trait" mechanic, multiple endings, etc.). In the end, I decided that it seemed rather less viable, given the time available.
So, how far have I come today? I've implemented walking, looking, blocking, and attacking, along with a basic pair of animated "player arms" to show what's going on, and a simple boxy test-level, I believe. Not much yet, perhaps, but a start, I do feel!
As others have done, here is a list of the tools that I'm using, and intend to use:
Engine: Panda3D
Graphics: Blender and GIMP (I intend to go for a low-poly look, however, so there should be few images)
Sound effects: Audacity
Music: Royalty-free; I'll likely look at
soundimage.org, but lukewarm response to tracks taken from there in previous years has me considering looking around for another source
Previously-made elements:
- GameSaver
- a game-saving module; this will most likely remain in the back-end, being used by other modules, below
- KeyMapper
- My key-mapping module. One advantage of this is--potentially--easily-included key-rebinding.
- SoftActor
- This is a subclass of Panda's animated-model class, which is named "Actor". This subclass is intended to automatically blend between one animation and the next
- TabbedFrame
- Provides a simple tabbed GUI-frame; this will likely not see use, but I have it to hand if I want it
- A variety of sound effects and models left over from previous projects
That's all for today--thank you for reading, and stay well! ^_^
