hey
I say if ya serious about making a game, just make something simple, alike a little puzzle game. I mean, I doubt many of us would have done such a thing before, and I think to start off with something big is quite risky. Another advantage of a simple game is that the game mechanics can be well tested and polished before release.
Maybe you could make a game called Pandora's Box, where you must move boxes into place to complete a puzzle, or you must try and open a box by doing something or other. Just something basic and simple.
But yea, I think big stories and such are out of the question. I think they just take too much time to refine, polish and implement.
I'm sure once you define the game mechanics a programmer could program the thing in a matter of days (I would be willing to have a go).
It's not very hard for a programmer in the know to WIP up the base for a platform game, such that levels are made of tiles and you can move and jump and such, what I think is hard is defining and implementing the gameplay, finding exceptional artists who can make all the character animations, backgrounds, and tiles, and finding a musician. You might get people who can do all these things, but I think they should only focus on one thing for such a project.
I have my own tools for generating a tilemap from a tga image of a map, where it searches and extracts each unique tile and stores an index to them, if I make any sense. Obviously I can load and view the map in my 2d game/graphics lib. I've also made some basic mario side scrollers before, and tile level editors, but I am still yet to make a side scroller game. Hmm, well I have started a few side scrollers before, and started some level graphics (pixels), but I seem to lose interest, although I'd really like to complete such a game some day.
I read something interesting the other day, about the making of Half-Life, something that is a big part of their workflow is gameplay testing. It seems to be that they don't accept an idea as being fun until it has been tested. If you are interested then checkout
The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-Life, you may also be interested in the making of
Goldeneye 007 on the N64.
It's funny, I'd like to get a game done for launch, but if it was Nintendo or something then I'd rather them delay the thing to make it better than have it ready for launch.
edit
Lets get started
This is an attempt to organise something and get things moving.
I think to begin we should have everyone who would like to be involved to state how they would like to contribute, whether that be code, gfx, or music.
After this we will assign everyone to a job, each person will be assigned only one thing at a time, no doing both programming, gfx and music at the same time. So if you complete your job then you can do something else.
I think we need a timeframe to decide on an idea? how about the next 3 days?
So are yas ready? does everyone agree with this plan?
another edit
I myself could possibly do code, gfx or music.
cyas
h34r: Heh. Anyway, I've already started working on Pandora Variant on SMC. I only have a few hours a day to work on it, but I should be able to have at least an hour or two of gameplay by the time Pandora launches.
