2014-05-05, 03:26 PM
So I have been thinking on this long and hard for months, poking around at the idea of getting help to overhaul my SoM game's graphics, restructuring maps to improve poorly made areas and so on. I have also dabbled in Unity over the past year and have come to terms that I am going to lay to rest the idea of revamping my SoM game, for these reasons:
#1 the scope of what I want to create goes beyond what SoM can really handle, for a time I had hopes that SomEx might give me some of the game functionality that I was after: projectiles, falling damage calculation that wasn't event heavy, events that could detect equipped items, map sets that could handle multi leveled depths more cleanly, a better lighting/shading engine, higher texture quality with bump maps and so on. I cam to the realization of what I wanted to accomplish was not meant for SoM, and what I had made with the tool should remain faithful to its design.
#2 I played through the game recently for the first time since I made it, so I could try to help some folks looking for certain items in the game. I actually changed my mind about what I wanted to overhaul...yes there are still a few sections I want to see fixed properly (like that god awful tower I have in the castle area), but that is not a giant project and something I can fix with a bit of help from a good modeller friend I know ;).
#3 Cost...to do some of the things I had in mind meant hiring some folks to do work for me, and at the end of the day, a game attached to the KF intellectual property will never give me a monetary return on investment.
So to that end, DD will get a few updates I had mentioned in another post - such as improved textures to the cliffside set, improved custom models in some areas that are severely lacking, a single new map area with new enemies and so on, but it will remain mostly as it is now, with the features/functionality of the game.
For the future of the series, its attachment to the King's Field universe will be coming to an end...so that leads me to the next part of the reboot project.
Dark Destiny on Unity
I have decided on creating an entirely brand new experience with the Unity engine, still staying faithful to many key elements of the SoM project, but with an entirely new world, current generation graphics, possible multiplayer and a much more epic game experience overall. It will be a minimum 18 month project and will include the following:
â⬠¢ All new game experience, played in first person (like King's Field), with a truly open ended environment, akin to the KF series and to a lesser extent the dark souls series. The game will take place on a much larger island than my SoM made game (think somewhere between melanat and morrowind size), with hints at a few of the same landmarks that made Melanat so cool.
â⬠¢ The game world will be dark, but not as dismal as Dark Souls, it will most certainly not be about undead people. I do prefer Dark Souls loot tables over the procedural loot of games like Skyrim, so the items in my game will have purpose and not be random. That isnt to say you may not find a crappy dagger halfway through the game, but the unique items will be unique and not something like eagle short sword of the rabbit +1. I am a firm believer that everything in a game should have a purpose...just like the KF games did it.
â⬠¢ There will be epic bosses, with real AI, but I do not want to or plan to confine them into sections such as Dark Souls made them. I am not a fan of forced environments, where you pass through a white bit of fog and you are stuck in a boss room until you win or die. This is where I hope to be unique among games of the genre, I want the bosses to meld with their surroundings naturally, like mamma kracken in KF..she just lives on the west shore of the island, she isnt in a confined room with a treasure chest stuck behind her and the key to the next area of the game. I hate that sort of thing a lot...I really try to keep the keys and the rails of gameplay to a minimum.
â⬠¢Continuing with the confinement stuff - I do not like mobs that are placed in a walkway just idly waiting for eternity for you to show up. I am sure I wont be able to avoid it entirely, but it frustrates me to no end that designers do not attempt more often to make enemy appearance more natural. One of the parts I really liked about the first Dark Souls was the hydra down in the Darkroot Valley, it felt like it belonged in that lake, that it lived there, slept there and ate there and didnt care if I ever came by. In fact he was entirely optional. He was not some omniscient being that lived its life watching me in some crystal ball saying, yep today is the day he comes to my lake so I am going to stand there at the ready until he walks by. That sort of thing is nonsense and breaks the seamlessness of gaming. IMO dark souls 1 did a better job at this than DS 2 did.
â⬠¢ I am aiming for 80 hours of gameplay in my game, I do not want to make it a grind fest, requiring you to level a million times to get through the game, but I also do not plan on making island travel as simple as DS2 did by allowing you to warp around the whole game from the get go.
â⬠¢ Multiplayer is something that may come down the road, if I can get in a good spot with this game, I may have enough connections at that point to make a real attempt at a kickstarter project, and get some funding to allow me to hire networking folks to program it. If I end up featuring multiplayer it will be based around 2-3 player coop maximum, and IF (big if) I allow pvp it will not be the random invasion crap, you will have to opt in/out of pvp invasions - i dont feel its necessary to force people who want to enjoy a coop game with their friends to have to put up with invasions by people who want to grief you over and over. And also, co-op can be random or by invite, so people who actually have friends in the real world can simply go to their friends list and invite them to their game. I also do not plan to make it where if you kill a boss your summoned help leaves...that stuff is nonsense too.
So that is more or less where I am at...I am keeping the title of the game (at least partially at this point) but I am separating it from its KF roots and making the story not use any of the from software intellectual property. My plan is to actually sell this game via Steam and maybe a few other channels within probably 2-2.5 years from now.
Hopefully I will be able to update this post to a nice board at some point with progress that you can see etc. Hopefully no one is annoyed that I am not using SoM for my next project :)
#1 the scope of what I want to create goes beyond what SoM can really handle, for a time I had hopes that SomEx might give me some of the game functionality that I was after: projectiles, falling damage calculation that wasn't event heavy, events that could detect equipped items, map sets that could handle multi leveled depths more cleanly, a better lighting/shading engine, higher texture quality with bump maps and so on. I cam to the realization of what I wanted to accomplish was not meant for SoM, and what I had made with the tool should remain faithful to its design.
#2 I played through the game recently for the first time since I made it, so I could try to help some folks looking for certain items in the game. I actually changed my mind about what I wanted to overhaul...yes there are still a few sections I want to see fixed properly (like that god awful tower I have in the castle area), but that is not a giant project and something I can fix with a bit of help from a good modeller friend I know ;).
#3 Cost...to do some of the things I had in mind meant hiring some folks to do work for me, and at the end of the day, a game attached to the KF intellectual property will never give me a monetary return on investment.
So to that end, DD will get a few updates I had mentioned in another post - such as improved textures to the cliffside set, improved custom models in some areas that are severely lacking, a single new map area with new enemies and so on, but it will remain mostly as it is now, with the features/functionality of the game.
For the future of the series, its attachment to the King's Field universe will be coming to an end...so that leads me to the next part of the reboot project.
Dark Destiny on Unity
I have decided on creating an entirely brand new experience with the Unity engine, still staying faithful to many key elements of the SoM project, but with an entirely new world, current generation graphics, possible multiplayer and a much more epic game experience overall. It will be a minimum 18 month project and will include the following:
â⬠¢ All new game experience, played in first person (like King's Field), with a truly open ended environment, akin to the KF series and to a lesser extent the dark souls series. The game will take place on a much larger island than my SoM made game (think somewhere between melanat and morrowind size), with hints at a few of the same landmarks that made Melanat so cool.
â⬠¢ The game world will be dark, but not as dismal as Dark Souls, it will most certainly not be about undead people. I do prefer Dark Souls loot tables over the procedural loot of games like Skyrim, so the items in my game will have purpose and not be random. That isnt to say you may not find a crappy dagger halfway through the game, but the unique items will be unique and not something like eagle short sword of the rabbit +1. I am a firm believer that everything in a game should have a purpose...just like the KF games did it.
â⬠¢ There will be epic bosses, with real AI, but I do not want to or plan to confine them into sections such as Dark Souls made them. I am not a fan of forced environments, where you pass through a white bit of fog and you are stuck in a boss room until you win or die. This is where I hope to be unique among games of the genre, I want the bosses to meld with their surroundings naturally, like mamma kracken in KF..she just lives on the west shore of the island, she isnt in a confined room with a treasure chest stuck behind her and the key to the next area of the game. I hate that sort of thing a lot...I really try to keep the keys and the rails of gameplay to a minimum.
â⬠¢Continuing with the confinement stuff - I do not like mobs that are placed in a walkway just idly waiting for eternity for you to show up. I am sure I wont be able to avoid it entirely, but it frustrates me to no end that designers do not attempt more often to make enemy appearance more natural. One of the parts I really liked about the first Dark Souls was the hydra down in the Darkroot Valley, it felt like it belonged in that lake, that it lived there, slept there and ate there and didnt care if I ever came by. In fact he was entirely optional. He was not some omniscient being that lived its life watching me in some crystal ball saying, yep today is the day he comes to my lake so I am going to stand there at the ready until he walks by. That sort of thing is nonsense and breaks the seamlessness of gaming. IMO dark souls 1 did a better job at this than DS 2 did.
â⬠¢ I am aiming for 80 hours of gameplay in my game, I do not want to make it a grind fest, requiring you to level a million times to get through the game, but I also do not plan on making island travel as simple as DS2 did by allowing you to warp around the whole game from the get go.
â⬠¢ Multiplayer is something that may come down the road, if I can get in a good spot with this game, I may have enough connections at that point to make a real attempt at a kickstarter project, and get some funding to allow me to hire networking folks to program it. If I end up featuring multiplayer it will be based around 2-3 player coop maximum, and IF (big if) I allow pvp it will not be the random invasion crap, you will have to opt in/out of pvp invasions - i dont feel its necessary to force people who want to enjoy a coop game with their friends to have to put up with invasions by people who want to grief you over and over. And also, co-op can be random or by invite, so people who actually have friends in the real world can simply go to their friends list and invite them to their game. I also do not plan to make it where if you kill a boss your summoned help leaves...that stuff is nonsense too.
So that is more or less where I am at...I am keeping the title of the game (at least partially at this point) but I am separating it from its KF roots and making the story not use any of the from software intellectual property. My plan is to actually sell this game via Steam and maybe a few other channels within probably 2-2.5 years from now.
Hopefully I will be able to update this post to a nice board at some point with progress that you can see etc. Hopefully no one is annoyed that I am not using SoM for my next project :)
- Todd DuFore (DMPDesign)
Site Founder
Site Founder
