Design Decisions

zWhen I first started getting into computers, the games I were playing were Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, and the Ultima series. All of those games had three dimensional dungeons (before I get email I will just point out that the computer version of the first five Ultima games had 2D outside maps, but all the dungeons were in 3D. The NES version may have been entirely 2D, but I didn't play the NES versions). This means that the decision to have the game be a three dimensional game was an obvious one. Had I been brought up on Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Final Fantasy, my game probably would have been done from the much easier 2D overhead perspective. That just shows you how much the games one plays in their youth can impact their future game preferences. Unfortunately, that probably means that future role-playing games will all be massively multi-player or twitch based shooters that are more about the players reflexes then role-playing the character in the game.

Three dimensional graphics are nice, but I decided I would start out with pseudo 3D graphics using the painters algorithm and advance to proper 3D graphics once Java applets were capable of handling 3D. As Sun does not seem to care about the client side of the Internet, I am not too sure this will ever happen. This is probably for the best as 3D adds a huge amount of work to all aspects of the development of the game. I hope that later chapters will be looking at these issues, but we will find out in the future (though if anyone can see the future, feel free to email me information about what the optimal development direction for future games is – and the winning lottery numbers for the next draw that I will have a chance to buy tickets for).

I probably shouldn't be writing to much in such a grumpy mood (lack of sleep does that) so I suppose I should get to the part about the maps to the released levels so those people who don't like downloading things can still be able to play through the games (as those people who have downloaded the construction set can simply load the maps into it to see them). Next chapter I will be discussing the format for the maps, how it works, how it becomes 3D, and how it has changed from my closed source release to the open source release.