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Old 08-05-2010, 06:02 AM   #41
Milawe
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: USA
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Re: Developing from scratch

It would be awesome to do it in a few weeks or even months, but I'm not sure how you would accomplish that and have any kind of an original game. I think that if you completely copied the game designs of another codebase, then maybe it wouldn't take as long, but you would still have all the time spent in creating the content of the game. If you have anything more than "This is a sword. It stabs things." or "This is a garden room. It grows things.", that alone would still take a long time for a good size game.

We could be talking about completely different types of games, though. For Primordiax, we had to write the lore, which is completely original which, in and of itself, required us to establish a detailed timeline. The driver was being coded at this point which included connecting and all your basic commands. Then the wold map was designed. Then we had to decide what parts were given to the player, what parts were to be discovered in game, and then what parts were possibly never to be discovered. Then we designed many of the game systems around the lore. Then we generated the world map and created the three city maps. Then we coded the backbone of the systems which included combat, crafting, guilds, buffs, grouping, mob AI, skill trees, collectibles, task system, quest system, achievement system, etc. Then we had to design, describe, and code all the content for those systems. Then we had to code the three cities and their contents. I'm just going to stop there for now because the list goes on and on before we even start to try getting players.

I don't think I really see this as pessimism, though, but a description of what CAN go into building a game from scratch. I understand that many developers choose to get the basics in, develop a few areas, and then throw open the doors. I'm not sure that I think that's the best way to open a new mud and may perhaps kill several infant muds before they really have a chance.

You're right that a decent engine doesn't take that much time to code. It took far less time to code the engine than it did to design and code the game and its systems. I would never presume to tell you that the game is better than a game that was coded in a few months or a year. Time spent on something is definitely not the determining factor of how good a game is. Duke Nukem Forever was in development for almost 13 years, and I can't say that it was better for it... since it never got released.
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