EPTHi guys,
My names Tristan Pilepich a 20-odd year old "bloke" from Melbourne, Australia.
Before I continue with the actual blog I just want to give some back-story to fill in why I'm attempting such a project. I've always wanted to make games, since early primary school. We always had a personal computer in the house since as far back as I can remember and I was always amazed by the different games and how on earth they could be made. It was all such a mystery for me.
Towards the end of high-school teachers made it very clear that you need a path and a plan and you need to go to University to be able to follow that plan, and that means you need to do well in School (in hind-sight, bullshit.) Regardless, after only getting a 60 ENTER (out of 100) in school due to playing too many games, and spending probably too much time on DeviantArt, I had few options left if I wanted to go to University.
One option was a BA in Digital Art, run by RMIT University in Melbourne. It was part of a new "game design" stream which had the intention of bringing together fellow budding game developers across 3 fields of study, Art, Design (BA in Games Graphic Design) and Programming (BS in Game Programming)... It required no enter, rather just a port-folio which they were very impressed with due to once again, spending too much time on DeviantArt.
So off I went to University to learn from an institution how to make games.
And I learnt nothing... Well, that's an over-exaggeration, but the program definitely didn't hold up to its lofty expectations. The main problem was they weren't selective enough with their entrants nor their lecturers. And most of the courses expected teamwork, which is hard when the majority of the people shouldn't have been there.
Either way, I dropped out half way through the degree (which was a big decision at the time, one I'm still not sure was the right thing to do) and just worked a normal regular job at a chicken shop while the plan was for me to continue to work on my port-folio and apply for a graphic design job somewhere.
I didn't, instead I managed to get stuck in a "rut" for about 6 years. I've worked on many mods and small games over the years, but I've never actually full on "released" a game, I've made prototypes (and one can even say this project is a prototype) in the past, so I've gathered lots of information and experience doing "the basic stuff" in a hacky way, but as I said, never got anything to that stage where you would be willing to share it with the general public.
And of course over the years while keeping my passion, and my goals in my heart, I've always been analysing the industry, reading things like Gamasutra post-mortems, listening to indie game dev podcasts, taking advantage of steam sales at every point, and of course following the huge e-sport sensation that seems to have blown up in the last few years.
Finally I think it's time for me to actually get down to work and actually finish a game. I was thinking of starting a personal blog to track this, but I've found if I do that, I'll probably spend just as much time managing how it looks, and time is of the essence right now, so I might as well use the tools available (tl blogs), and having the community here to hopefully inspire me to continue the project and keep on going.
So... What about the game?
![[image loading]](http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/2064/raidcraftss.jpg)
(I just want to stress that the name is still not final, I know how cliche and overused somethingcraft is now, but it fits, so I'll leave it for now unless something better comes along.)
Raidcraft actually started many years ago in my head as the "shadow priest raiding simulator" many moons ago WoW was a game with many imbalances, and one of these imbalances was the shadow priest. See, in TBC they gave shadow priests a new ability which gave everyone in the party mana regeneration as a % of the shadow priests damage dealt. This meant not only could shadow priests raid they were a well sought after commodity. And the shadow priest spell priority system at the time made for a more dynamic experience rather than just pressing a few buttons in a rotation, this also meant that a good shadowpriest could far out-perform a bad one, regardless of gear (gear = time spent in the game progressing.) This definitely attracted me to the role. I loved raiding and considered myself a good one, but due to a lack of time, I never found myself being able to raid at the top level.
Anyway, in order to improve my skills I started work on the raiding simulator, which I always wanted to do in Flash. It was supposed to be a way for shadow priests to practice their spell priority system in a raiding environment, without actually raiding. Anyway, after a few months of literally fumbling about in flash and learning actionscript for the first time, I simultaneously realised 2 things... The "game" wasn't fun, and I did not know enough about scripting, I had trouble even keeping up with a lynda.com tutorial on actionscript.
So I ditched the idea and let it sit for a while, while I went off to do other things, I think my next project was trying to make a sourceMod serverside script for cs:s, but that's irrelevent.
The idea came back in to my head a few years ago now. And I decided to have another crack with Actionscript, very quickly I learnt once again that I didn't know enough about scripting, so instead I decided to hammer down a design doc and actually go through and systematically work out how the code would work.
After hammering down the concept a bit more I came up with the idea of "MageCraft" (this was before minecraft btw, so the something-craft has been in my head for a while.) The idea was once again a single player "raiding simulator" so to speak, however it somewhat had a back-story, you were a mage about to graduate from a mage academy, and you had to pass all your trials to graduate while at the same time discovering corruption and dealing with political struggles within the academy.
The main problem here was because it was all about mages, it was hard to figure out a way to deal with things like threat, and the "holy trinity" aspect which is integral to raiding. However I did learn quite a bit about actionscript and got to the point where I could implement my own hand-written psuedo-code rather effectively. Another problem was simply due to having a story, this would need to be conveyed, and to do it any justice it would require voice acting and cut-scenes, neither of which I have the time, resources or skill to do any justice to.
So I once again let it sit for a while, and went off to work on other stuff, I think my next project was skins and a track model for the racing game rFactor, but once again, irrelevent.
Most recently, around one year ago, I was catching up on the Indie Games Podcast, where they were interviewing someone called ChevyRay who had developed an Actionscript library called FlashPunk... I was intrigued after hearing the interview, as they were talking about how easy this made it for anyone to make a game. Great I thought, lets do it.
So I downloaded FlashPunk and gave my Flash game idea another go. This time I thought screw it, let's just do "whatever" and actually get down to producing something before I realised I couldn't finish it.
after a few weeks, this was the result
![[image loading]](http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/7538/raidcraftss2.jpg)
https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/Public/RaidCraft2.swf?w=d7d18763 (wasd to move, numbers to cast spells, click on enemies to target them before casting)
Needless to say I was pretty pleased, I had a player, monsters, easily editable maps, spells, cooldowns, cast time, dots, health, mana... It was actually coming together. But it was at this time I realised I'd need to start from scratch. It was coded as a single-player game, and I needed it to be multi-player, after learning so much and doing so much in a short period of time, I was getting burnt out, and the thought of starting from scratch and adding multiplayer at that time, was too much for me to handle
So I went off and tried to apply what I had learnt from actionscript in another project, but once again, irrelevent.
Now here we are. About 2 weeks ago I started to pick-up work on RaidCraft again, after having somewhat of a personal revelation in RL, being inspired by Realm of the Mad God, and once again, learning a bit more from other projects that I think could apply (most recently a php/mysql rally/autocross timing system). I honestly believe now is the time, I've learnt enough and have the determination to really make a go at it.
Okay, now if you managed to read all this so far I congratulate you :D and sorry for being such a bore. I just wanted to get the back-story out there before I start on the actual blog, so people can understand where the project is coming from hopefully.
I'll quickly describe the basic game concept, and what I hope it will be, and why. The game is going to be a flash-based multiplayer raiding game, from a top-down 2d perspective, without all the MMO elements common to the "endgame" of MMO's. That means no gear, no "progression" you just pick a character (and skill from the respective skill tree's) and try to beat some bosses. The game will focus specifically on the "craft" of raiding. I hope it will provide a solid foundation that raiders can relate to, and enjoy, without all the dumbing down of game-play systems that WoW went through due to PvP and later, their focus on the more casual playerbase.
It wont shy away from being "hardcore" with complicated skill-trees that will require people to actually think about what skills they will take to raids. While WoW has tried to prevent cookie cutter specs by simplifying everything, and basically making players choose one of two things. Raidcraft will go the opposite route of offering players so much choice they will (hopefully) be overwhelmed.
All the while offering accessibility, and an easy "pick-up and play" environment, that doesn't require any grinding or farming of content to be successful. The goal is the only thing that will stop you from progressing is your skill, and the skill of those around you.
I honestly believe this kind of game can be successful, and that the core concept of "raiding" is a solid gameplay system which has not been explored fully outside of the MMO or at least the RPG world. This game will my attempt to prove that it can stand on its own two feet without the MMO/RPG traps.
As for what the blog will contain in the future? I hope to have code examples, breakdowns of current challenges I'm facing with the code or design of the game, maybe even a few mini-tutorials, share game assets, muse about the design in general, or anything else I feel like sharing as the project progresses.
So I hope if you have time you can check it out in the future
In the meantime though if you want to check out how the "game" is shaping up, I've set up a Git Repository here: https://github.com/skipgamer/Raidcraft3/tree/indev feel free to have a browse around if you know what you're looking at. (ill cover what github is and does in another blog :D)
And I'll keep the current build at http://www.skipgamer.com/raidcraft/ As can be seen this is definitely a work in progress, so hopefully as time goes on I, and possibly even we, can learn a lot as we go.
Good Hunting;
Tristan "skipgamer" Pilepich.
(seriously, this blog is long, and I don't know if that's a good or bad thing...)
