Week Ten - Darklands

I am feeling pretty confident about the progress of our final project. While we have all been struggling with separate implementations of different features, the last lab we began integrating the systems we did have completed, and I am very pleased with the results. Currently, we have NPC civilians walking around a couple of blocks of the city, and a player character that can move and shoot things. While there are still many systems to improve and implement, this is the initial version of the primary gameplay loop of GTA, going around the city and causing destruction. I know another member of my group is helming the development of the car system and is making good progress despite how difficult a task it is proving to be. My main wish is that I would like to better help and support them, but I am not sure how. Going forward, I will continue to work on the NPC civilians and improve their pathfinding and responses to the player, and then I may start to work on the scoring system for the game. Currently, I do not know how to handle the difference between NPC cars once they are implemented, and player-driven cars, but hopefully my group and I will be able to figure it out.

This week I also read the Digital Antiquarian’s article on the failed MicroProse game: Darklands. Darklands was a Computer Role Playing Game that strove to drift away from the traditional epic fantasy setting of CRPGs by taking place in a fictionalized version of 15th century Germany. However, Darklands, unfortunately, failed due to a variety of reasons. One of the most impactful developmental reasons for the failure of Darklands I think is the lack of communication in its development team. According to the Digital Antiquarian’s article, most of the ideas and direction for Darklands existed solely within the mind of the lead developer and were only poorly verbally conveyed to the rest of the team. This resulted in a lack of cohesiveness in the implementation fo the various game systems. If I were given control of the development of Darklands, I would inevitably want to cut many of these systems to make for a less bloated and more cohesive experience. My answer to which of these systems to cut greatly depends on the resources available to me, however, I incline to make a game out of the character creator. This would set up the world behind Darklands and allow players to create their backstories and ideals much in a similar vein to Darklands' current character creator. Then possibly a system that plays out a short text summary of the fate of the created character plays out, ending with the player being prompted to create a new character.