15-493 Final Project Website.

Game Name: Zorthizod (tentative)

Developers: Giancarlo Dozzi (gdozzi), Joe Roth (jaroth)

Description:

Our game will be a role-playing game for a single player (most likely) or multiple players (much less likely, see note 1 at the bottom). It will be of a pretty small scale as such games go, consisting of a "main world map" and several (2 or 3 perhaps) submaps (dungeons). The player will fight several different AI controlled enemies to gain experience through a simple combat system we will develop. The game will have a minimal back-story, primarily for the purposes of some sort of goal (retrieve an artifact, defeat an enemy, etc.). There will be multiple character classes (most likely, only 2) with different abilities, possibly a "melee"-type class, and a "ranged"-type class.

Game Features:

Customizable world for limitless expansion.
Multiple character classes.
Enemy AI (including group AI, time permitting).
Network / Multiplayer (time permitting).
Save and restore mechanisms (if applicable).

Tech Features:

Data driven design.
Adaptive, environment-based lighting.
Enemy AI, including path-finding.
Original combat engine.
3rd person camera view.
Compression and network play (time permitting).
Data driven character design for save and restore (if applicable).

Implementation Plan:

As noted at the bottom (2), we plan to use very little "external" code for this project. Furthermore, we have decided to roughly split the work into the "logical" components (or infrastructure), which Joe will mostly handle, and the "graphics" components, which Giancarlo will mostly handle. This is still a tentative plan, however. With that in mind, the various modules that we will need to implement are listed below and roughly divided into the two categories:

Logic / Infrastructure:

Data map processing.
Save/load architecture (if applicable).
Enemy AI routines.
Combat/experience system.
Inventory control (including available items, skills, spells, etc.).

Graphics:

Character, enemy, and item models and animation.
Camera control (current plan is camera maintains character in center of screen).
Terrain rendering.
Inventory graphical display or text list.
Skill/spell graphical display or text list.

Both/Neither:

Intro & story/goal presentation.
Game end presentation.

Development Schedule:

April 6: Playable demo (Milestone 1).
April 14: Finalize design decisions.
April 20: Feature freeze (Milestone 2).
April 27: All code written, debug.
???: Launch.

Notes:

Our mini proposal stated that we should do either enemy AI or networking. Now, we realize that the game is going to be pretty lame if it has networking, but the enemies don't actually do anything, so rest assured we will have AI. That said, I'm just not ready to give up on my networking dream yet, so I'm leaving it in there, with the caveat that it doesn't get touched unless everything else is complete.
-- Joe
With regard to coding, we plan on writing everything ourselves. While we realize that in a commercial development environment, this might not be the best course of action, we have two reasons for doing so. First, we feel like by writing it all, we'd have a better feel for exactly what it takes to make even a simple game. Secondly, neither of us like trying to take guesses at what some other programmer means for us to do with their library, so unless something really useful or easy to use crops up, expect this to be an effort of our own accord.
-- Joe & Giancarlo

Giancarlo Dozzi
Joe Roth

Last Modified: March 2, 2004, 22:56 by Giancarlo Dozzi.