Dream game

Piano Monkey

New Member
So a month or so ago I had a dream, I was in a game, it was a first person role playing game much like the gothic and elder scrolls series, but it was a randomly generated world (diablo/minecraft), it had an older art style as well, I guess like as if the squares in minecraft had been shrunk a lot, the terain or at least some parts of it were destroyable too I remember destroy a pillar in a dungeon/cave will fighting some sort of enemy. There was also a viking village and something about some lost book that was needed to summon a really powerfull weapon.
But I was wondering how easy would it be to make such a game? I was thinking, not that I have any experiance with game engines or anything, that using voxels like minecraft but having smaller squares could make destruction of the enviroment a lot easier than trying to make destruction similar to battlefield, plus it would be alot more precise and not prescripted destrction that all ways breaks down the same time.
So any thoughts on this idea?
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
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Hi Piano Monkey - building it from scratch would take a lot of time and skill for sure. What you describe sounds a little more like Cube World, which uses fairly small cubes and has more of an RPG feel to it. The destruction mechanics are very cool as well, tiny cubes flying everywhere. Nowadays if it involves voxels somebody is probably already working on it somewhere, hot topic :)

If you want to build something yourself you have a few options:
  • Build it entirely from scratch: difficult, takes lots of skill, and lots of time. Plenty of people are doing this anyway and a few are becoming quite successful including 5-6 digit Kickstarter projects. Do not underestimate the sheer difficulty of this, however - if you're not currently familiar with full game engines, but only modding for instance, this would be extremely hard, and would require immense commitment and time.
  • Build it using a mainstream game engine like Unity3D: takes a huge amount of the basic work away, at the cost of some flexibility. I'm not sure how well any existing engine would handle the style you're looking for. Still takes a ton of skill and commitment to get to a solid game.
  • Build it using Terasology: probably not impossible, although I'm not sure about the technical viability short of forking the engine and making adjustments. What makes the tiny cubes in Cube World work is probably that they use vertex colors rather than textures like us, making rendering a fair bit less power intense.
  • Build it in another similar open source project: maybe, if you can find an appropriate project. There are only a few solid open source projects, Minetest comes to mind, but is in C++ rather than Java. The Spout project might also have held potential, but fell apart, some are trying to reform under the name "Flow"
  • Somehow get hired by one of the proprietary voxel games out there that are closed source and trying to eventually make a profit: probably about as hard to pull off as starting from scratch, there are very few indie groups like that and a massive number of skilled people probably already wanting to help out if they're let in
If on the other hand you can live with a little less ambitious project you might be able to more easily build an RPG setting in Terasology as it exists now, focusing on generating your viking villages (we've got the Cities module already), your dungeons, etc. We have nice explosions with blocks flying everywhere, that can be extended some more too. That's probably the most doable option. That brings you back somewhat toward "just" modding in Minecraft, although long-term that may be a lot easier in open source Terasology :)
 
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