I struggle with wanting to work on projects that are too massive for me to realistically undertake.
DNFWS
DNFWS is a game I’ve been thinking about for about a decade.
It’s themed around the a universe that lies between other universes. Phenomenon in the world of DNFWS would be things like soul streams which are the connection between a soul in the soul universe and beings in the real universe, but in DNFWS it’s a river that flows up from the ground and the player can fish from it and tend to it. It’s an abstract, complex universe that fun to think about.
I’ve made a few small versions of parts of the game. One is an Android app that I should resurrect. Another can be found on dnfws.com. The most recent one is written in go and I’ve put a few hundred hours into it this year.
I haven’t done any of the networking stuff, even though I imagine it as an MMO. There are so many aspects to the game. 3D Graphics is a huge learning curve. Making fun game mechanics is tough. User interfaces for games are messy. Getting it all to mesh is nearly insane.
Worst of all, I’m not sure if I’d be truly satisfied with any version of DNFWS that isn’t the whole thing.
Intellectually Appealing Non-Starters
I was really excited for a while about making worlds with different topologies. The latest version of the game is hex-tile-based and I thought it would be cool if going to different worlds would use a different tiling pattern which would make movement through the worlds quirky. However, it took me so long to get the hex-tile system hammered down that doing it again with different tiles would be a nightmare. I also think it wouldn’t lead to fun gameplay.
I wanted to make a complicated currency system where players could choose whether to take part in a sort of communist-style market or a free market. Ideas were floating around for a player run government that would go with that. These systems are severely flawed because they are inherently unfun and they would require a large number of players to partake to make them work at all.
Grinding
The biggest issue to I face is actually getting myself to sit down and build content.
I’ve been trying to do everything with procedural generation. There aren’t any prebuilt models with the game, only code that generates the geometry, textures, etc. This also extends to the world generation, where I’m mostly using simplex noise and voronoi diagrams to randomize elements of the world.
I’ve added a little village at the spawn point. There are wonky looking houses because the walls follow the edge of the hex tiles. There are four biomes which are just recolorations of each other. There are trees and rocks that you can mine. There are also trees and rocks that fight back and fight each other.
All of that took me a hundred hours to make. It’s fun for me as the creator, but it’s fairly monotonous.
My best guess is that I’d need to consistently create new content for years to get to a level of satisfaction that I would release the game. I don’t think I have that level of consistency in me.
Think Smaller?
I’ve considered focusing on making a handful of smaller games. Maybe minigames or subsets of content for DNFWS that I could integrate later. It would be a way to learn things and practice without getting tied down for years without releasing anything. I could make DNFWS in a changed form, such as using 2D graphics or making a MUD-style game.
I’m just going to abruptly end this post.