M64’s Games Blog

Hello.  Today I have something special for my readers. An actual game idea in the form of a hight concept document for a game. The general idea is to create a city building/economic game set in a post-apocalyptic world of PARPG. I proposed the idea a few weeks ago on the #freegamer and most interested people, like TheAncientGoat and mvBarracuda, seemed to like it. I also like it because it allows us to test the commundo ideas with two games in it right from the start.

For the last 3 weeks or so I was polishing out a high concept document. This is a document that is supposed to present a vision of the game, perhaps describe a few unique ideas about it and not to detail the game design in every possible detail. Many mechanics that are quite certain to be included in the game (like some sort of a combat system) were not described. My main sources of inspiration during writing of the document were: Fallout RPGs (mainly the third part), Fallout Tactics, PARPG story design documents, Settlers II, Anno 1701, Dwarf Fortress and Majesty – The Fantasy Kingdom Sim.
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As an aspiring FOSS game creator I stand before some dilemmas and questions that I think may be common to other creators. One is that I have many game ideas – much more than I think I am able to turn into full game projects. Therefore I have to make some tough choices, which is hard without any other input than my gut feeling. Second, I feel there is a sort of unspoken premise of developing FOSS games – that you will be able to attract some contributors and make your games bigger then what you could ever do by yourself. But it is wiser to create small games, as big project require large initial investment before you will have a working product to show off and without that it is difficult to find contributors. Third, is the question of how to perform preproductions – without them it is rather hard to get the gameplay right, but they lengthen the project and move away the moment when you have something playable to show. I write about those questions today because I think I have found a possible answer and I would like to discuss it.

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Hello there. Long time without posting. I have had some bad case of what can be called a designers block and this has lead to a blogger’s block. To put the long story short I have decided that the next logical step in the commundo development would be to design some games that could be used as starters and I got stuck while doing so. Anyway, I think I owe my readers an apology for the lack of updates as well as some insight into what is going on in my head and notebook. I also hope that resulting discussion could help me with some decisions.

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