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Maverick: About the username: yeah, kinda. I was trying to be cute with kanji but it backfired somewhere along the way. I wasn't paying attention so I don't know if I accidently messed up the text while I was cutting and pasting it around or if the forum simply couldn't handle it. It could also have been the wrong encoding on export. Oh well...

Point and click adventure game: I guess it's kinda like Myst, although I honestly haven't played it.

Basically, you've got static backgrounds for locations, as seen in the first person. Each location is a separate picture and you've got a menu of choices.

-Move to a different location
-Examine background or any objects
-Talk to a character (if any are present)
-Take
-Use

...and so on. If you take away the graphics it's kinda like the really old text adventures except with a much stricter interface.

Some adventure games like Monkey Island or Indiana Jones are a bit more complex with scrolling backgrounds and animated third-person character graphics. These are not what I'm aiming for.

As you can see, it should be fairly easy to take backgrounds from the various anime, as well as some character portraits. Combine that with the ready-made sountrack and you've got enough assets to make a game without the need for artists or musicians.


MadMax: Too bad I didn't know about your project at the time I would have gladly signed up.

My position is sort of the opposite: I can handle the technical aspects but I need help with the creative stuff.

By the way, why are you thinking so much about music when there is no game yet to include it in? Maybe you could develop some demo or alpha version and then decide which music to put in; otherwise you'll end up researching music, art and whatnot for way too long during which time you could have written program code.

Well, one basic reason: design. It's something that I'm capable of designing and I'm hoping that by discussing it in a public forum I can get people involved in the design or at least interested in the project.

The hardest part of creating any significant program is design, especially for games. References suggest you should have several levels of a game completely designed on paper, with storyboards, concept art, etc. before beginning to code. This is very good advice because if you start coding before you know exactly what the program will eventually need to do, it will probably be a disaster.

That's why I'm reluctant to start coding without a good team and a solid design. If I did, I would expect one of two things would happen, from my own experience:


1) I'd make a simple demo that would work, but would be too simple to use for a real game. From personal experience, it's a lot of work to rewrite a program and reusing code is not as easy as you might think. Ultimately I'd probably have to rewrite the entire program from scratch IF and when I got the help I needed to make a full game.

2) To avoid the wasted effort described above, I'd try to make it so generalized that it would become way too complicated and I'd just give up. This sort of thing has happened before.


So without a very solid design in place, I would consider it a waste of time to start coding.

Design on the other hand, is not wasted effort. At the very least it is a mental exercise and can provide useful ideas for other projects. Even though I haven't written any code I've still thought about the structure that would be necessary. What I need the most help with is the stuff I'm no good at: see the bullet labeled "Story / Dialog / Game Design" in my very first post.


So, anyone willing to contribute some design ideas? Interested in ripping some graphics? Want to talk about the music? Passionate about fan fiction?

Any veterans from other BGC games want to give it another shot?


Thanks for the info, BTW. If they sound similar then they might be usable.