PROJECTS & IDEAS

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Game Ideas

Around the beginning of December, 1996, people on the java-games alias wanted to get together to develop a game. This effort was started by Bob Troia who collected ideas from people in the group and put them out for a vote on what to work on. The ideas were:

  1. "...a multiplayer map tiled Ultima-style game (which could ultimate evolve to a Syndicate Wars 3D environment using raster-graphics..." - Linh Ngo

  2. "An online NetRunner/Neuromancer flavored game. Players play thepart of hackers in 'the net'. Their goal is to become the NetGod. To become the Net God, you need to take over control of all (or most) of the net resources. I see this as being somethinglike a game of Risk, where players can gain bonuses by acquire the right groups of resources. I'm still undecided whether thisshould be turn-based or real-time or what the interface should be, but it's definitely a multi-player game." - Trevor Bechtel

  3. "...simple 3D spaceships with few polygons and minimal decorations a la Elite for the BBC/Commodore 64. Planets, satellites, and stars are simple circles, with your ship's motion through space depicted as simple moving points of light (tiny stars). We're talking wire-frame with hidden line removal. This level of detail is sufficient to depict a 3D space environment, yet not so CPU hungry hopefully as to prevent meaningful networked game play. And ambitious programmers could add bitmapped light-sourced textures later if they wanted to. :-) But the level of detail should always be configurable to allow gameplay by non-JIT & non-Pentium Java browsers." - Linh Ngo

  4. "A real-time, multi-player, rogue-like game. The interface could either be minimalistic (top-down 2-D, just like in nethack), or something fancier like in Loaded (top-down 3-D view, reminiscent of Gauntlet). The challenges here are the performance of the real-time interaction over the internet and the 3-D view." - Trevor Bechtel

  5. "A strategic fantasy combat game similar to conquer (without the bugs). This would be a turn-based, 2-D graphic game. This game includes building armies, cities, navies, farms & other structures, trading with other players, combat, magic, races, monsters, and general resource management. " - Trevor Bechtel

  6. "Some type of sports game". - James Boorn

The results of the vote were:

       Final tallies:
       ---------------------------------------
       game #  |  1    2    3    4    5    6
       ---------------------------------------  
       # votes |  2    3    2    6    4    0

The Current Project

As reflected in the results of the voting, the current project is the 'real-time, multi-player, rogue-like game' called Hero's Tale. This project will be starting up in full swing in January, 1997. Correspondence regarding this project is done using the java-games alias with "[Java Game]" in the subject line.