» Sun Dec 08, 2013 10:23 am Ever played the Android game Dopewars or the Apple 2 game Taipan? I think it's called Candy Wars on iStuff.
Here's an online version: http://www.kongregate.com/games/5minutesoff/dope-wars
android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.dopewars&hl=en
iphone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/candywars/id301786163 (it's the same in spirit)
If you're old enough, you might know that Dopewars is based on the Apple 2 game from the early-to-mid 80s called Taipan.
http://www.taipangame.com
The android Dopewars is probably the cleanest example. Taipan is the absolute simplest example. Give one of them a playthru and you'll quickly get the picture of what the game is.
A description for the impatient
In Taipain, you trade various forms of freight from 1800s east asian sea trade. Cargo ranges from cheap General goods to the highly expensive (and big money maker) Opium. You start with either guns and no debt or cash (and debt) but no guns. You play the game till you get 1m gold, and then you can retire at your leisure. During this time, you will upgrade the size of your ship, sometimes fight pirates (or the 1800s version of the triads) with ships cannons. Sometimes you'll encounter small troubles or sell/buy stuff at extremely high/low prices. It is a text based game with some simple graphics for the sea-fighting part.
So here's the idea:
Belethor hires the player to secure his caravan as he travels between the major cities (Riften, Whiterun, etc) buying and selling a simplified, Skyrim-generic inventory that is completely randomly priced at every stop. The fantasy part is in the hiring of mercenaries to fight off raids during fast-travel. (Mercenaries are the equivalent of guns in DopeWars or the cannons in Taipan. Raiders are the equivalent of cops in DopeWars or Li Yuens pirates in Taipan.)
The idea is to take the basic gameplay from the Taipan/Dopewars games, but use Skyrim only as a framework to build the game. In other words, this is a mod that has nothing to do with the vanilla Skyrim stories or interactions but uses the assets (sounds, cells, mechanics, characters, monsters etc.) to define the gameplay.
The Real Time Settler type games have come closest to this design choice. In my opinion, their downfall was in not walling off their world. You could play the mod, but at any point you could wander off and try to resume the vanilla game and forget the mod. This introduces myriad variables that simply can't be taken into account. By making the decision to completely segregate the mod from the vanilla world, and warning the player of this fact, the mod is free to disregard any impact on the real world. Consequently, players that choose to eschew that won't be supported as the solution is simple: Just start a new game.
The goal of the game:
Amass money thru buying low and selling high. Gain player levels thru hands-on fighting in raids. Use profits to buy/obtain/hire increasingly more relevant mercenaries and then level and equip them to survive increasingly harder raids. Achieve a high score (based on as-yet defined aggregate math) by the end of the game term. Buy stuff > hire mercs > fast travel to a city > deal with randomized raids during travel > arrive city > sell stuff > lather, rinse, repeat. Use trading to generate profit, use profit to acquire mercs, use mercs to to defend the trading. 1 week turns with the game lasting 52 weeks. (FYI, Dopewars is hardset for 30 or 60 days, but Taipan lets you choose to "retire" after reaching 1m gold). Retire to end the quest at the end of the term and post your score to the high score list on the web . . . or keep playing for the hell of it.
Once you start the quest, you're in it till you finish. Since a game of dopewars might take :10-:20, the goal of this travelling trader game-mod, from start to end of the quest, is to take no more than a couple of hours. The development goal is to inject some replay value for the player that's played all the major story lines. This should be the kind of thing where they could sit down and play thru in an evening and to be entertaining each time as it focuses on the meat & potatoes of Skryim which is, of course, fighting things.
The plan:
I have 2 detailed design documents covering a 2-phase dev plan.
- The Proof of Concept doc (PoC = phase 1 = v0.1) outlines the economic/trading aspect and the breaks in play that represent the randomized interactions. It takes place in the Riften market, walking between stalls, buying and selling the simplified cargo while dealing with "interactions" (and altercations) in a very simplified way. The PoC would be about getting the major actions working and playable.
- The Release doc (phase 2 = v1.0) covers the details of the completed game that I've described above.
Development Points of interest:
- I will make the docs available to anyone that would like to see them.
What I request in return is an anolysis of the points and some kind of discussion about the depth of scripting that may be required. The point of the docs, and subsequent anolysis, is that I want to have very solid direction before putting pixel to screen.
For example, I want raids to be determined from a leveled list of enemies. I know that leveled lists are not difficult to make in CK. But what I don't know is what else would be required just to populate a raid (outside of testing and gameplay balancing, of course). As a web developer by trade, I don't have anywhere near the papyrus knowledge to be able to do this. Of course the catch 22 is that after completing the mod, I would probably be able to do that heh.
- I believe this requires ZERO originally design assets.
There are no arms/armor, sounds, dungeons, etc., just a few cells in the normal styles. I don't think that it's even doing anything particularly innovative in the scripting.
- The world is highly defined
Every interaction is serialized. It knows where the player has come from and where they are going next. It includes a number of abstract gameplay elements... combat, companions (mercs), locations, trading, npc interaction, unique items (the cargo), etc., BUT I don't believe it to be a big giant complex development as the entire mod exists in a well defined, highly controlled, predictable environment. Every interaction can be accounted for and there's no reason to leave anything to the chance of the vanilla open world. There is ZERO expectation for the player to, say, come across a side quest that they'll want to pursue and thus interrupt the game.
- I have infrastructure and knowledge for a 'high score' list on the web
Since the game is not network aware there will (obviously) have to be some kind of player interaction to transfer values. It will need to take into account a basic web developer doctrine: Never trust the user.
- I have researched and looked at Dopewars clones in various programming languages.
The core of the gameplay -- the economics -- is very simple and I would expect it to easily translate to Skyrim. It's basically a randomizer-with-parameters for the prices of goods. Since it was originally written in Apple Basic I can't imagine the core of it being too much for Papyrus.
If you are interested, please respond here or email [my-nick at my-nick dot com]. Please be prepared to have solid, approachable and regular communication. I don't intend to invade every moment of your life, but more often than once daily emails would be a minimum. 1-to-1 chat would be better. If there winds up being more than a couple people, an IRC or other group communication would be pretty much required.
Questions, comments, discussion are welcome.
