Untitled RPG project prototyping: Page 2

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Untitled RPG project prototyping

VMblast

Megalomaniak
Yeah I do understand this ethos, I mean it is good in a sense. You make terrain exact tailored to needs of your project. The only downside that I could see, is that for low tier projects, which could you like a default standard terrain work, that would be taxing on the time and budget.

Megalomaniak

VMblast The only downside that I could see, is that for low tier projects, which could you like a default standard terrain work, that would be taxing on the time and budget.

Ah, but there already are terrain plugins/addons that you could modify and cater to your projects needs if you have the skill and/or the resources for or just try to live with the limitations of as they are if you can't afford to do more with them. It's just that the godot project hasn't yet gotten to the point where it has the capacity to adopt some of these addons as 'official' yet.

For terrain see for an example Zylanns. The caveat of course being that 4.0 was only just recently released and the plugin hasn't yet been updated for it.

VMblast

Added some broadleaf trees for testing.

Lethn

VMblast This is the problem a lot of people don't realise who think they can make their own game, when it comes to programmers who know what they're doing it's either money upfront or they walk. I mean, if it's just a friendly collab project, there's nothing wrong with that, but you seem to understand that realistically when it comes to projects you're not going to get any programmers onside by yourself without money because being blunt all of us here can and do make projects similar by ourselves no problem. 'Revenue sharing agreements' are a joke to anyone professional, I'd avoid that like the plague because it's just a way to scam free labour from earnest people on the vague promise of ROI which would barely hold up in court as a verbal agreement.

This is why I advise, learn to code, even if it's painful initially, it will be worth it, I've surprised myself at how much I'm enjoying programming now and I hated maths in school.

VMblast

Lethn
What are the prices? I mean roughly?
I cant even imagine how it would be counted. Like per script? How many lines of code? What about those plugin integrations that needs C++?

Lethn

VMblast That's a difficult one that I can't answer all myself because it does depend on person to person or what project is being worked on, I imagine the fairest way would be to do it after certain targets have been reached with the project generally so you'd get paid based on if you have certain gameplay mechanics in and functional which seems like the most sensible approach to me. Obviously you wouldn't want to do it by line and yes maybe per script would be a good idea and price things depending on how big or complex it is. By line encourages programmers to mess around and add more than necessary instead of making their code efficient.

You can't really pay programmers by hour or anything like that in the traditional manner because for instance I can code in my sleep, so how the hell would you calculate that? It is a problem that should be talked about more amongst employers and people wanting to pay programmers properly.

VMblast

Lethn
This is good talk actually. So if the work is priced by the gameplay mechanic, how would you define that? In term, like player character, but how deep? If its RPG akin to something like Morrowind, is one gameplay mechanic just character motor? But what about lets say, combat, and how complex?
What about enemy AI in similar setting, and its combat? Enemies in-fighting? What about interactions between NPCs and player, between npc-npc?
Note: Im talking about prototype here, pre-alpha, not full game ofc.

Tomcat

VMblast The big letdown for me concerning Godot, at least in this first iteration of No4, is that there is no any built in terrain implementation.

If you need a landscape generator, you can use free third-party ones for now. Making a whole continent by hand, of course, somewhat tedious.

By the way, Boreal Orienteering somewhat disappointed me. Yes, there is a very nice landscape, but repetitive trees with straight trunks on which the leaves do not even flutter.

VMblast

Tomcat
Thanks! Good to know.
Im using World Machine for the terrain gen.

Yeah Boral Orienteering is fully static and repetitive, however it is good proof of concept and prototype. For me personally as an artitst it was of great importance of how he achieved vast forest look, with very soft and natural shading of the trees and foliage overall. Ofc its not like 101% photo realistic, I think only maybe UE5 can achieve this today (and maybe Cryengine, its good with foliage).

But the soft look for the foliage overall is what Ive been after, its actually how we perceive foliage, feel it, we filter out noise, our brain do it automatically. So that prototype is very interesting in that regards.
Also it is very, very good with performance.

Lethn

I mean it would have to be negotiated obviously because opinions would differ but I would have thought an example would be me putting in combat mechanics for you and getting all that setup and working I'd want a chunk of money for that as a task accomplished. That way you'd at least be getting something finished and I'd feel like I'm getting a worthwhile payment for the job done. It does depend on the person though and what tasks are being assigned.

A simpler example would be an animator or character designer, if you wanted the character done by itself with a rig setup then you'd pay just for that, however if you then wanted to have animations done with it for you, you'd pay extra for the animations after the character has been finished if you were happy with it. So that's how I'd view my work as a programmer and I hope others would agree with me on that but you never know they might look at things differently.

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