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Team name: Project Dragon Project name: "The Order of the Dragon" Brief description: The tentative title of project dragon is “The Order of the Dragon.” A 2D fighting game with simple controls but deep tactical and strategic possibilities, Order of the Dragon will be playable on the personal computer with single-player modes and internet multiplayer modes. Project Dragon has been in production for about 6 months now, and I consider the project to be very near a state where full content development can begin. Target aim: Open Source (GNU), Freeware Technology: For Windows based PC, programmed in C++ using the Dev-C++ IDE Talent needed: Concept and Story Artist: Responsible for fleshing out the cast's visual design. Will also create single-panel story sequences that will illustrate the game's story during the single-player mode. Drawing skill a prerequisite. Pixel Artists: Will a paint program to create character animations for the cast of the game. Experiance with photoshop or similar software is recommended. Programmer(s): Various tasks including network and general purpose programming. Game Designers: Will use the our custom character creator program to design character moves and properties. Responsible for gameplay balance and single-player mission design. Experiance playing fighting games (at a competitive level hopefully) is recommended. Sound Engineer: Responsible for creating all game music and sound effects. Webmaster: Create and maintain a website for the game. Team structure: Currently it's only me, the game's lead designer and programmer. Contacts: Email: NaviJr_12@yahoo.com GameDev.net Tag: MangaFox Additional Info: “Once every decade the illustrious ‘Order of the Dragon’ admits two members into it’s secret ranks. A politically connected and militarily powerful organization, the Order only accepts the most adept warriors and fighters into its number. It chooses new recruits from the winners of a grand fighting tournament the Order throws every ten years. Warriors from all over the world are drawn to the contest by the promise of acceptance into the affluent organization. Some warriors however, are drawn only by the promise of incredible competition and the chance to test their skills against the legendary warrior, Lord Draconus, a fighter rumored to be unbeatable who personally challenges the winner of every tournament. This year the contest takes place in Egypt, once the home of mighty pharaohs; now the secret battlefield of the world’s greatest fighting tournament!” We follow nine warriors as they attempt to enter the Order, each with his or her own reasons behind wanting to join. Little do they know that Lord Draconus is actually an ageless and insane vampire lord attempting to recruit an army of elite immortal warriors with which to take over the world. At the end of every tournament the winners have to face Draconus himself and either accept their fate or die by his hand! The purpose of this software project is to develop a full 2D fighting game for the personal computer. A hobby project not aimed directly for the commercial market, the main driving force behind the development of Project Dragon is 5 fold: the desire to create a unique, fun and deep fighting game experience not currently available on the PC platform; to gain experience in serious game development including involvement in a game project from beginning to end; to challenge and elevate my creative abilities and knowledge of programming; finally, to learn standard coding practices, techniques and game design rules. The tentative title for Project Dragon is “The Order of the Dragon.” On the technical side, I currently have an early version of the game engine running, including a simple and scrollable background and a controllable (and badly-animated) stick-man. Programmed fully in C++ the architecture of Project Dragon uses object-oriented design in order to keep management and addition of game objects simple. SDL is used as a wrapper for the Windows API, allowing easy access to the OpenGL graphics API used for rendering. BMF_Font is being used for rendering text on screen. Though not implemented yet, FMOD is planned as the sound/music library. Being a 2D fighting game, having a robust animation system is of the utmost importance. The animation class in Project Dragon is timing based (speed of the computer shouldn’t effect it) and supports play, rewind, stop, pause, extended play and (soon-to-be implemented) fast-forward. The animation textures are saved in the TGA file format. Once loaded into memory a custom texture manager will decide when the texture will be placed in and out of video memory. Since the standard character size is 128x128 (the screen resolution is 640x480) and OpenGL requires textures to be power of 2 the textures come in sizes of 128x128 (1 frame), 256x256 (4 frames), 512x512 (16 frames) and so on. Once in video memory the individual frames are drawn using texture coordinates based on the current frame number of the playing animation. Backgrounds in Project Dragon are built as stills (single textures) and tiled-layers (not yet implemented). The point-of-view in the game is ¾ bird’s eye view, similar to Final Fight and most other beat-em up games. The levels themselves will be flat and rectangular, with walls at each end and at the top and bottom. The gameplay technical design all revolves around the concept of “moves.” Every thing a character can do in the game is represented as a move, including standing, walking, jumping, etc… Each character class has it’s moves saved in a logical “move graph.” The nodes in the move graph are the move structures and the links are the transition structures. The transitions describe what catalyst is required in order to progress from the source move to the destination move. As the character/object transitions from move to move it switches animations and executes it’s current move rule function. The rule function of a move defines the properties of the move and how the character will interact with other characters and the game world. Controlling the physics in the game is a custom physics solver that manages “physics modules.” Each game object in the game that can be interacted with has a pointer to it’s own physics module. The solver applies forces and checks for collisions, calling a callback function in the case of one. Though Project Dragon is 2D in graphical nature its gameplay is 3D. Thus axis-aligned 3D bounding boxes are used for collision detection, also due to their ease of use. Though not implemented yet, I plan to have online multiplayer modes as well as single-player story/VS modes. Currently, 10 playable characters are planned, each with 50 to 60 moves (remember moves include idle and movement states). Also 9 minor characters are planned as well, each supporting a small subset of moves (~20 to 30). Levels and effects are still in the planning stages. Currently, I am working on a Character Creator program that will bind textures and moves together for characters. The program uses the main game engine and implements a custom GUI system. I am eager to make this game a reality and hope to form a development team soon. Feedback: Any feedback would be appreciated. Peace.