Original Post
Team name: fat team Project name: fat (fast action tanks. Lame working title) Brief description: This game is a 320x240 SNES-style topdown multiplayer shooter, with tanks. It is not a realistic war simulation, nor is it an RTS. If you know games like Firepower (Amiga), Soldat, Battlefield 1942 and BF2, Herzog Zwei, Gate88, think of a hybrid of these games. Most of these games have in common that they are played in LAN or online in relatively short rounds, and have a nice community built around them. My goal is to create such a game and community, players teaming up in clans, playing online with them every other friday night. This multiplayer game will have several game modes: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Mission, Co-op Mission, ... The core game is basically always about "Team A vs. Team B", hopefully up to 8 players per team. Each team has a homebase used as a spawnpoint and for repair/refuel. There are several tank "classes" the player can choose from. It will take a lot of playtesting to balance these classes to ensure that the game is fair and fun to play. The default control scheme is as follows. The player's tank is centered on screen always. * W/S: (accelerate forward/backward) * A/D: (turn left/right) * R for reload, SPACE for special (Shields, Bombs, ...) * Left-Mouse: Primary Fire * Right-Mouse: Secondary Fire * Mouse-Wheel: Change Weapon or similar * Aiming is done by mouse, the tank's turret will always point to the cursor. The turret will eventually need to have a small delay but basically you can turn it really fast by just moving your crosshair to whereever you want to shoot at. Different tank classes have different weapons and movement: * The Stomper is a Heavy Assault Tank, moves like a snail but has a real Huge Gun and two rocket launchers for some nice fireworks. The huge gun might take a while to reload, which is the main disadvantage of this tank. * The Scourge is a Light Defense Tank and is quite fast (maybe even a shorter turn radius) and can drop landmines onto the ground. This is a low res game so the landmines will be hard to spot since the landmine sprites will be only 3*3 pixels or so :) * The Server is a Supply Tank and could be equipped with a crappy sub machine gun and a grenade launcher, but with the useful ability to refuel/repair teammates when they are near. He could also drop these medikits on the map so other tanks can pick them up if needed. * The Stealth is a Sniper Tank. It is definitely the class of tank for the players who like to play snipers in e.g. FPS games. It is small and fast, doesn't make any noise, and has an invisibility device that lasts for a few seconds. It is used to gather tactical information about the enemy and to mark artillery targets with a laser pointer :) It could even be able to move where other tanks can't go, like hovering above water etc. This class system really requires players to play as a team to achieve their objectives. Teamplay is the whole point of this game. The game should be balanced so that it is just not possible that a single Heavy Assault Tank can go on a rampage into the enemy homebase. He will at least need an engineer to escort him on its way, and a stealth tank needs to report which places should be avoided. This tank class system is just a draft and I actually have too many other ideas for the design but it would be way too much work. Also I haven't mentioned anything about the map design here. Target aim: Due to it being a multiplayer game it could be possible to make some money off it. Players will need the full version to play online. If that doesn't work out then there could be at least some incentives to register for avatars, medals, special community status, ... Running the game servers and matchmaking servers obviously costs money. I am not worried about piracy at all though, I believe when we carefully build a community around the game then it could regulate itself and weed out the bad guys. We will also implement server side checks but shouldn't waste too much time on that. Talent needed: You are a Game Programmer with some experience and you are interested in programming the actual game logic, not writing yet another pixel shader DirectX wrapper engine thing. We don't need that. I will not look at your Quake3 model class, but I will be impressed if you send me your finished Pacman or Breakout clone. This will be a rather slow moving project but you should have a few hours per week to work on the game, and I will put in at least the same amount of work. I don't really care where you come from but you need to speak (write) english and you must be at least 19 years old (for several reasons) and have a broadband connection for running the game (later). The most fragile and scary part of this game will obviously be the network code. This can be challenging even for experienced developers so you should really have a high interest in network related stuff. The real fun part of your job will be implementing the different game modes, tanks and weapons, and testing the game over the net. Compensation: No steady paycheck but I am willing to send some beer&pizza money (or for books) every once in a while. Also you can have an FTP account with some storage space and bandwidth for stuff. Until the game's release we will work out a fair arrangement for royalties. If you intend to get rich with this project, you are insane! Technology: The game will be written in C/Cpp. We will work with an existing framework that already runs on Mac/Linux/Windows. Additional libraries in use are all the SDL family libs, OpenGL, libcurl, enet, zlib. We will most likely use a distributed source control system, preferrably Darcs. Also I still have the source for my very crude prototype of the game which we can use and abuse for testing some features etc. Team structure: ME: Although I'm a programmer by trade I will do most of the content (design, pixelart, sounds) for this game. I will also maintain the C framework and the server (wiki, bugtracker, official website etc.) My remaining time I will spend on coding some tools and help you with some parts of the game, and I will frequently ensure the builds for all platforms are kept up to date. I am using Linux and also have a Mac here. YOU: will basically code the whole game and the network protocol. Your tasks include: a simple terrain system (Zelda-like tilebased maps) with a map editor, implementing an already designed entity (game object) database system, and of course all the hard work on the game code for client and server. There are the usual problems with synchronization, latency, dead-reckoning, ... There's also some user interface grunt work for server browsers, minimap, ... Roadmap: * The first 1 or 2 months we will install all the necessary tools (wiki, forum, website, bugtracker) and talk a lot about the game design and put the results on our wiki. * After that I will introduce you to the existing framework. At around christmas time we should be hacking on the game with a very clear idea of where we're going with all the features. If in doubts we can always abuse the old prototype code. * Ideally I would like to use the game itself to develop the game. That is, at some point we'll be able to meet in the in-game chat (which is already functional) and design maps with the built-in console and map editor. Large part of the game and engine is scripted, which makes this possible. Contact/Feedback I don't post a lot here but please send me a PM including your email address if you're interested. This project needs just one additional programmer, so please don't ask me about doing music or something. Any other feedback appreciated of course. [Edited by - basement on August 29, 2006 2:34:34 PM]