Damasca Neo 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Dart Zaidyer]

Bowlich and I have been brainstorming for the past week or two, trying to come up with a way to develop a playable Damasca experience in our current state. We realize that it's not possible to fulfill our original mission with an active dev team of less than five people, especially given that it's getting harder and harder to expand a team and keep it active.

We've come up with a scaled-down game design that incorporates the following guidelines in order to ensure that it remains feasible. This project needs only three team members to function: One programmer/script writer and two general developers. It can also use our choice of either the Graal engine (which has the advantage of being complete) or our TMW variant (which has the advantage of us being able to do whatever the hell we want to it).

• The game must remain small in scope. During our heyday on GServers, we never had many more than 10 simultaneous players at peak times. Even given the exposure we had on the official serverlist for a while, we never went past 30.
  
• Because it's very difficult to get a sprite artist, all graphics will either call upon our Damasca Classic library or we can rip liberally from Zelda and Mana. And as difficult as it is to get a pixel artist, it's nigh impossible to find one who can do hi-res graphics meant for a 640x480-minimum screen, so any new art will probably have to be rendered for a 320x240 gameplay environment and then enlarged, with only rare exceptions like the UI.
  
• To demonstrate that we mean business, we will have to develop the game world regardless of whether or not we have a programmer/script writer on our side. Finished content is much more attractive than none at all.
  
• Kingdoms will have to be re-ordered slightly to compensate for the 10-player average. Allied Kingdoms would effectively be treated as branches of the same faction, meaning they share scores and conquests.
  

I have detailed the game in a Design Document and reviewed it with Bowlich, although I can't post it at the moment as it is currently on my other machine. It only requires a few small modifications to bring up to speed, and then I will post it here.
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Remember: Friends don't let moons eat monkeys.

[Shaun]

Sphere may be a viable alternative to a Graal engine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_%28program%29

Screenshots of some of the stuff done with it can be seen here:

http://www.spheredev.org/smforums/index.php/topic,282.msg2714.html#msg2714
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[Scythe]

I played around with Sphere "back in the day" and didn't really get into it. But it looks like it may have come a little ways since then. According to that wiki link there was a version that used python? I love python, its a shame it was never really integrated else I'd jump on that like none other, of course I could always go and learn JS as well. And it has network functionality according to the wiki, so I see no reason it wouldn't work.
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"We must SPAM! It is our lifeblood! SPAM FOR THE SUCCESS OF DAMASCA!" - Bowlich

[Sakiro A.]

You know, I suggested to you punks YEARS ago, many years ago, that we ought to use Ika to develop Damasca -- a similar game engine in the vein of Sphere, which uses Python -- since we wouldn't have the man power to, essentially, reinvent the wheel and make an engine from scratch.

I just love being right, always.








ALWAYS.

Although I know that if we went that route right now you'd just scrap it again in a month (or several years) and just make a GServer anyway. Don't opt towards futility, guys.

You know, when I heard from Anth you had a GServer up I had planned to log on at least once and be a lousy troll, but I guess I shouldn't have assumed you'd keep anything up for two weeks...
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Gagging, here. Maybe if you existed outside of my computer you could help me. What a pitiable existence you lead.

[Dart Zaidyer]

Here is the preliminary design doc in RTF format:

http://runefox.net/damasca/designdoc-damascaneo2.rtf

Please be sure to post any questions or comments you may have.

EDIT: I just noticed you guys suggested Sphere and Ika as engine alternatives. While I sincerely doubt we'd be able to work with them using only a three-man dev team (More to create from scratch), if you are serious enough about it, we can give it a whirl.
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Remember: Friends don't let moons eat monkeys.

[Shaun]

I'm far too busy to be serious about Damasca anymore, personally. Sorry.
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