Project Lazarus

Introduction

Going to be totally honest here. This game has very little likely hood of completion but will not stop me from continuing to try to make it a reality. My hope is to use this space as more of a development diary where one can organize the concepts and ideas that have come towards a more holistic concept with WIP pictures of geometry and design choices. With any luck people will be intrigued with this and can get some constructive criticism and maybe if im overly lucky people will be interested in getting involved and helping with the process.

Its been four years since this journey has started. When that happened I was only your average player with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the MMO game industry. Dont get me wrong many of these games where pivital to a brighter future and yet the evolution of these game types for the most part just feel like wow clones when for games of this nature why do they not feel more like echosystems at this point.

The players give some feeling of this nature but at this point the only game in my knowledge trying to rectify this is GW2 with the living world system they have created which is a good start. Now im constantly on free time doing studies on game phylosipy, taking that information and trying to create a game that is an echosystem driven by players involvement.

My experiance before that with actual game design and code is rather limited. Did a large scale world design in never winter nights package that came with the game, some game maker unfinished games and some basic website design back in the early 2k. Now i have a moderate understanding of houdini, a program that will be pivital in the process of this games development. Articy draft which is a possibility space engine. Lastly very limited expereance with unity and UDK which will admit needs lots of work.

Mostly anything that will be shown as images here in my diary will be from Houdini if its 3D rendered and Articy Draft if you see charts or spreadsheets of sort. This will help me better contextualize what the hope for the games end will be and with any luck will find someone with more actual game code experiance to help put the peaces from houdini and articy into motion. (they both have game engine plugins)

Now for the actual game info

The pictures below are roadmaps to my core world design. At first when making plans for capabilities the game should have was plate techtonics. Figured it would be very interesting stratigically if one could trigger the world to break appart rotate a portion of the land than meld back togeather over a short time in order to change the battlefield so to speak.

in this came the idea to design it around a similar concept to a rubix cube. This lead me to find a design which gave some interesting variation while also keeping things to a fairly simple lay out which can be seen in these pictures. the main colors red, yellow, blue represent the areas which will be contemplated how they can rotate and how much at a time. the other colors orange, green,purple represent how these zones intersect and by that will have edges which break off in different ways to mix up the flow but not the logic of the world.

The black wall which sections off the globe is meant to separate geographical regions. the north section will be a permafrost state, totally frozen snow falling down with a permanent Dawn. the south section will be the hell mouth, with lava flows, ash falling from the sky with a permanent Dusk. The four around the mid section will represent the elements similar to magic the gathering but defiantly not the same. So Fire, mountains. Earth, Forest. Water, Swamp. Air, Rolling Hills. These are subject to change as things go forwards but hopefully want to give the feel of all four elements play a huge role in those zones.

after taking all that in the next part is made more interesting. the world will have a day and night cycle. Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night, the speed and spread of this will need to be determined during testing as the factions or sides one plays on in the game will instrimental due to this cycle. one faction is stronger and able to function over all better in the day while the other the night. this means that constantly will the shift of empowerment change as dose the cycle of the light.

As I go forwards will talk more on the directions and paths hopping to be made in this project. For now going to keep it short and get back to it. Will post again soon.
#other