The Tribes II

Jumping away from recent discouraging/depressing subjects, here's a post about The Tribes II.

But, I'll have to start with a bit about The Tribes I. I haven't made a post on it.
I started writing it a few years ago, back before I had internet access. I had plenty of time on my hands - I worked pretty much all morning, six to twelve with no interruptions, and after that I would work on and off for the rest of the day - probably putting in a total of about ten hours a day. I kept this up for two weeks, and I had what I ended up releasing on Phrogram's website - The Tribes. Screenshots:

It's a very low-tech game, visually. Behind the scenes, the NPC people have semi-complex personalities and are capable of gathering others to their cause, creating weapons and other items, and fighting rather effectively. There are 99 NPC characters on the map at once, all always active with very specialized AI so that the game runs quickly, and the NPCs are efficient and effective at making the game a challenge. The game runs on a day/night cycle (pretty much for visual effect only), requiring you to find somewhere safe to sleep at night. The problem with this is, almost nowhere is safe, if you're alone.

The ally/enemy system is highly complex. No one has set sides, and someone can be enemies to a friend's friends. People can be neutral to you as well. You, and all NPCs, get allies through trading, convincing them, or doing things for them. If you attack a neutral's allies, they become enemies with you. Civil war is completely possible, and in fact happens frequently.

The objective of the game is to become the ruler of all the tribes on the continent. A tribe is formed when a lot of people are allied to someone who gains much prestige through battle. Kills level you up in rank, and when you have high enough rank, you can give tasks to others in your tribe. When everyone is a member of your tribe, and no more fighting is going on, you win the game.

The game gained comparatively good reviews, and I decided last summer that I would make a sequel to it. Keeping with my theme of making original games, I decided it would be a full-fledged RTS/FPS/RPG cross. I decided that in The Tribes II, you could build mine stone, gather herbs, chop trees, build buildings and cities, recruit and organize armies and citizens, and of course, fight. I designed a huge world for it (though the world itself never received a name):

As you can probably guess from looking at the picture, I also decided that you'd be able to choose from a good number of "races" or species to play as. The world was designed to be ridiculously large (compared to most games I make) - it would take six hours to cross it from one side to the other. It would be dotted with cities and such - and as you've also guessed, I didn't want the terrain to be flat. I wanted obstacles, and things to make the terrain more interesting to navigate. The terrain itself is semi-dynamically generated every time you create a new world - you travel through what is essentially the same world, but it looks different every time.

You can see above pretty much everything I've added in. At the bottom you see the compass - it always points North. You can see the trees got an overhaul - there's more than one image for each. You can also see a variety of monsters and plants running around. Most of the pictures for the monsters are from an old game called Ragnarok - I lack an artist.

You can see above some of the colder regions in the north. Those hills are completely navigable, though at the moment they don't block enemy line-of-sight or anything like that. The above picture was taken before I added the monsters.

The world is kept in 400 regions (20x20), each about equal to twenty-five square miles, making the entire map about 10,000 square miles in area, and 100 miles across. As you can traverse it in six hours, you can go a lot faster than you could in real life, keeping gameplay constant. The world itself can have up to 40,000 people living and fighting in it - and while they unfortunately only act while in or near a loaded area, they can zone just like you can, which means you can't escape enemies by going over a zoning line.

The relationships between the races are designed to be dynamic - trading, for example, might increase relations and eventually cause the two races to ally with each other. Eventually you could completely wipe out a race by attacking it, or by persuading others to attack it.

I was planning on including a very in-depth magic system - far more spells than in Skyrim, in fact, though not as many types. These spells would allow you to even go as far as morphing terrain to suit your purposes: killing someone with a lake of lava sounds particularly attractive, doesn't it?

The best part about the game, in my opinion, is that you could have multiple characters in the same world. You could have one person start as a Giant, and another start as a Human, and playing as a human, you might build up a city, and playing as the Giant you could go and wreck it. If you die, the world isn't destroyed - you would be given the option to either revert to the last save (the last time you zoned, usually), or to start a new game in the same world. If you chose the second, you might eventually find evidence of your past characters being somewhere, or you might find a peasant in an inn singing a song about your other character's adventures. I also had it designed so you could actually level your character up - unlike The Tribes I, where you had certain stats that never changed once you respawned (which you could do unlimited times, until someone won).

The problem I finally ran into is this - I finally had to admit that I'd bitten off more than I could chew. If I had other programmers helping me, if I had a couple artists, I might be able to pull it off. Unfortunately, it was a bit too much for a single person to handle. I had to keep the entire volume of code below 7000 lines, and while I think I'd be able to manage it, it's just a bit much. The game folder is over 125 MB in size, and I'd expect it to get much larger than that. Maybe someday...