I’m generally an optimist. I try to see the good side of bad things. Sometimes, bad things turn out to not be bad things after all.
Something bad: we’re waiting for Lila Dreams to get back into production. The good thing: I get a lot of time to think more deeply about the game design while I’m working on smaller projects.
Right now I am working on a game design which isn’t Lila Dreams, but it is actually revealing a lot about some fundamentals that I hadn’t considered enough. Eventually, I would have, but with constant financial pressure bearing down on you when working on a game someone else is paying for, things just get skimmed and even skipped. It’s actually really nice to just think about the game and not have that constant nagging in my head to “hurry, hurry up!”
So this other game design has as its core mechanics a competitive combat system (which I hope to make into a multiplayer Flash game). In the course of studying other games and reading articles and all that, I am improving my process for developing a combat system. I don’t think that I would have seen some of the dimensions of the design that I see now without the “leisure” afforded by putting Lila Dreams on hold which has allowed me to marinate the ideas in my subconscious for a while.
This will undoubtedly lead to some changes in my ideas for classes and combat in general for Lila Dreams–especially if the combat is not in the context of side-scrolling control mechanics.
The more I think about it, the less I want combat to be restricted to the twitchy, 2d-plane of a side-scrolling game. It would not only open up some possibilities otherwise absent, making encounters a lot more tactical, it would also reduce technical hurdles. Action gameplay (even the more plodding sort I have planned) is a lot more demanding in terms of technical design as well as from physical resources, that is, the servers. (If combat isn’t from a side view, that change cascades to a bunch of others, but I won’t be talking about that for a while.) 
The real thing I’m wrestling with at the moment is how my new insights will affect the nature of classes and skills in Lila Dreams. The old debate arises: classes or skills? There will be some of both, as I’ve always planned. There are a lot of ways to make those two play nicely together, and by exploring various approaches in some smaller projects, that will lead to a stronger design for Lila Dreams.
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An interesting take I have seen on character growth is the system being designed for a French game called Wakfu. While there are classes there is still a great deal of variability in play style, and rather than character levels, the skills used level up as they are used.
Remember when we thought there might have been a playable object by Halloween 2008? That was nice…
Aushou, I agree, but we have to make the best of the situation.
Even though I can’t work on this directly right now, I do continue to evolve and refine the plans for it.
It’s a little bit like writing a novel or script, I think. If you let it sit for a while, new things bubble up, and it can only be good for the end product. Stepping away gives more perspective.
It could be that so many games are rushed because of financial pressures that a lot of design choices are poorly made simply because they are the path of least resistance. You know, “This game is about combat, but it’s a variation on that theme.” That saves time and puts you ahead since you know what you’re getting into.
Well, I like combat enough (as mentioned in this post, I’m working on something based solely around combat), but to be honest I want to be able to make Lila Dreams into a game that isn’t just about frickin’ combat! I’m willing to wait until I can make the game I want to make, even if it takes a lot longer. We’ll all be happier that way.
So, thank you for your continued support and patience. I really do appreciate it!
It’s completely unrelated, but I just heard of this and I thought you would be interested:
http://pushbuttonengine.com/
Haven’t used it one bit yet, but it might accelerate game development. It looks promising. I don’t know if it beats developing your own engine though.
Hey, thanks for the heads-up! Actually I’ve already got my grubby paws on the beta version.
I think it will be very, very useful because it will be like having a team working on the core engine for me! And, to be honest, that’s all the stuff I’m not particularly passionate about working on (sprite rendering, collision management, input mapping, etc). So, I fully plan to use it for all my future Flash projects. It will give me a big leg up.
It’s from some of the guys behind the various old Torque engines (TGE, TGB), so I know it’s got some good brains behind it. I’m also really happy that it is component-based like my engine, which is my preferred technical architecture. It’s also leveraging some of the libraries I use, like Box2d. Couldn’t get much more kosher than that, in my opinion.
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