@mooonmagic @mousefountain played Thief 4, thought "stealth is dead"; Invisible Inc, "stealth is real"; AssCreed London, "huh I can do that"
— Roberto Yanga (@radiatoryang) January 1, 2016
... so, my 2016 New Years Resolution is to make a double-A 7/10 open world stealth game. It is tentatively called "Maven."
Part of my motivation involves wanting a break from my current cycle of sex games, part of it comes from wondering what if I made some gamer-pandering stuff for half of the year and then fiercely not-gamer stuff for the other half of the year and that's a funny contradiction... also, a bunch of stuff has suddenly aligned in my head to make this feasible.
I'm basically blending together elements from a bunch of games I've played:
- Thief's medieval "steampunk" bullshit
- Invisible Inc's use of global alarm levels and procedural levels
- Assassin's Creed's scale and demarcated restricted / unrestricted areas
- Metal Gear Solid 5's pokemon guard capturing / helicopter stuff
I'm also interested in various historical settings / themes:
- The rise and fall of organized labor in Butte, Montana
- Medieval Cordoba, European life under a hyper-educated caliphate
- Climate change, resource / material scarcity
- Women in positions of power
Some technologies and workflows and assets that are now coming together:
- Dynamic global illumination in Unity, dynamic cubemaps, dynamic skybox, pretty robust deferred renderer
- NavMesh carving in Unity, allows for some procedural generation / mutation without trying to develop my own navigation tech
- Acquired an obscene amount of decent medieval-European-themed 3D models
- Procedural generation for stealth games -- academic research at McGill University about assessing sneaking risk and automatically generating guard patrols for good coverage -- not really using their algorithms, but approximating similar logic and reasoning and metrics for my own systems
- Hundreds of free animations at Mixamo; sword combat animations, torch holding animations, etc.
Don't worry, I'll still keep working on gay sex games as well. I just got permission for music to use in the upcoming gay bar sim Attract Mode, and the next game is already half-done from a previous prototype. I'm planning on pushing those out, along with a Steam release of the first gay sex trilogy, in 2016.
But I'm also interested in pushing myself as a developer. Right now, I know I'm good at making small gay sex games that are really good at getting press and YouTuber coverage and zero money. What if I tried doing this other thing instead? If I fail, at least will I fail for different reasons from before?
