Davaris

Personally I don't think piracy can be stopped. However I think studios will survive if they think of their offerings as a service. That could mean asking their communities to donate to help finance the making of their next game. Or it could be only allowing access to the best parts of their forums (and developers) if people have bought the game, or donated at some point during its development. The band you mentioned seem to be doing something similar, in that the more a fan contributes, the more 'service' they get.

My idea is a cross between a state diagram and scripts. What you'd do is draw out the diagram (for everything that goes on in the game) with descriptions for the states and transitions in text, as well as a link to a script or to a lower sub-state diagram. If you pre built some unit scripts beforehand, with basic quest tasks/operations that are known to work correctly, you could lay out a correct RPG pretty quickly. Once that is done you would go in and add the detail, by adding to your unit scripts in an object oriented inheritance kind of way.

The books I know about are: GM MASTERY NPC Essentials Dungeon Master's Design Kit Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (I have this on order and hope it will be good) I hope there are more out there. . .

Someone should write a graphical quest designer program that can be dropped into a game engine and will run perfectly first time. It wouldn't surprise me if this has already been done by the larger game studios, because it would be very inefficient to script RPGs the old fashioned way.

I'm finding it difficult to find good books about game design. What I am interested in is what makes good quests, what makes characters interesting and how to make them grow. How to create stimulating game mechanics (mathematics of RPG quests/rule systems) and so on. So with the forum mods permission, I'd like to post a couple of books I know about and if anyone else has come across others, please post them as well.

This is great. For the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about a world, where the inhabitants make/repair themselves out of 1950s sci-fi junk.