PARPG

[mvBarracuda]

What is PARPG?:

PARPG is the working title of an isometric open source roleplaying game based on a post-apocalyptic setting. The project is currently still in its early planning stages. It will be a hommage to the golden age of RPGs of the late 90's and early postmillenium years. Main source of inspiration will be the Fallout series but also other classics of the genre, e.g. Arcanum and Planescape: Torment.

 

There are no fancy screenshots in this announcement so in case you're just looking for the eyecandy don't be disappointed: there is none at this stage of development.

 

The vapourware trap:

You've seen such announcements prolly over a dozen times before and the vast majority of them might have turned out as vapourware in the long run. There is no guarantee that PARPG might not suffer from the same tragic issues however I'm trying to explain why this project has a better chance of succeeding than some others that you've seen in the past.

 

My main source of confidence is my prior experience in the field of open source development. I was one of the founders of the open source game engine project FIFE and worked on the project over the course of three full years from 2005-2008. While working on FIFE I learnt a fair share about project management in general; but also about public relations, developer recruitment, maintenance of development-related infrastructure (SVN, Trac, Wiki) and software engineering in particular. This development background will hopefully help the PARPG project to succeed in the long run.

 

I know that it's impossible to remove doubts about the future development of the project at this moment. Some might still know me from my involvement in FIFE and I can hopefully convince the ones who don't know me yet with solid progress over the course of the next months.

 

Technical framework:

There is no final decision about all details of the technical framework of PARPG yet. What can be said is that the majority of the game-related code will be written in Python. Python - the 2.5x brach of it for now - was chosen as it features an easy to adopt clean syntax (yes, we are aware of the whitespace complaints), comes with a large standard library and seems to be well suited for easy and fast prototyping of game concepts. We might need to mix in some C or C++ in case time-critical code turns out to be too slow in Python.

 

The most important decision besides the programming language of choice is the question which engine to use for PARPG. FIFE might be well-suited for the task, however I'm not a programmer so I won't try to enforce any decision in this direction. One of the key principles of the project is subsidiarity: leave the important decisions to the departments that understand them. Therefore we'll sit together with interested programmers later to see what kind of choices we have (FIFE, GemRB, custom engine based on libraries like pyglet, etc.) and decide about it once we feel like having a clearer picture of what we want to achieve and what kind of technical framework would be needed for this purpose.

 

Setting, gameplay, key design elements:

The game is to be set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout. Key elements include:

* Cold war in the past ending with an atomic war with no winners.

* Collapse of society as we know it.

* Hardship to survive in a radiated environment, between bands of highway men, mutants and other deviant forces.

* Irony and parody of the cold war and the retro 50's vision of the future.

 

The exact setting is yet to be defined. There are numerous interesting locations to be picked. The game could be set in a snow-covered world, or in a more temperate climate or perhaps in a desert as the original Fallout. It could include successors to the remains of the Soviet Union (ever wondered how soviet vaults would look like?), remains of other allied nations or anything else, interesting enough to fit this setting. The final decision would be on a community of skilled people with imagination, in which great ideas would hopefully evolve.

 

Gameplay is planned to be a combination of meaningful, well-written dialogue and turn-based combat. The player would have multiple progress paths through the game and not all would include combat. The combat itself would be turn-based and include various tactics to overcome your foes.

 

Everything else besides that is up to the people who are attracted by the points outlined above, have experience in the relevant fields and would like to get involved in PARPG development. A compiled list of key design elements as well as important remarks about the project philosophy can be found at the PARPG wiki.

 

What is done:

So what is done so far? A couple of things: I've set up the basic infrastructure for the project (blog, forums, SVN, Trac, wiki) and I've started to outline the concept at the wiki. I might need three additional weeks to flesh out the remaining details that are currently flying around in my head but haven't been written down yet. Once these steps are tackled, I'll start to try to recruit developers for the other development departments: writing, gameplay, programming and graphics. Audio / music is not a top priority at the moment so we could get started without any developer in this field though having a composer or an audio engineer on the team is surely a nice plus.

 

What's still left to take care of:

A couple of things are unfinished business at the moment. I'm still waiting for a final decision from sourceforge if my hosting plea gets accepted. Hopefully they'll get back to me in the next couple of days. Furthermore there are a bunch of wiki articles left to flesh out. I'm not totally sure what kind of essential information is still missing before actual recruitment can start but that's why decided to announce the project at this early stage of development.

 

The purpose of this announcement:

I'm posting this announcement on a couple of forums where I'm either actively contributing or at least lurking on a regular basis. Hopefully there are community members out there who would like to provide early feedback. The best part of it is that there is still a lot of things to decide so your informed opinion can make a real difference.

 

Feel free to sign up at the forums, take a peek into the project wiki, visit the development blog or simply join the project's IRC channel. All kind of early feedback concerning the game (development) concept outlined at the project wiki is really appreciated.

 

Contributions:

Last but not least one final word about contributions: the project is still in its planning phase. That means I'm still busy writing down my ideas to convince other developers to join the effort. Once concepts are properly outlined - which will be hopefully around the end of February - official recruitment can start. The contribution policy is: power to the people who understand what they're doing and who don't mind spending some time on doing so. That means that although all kind of feedback is appreciated and will be taken into account, decision making will happen among the developers of the revelant department who invested their time into the project. We prefer the rule of decisions based on informed discussion over the rule of decisions by simple majority vote.

 

If you would like to know more about the next steps of PARPG development beyond the developers recruitment phase, feel free to check out the roadmap article at the wiki. Furthermore we recently compiled some first guidelines for interested contributors.

[Lare Kikkeli]

This project is doomed from the start, heh. You're basically doing Fallout with the Soviet Union instead of China. How about some originality? Post apocalypse is fine, just make it a bit more interesting than nuclear holocaust. A comet? How about Yellowstone explodes, leaving the whole USA in smoking ruin and the last "civilized" people are in say a small island in the pacific? Put an original twist to it, your idea as it is just screams of unoriginality. And learn to code or model or something if you want your game to get done for christ sakes, no one will take you seriously if all you have are "great" ideas ripped off from Fallout.

[Musopticon?]

As my native pal so deftly put; good luck and godspeed.

 

This is definitely something that can die at the fall of a leaf, but I hope you perservere.

 

And honestly, no super mutants please. And try not to rip everything from Fallout, ok? We'd like to see your own game and not some empty homage.

[mvBarracuda]

I already tried to clear up the situation at the PARPG blog today:

http://parpg.fifengine.de/wordpress/2009/0...n-check-failed/

 

The original project announcement draft didn't feature the large amount of Fallout references. When I created the draft I asked for feedback and it looked like my first version was actually too vague, missing vital settings and story information. So I decided to close all the gaps that were unfilled with material from Fallout. Which was a definite fault and I should have refrained from doing so. Anyway, here's the difference between the early draft and the final version that was posted:

http://parpg.fifengine.de/mediawiki/index....9&oldid=387

 

I don't have an informed opinion about details of setting and story yet so everyone is invited to contribute with suggestions. See the contribution wiki article linked above. I'll update the project announcement at the wiki and just post the updated version in the future. There was already some negative reaction concerning too many Fallout references at RPGcodex and I think this criticism is well grounded. Thanks for the feedback )

[Lare Kikkeli]

Being unoriginal is the least of your worries. Do you have any idea how much work goes into making a full game? It takes years of work from a dedicated team of skilled people. If you're planning on having any authority you better start learning some basic game development skills (coding, modeling etc.) and fast.

[Tigranes]

Um....

 

http://www.fifengine.de/

 

Foot attacks Lare Kikkeli!

 

Foot strikes Lare Kikkeli in mouth.

[mvBarracuda]

Concerning FIFE: while it can be said that development of the engine is pretty much stuck at the moment, the project showed solid progress over the course of the last 3 years. So while this might not be a perfect example of a project that succeeded in the end, it's a not a role model of a vapourware project that never took off either.

 

EDIT: To clarify my role in the project and prior (game) development experience:

http://parpg.fifengine.de/mediawiki/index....da#Why_PARPG.3F

Edited February 9, 2009 by mvBarracuda

[Azure79]

Good luck. Hope you finish what you set out to do.

[Lare Kikkeli]

Um....

 

http://www.fifengine.de/

 

Foot attacks Lare Kikkeli!

 

Foot strikes Lare Kikkeli in mouth.

 

So he was the "project manager" of a 3-year vapourware project with an end product he doesn't want to use himself, despite making the type of game the engine was made for. I think what we'll see is another Project FIFE. No offense dude but one great programmer is worth 10 project managers (100 of the kind who can't manage a project).

[mvBarracuda]

It's a pity that these are the Obsidian forums and not RPGcodex because they would prolly give you a nice custom title there for your intelligent reply.

 

A project with 7 major public releases and over 55.000 downloads can't be vapourware. Furthermore there are two promising games based on FIFE currently in development. That's not overwhelming but considering the status of the projects and their steady progress it's not bad either:

* OpenAnno: http://www.openanno.org/site/

* Zero-Projekt: http://zero-projekt.net/

 

It sounds like you've got no prior experience in game development and project management. While there is always room for improvement, the developers who worked together with me were quite satisfied with the way the project was coordinated.

 

I didn't get the comment about not waiting to use our own engine; looks like I'm not the only one who has failed a reading comprehension check. I clearly stated above that FIFE would be my prefered engine of choice for the project but as I'm not a programmer this is only a suggestion for now. Interested programmers will check all viable engine options and we'll decide together what would be the best choice. We won't need to decide immediately so I'm surprised that you can already say now that we won't use FIFE. I'm personally quite positive that we'll end up using it or maybe GemRB but let's see what the programmers say.

[Tigranes]

Obviously all amateur projects need to be treated with suspicion until they have anything to show, but LK you are going overboard.

 

That said, I have to say that I'm not sure why you have announced this so early Barracuda. Skipping the part about similarities to FO, cause I've already said that on the Codex, if you aren't sure what engine to use, what story to have, what setting to have, etc., why is the trumpet blowing? Is it because you would like to gather a team and recruit some people? You're not going to get a lot of enthusiastic, valuable feedback from the lay folk if you don't have a clear pitch to throw at us - i.e. if you came at us with a clear setting and story and game features list, then asked us "does this sound good", it would be more positive/productive. Likewise, if you're looking to recruit, let's say I am a programmer. All I know about your project is that it might use FIFE, it might not. It might have a Falloutish setting, it might not.

 

Just go with FIFE, you know. I always liked how it looked when you let us know on here, and it'd be a shame to work on it for so long then not use it.

[Bos_hybrid]

It's a pity that these are the Obsidian forums and not RPGcodex because they would prolly give you a nice custom title there for your intelligent reply.

 

The majority of the codex posters are equal to X360/PS3 fanboys. Very rarely does anything good or interesting come from topics/discussions there.

 

Anyway good luck with PARPG.

Edited February 10, 2009 by Bos_hybrid

[mvBarracuda]

Obviously all amateur projects need to be treated with suspicion until they have anything to show, but LK you are going overboard.

I appreciate critical feedback and there is much that can be criticized about the announcement in its current form. However I think calling FIFE vapourware and the pretty dumb comment about project management vs. programming department and their value is a bit over the top.

 

That said, I have to say that I'm not sure why you have announced this so early Barracuda. Skipping the part about similarities to FO, cause I've already said that on the Codex, if you aren't sure what engine to use, what story to have, what setting to have, etc., why is the trumpet blowing?

My main reason was receiving early feedback and that worked ) I can deal with it and the majority of criticism is well grounded so that helped me to see where more work is needed before I should announce the project at other places.

 

Is it because you would like to gather a team and recruit some people?

Recruitment won't start officially before early March. There is already some public interest and I think the people who got involved lately can boil down possible setting and gameplay options and once we've agreed on something more solid, we'll go to the public again for a second round of feedback.

 

You're not going to get a lot of enthusiastic, valuable feedback from the lay folk if you don't have a clear pitch to throw at us - i.e. if you came at us with a clear setting and story and game features list, then asked us "does this sound good", it would be more positive/productive. Likewise, if you're looking to recruit, let's say I am a programmer. All I know about your project is that it might use FIFE, it might not. It might have a Falloutish setting, it might not.

That's a bit black and white view in my opinon. The aspects that are already decided are:

* Python programming language.

* Turnbased, tactical combat.

* PA setting (though no decision about any details yet).

* Open source licensing for code and assets.

* Open development: public wiki, forums, SVN repository.

* (Meaningful) Choice and consequence.

* Isometric 2d look instead of going for a real 3d engine.

* Emphasis on well-written detailed dialogue.

* No carbon copy of the Fallout ruleset to avoid legal problems. Furthermore this gives us the chance to come up with something unique.

 

While this is not near a completely fleshed out game concept, it's not totally vague either. I've got no detailed plan for setting details and story; that's part of my concept: to leave these kind of fields to the people with the talent in them. I think I got the skills and the requirements to fulfill my tasks in the project management department. Delegating tasks to the specific departments is not an emergency solution but a vital key element of the project philsophy:

http://parpg.fifengine.de/mediawiki/index....ject_philosophy

 

Just go with FIFE, you know. I always liked how it looked when you let us know on here, and it'd be a shame to work on it for so long then not use it.

The engine proposal is a pragmatic one. I think that FIFE is _prolly_ best suited for the purpose; taking into account that isometric 2d graphics are set in stone. But there are other engines around and GemRB seems like a valid option too. Enforcing a certain engine decision against the informed opinion of the programming department would be foolish. They are the experts so why not let them take a look into FIFE and see if the engine would be viable for PARPG?

 

I'm confident that FIFE is viable but if not we'll need to think about alternatives anyway so why be stubborn and set something into stone instead of considering all options? It's not that we would need to decide on an engine within a week. The writing department can flesh out setting and story elements in the meanwhile, the gameplay designers can discuss ruleset and gameplay elements; that leaves the programming department with enough time left to not make a hasty decision just because of last minute panic.

[Humodour]

Um....

 

http://www.fifengine.de/

 

Foot attacks Lare Kikkeli!

 

Foot strikes Lare Kikkeli in mouth.

 

So he was the "project manager" of a 3-year vapourware project with an end product he doesn't want to use himself, despite making the type of game the engine was made for. I think what we'll see is another Project FIFE. No offense dude but one great programmer is worth 10 project managers (100 of the kind who can't manage a project).

 

You know, you really are sounding like a bitter jackarse with your unfounded accusations of doom, Lare.

 

If you really, really, really think that despite the odds and the fact that this project is already half done in terms of the engines (whether GemRB or FIFE), then why not simply ignore it and irrationally presume it failed to satisfy your predictions? Everybody wins: we don't have to listen to you moan, and you get to feel smug.

[mvBarracuda]

It's time for a little news update )

 

We've boiled down possible setting and game mechanics aspects in the last week. So far we've agreed on a nuclear winter setting; furthermore the game will take place in Northern Europe / Scandinavia. In case you're interested about the details, feel free to check out the full news update at the PARPG development blog.

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to yet another PARPG news update. In the course of the last week we've agreed on a bunch of setting-related aspects as well as game mechanics: branching tree dialogue, real isometric projection, rivaling factions, crafting use cases and post-game slides that show the consequences of your actions.

 

We're currently searching for interested Python and C++ programmers who would like to help us with engine evaluation for PARPG. Furthermore we're looking for a writer with passion for post-apocalyptic settings for the story department.

 

Zenbitz and qubodup started to compile lists of engine requirements and Lamoot collected information how other isometric games implement graphics-related features. Last but not least qubodup overworked the look of our blog, wiki and forums.

 

If you would like to know more about it, feel free to check out the full news update at the PARPG blog.

[Monte Carlo]

... but also other classics of the genre, e.g. Arcanum

 

You lost me there mate, because I'd rather feed my hand into a shredder than play Arcanum or anything remotely like it.

 

Good luck though.

 

Cheers

MC

[mvBarracuda]

Huh? What aspect of Arcanum did you dislike? One game mechanic of Arcanum was the crafting system that I really appreciated; so something similar is planned for PARPG as well. Furthermore steam punk was quite unconvential so that was great as well, though PARPG will feature a post-apocalyptic setting.

[Monte Carlo]

Arcanum?

 

Ugly to look at, pretentious, awful combat and depressing music. And I don't have a lot of time for crafting.

 

Apart from that, I loved it

 

Good luck with your game, heartily ignore grognards like me!

 

Cheers

MC

[Slowtrain]

Arcanum?

 

Ugly to look at, pretentious, awful combat and depressing music. And I don't have a lot of time for crafting.

 

Apart from that, I loved it

 

Good luck with your game, heartily ignore grognards like me!

 

Cheers

MC

 

Combat was poo. Animations were not so great. It was buggy as a roach motel. But other than that Arcanum was pretty fab.

 

I would love to play more games like it.

[Monte Carlo]

^ Hey, we can't agree all the time.

[Slowtrain]

^ Hey, we can't agree all the time.

 

 

But we should!

[mvBarracuda]

We're now looking for a talen for a talented writer, preferably a native speaker. Interest in post-apocalyptic fiction is the most important and only real requirement besides that. If you always wanted to get involved in the development of a game that aims to feature a sophisticated story and you like to work with other dedicated people who enjoy non-cliche RPGs, here is your chance )

 

We are also looking for people with experience writing for dialog trees and those familiar with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and other areas near the Baltic Sea.

Edited February 28, 2009 by mvBarracuda

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to yet another weekly PARPG update! This time we

[mvBarracuda]

Heya and welcome to your weekly dose of post-apocalyptic development news. Looks like we are picking up quite some speed lately - at least the number of topics to cover in each news update is growing and growing. I'll keep things short this time and you simply click through the various links if you find a topic of interest.

 

We got covered at the freegamer blog some days ago and agreed upon a first license for the assets we'll create. PARPG got it's own top level domain now and zenbitz was on a game design spree last week again.

 

Icelus came up with a proposal for a story format and suddenly a lot of writers popped up and filled up the writing board of the forums.

 

Last but not least we're currently discussing how the game can be challenging while avoiding universal frustration. Feel free to jump into the permadeath thread at the forums right away.

 

Interested in all the details? Check out the full news update at the PARPG blog (now featuring subdomain candy!).