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Salutations. Yes I am wordy and I like "quotes".
I represent a group of young tech-savvy entrepreneurs seeking to actualize their communitive creativity by the actualization of a intangible super-happy-fun-mega-rad virtual stimulii.
(Translation: Hi, I'm Adam. A bunch of my nerd friends like Graal and want to make a playerworld. I like Ice Cream.)
Okay... sorry. I'm bad at first impressions. Also spelling and grammar. Anyway, Stephen/Unixmad/Whomever has my 44 dollars for a VIP membership so I think I'm already on someone's good side.
I'll start over.
{--Begin Background information--}
Hi, I'm Adam. I used to play Graal waaaaay back in the early days before it went pay-for-play. I have always been a fan of the classic SNES games. Games to me were just more FUN when framerates didn't matter. The 3D revolution is great and all, but I've never seen a 3D character that captures the essence and character of a 16x32x256 sprite. I've had plenty of experiences with 3D as well, I'm the proud owner of a Radeon 9700, and nVidia's Dawn (modified to run with Rady) demo is the closest thing to virtual porn I'm still awed by it.
Alas, 3D has never really given me the level of appreciation that minimalist, last generation 2D games have given. I've got my leaked alpha of Doom 3, Unreal 2, and the lot (which I do play... often), but I still find myself settling down for a good game of Chrono Trigger more than anything else. Before game companies spent more time squeezing extra polys and high-rez textures, games to me were... do I dare say it ...more fun. Before you assume I'm some nostalgic 30-something bald pedophile, let me tell you that I'm not 30-something, but rather the young age of ~6080 days.
I'll get to the point, I like games. I have many friends who also like games. I am talented with a computer. I have many friends who are talented with a computer. We are bored. We need a project. Last year in Pre-Calculus we kicked around the idea of this little world in our heads, to therein be converted to a "really really cool" game after we've all been through college (I'm praying for MIT). We basically just started throwing out these ideas we had all had for a nice little universe, complete with storyline, races, etc. It was all in good fun, I knew Software Development wasn't for me, I don't like sitting behind a desk for hours writing bank software while my wrist turned to chalk. Heck, I had to take a good deal of time explaining how it is "really really long and hard to program a game engine, and no just because your brother is coming in from college that doesn't mean he'll 'teach' you Visual C++ in a week." The whole "universe" was a fun idea for us, and I thought we had enough original, applicable ideas to give a certainly different experience than the standard "mideval world, complete X task to win" theme.
The group pretty much brushed off the whole idea after a while. We talked about it, no one really had anyway to make it all a reality. I still kept it in mind however. Our little "world" seemed to strike a cord with me. (Now, don't go assume I'm some sort of escapist, fantasy, loser that likes dressing up like chewbacca and building model spaceships.) I've spend a good deal of my childhood free-time playing videogames, and the experience has put many an idea in my head.
Now, here comes the part where Graal fits in... but first: I tried looking around for some basic game/RPG engines that might fit the bill for a nice "rough sketch" of what I could do. The only program that really caught my eye was "RPG Maker 2000", which was a japanese program translated by a Russian man into Engrish. At first, the program was amazing. It had some very nice tile and layer controls, EXTREMLY easy to manipulate "objects" and was built to make a completely heartless, carbon copy Final Fantasy rip-off. After a few days I hated it. It had no programming language, just 90 "actions" you could call and a completely illogical switch/flag/array/whatever system. Plus you could only move in a grid formation.
Then I thought: Hey, I remember that old Online game I used to play a few years back. What was it... Graal? Yeah, the Zelda Online thingy. I redownloaded the client, took a refresher on the editor, (I once made pretty mean guildhouse, never submitted though) and I started messing around. I made my own tileset, then promptly realized that after testing that I had no control over whether X tile blocks, does Y, or whatever.
I then go check out Graal's website. Hey! New stuff! What's "Graal Kingdoms"? I take a look, see the very nice lighting effects, simple presentation, and POWERFUL scripting abilities all over again. Yay-happy-smiles.
{--End Background Information--}
In a nutshell for those of you who hate reading, Graal has an incredible engine for our needs. It's 2D, it supports very nice detailed animation, the new version has a wonderful terrain system, (this is important for our "world", I'll get into more later,) the style of fighting is Action RPG (My FAVORITE), the scripting language is phenominal compared to other games, it has (massive) online play, it isn't Everquest, and it isn't quite so large and commercial that you never get to "meet" the creators.
I'm splitting this up into two posts, because there is a 10,000 character limit and I'm wordy.|
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06-29-2003, 08:25 AM
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