I once tried to figure out some general components that many games could use. It’s a much harder thing to do than you realize. If you want to design these systems that will be usable in, say, 50% of games, and will take a sensible amount of time to develop, let me know and I’ll do it.
Those would have to be designed after game genres. If you’re actually up for it I would happily let you know what an amateur programmer but a professional artist would be interested in using. Some time back I saw a couple of these game presets for the blender game engine and just out of curiosity I opened them up and a lot of uncessary features, a lot of clutter and stuff all over the screen.
A game kit shouldn’t try to push a game genre into something unique, the thing I looked at for example was a fps shooter kit in which you could zoom in and out the camera. From a first person to a third person view. Not really necessary, what if the guy wanted to just create a first person shooter or just create a third person shooter. It’s not always as simple as just deleting stuff and can often be confusing for people who aren’t programmers to re-purpose something like that into something more simple.
Here are the game genres kits could be created for:
•Platformer games
•Sidescroller games
•First person shooter games
•Fighting games
•Open world rpg games
•Linear rpg games
•Racing games
Strategy games might be too hard to create a kit for in my opinion. It would be best to design these kits into the most simple form of mentioned genres.
A platofmer kit would be a kit in which all the gameplay elements are done already. You’ve got save points, a main menu from which you can start a new game or load a new game. Decent control scheme modeled on something like Spyro the dragon, camera collision and very basic enemies that you can jump on. A health bar, being able to fade the screen to black by just activating a variable or sending a message. Everything documented in a nice text file. The content creator wouldn’t have to worry about anything, he could start working at the character, at the animations, at the levels and assets and at the script.
The most important thing in these game kits would have to be intuitevely designed and easily to be picked up and wrap your head around in less than an hour. The advanced programming wouldn’t have to be explained but something that you would think is simple, like how to replace the character’s model and animations or how to change the textures on the main menu that stuff would have to be explained in detail so the person, when it’s time to repurpose the game kit into a better looking game could just open up the text document and follow the instructions from point to point.
Same would have to be done for the other game genres, good thing is that if anybody would ever attempt to create these kits. Much could be reused, saving and loading for example, the main menus. The challenges would be the roleplaying games and the fighting games. Fighting games mainly because you’ll need an animated dummy and quite advanced AI. There’s an argument that a fighting game might be too much work. The rpg games might also be much work since you’ll have to create stats, a leveling up system and for the linear rpg games a battle system similar to final fantasy. Me and some other guy actually worked on this awhile back and we got quite far but were ultimately discouraged by the pre rendered backgrounds that appeared in the old JRPG games.
Anyway if you’re interested in creating any of these kits send me a pm and I’ll happily help you out, I could give you directions as to what a non programmer would be interested in using and create some assets that the kits could use. :rolleyes:
I know this because many of my ex-colleagues are working in those companies.
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