Michael, Yeah, I understand where you are coming from. However, it is unrealistic for a community our size and with one or two man operations. Its not possible for a single indi developer to crank out anything remotely as advanced or complex as Final Fantasy. Although, it might be possible to create something on a smaller scale.
Its one thing for a single developer to spend a year or two writing say 50,000 lines of code and quite another for a company who can hire fully trained teams of specialists who can crank out millions of lines a code per year. That's in part why there is no Final Fantasy or Galaxy Civilization games for the VI audio games community. No one is willing to spend the 5 to 10 years it will take to produce a single game on that level. Certainly not me. Unfortunately, its not a simple case of getting all the VI game developers together to do it. We all use different programming languages, different development tools, and are pretty individual on how we do things. For instance, I consider myself primarily a C++ developer. David Greenwood from GMA is a Visual Basic 6 programmer. For us to be able to colaberate on a project one of us would have to switch programming languages just to get started unless we picked a tool like the GMA Engine which I feel is out of date considering Visual Basic 6 is no longer supported on Windows 7 or on the Windows 8 beta. This doesn't even count the potential for cross-platform design and certain areas of game development I've been researching for quite some time. As most VI game developers are Windows only users we could hardly agree if one developer uses a Mac, another uses Linux, and all the rest use Windows. Who's platform takes priority? Anyway, what I'm saying is its not practical. You need a dedicated team with similar skills, similar level of training, same programming language, tools, operating system, etc in order to pull off a project like Final Fantasy. The VI audio game developers just do not have those resources to speak of. As for using Gamebooks for game ideas its a matter of copyrights. Anything and everything game related is copyrighted. You can only use a game story and characters if the author or company who produces that work gives you written permission, or that it is within the fair use terms of the copyright laws. Otherwise using a copyrighted work without permission can end up getting you fined, sued, or at the very least hastled by the copyright holder. So its generally not good practice to go around steeling someone's work. I will say, however, that I've been working on writing documents here and there for a potential RPG game. It is an audio/text adventure, but as I've got many other things on my plate it could be a very very long time before I actually work on it if at all. I've borrowed some design elements from Entombed, but is a text adventure type game more like Sryth with several cities, individual quests, and lots of weapons and armor combinations. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
