I was wondering, what games inspired this. I recognize that it is like minecraft. I posted another topic that You (Paul) said that you liked Minecraft. The only reason I found this is by searching "Games related to Minecraft" So was Minceraft the main inspiration or any other games?
PS - I always wanted a game like this. Minecraft, but with more objects (such as slopes)
The truth is Minecraft was a pretty tiny part of my inspiration.
I've wanted to write my own RPG since the days of Ultima 3:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_III:_Exodus And back in those days, I made quite a few of my own simple top-down 2D RPG games... I just never finished any of them.
I've dabbled with random terrain generation as far back as 1992 when I wrote my first diamond squares implementation. I was very interested in simulating terrain and ecology. The computing power just wasn't there to do much interesting with it. A buddy of mine and I tried to take some of my random terrains and turn them into a top-down tile based thing similar to Ultima but the maps were always kind of boring when dissected like that.
In 2006, I was rereading my copy of "Texturing and Modeling" (
http://www.amazon.com/Texturing-Modeling-Procedural-Approach-Kaufmann/dp/1558608486) that I'd originally purchased somewhere around 1992. The fractal sections made much more sense to me this time so I combined them with some GIS layering/generation approaches that I'd worked on in 2001 when I was out of work. Using the inputs of one layer to feed the next and combine fractals. I had a nice little app that allowed me to edit the different fractals or add new layer types, etc. and see what the result would be. I could save these off as XML descriptors and images and stuff. (This app is actually available to donators in the donators group.)
This is what the main base Mythruna fractal looks like in the app:
At that time, I was trying to do more photo realistic style rendering of terrain using an early version of jMonkeyEngine (apparently before it was even 1.0). I had some terrain that I could paint procedural fences on and stuff but it was lots of work and writing shaders was a real pain back then. I had to do nearly everything from scratch... and work was pretty demanding back then and I was already doing 3D graphics at work to view hi-res 3D imagery, terrain, etc. I was having too much fun at work to obsess over a home-project.
Also, during those times I spent a lot of time writing mods for Neverwinter Nights. I was heavily involved in the modding community there and wrote a few utilities and systems that achieved some level of popularity. This is likely the game that has influenced me the most even if it's in the "I'm never going to do it like that" kind of way. It was a really nice game and a fun engine to play with.
Anyway, fast forward to November of 2010 and I was playing with the idea of making a space game. For fun and learning, I made a scale map of one of the decks of the NX-01 (Enterprise) from some hires pieces I found online. I've turned this into a giant poster and you can see that picture in a different thread. I was starting to get the itch to write a game again.
Work was less demanding and I wasn't really getting to work on graphics there as much anymore... and definitely hadn't done any 3D in a while. I had slowly managed to demote myself from Deputy Division Manager back down to just a developer guy where I preferred to be. Fun games like Oblivion were weighing heavily in my mind, etc... the time was getting ripe.
Around that time (maybe late december) I'd decided to try out that Minecraft game I'd heard about here and there. I spent a week or so obsessing over my castles and tunnels... figuring out how creepers and zombies were still making it into my caves, etc.. Then I started to hit it's limits. The things I wished it could do (some of which it now does anyway). Something in my brain just "clicked" one day. I asked myself why I was spending so much time in a game that I'd stopped enjoying when I could be writing my own game... and the "simpler" style meant some easy early momentum.
Having done 3D graphics in OpenGL for almost a decade at that point, I had a reasonably good idea of how it could be done... but I do admit to having downloaded the infiniminer source code just to confirm.
Anyway, I downloaded jMonkeyEngine 3 on a Friday and prototyped some stuff with block mesh generation and day/night lighting transitions. That Monday, January 31st 2011, I committed my first Mythruna code (called Mythra back then) to my source repository. Within 2-3 days, I'd take a raw dump of a map from my fractal generator (see above) and made it into a block engine. The next part of that two weeks was spent getting lighting and camera/terrain collision/physics going so you could walk around. So that first release on Februrary 14th or 15th or whatever... was two weeks of solid obsessed working. I quit watching TV or doing any other extracurricular activities. I worked my day job, ate, and worked on Mythruna. I still don't watch TV anymore but I do pay more attention to my family these days.
All of those old releases are still available if you want to play with them.
If you wanted to line up all of my influences then they would look something like:
-Ultima IV
-Every MUD I ever played in the 80s and early 90s. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD)
-Neverwinter Nights
-Oblivion
Minecraft was just a catalyst. It showed me that I could have a simpler "view" of the world and still get all of the stuff done that I was really interested in: the game part. In my heart, I still dream of a far-away future Mythruna 2.0 where the terrain is more like Skyrim but all of the game systems are otherwise the same. In the mean time, this one is pretty fun... even I get sucked into it for hours at a time still.
