good to get some quick replies to my first post. thank you all for welcoming me here. Now I will tell you a few more ideas I have that could be used in Fallout 3, or future RPGs.
Idea 1 - 3rd Party interruptions in the dialogue screen. When you are intimidating or charming an NPC, there could be other NPCs who will potentially enter your conversation dialogue for the sake of defending another NPC or maybe to side with you. I know this could get quite confusing if multiple NPCs try to do it, but basically it would turn the dialogue screen into a turn-based chat room with multiple characters. This allows for group dynamics such as bullying, banding together, and playing people off of each other. There's a lot of dialogue in Fallout/Oblivion RPGs and I love it. It'd be nice to have more options for coercion and persuasion.

Idea 2 - Physical behavior representative of ability I think the time is long overdue for the characters in an RPG to move and fight in a manner that reflects their level of proficiency. Example: A Level 3 mage does not throw punches like Rocky Marciano, but more like somebody who has never been in a fist fight in their life. There should be different sets of sprites for different skill levels and talent. That would make leveling up physically noticeable on the battlefield, instead of just in how much damage you do. Your Level 12 Brawler can do overhead slams and baseball swings with a super sledge, while your level 3 Tech can't keep it straight enough to hit anything.
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That second idea is an interesting one, and something I think can only now really be explored. The problem in the past has always been a lack of storage space on both the media used to load the game and the memory inside the console or PC. These days we have more than enough storage and more than enough memory that runs nice and fast to be able to introduce more advanced variations in character modelling.

It would definitely be good to see characters physically develop more visually on screen. Many RPGs have already done this, but these elements have so far been cosmetic with you able to see the change in weapons and clothing/armour, but not any difference in actual fighting style based on their level of skill. That would be a nice cosmetic addition for sure.

Idea 1 is also an interesting idea, and one I've seen already in quite a few RPGs, all be it on quite a limited scale. In some RPGs you are taken into conversations via an overlay with 2D hand drawn representations of the characters. And these conversations can contain a variety of different characters entering and leaving the conversation as it proceeds. These have tended to be quite automated though, with you just selecting options at specific moments to change the course of the conversation, with it being a click to proceed for the rest of the interaction.

I think conversation control and handling must me one of the hardest things to perfect in a game. Get it wrong and you end up just getting bored having to sit through screen after screen of predefined text, just trying to reach the end so you can then actually do something within the game.
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Hello all,

Sorry that I was gone.
Regarding all those suggestions of more intelligent NPC and consequences of stealing etc. well I am all for it but I am not really the programmer, I can only relay all the ideas and suggestions to the people who will write all the script and such.

Hello nightrain,

You bring up a couple of interesting suggestions, I will relay them but as the project does not have much people now I am not sure when such features could be implemented (if at all)

One of the major problems is still that we have so little people, we need far more for such positions as;

-Writing (story/ideas)
-Graphics (ingame/art)
-Coding
-Scripting
-Map making
-Music

The whole recruiting business has been pushed on me, much to my dislike as I am not good at it, I don't have much contacts in all of this or know where to look for such people, and believe me I am trying.

The problem is, the people that have such skills are either already on a project, working professional with no interest in doing something like this after work.

I am really frustrated about this, if any of you have suggestions please give them.
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There are a number of places you can go to try and recruit some people into your project. Do searches for Game Fan Fiction as some of the writers of that might well be very interesting in writing scripts and story for a game. And the mod community is a great place to look for people for map making and in in game graphics modelling. Not sure where for the coding, but there are a lot of programmers forums and sites online so they should be easy to find.
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Hello Harrison,

I have tried to reach out to the mod community (Fallout anyway), asking for interested people to join up, but so far they respond with skepticism, thinking that this is another would be project that will disappear as quickly as it came.
Most often the few skilled people are already tied to a project or are not interested as they in real life already have their hands full.

I also signed up at the following places:

http://www.devmaster.net/
http://www.gamedev.net/

But I discovered that these are mostly places for people who are looking for paid work, working for free on a small project is not in it.


Regarding Fan Fiction, while I do not rule out that there are also some skilled people amongst this crowd, in general I find some of the work questionable (for the record, I find my own work also questionable), and its often people who walk around with the idea that they think is the "coolest".
I'd rather find some people who already have some experience with this, having made several stories and so on.

Such people could have responded on the add I made but I barely hear from them either.


In general I am very frustrated with the fact that I am basically appointed to find new people for this project, I told this friend of mine already that I stink at it as I know no contacts and am not familiar with this type of community.

I really try my best at finding people but I am simply not the right choice.
(this all really does make me angry and I feel that I am personally targetted)
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Have you tried any mod communities outside of just Fallout? The mod community as a whole is huge and many people like to get involved in their free time. And good mod groups can even lead to being offered jobs by developers eventually, so there is incentive for them to work on projects to show what they can do.
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Hello Harrison,

The problem is, I don't know any longer where to look.
I am not lazy, I am not unwilling, but as we in the Netherlands say, "I am on the end of my Latin."

The problem is, I barely have any experience with any of this, and when people are constant skeptical of you, you become very frustrated and angry.
I am already trying my best at coming up with ideas, trying to help someone else with his project, doing school work at home and maintaing a house hold at the same time, but I don't come to do anything effectively.

These days there are very little things I get real joy out of, I am not able to play any of the new games I got due to system and OS limitations, I am running behind on assignments, and I generally feel pissed at everything right now.


If any of you know of places with modelers, artists, writers, etc. please post them here, other game forums but perhaps also places were writers come together.
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I guess I went a little to much on the self pity tour huh?
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I haven't really been keeping up with this topic, but from what I read here, it seems you might be trying a little bit too hard, trying to carry more of a burden than you can carry? It doesn't sound like a particularly healthy thing to me, especially if you have to juggle school and home life along with it.

Remember that oftentimes, the best ideas and inspiration come when you're not actually actively working on a project. I used to do a little comic art drawing when I was younger, but I never could manage to draw anything good if I just sat down with a piece of pencil and paper. It just didn't work that way.

As for a gathering place for artists and fiction writers, have you been at Elfwood? I'm not sure if it's the right kind of folk over there, but it might be worth browsing a bit anyway, if only to get some inspiration.
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That is very true. Trying to force yourself to do anything creative doesn't work.

I personally find I get the most ideas and actual design done at night time and I sometimes stay up till 3 or 4am as I have ideas and can get them down. In contrast if I sit down in the daytime and try to force myself to do something new it hardly works. But once I have the initial ideas for something started that then isn't a problem, I can then work on it any time of the day or night without a problem. For me it is the initial ideas and beginnings that require just waiting for them to start.

Everyone's mind and thought processes work in a different way. It's just finding out the best way you personally find motivation and ideas.
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