| Submitted by , posted on 08 October 2003 |

Image Description, by These are images from a game project I have been working on for the past two months. The game is called Chaos Chronicle, and it is going to be my submission for the 2004 Independent Games Festival, as well as my final project for my masters degree in Software Engineering. It's a multiplayer internet game, where two players take the role of gods, and the rest are adventurers. The gods' duties are to help or hinder the adventurers, based on the side they choose at the beginning. They then customize the world, placing dungeons and town pieces, while the heroes make their characters. The idea is to have a condensed adventure experience, completing a whole quest in one sitting, so the hero characters are abstracts of the stereotypical hero types. Throughout the game, the gods can guide the players, dropping helpful items, providing direction, or provide them with opposition, breeding monsters and crafting labyrinths that guard the treasure they seek. It's all part of an experiment in what I've come to call Simultaneous Disparate Interaction Models. Anyway, the images areas follows:
Header - the icons on the left are the symbols representing the different available character classes: Ranger, Warrior, Thief and Wizard. To the right of that is the first character model I have produced, that of the warrior.
Next row: On the left is a screenshot from my tile editing program. I created it, and the whole game, in director. The tile editor allowed me to make several map screens, 60 as of this writing, that conform to a certain format. These tiles are then randomly arranged, so that the facing sides match, into a world map. This map can be seen on the right. Between these two images are samples from the hero creation screen, with the elemental alignments and character attributes.
Directly below the tile editor is the dungeon editor screen. This will be close to what is seen by the gods in-game. The dungeon itself is randomly generated, then the gods "fill" rooms in by selecting areas bound by corridors. These rooms are then populated by monsters and treasure, etc.
To the right of this are two sample screens of the weather system in the game, on the left is snow, and the right one is rain. The hero interface is a 3rd person 3d view.
On the bottom left is a shot of one of the buildings the god can create, the temple. Characters can go here to revive their dead.
Finally, the bottom right is a screen of game in action, though some interface elements may change. Each quad that you can see on the unfinished tiles corresponds to one pixel on the map above, so the world ended up being pretty huge, which may or may not be changed for the betterment of gameplay. The whole thing is streamed, as well, so a character can walk from one end of creation to the other without a load screen of any sort.
With 7 weeks remaining, I have a long way to go, but I feel pretty positive about what I've got so far. Any questions, comments or job offers are welcome.
Rich Wilson
Starving artist, programmer & aspiring game developer
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/Rich_wilson

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