BarFly Concepts and Ideas:

This page is for communicating the concepts and ideas for the layout and scenarios that comprise BarFly

The Concept

BarFly is going to be a game set at night (Barflies sleep all day), and will put the player in the shoes of a protagonist (male or female not decided, and possibly user-selectable) and his/her actions in and between various bars and clubs around town. The idea came up when I told some of my friends I was thinking of writing a game. They all asked 'what kind of game', and I said I wasn't too sure.

I wanted to make a game that would be interesting to a wide range of people, not just academic UNIX guys (NetHack), 'hardcore' gamers (Quake etc.) or bored administration staff (Minesweeper, Solitaire). I wanted to make a game that I would enjoy writing, and that my friends (though probably not my parents) will enjoy playing.

Some of the games that have held my attention for long periods of time have been adventure games - Sierra Kings Quests, Space Quests, LucasArts games like Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. I want my game to have humour, puzzle-solving and broad appeal like those games

After tossing a few ideas around and being met mostly with blank stares or some variant of 'I don't get it...', I was out in a pub having a couple of beers with a few friends and the idea came to me. The game would be about navigating around bars doing the stuff that goes on in them. Immediately, there were a chorus of ideas from around the table. This was unexpected but very welcome, and so, it seemed an idea with some real appeal was born.

The variety of ideas for concepts and in-game puzzles and activities was pretty broad. They included:

• Work behind the bar to get money to progess - Pulling pints correctly, mixing cocktail ingredients etc.
• Reconnecting kegs when they run out
• Couriering illicit drugs from bar to bar
• Picking up girls/guys
• Meeting entry criteria for various bars/clubs
• Having to win pool/darts competitions in-game to progress
• Complete dance moves successfully to progress
• Maintain correct balance of alcohol, stimulant drugs and food to avoid sleeping while not becoming too crazed and sick to get into bars or talk to people
• Maintain corect balance of 'self-respect' 'street-cred' and 'coolness' to progess

These are only ideas, and the final form the game takes was not entirely clear.

I have not yet come to a decision on the licensing of the game or it's supporting tools. I think I would like to make the game free (as in beer) for Linux/UNIX, possibly shareware for Windows, and maybe GPL the Tile Editing tools and game engine. I doubt the world really needs another isometric engine or editor, but if there had been a really good free one that I could find (Kyra looks good but C++ is not my thing.) I might have used it myself instead of writing my own. I will also have to document and clean up the code a bit before I could overcome the shame of dumping such garbage on an unsuspecting world. Let me know what you think about licensing on the Messageboard.

Several things were, however, set in stone:

• The game would be written in C. This is because, perversely, I have grown to like C (I used to code mostly in Perl and Java) and it does offer better performance than Java on my hardware.

  The game would be developed and run on Linux, because that is the OS I use.

  Porting to other platforms should be straightforward, since SDL is cross-platform.

• The game would run well on 'less-than-cutting-edge' hardware, for one thing because it is being developed on a P166 Laptop (my only machine at the moment).

  I am also more interested in making a decent game than derivative eye-candy. A worrying trend I have seen lately is the assumption that everybody has a 1.5GHz P4 or better with a $500 graphics accelerator, and that this is an excuse for the game/application to run like a dog on anything less. I think about the sheer number of operations per second that any Pentium class processor can perform, and am stupefied at what poor use of those operations many pieces of modern software appear to make.

  Even if I did have a 'real' computer, I think there is a place for 'old-school' graphics and gaming, and I think it is appropriate to try and start with something like this than to dive in and try to compete with gaming development houses that have tens or hundreds of staff and money and stuff.

• The game would be at least partially based on an isometric tile engine. I wanted to write one because I like the look, there were plenty of docs to help me do it, and also because I wanted a balance between game performance, applicability to interior and exterior views and ease of image production.

The Team

BarFly is being developed by a team of 1 person at the moment. Producing a game, especially a decent game, is a lot of work for one person, but as I am currently unemployed I have nothing much better to do. If you think you have something to offer the BarFly project, then by all means email me and let me know.