Recruiting: Modern Interpretation of Wasteland (DOS) Thread

I'm a huge fan of RPGs in general, for both console and computer. Some of my favorite games have to be the Fallout, Shin Megami Tensei, and The Elder Scrolls series. Naturally, I would want to work on games that mesh with these tastes. So I came up with the idea of re-imagining a game like Wasteland (originally for the DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64) and update it with modern gameplay and graphics based squarely on the mechanics and features of the original game. Not necessarily a remake, because we'll probably end up creating our own lore and such in the process, but a fitting tribute to the original game. Here, I'll address a few questions many of you who are interested may have.

"Why re-imagine Wasteland? Aren't the Fallout games the same thing?"
Wasteland and the Fallout series have a shared heritage in development, involving a few of the same people in their respective development teams, and many shared elements in their setting and lore. What isn't shared, however, is the focus and gameplay. Wasteland is rather nihilistic in comparison to it's offspring. While an RPG at heart, all of the characters and party members in Wasteland are expendable and replaceable as long as one character survives to requisition new troops from the Ranger H.Q., all that it costs is the skills that the dead party members had, as all new recruits are level 1. The effect of this on the player, psychologically, is that the characters aren't as important as the goal of the organization as a whole. In contrast, the Fallout series follows one character per game who could potentially recruit party members. When the main character died, the game ended, which is a more traditional RPG stance.

Gameplay-wise, Wasteland allowed you to split up your squad of Rangers at any point for character-specific tactics and skills. Even outside of combat, you could have separate teams split up between different areas and you can switch control to any of the teams. In Fallout, if you have party members, you have minimal control over them and there is no way to separate them to different locations for any functional reason of gameplay. The differences make Wasteland a bit more squad-based and tactical, like the old-school DOS equivalent to Rainbow Six, Full Spectrum Warrior, SWAT, or Ghost Recon with heavy Computer RPG elements, a unique hybrid, while Fallout is more like your normal Computer RPG/Action RPG series.

"So Wasteland is like Rainbow Six meets The Witcher? How would those mechanics work together in a re-imagining?"

Ideally, the focus, unlike most RPGs, would not be on building a singular character as much as building an organization. While an individual character's reputation amongst certain groups could be tracked (ala' Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas' karma and reputation systems) via smaller actions in gameplay, as larger actions (quests) are completed, the same systems could be applied to the organization as a whole. Eventually, a character's bad reputation could block that one character from negotiations with an NPC, another character with a better reputation could be used to better effect, though still effected a bit negatively by association to the character with the bad reputation. As such, reputations of your characters and organization could modify people's reactions to you and the quests made available to you. Other things like physical stats and skills/talents/perks would apply to individual characters and be developed by traditional level-up mechanics common to Computer RPGs.

The tactical aspects could be embedded in the roleplaying mechanics in obvious ways, like using different weapons, armor, ammo, and skills in situations as needed, but also in typical squad-based shooter fashion, with tactical keyboard commands for things like cover, checking rooms, splitting into groups, advancing, retreating to a previously-visited location, using special weapons like grenades or heavy weaponry on specific targets, etc. (hey, with so many keys on a keyboard, why not use them, amirite?). But the most important thing I think you could do with this kind of game is splitting your group to different areas of the game world, to make accomplishing different quests more timely and effective. Ideally, you could go from one group finishing a quest on one side of the game world, giving them some R&R at a safe location to recover, and take the recovery time for that team to use another previously-separated squad to start another quest on the other side of the map.

"Sounds awfully crazy and ambitious, why are you doing this?"
It is crazy, and it is huge, and I won't deny that it's hard to expect anyone to work on something like this without funds or pay, but this is precisely the reason I want to do it. I went to a college for art and design for about two years, came back home looking for work to pay off student loans and found that nobody in my general region was hiring in practically every career field. I don't live near any major business or game development studios. I live in the boonies, and am unemployed because I have no previous job experience under my belt, and nobody is hiring entry-level positions. My dream is to work on high-profile projects, but to get there at this point, I need something huge behind me to get there. If I could get a team of talented, highly-dedicated people to work on this with me, we could all have a ticket to professional careers in the field. If this project goes well, it would be the penultimate bookend to a proper resume.

"What kind of people do you need for this? What can you provide for this project?"

I'll need programmers, modelers, animators, texture artists, level designers, concept artists, and environmental artists for the time being. As for my experience, I've mostly worked on character and creature designs and writing, as well as directing a small team to work on a proof-of-concept flash game and boardgame. I'm currently actively working on expanding my talents by experimenting with Blender, the Unreal 3 engine, and the Source engine, as well as Python and C++ programming languages, some help with those would be appreciated as well as advice on different rendering and modelling programs and game engines. I'm still uncertain if I want us to work on this as a modification for a game or a full-fledged game in an existing engine, so I would be very grateful for any input and advice.

I hope to hear back from the community very soon, and to all who have read this, whether or not you plan to reply, thank you for taking the time to look this over.

Edited by: RioDragon

Sounds crazy enough to work!!!!

If you need music/sound design I'm interested!

M.soundcloud.com

Krafty.