Most games can be boiled down to isolated game mechanics found on the back of the box. Very few games boldly list Chopping Wood: Chop the hell out of wood just like in real life. I ask myself a question posed to me a zillion times by a man named James Landes, "But is it fun?" In this case I ask myself, is chopping wood fun?
I used to love playing Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans, in fact, it was the first game I had ever played. I would play for hours before school in the morning, and for hours more after school (I was 5, no bills to pay). One aspect of the game that I loved was chopping individual wood nodes, creating shapes, and then using that wood to build buildings. This fascination of chopping wood continued to Warcraft II, Age of Empires II, Tropico 3 & 4, and all manner of rts games that followed. I watch people chop wood in Skyrim and other first person RPGs and wonder... "Is it fun?"
I suppose this enjoyment I get from chopping wood has to do with taking something that is nothing... just a stand of trees. Changing my environment by removing them, and then use something that I took from my environment to change it further. I built a house, a farm, a barracks, anything and at the same time nothing, because the map can be reloaded and everything I have done erased. I love Minecraft, and I can't help but notice that this mechanic is all the game has to rest on. Load world > chop wood > make things, lather, rinse, repeat. One might be lead to believe that this is some sort of Manifest Destiny, but it is not. Minecraft is not a fundamentally American experience, it is a collective experience of millions. It is fun. Some people do not understand why, and I think I don't exactly get it either. Why does a carpenter make shelves all day? We are making something, from nothing, and in many cases receiving no recognition.
So, chopping wood?:
I stated in a previous post that I have been agonizing over a first person city building game (though there are rumbles of that coming out of Godus). I have done so much soul searching over the past few days about first person 3D, first person 2D with sprite animation, and classical 2D city building. As much as I would love to just jump in and start coding this thing I felt that stepping back and examining game mechanics was necessary. The easiest route would definitely be a Zeus style city builder (see Zeus) because each building uses a single sprite though all the walkers get 4 plus all the animations probably somewhere around 20 sprites per walker. Still, heaps of work.
The original idea is to use a Dungeon Keeper two style game mixed with a more traditional city builder. Again, that is a lot of work, but the immersion aspect is what I enjoy. I enjoyed being able to play Dungeon Keeper 2 from the perspective of a minion and being able to toil away breaking blocks. I feel for this reason I feel that a first person city builder could have an incredible attachment between the person and place.
Still no wood?:
So I think this is where I am going to start, I have lots of old game ideas from back when I coded muds. One of them was about dropping myself in a forest some place and setting up shop. There is so much involved (as I live in a forest) in something so simple as building structures. Things like clearing away brush and grasses so that you don't get maimed by any number of small fanged creatures and cutting down trees for use (there it is, chopping wood).
So lets boil all of this down to something very simple, chopping wood (insert game design metaphor here). Something so simple it has been done in video games since the 90's (and before?). I am going to setup a wood chopping simulator. I will start small by creating a hand made forest out of very low polly trees, most likely copy and pasted from Blender Cookie or something similar. The mechanic is deceptively complex:
First my NPC must be put into a group that manages the cutting of wood, most likely lumberjack or outdoorsman or whatever I choose for the final version. Then I have to mark the trees I want to be cut in first person mode, or mark the trees which I do NOT want to be cut for decoration. My NPC needs to be checking in real time for work that needs to be done. Walk to the nearest tree, and actually cut it down. Once it is down a variety of things needs to happen, first I would say that the tree has to be prepared (de-limbed, and either cut into blocks or left as a log.) This will most likely be a canned animation where the NPC swings an axe and things fly up in the air like leaves. Then comes the tricky part, the wood has to move to either a worksite or to some sort of community storage area. Good luck moving a log by one's self like a wood cutter in Tropico. For now, our NPC will have super human strength and just move it to where it needs to go, in the old log yard/ work site. It seems simple and unimportant but there is a lot that needs to be done.
TLDNR:
1) Mark Trees
2) NPC interprets marks and does work
3) NPC prepares tree
4) NPC delivers tree in 30 minutes or less (otherwise it is free)
5) Profit
To Do List:
Make Tree in 3 pieces: Stump, Trunk, Limbs (leaves can fall off turning cutting animation)
Eureka Moment: Trees can use leaves/ needles as an indication of how far through the cutting process it is. Swing one-five tree lurches and a portion of the leaves dissapear, etc, all the leaves are gone when it hits the ground. Cleans up the need for high polly leaves etc.
Make my person, and animate his/her walking/ ax handling skills. Code EVERYTHING.
YAY:
Hopefully I can use this to work up a proof of concept, and determine if, in fact, chopping wood is fun. A final proof of concept would have a largeish tree stand (perhaps 100 trees) and a work force of 10 NPCs who will be able to divide the work to be done amongst them. It would be interesting if I could make people cut trees in tandem from either side like the old loggers. Other concepts are making types of trees and wood, and different shapes and sizes. Essentially, cutting wood could be its own game like Farming Simulator, but that wouldn't be very fun... or wood it? (Thats right, I said it)
Guess that is enough for now.
Sairtar
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