You enjoy playing Skyrim for the same reason I enjoyed it and, probably, everyone else - it's a medieval fantasy simulator in open world where you can freely choose your character's name, race, gender and appearance. Then you can freely move anywhere you want. What alternatives you have? There're like... no such games? And if person doesn't know (yet) how cheaply made this game is and that every mechanic is faked and doesn't really do/change anything, because the whole game is just a show (literally ALL players actions have literally ZERO consequences), then such person will even have a lot of fun playing it. Then there're mods that can completely change they way you're playing the game allowing you to prolong the time you spend on this game. Unfortunately there're zero mods that change the fact that your actions have zero consequences. Not even a single overhaul does it, but it's normal, because it'll be easier to create your own game, than to make such mod, lol.
By consequences I mean:
Imagine the village A, which is under attack by local bandits, who rob their food and women from time to time. Then you come into that village and they ask you to help. Then there's another village B, which is in good relations with those bandits (may be they're even relatives or same gang), and they want to control something from village A, so they don't need to rely on their "friends", because they want domination, and yet they can't do that openly, because it'll ruin their reputation with the rest of the world. You can either kill the bandits and make village A your friends and make village B somewhat mad at you and receive good global reputation, village A will now have better shops and may be even offer other services. Or you can persuade village A into cooperation with village B and have protection from bandits, making you "Bandit friend" which will make all local bandits neutral to you, you'll also have better services in village B, but you'll have bad global reputation. Or you can kill main guy of bandits in some challenge, if you meet the requirements (may be charisma or some background or even race), become their leader and then set your own rules - you can stop raiding village A or not, you can even start raiding village B or not, or use your own gang for other quests somewhere else. In other words you'll have strategic advantage now. Or you can simply say "screw you all" and ignore it and then after some in-game time a random thing will happen: village A may find good party of adventurers who killed the bandits or village B tired of pretending to be good guys and occupied village A and then other villages declared war on them to liberate it. Or bandits became very bold and independent, may be a new leader appeared, who is smarter and stronger, and now they raid both villages and even beyond, because nothing can stop them. And this is just examples I made up while typing this post, now put 100 things like that in a single world and you'll have RPG + strategy at the same time. Players will see that their actions (or lack of actions) actually have consequences. And, ironically, it's shouldn't be hard to do: simply make a slow paced real time 4X strategy for AI. Then make RPG for the player inside that 4X strategy. I mean, yes, of couse it's hard... but from "design" or "idea" point of view, it shouldn't be something impossible. People think it's very hard to make RPG where you live in truly dynamic world, but it's not - game devs already did it all, it's simply scattered among different game genres. RTS or 4X strategy will provide you with dynamic world, especially if you implement somewhat realistic economy, like in Settlers2, where lumberjacks cut down trees, then trees are made into planks, then masons cut stones and then builders use them to build structures, then hunters/fishers/farmers generate food for miners (but better for everyone), who in return gather metals/coal, which is used for tools/weapons/armors, etc. Now add player diplomacy like in Civilization, add player character like in Skyrim and here you go - perfect medieval fantasy simulator where literally every player's action actually has consequences, because the world is a sandbox.
What? People ask money for THIS? You don't need to know how to code to make it yourself, it's the most primitive and simple features of any game. Plus, assets like that are usually (or may be always?) for general use. In other words aren't optimized, because their creator made it for non-specific project. And that's one of the reasons why games have loading screens/low FPS :D
Seriously, to move character using either physics or grid or I don't know - nodes (which is essentially a grid) - is a trivial task. Especially in Unity, with its documentation. Although I advise to not rely on tutorials or forums for the same exact reason - they're not optimized. For example if you google how to make square grid tile pathfinding on Unity, you may find a video, where some IT guy creates tons of classes and tons of functions and then yeah, it works! Except that it'll destroy your FPS, because using OOP in pathfinding or even in game development in general is a suicide. Ideally your game must be within single class using only locals and ptivate-statics. Try not to use "new" keyword to achieve what you need, unless it's in the very beginning (Awake). Try to create everything right after player launched the game. Then simply reuse that memory, this way you will never trigger GC and thus player will never experience lag spike. If you're using Unity's physics, then you must have no more than 1 FixedUpdate in the whole project. And no matter what you're using, you must have no more than 1 Update in the whole project.
But all of is possible only if you 100% know what you're doing from the very start till the end. Also it's mostly for one-man-projects, or 2nd+ person must have no relation to coding at all. In other words it's for 1-programmer team. Because 2 coders will have hard time working with 1 huge script, which is whole game. Unless they're twins who think the same and never code at the same time (or else there will be problems with syncing, as they will edit the same file).
I disagree to what people say about Skyrim, I played it a lot and modded it too, it's one of the most primitive and cheap games in the history of game industry. I can remake Skyrim clone in Unity in few days, if we don't take into account voice acting and visuals. This game is a perfect example of what happened to game industry after businessmen completely replaced game designers and artists. This game is just one huge pile of fake and illusion that looks cool and feels epic, while in reality it's more primitive than very first computer RPGs ever made.
It's basically just a courier boy simulator, the whole game has only 3 quests:
1) Go there, kill that thing.
2) Go there, grab that thing and return it.
3) Go there, talk to that guy, he'll either give quest #1, #2, #3 or end the chain.
That's it. Even main quest simply consists of these simple unrelated "quests". Faction quests are also just a chain of primitive errand tasks. This game is so generic, that you simply can't make it even more generic.
In order to create Skyrim clone on any free game engine you simply need:
1) Generate few hundreds or thousands quests like I mentioned above.
2) Now let those quests generate NPCs and targets, including dungeons.
3) Now generate some cities and shuffle ~80% of those NPCs across those cities, the rest will be in wilderness or dungeons. Most targets will be in dungeons, some in cities.
4) Generate the most idiotic and primitive loot system where most numbers are taken randomly from the sky and make no sense (because if you do everything balanced, then it won't be a Skyrim clone).
5) Intentionally make terrain geometry very non-flat, designed for player character and not for NPCs to ensure that AI will constantly stuck, so it looks more like Skyrim. Also make sure you make pathfinding very unoptimized, so players will have low FPS when crowded areas, when all NPCs decide to move somewhere.
6) Every few N random minutes roll random number between 1 and 100, if rolls 1 - simulate crash to desktop.
7) Every time you load a cell, roll random number between 1 and 500, if rolls 1 - simulate freeze during loading screen. Oh yes, make everything use different textures and unoptimized models, and make open world really an open world (instead of simply using the same small area where you simply change terrain meshes and move everything, including distant land) like you're not a game dev and have absolutely no idea what you're doing to ensure that you ACTUALLY HAVE loading screens, because if you make your game normally - you won't have them and thus will be unable to simulate freezes.
8) Now spend 99.999% of your budget on advertisments, streamers' donations, attend some TV shows and bribe game critics. And buy some random game of the year award (there're a lot of them), basically all famous games are games of the year, even if they were released in the same year.
9) Now you just need to somehow do voice acting, models, animations, textures and put some generic boring dialogues. Although dialogues can be generated. For example every time you meed NPC-in-need they always start with words "Please, you must help me!". Seriously, I've heard it like 1000 times in many games. Generic peasants in villages will just randomly wander village, because all NPCs in RPGs suffer from alzheimer. They will wait until you talk to them, so they can send you on holy quest to retrieve their possession from random cave, which is inhabited by bandits who never leave and never actually rob anyone, they just live there and quest item was simply spawned there, so now you're forced to murderer those poor innocent generic NPCs, so you can return useless quest item to alzheimer-suffering-NPC who will give you useless generic reward and then continue wander village, because that's what he's doing whole his life. And if you don't complete this quest, then... er... nothing will change. Really. Now apply this to every quest in the game. As I said - it's easy! Just create some dialogue generator like "Oh noes! Evil <insert hostile NPC name in plural> stole my <insert random useless item>! It belonged to my <insert random relative>! Please, you must help me! Here I mark it on your GPS tracker, go there, murder them for no reason and give it back to me!" or "I'm <insert some random generic activity> whole day, can you please deliver <insert random useless item> to <insert name of generic NPC> in <insert name of the city (if other city)/buildings (if the same city)?>" It's doable and not hard, really. You only need to pay a lot of money to voice actors...
Ideally it should be remade in 3D, because what I did is more a quick solution - I simply took top edge from top-left ramp and rotated it for top-right ramp, then mirrored for others. As the result it looks non-unique and cheap.
TurboSquid and CGTrader aren't 100% safe either. There're a lot of stolen models and you can't know that unless it's from popular game or you do your own research or stumble upon it accidentally somewhere else. Sketchfab (https://sketchfab.com/) is also similar to two mentioned and again - it's not 100% safe, just like basically anything. Uploaders will even claim it's they who made it, but in reality it can be ripped from some game and sometimes simply retextured. I personally downloaded one good looking 3d sci-fi character model purely for its armor, which I then changed and reshaped for my needs, wasting like 2 or 3 days on that, until I ACCIDENTALLY saw exactly this armor on one unpopular MMO's screenshots which I never even heard about like 2 or 3 months later when I simply googled images of sci-fi armors just for insipration. It means that you may think you have good looking legal 3d asset for your game, but in reality you don't.
Oh and it's not just 3D, look at Unity Asset Store's 2D icons (abilities, inventory icons)... there're A LOT of the same recolored or slightly changed icons from completely different authors, which means they're either partners/friends (seriously?!) or one of them is the real author (or none) and the rest are scammers.
You can also google "PARPG" and see some videos of isometric game to confirm if it's the one you're looking for. I don't know what website it had and if it was .de though. However google says the game was made with open source game engine FIFE, which has http://www.fifengine.de/ address, which ends with .de.
Yes, I was unable to open opengameart from all browsers today because of certificate error. But after some time the error gone. Moreover, I was unable to visit the site using free proxy surf services, they were unable to connect too.
You enjoy playing Skyrim for the same reason I enjoyed it and, probably, everyone else - it's a medieval fantasy simulator in open world where you can freely choose your character's name, race, gender and appearance. Then you can freely move anywhere you want. What alternatives you have? There're like... no such games? And if person doesn't know (yet) how cheaply made this game is and that every mechanic is faked and doesn't really do/change anything, because the whole game is just a show (literally ALL players actions have literally ZERO consequences), then such person will even have a lot of fun playing it. Then there're mods that can completely change they way you're playing the game allowing you to prolong the time you spend on this game. Unfortunately there're zero mods that change the fact that your actions have zero consequences. Not even a single overhaul does it, but it's normal, because it'll be easier to create your own game, than to make such mod, lol.
By consequences I mean:
Imagine the village A, which is under attack by local bandits, who rob their food and women from time to time. Then you come into that village and they ask you to help. Then there's another village B, which is in good relations with those bandits (may be they're even relatives or same gang), and they want to control something from village A, so they don't need to rely on their "friends", because they want domination, and yet they can't do that openly, because it'll ruin their reputation with the rest of the world. You can either kill the bandits and make village A your friends and make village B somewhat mad at you and receive good global reputation, village A will now have better shops and may be even offer other services. Or you can persuade village A into cooperation with village B and have protection from bandits, making you "Bandit friend" which will make all local bandits neutral to you, you'll also have better services in village B, but you'll have bad global reputation. Or you can kill main guy of bandits in some challenge, if you meet the requirements (may be charisma or some background or even race), become their leader and then set your own rules - you can stop raiding village A or not, you can even start raiding village B or not, or use your own gang for other quests somewhere else. In other words you'll have strategic advantage now. Or you can simply say "screw you all" and ignore it and then after some in-game time a random thing will happen: village A may find good party of adventurers who killed the bandits or village B tired of pretending to be good guys and occupied village A and then other villages declared war on them to liberate it. Or bandits became very bold and independent, may be a new leader appeared, who is smarter and stronger, and now they raid both villages and even beyond, because nothing can stop them. And this is just examples I made up while typing this post, now put 100 things like that in a single world and you'll have RPG + strategy at the same time. Players will see that their actions (or lack of actions) actually have consequences. And, ironically, it's shouldn't be hard to do: simply make a slow paced real time 4X strategy for AI. Then make RPG for the player inside that 4X strategy. I mean, yes, of couse it's hard... but from "design" or "idea" point of view, it shouldn't be something impossible. People think it's very hard to make RPG where you live in truly dynamic world, but it's not - game devs already did it all, it's simply scattered among different game genres. RTS or 4X strategy will provide you with dynamic world, especially if you implement somewhat realistic economy, like in Settlers2, where lumberjacks cut down trees, then trees are made into planks, then masons cut stones and then builders use them to build structures, then hunters/fishers/farmers generate food for miners (but better for everyone), who in return gather metals/coal, which is used for tools/weapons/armors, etc. Now add player diplomacy like in Civilization, add player character like in Skyrim and here you go - perfect medieval fantasy simulator where literally every player's action actually has consequences, because the world is a sandbox.
What? People ask money for THIS? You don't need to know how to code to make it yourself, it's the most primitive and simple features of any game. Plus, assets like that are usually (or may be always?) for general use. In other words aren't optimized, because their creator made it for non-specific project. And that's one of the reasons why games have loading screens/low FPS :D
Seriously, to move character using either physics or grid or I don't know - nodes (which is essentially a grid) - is a trivial task. Especially in Unity, with its documentation. Although I advise to not rely on tutorials or forums for the same exact reason - they're not optimized. For example if you google how to make square grid tile pathfinding on Unity, you may find a video, where some IT guy creates tons of classes and tons of functions and then yeah, it works! Except that it'll destroy your FPS, because using OOP in pathfinding or even in game development in general is a suicide. Ideally your game must be within single class using only locals and ptivate-statics. Try not to use "new" keyword to achieve what you need, unless it's in the very beginning (Awake). Try to create everything right after player launched the game. Then simply reuse that memory, this way you will never trigger GC and thus player will never experience lag spike. If you're using Unity's physics, then you must have no more than 1 FixedUpdate in the whole project. And no matter what you're using, you must have no more than 1 Update in the whole project.
But all of is possible only if you 100% know what you're doing from the very start till the end. Also it's mostly for one-man-projects, or 2nd+ person must have no relation to coding at all. In other words it's for 1-programmer team. Because 2 coders will have hard time working with 1 huge script, which is whole game. Unless they're twins who think the same and never code at the same time (or else there will be problems with syncing, as they will edit the same file).
I disagree to what people say about Skyrim, I played it a lot and modded it too, it's one of the most primitive and cheap games in the history of game industry. I can remake Skyrim clone in Unity in few days, if we don't take into account voice acting and visuals. This game is a perfect example of what happened to game industry after businessmen completely replaced game designers and artists. This game is just one huge pile of fake and illusion that looks cool and feels epic, while in reality it's more primitive than very first computer RPGs ever made.
It's basically just a courier boy simulator, the whole game has only 3 quests:
1) Go there, kill that thing.
2) Go there, grab that thing and return it.
3) Go there, talk to that guy, he'll either give quest #1, #2, #3 or end the chain.
That's it. Even main quest simply consists of these simple unrelated "quests". Faction quests are also just a chain of primitive errand tasks. This game is so generic, that you simply can't make it even more generic.
In order to create Skyrim clone on any free game engine you simply need:
1) Generate few hundreds or thousands quests like I mentioned above.
2) Now let those quests generate NPCs and targets, including dungeons.
3) Now generate some cities and shuffle ~80% of those NPCs across those cities, the rest will be in wilderness or dungeons. Most targets will be in dungeons, some in cities.
4) Generate the most idiotic and primitive loot system where most numbers are taken randomly from the sky and make no sense (because if you do everything balanced, then it won't be a Skyrim clone).
5) Intentionally make terrain geometry very non-flat, designed for player character and not for NPCs to ensure that AI will constantly stuck, so it looks more like Skyrim. Also make sure you make pathfinding very unoptimized, so players will have low FPS when crowded areas, when all NPCs decide to move somewhere.
6) Every few N random minutes roll random number between 1 and 100, if rolls 1 - simulate crash to desktop.
7) Every time you load a cell, roll random number between 1 and 500, if rolls 1 - simulate freeze during loading screen. Oh yes, make everything use different textures and unoptimized models, and make open world really an open world (instead of simply using the same small area where you simply change terrain meshes and move everything, including distant land) like you're not a game dev and have absolutely no idea what you're doing to ensure that you ACTUALLY HAVE loading screens, because if you make your game normally - you won't have them and thus will be unable to simulate freezes.
8) Now spend 99.999% of your budget on advertisments, streamers' donations, attend some TV shows and bribe game critics. And buy some random game of the year award (there're a lot of them), basically all famous games are games of the year, even if they were released in the same year.
9) Now you just need to somehow do voice acting, models, animations, textures and put some generic boring dialogues. Although dialogues can be generated. For example every time you meed NPC-in-need they always start with words "Please, you must help me!". Seriously, I've heard it like 1000 times in many games. Generic peasants in villages will just randomly wander village, because all NPCs in RPGs suffer from alzheimer. They will wait until you talk to them, so they can send you on holy quest to retrieve their possession from random cave, which is inhabited by bandits who never leave and never actually rob anyone, they just live there and quest item was simply spawned there, so now you're forced to murderer those poor innocent generic NPCs, so you can return useless quest item to alzheimer-suffering-NPC who will give you useless generic reward and then continue wander village, because that's what he's doing whole his life. And if you don't complete this quest, then... er... nothing will change. Really. Now apply this to every quest in the game. As I said - it's easy! Just create some dialogue generator like "Oh noes! Evil <insert hostile NPC name in plural> stole my <insert random useless item>! It belonged to my <insert random relative>! Please, you must help me! Here I mark it on your GPS tracker, go there, murder them for no reason and give it back to me!" or "I'm <insert some random generic activity> whole day, can you please deliver <insert random useless item> to <insert name of generic NPC> in <insert name of the city (if other city)/buildings (if the same city)?>" It's doable and not hard, really. You only need to pay a lot of money to voice actors...
Just include it into your submission if you like it more. I give permission, if it's required.
Ideally it should be remade in 3D, because what I did is more a quick solution - I simply took top edge from top-left ramp and rotated it for top-right ramp, then mirrored for others. As the result it looks non-unique and cheap.
Here, I made it less sharp, although it can be done even better with more noise/transparency:
You can make it less prominent/linear by looking how it was done in other isometric games, for example Icewind Dale:
Kuldahar:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/icewind-dale/images/4/45/AR2100_Kuldah...
Easthaven:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/icewind-dale/images/6/6f/AR1000_Eastha...
(Warning, images are rather big - 3840x2880)
TurboSquid and CGTrader aren't 100% safe either. There're a lot of stolen models and you can't know that unless it's from popular game or you do your own research or stumble upon it accidentally somewhere else. Sketchfab (https://sketchfab.com/) is also similar to two mentioned and again - it's not 100% safe, just like basically anything. Uploaders will even claim it's they who made it, but in reality it can be ripped from some game and sometimes simply retextured. I personally downloaded one good looking 3d sci-fi character model purely for its armor, which I then changed and reshaped for my needs, wasting like 2 or 3 days on that, until I ACCIDENTALLY saw exactly this armor on one unpopular MMO's screenshots which I never even heard about like 2 or 3 months later when I simply googled images of sci-fi armors just for insipration. It means that you may think you have good looking legal 3d asset for your game, but in reality you don't.
Oh and it's not just 3D, look at Unity Asset Store's 2D icons (abilities, inventory icons)... there're A LOT of the same recolored or slightly changed icons from completely different authors, which means they're either partners/friends (seriously?!) or one of them is the real author (or none) and the rest are scammers.
I remember there was some PARPG. It has its own tag here on OGA "PARPG":
https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?field_art_tags_tid=PARPG
You can also google "PARPG" and see some videos of isometric game to confirm if it's the one you're looking for. I don't know what website it had and if it was .de though. However google says the game was made with open source game engine FIFE, which has http://www.fifengine.de/ address, which ends with .de.
Yes, I was unable to open opengameart from all browsers today because of certificate error. But after some time the error gone. Moreover, I was unable to visit the site using free proxy surf services, they were unable to connect too.
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