That sounds interesting. Maybe the wrecked spaceship could damage the space station's internal defenses and you have to get to the core processor and reboot it.

Let's not think about failure, it's fun while it lasts.

Well, we now have the general game idea and genre down. We have several people willing to work on the game. We have someone with access to a temporary repository.

What we DON'T want for a game is a committee. All of the programmers who will be in this team will have to acknowledge that they may give some game ideas that are flat out rejected by the project leader, and some that are only partially accepted or implemented.

All the game fleshing-out, storyline details, environments, animations, battles, and so on should only be the project group's decisions. Forum input is always welcome, but quickly gets out of hand.

Is there anything else we need to actually start programming now? The whole idea is to get a simple idea "just working enough" to showcase it here on the forums in a short amount of time. It doesn't HAVE to be a blockbuster. Heck, it doesn't even need to be FUN, nor 100% bug-free. Just get something working and "out there" and let others take a look at the group effort, give feedback, etc.

I wanted to do something fun without it becoming tedious.

So let's program!

I suggest setting up trac. Its wiki and task management is easy to work with and it can be extended with more features if needed.

And no, I don't think we're ready to start coding yet. You can start on your own stuff if the fingers are itching, but we haven't even passed the concept stage yet.

Scripts for dialoque scenes would be useful, but the story can often follow after the map. Instead of a story declaring "He walked a long way" it's a case of "Map #3 looks nice but takes a long time to walk across, so let's explain that in the story".

Major characters need fleshing out first, so they can be drawn, animated and used to devise storylines. This would need to be a fairly detailed biography. Professional authors do it for themselves, and it would be utterly essential in a group project, or else the characters will be children of a single mind. If it's your primary duty Chris, then you'll either have to carry through the "visionary" thing or let go at the start and make sure the character's motivations and emotions are public property.
EDIT: Another plan would be to get volunteers for the voice acting, and let them motivate their own characters. Is there something like skype which lets you multitrack record a conference call?

Somebody needs to specify exactly what the tile size and perspective is, unless you are waiting for an artist to come along and read your mind.

It would be safe to assume it will load map-by-map. Whether that involves scrolling is not important at this stage, and is platform dependent anyway.

How the combat is done is constrained by the available graphics. If your artist can do 20 frame sword sweep animations in an hour, then do that everywhere. If you are forced to work with scanned concept art then you need a separate combat 'pop up'.

Doing everything as 3d models saves making pixel-size decisions, and needn't take any longer to do. Pixelling can be VERY tedious, after all. You could shave this burden off the total prohect workload if you used Reiner's Tilesets for everything.

http://reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.html !

He uses an odd 4:3 iso with 64x48 tiles. There's a lot more interesting characters now. The original ones from his RTS would have left you with a main character who mines gold, and in his spare time hunts and chops trees.

Best of all, they are all totally free to use in any game you like.

EDIT: I've just found his Sound Effects That's another 100 man hours saved. http://reinerstileset.4players.de/soundfxE.html

Whatever kind the artist gives you. Draw Your Captain!!!

Strangely enough, thats what a good leader does.

I like the idea of aliens, especially really funky-looking aliens that would have interesting sprites.

Comprimise: Illegal aliens! Now you have humans AND you have aliens!::)

Who wants to add a Hooloovoo somewhere in the game?
(A Hooloovoo is a superintelligent shade of the colour blue)