Game IV

Boxville, Pliston and Total Anarchy, they're all top down pseudo-Grand Theft Auto games I've put together in my spare time as a teenager and released as freeware.

I'm now twenty and it has been over two years since I've touched the 'Total Anarchy' project but with an open summer coming up I've decided to begin development of 'Game IV'. I'm keeping relatively quiet about this for now, hopefully you'll have stumbled across this if you follow my Google profile or if I've started to show the new project off a bit more. At the time of writing this I have absolutely nothing to show except for some old concept art and planning.
I'll be approaching Game IV similarly to how I managed Total Anarchy. Game Maker Studio should be extremely easy to work with and is the only feasible option when trying to make a fully fledged 3D action adventure game in under a year with a team of one person.

But will Game IV be another GTA clone? I've been considering game play changes that would really take it out of that category. These ideas are by no means final as I'll need to bring into consideration tester opinion and how new features work with the rest of the game engine. I'm reluctant to call even Total Anarchy a GTA clone nowadays as commercial games such as Saints Row and Driver: Parallel Lines mimic the GTA formula even closer than my old games. I never saw Saints Row being given a futuristic setting away from the USA anyway!

Looking at the Grand Theft Auto series along with the Saints Row series it's becoming clear that one is taking the deep, detailed and immersion route while the other is piling on endless game play features to pack in as much sandbox fun as possible. Saints Row was a good laugh, in fact I'm still having fun with the latest release but I'm never going to find it as memorable or as worthwhile as any of the GTA games. I completed Saints Row 2 about two and a half years ago and now I couldn't be able to tell you the names of any of the characters. I even forget how it ends... just that you kill all the enemies in a spectacular fashion. The GTA stories, on the other hand, well I can recite the order of the missions and all of the characters involved, even in San Andreas. I have this annoying party trick whenever I see a friend playing GTA where I'll get them to point at a car that's barely visible on the horizon and I'll be able to tell them what it's called and whether it's worth jacking. I'll then sing along to whatever is playing on the radio station. I really cared about the worlds that GTA simulated. No other game has immersed me and held my attention like GTA and it remains the only series I follow and get genuinely excited about new releases. (And Grand Theft Auto V looks to be epic!)

Through producing my own sandbox game I have the opportunity to create a world that's based on my own imagination - and I'd love to develop some of my ideas into forming a world that can deeply immerse the player. I really enjoyed making the futuristic city of New Verago for Total Anarchy and look forward to brushing up on my basic 3D modelling skills and constructing another skyline for this new game. And will the game be fully 3D? I get this question a lot... for now know that without a team of artists and animators there's no hope of producing a nice looking and fully 3D game, not with Game Maker anyway. The Crimelife series Sakisa produced were very impressive but it suffers from looking too much like an attempt to replicate GTA:III; and yes, it's fair to say that Total Anarchy is pretty close to GTA2 in certain respects. Game IV is going to look a lot different from games I've produced in the past.

I've never had the chance to develop a good story for a game even though I've always penned out characters and themes during development. Total Anarchy never really made it past the beta so the missions were mostly left out. You get to see 'dirty Mitch' and drive him to a hotel on the seafront but that's about it. This game was meant to have quite a lot more to it including different gangs that you could be allied or opposed to, an underground resistance movement that would hire you to blow stuff up, this crazy old lady who uses you to start riots around the city... loads of fun rubbish like that.

Total Anarchy became my baby as I was growing up. You see I've been making these sorts of games since I was fourteen and have never thought to myself, even at my current age of twenty, that I'll never make another one. While Boxville and Pliston weren't much more than experimental fan-games, Total Anarchy got some publicity and recognition. While I'm a musician first and only a hobbyist when it comes to game development, Total Anarchy is still the most notable thing I've ever put together. So yeah, time to let my baby grow a little. New engine, new story and entirely new style. I hope that this can be big, especially if I can start to bring this thing out on both PC, Mac and maybe even mobile platforms.

This blog is going to cover what I'm up to over the next year so. It'll hopefully get more interesting as more of the game comes together. I'll be posting about how I'm making the resources, developing the world and programming each feature. I get tonnes of e-mails and comments each week from people who demand to see the source code for Total Anarchy but rather than throw my clumsily written code and a large collection of my own personal resources (I get annoyed at seeing my stuff ripped and used in amateur games, sorry) into the public domain I'd like to walk you through how this new project is made so some of you can become familiar with such a huge bedroom game creation process.

Grand Theft Auto

Weston, 9pm, 6th July 2029. 

Animated holo-ads continue to blind the drivers below, showing off the latest defense gadgets and electric cars. Pedestrians pass hurriedly over a slot built into the pavement, a two-inch thick wall threatens to emerge in the event of a security breach. More concealed technology is strategically placed around the streets including collapsible weapon turrets, controversially designed for tackling riots. Weston industrial district mostly comprises of abandoned construction sites, huge containers and the burnt out shells of disused factories. Large diesel trucks crawl down the wide roads; tuk tuks, cyclists and electric scooters fill up the remaining space.

A tall man in his thirties, dark haired, grizzled and wearing a grey combat jacket is one of the few pedestrians. He's found one of the last remaining phone boxes in town, covered in out of date posters and barely legible graffiti. Remarkably, it begins to ring as he approaches. He puts the receiver to his ear for several seconds and then replaces it without saying a word. Now he exits the booth and walks into the path of a bright red Sentinel saloon that screeches to a halt before him. To the driver's astonishment, the man pulls out a weapon from inside his jacket and points it squarely at the vehicle's windscreen. With his free hand he first points at the driver and then towards the pavement. The driver emerges, a shaking and whimpering young woman. She backs away from the man, her eyes fixed on his gun.
"P...p...please don't!"
He ignores her entirely, walks towards her car and sits in the driver's seat. The keys are still in the ignition and the engine is idling. For now, the car is as good as his.

The woman breaks down in tears as he speeds off, disappearing in seconds. Bystanders have been watching but haven't made any action. The traffic behind continues to move as if nothing happened.
"Jesus! That was my Dad's car!" She screams. "I'm so dead! So, so dead!"
The people on the streets turn away and continue about their day. Not a single soul helps the woman. Her accessories have spilled out of her dropped handbag and has fallen in between the slots in the pavement.

A crime like that, performed in front of dozens of witnesses and surveillance drones, surely that man must have been caught. It turns out that the man was already wanted for years and that the woman was lucky to have only lost her Dad's car. By the time the police were called to track the stolen Sentinel it had been taken to a specialist and the IDs changed to make it invisible to the cameras. This was no ordinary carjacking. Twenty expensive vehicles had been hijacked in June and July under similar circumstances by a man matching the same description. The authorities, now trained to deal with civil disorder and reliant on hi-tech equipment to handle petty crimes were unsure about how to stop this man. He would appear nearby an expensive vehicle, snatch it and disappear without a trace. Scans of his face had produced no matches and any of the stolen cars that turned up again were found almost completely destroyed and without any traces of DNA.