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.