"MusicBiz Unlimited" news!

Hello everybody!
Hello Osiris Games Forum!

So as I’ve said earlier, Wednesday, was the day where the future of MusicBiz Unlimited was to be determined. It has partly happened…
Yesterday I met up with one of my oldest friends (We know each other all the way back from kinder garden!!!), so we could talk about making a video game together. I had previously introduced him to the concept of the game and how I had imagined that we should organize this process. In return my task was to look at the concepts behind “object-oriented-design” (I have no programming experience whatsoever, so this was new to me).
I introduced him to Chart Wars and MusicWars, so that he could get a better understand of the games, and more specifically we looked at how the database worked in those two games.
I showed him what I had worked on with this “object-oriented-design” (though I had misunderstood the concept a bit, but he quickly got me on the right track). We played around with a few designs for the database and he also showed me the concept of each object doing certain tasks. We took the example of how a bank would behave in the game and what the relationship between the bank and the labels would be like.
As we agreed on, a game like this is basically a HUGE spreadsheet! The biggest hurdles are all the formulas that are going to calculate everything from record sales to the AI’s behaviour. It will take a lot of time to figure out how these are going to be designed and also to make the final results realistic – this is actually the hardest part of designing this game.
But he was relatively positive around the concept of the game and the idea of working together with me, and he especially liked the fact, that I have a more or less complete idea of the entire game ready – it “just” needs to be designed.
The thing is though that both of us have full-time jobs (Currently I have ¾ time, but anyways…), and we both have other spare time activities to attend to, so we can only allow limited time for the development of this game. This means that both of us will have to think ahead and determine if we’ll have the time or not to continue working on this project. There’s no point in starting if it turns out that in six months, we don’t have the time anymore.
The programming part of the process won’t take long, however the game design part will take a lot of time and that will mainly be on my shoulders. The “problems” is that I’m new to making video games, so I have no experience and I’ll have to fully understand the idea behind object-oriented-design before I can begin to work on larger design documents that make sense.
Right now I’m going to spend the next days/weeks to work on some design documents and determine how much time I’m going to spend on this to get us moving – I don’t want this to turn into a 5-year project – or never ending project!
Also my friend have some other projects that he would like to work on, so he’ll also have to determine which projects he’ll invest his time in.
So this is where we stand right now.
But I can with confidence in my voice say, that this looks more promising than the idea of doing a project like this online. I’ll defiantly have a better work-ethic and moral when I meet up with people face to face – so I’m far more positive than last time this was attempted.

On February 18.-20. I’m attending a game-jam here in Aalborg with my friend and one of his friends, so there we can really see how we work together as a group. Maybe this other friend would like to join our project – Who knows?

This is all for now!

Regards
Klaus

thanks for update, love to see this move forward....keep us updated if you could...

Interesting. Well all I can say is don't spend too much time working on the project at any given time. Allocate a set amount of time per day or on certain days to work on it. You need a set schedule in order to get things done, this is something that I've had to learn and now I have a somewhat decent schedule, if only my work worked around my programming schedule lol. Right now I program about 2-3 hours per night after work. I start at around 11pm until around 2am. Depends on the days though and what time I have work the next day, but if it doesn't work out then I just don't program that day, that way it forces me to take a break while it also keeps me thinking throughout the days of how I'm going to continue and what I want to accomplish the next time I'm able to work.

Thanks for the nice words and the advise.
When we get further in the process (and we have finally decided to really work on this project) I'll set up a blog of some sort. Untill then, you can follow the development here:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/hom...121508607910302

Maybe I'll also post the updates on this forum (though it seems rather dead....)

Cool

Please keep updating on here as well we need to make this forum come back to life !

Since it seems like some people still enter this forum from time to time - especially non-registered guests, I will announce mayor updates on this forum as well...
However, check out the Osiris Games Forum Facebook site as well.

Wheres the updating on here!

Haha.