Community Spotlight - The Peon by Jeff McNab
This week's community spotlight is on "The Peon", a type of Real Time Strategy game created by Jeff McNab.
Can you tell us a bit about The Peon?
In The Peon, players take on the role of lowly peasants in a medieval city who travel between various zones collecting ore, wood and grain. These resources are then deposited in the city. The resources are used to increase the size of the city, granting bonuses to all players, along with being used for the local city's defenses. Player's increase their capacity to harvest and carry resources each time they deposit resources in the city , similar to experience gained in more traditional RPGs. The players all have to work together, harvesting the various resources, in order to make the city flourish and grow, along with keeping an invading army at bay.
How long did it take you to make this world?
While I haven't kept good notes on exact figures, I would guess that it's somewhere between 35 and 50 hours. The majority of it was spent on art assets, since I've been hand painting most of them. For instance, I spent about 12 hours of time creating the player sprite because of the various angles he needs to face. I would say I've spent about 60% of the time on art assets, with 30% on scripting and learning various Metaplace functionalities and the last 10% on pre-production, a.k.a. thinking and writing.
What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?
The community. Hands down. Both employees and non-employees alike have such a strong passion for the product, and it shows. Getting help is extremely easy and people are more than willing to help out with anything you may be having questions about.
I also like the ease with which you can create virtual worlds. It really is as simple as "point-click-virtual world". The manner in which Metaplace allows game creators to get a working game up quickly with lots of functionality is just great!
Where did you obtain the art for The Peon?
I created all of it from scratch, so I guess the answer would be "my head". When I first started working on the art, I was playing around with a more painterly style using my pen tablet. Of course, this was only created after using "filler" sprites (circles and squares of various colors) while I played around with the game design.
Did you work alone or collaborate with others?
I worked alone on this project. I wanted to see how much I could do by myself. Metaplace is such an easy tool to use that this was not only possible, but actually easy to do.
If not finished, what else do you have planned your game?
It's definitely not finished right now. There's a couple of bugs in the player script, along with various other non-implemented aspects (like the invading army). Of course, lots of art assets to do. I've actually been toying around with the idea of changing the visuals completely for a more comical style of graphics.
Do you have any other worlds or games in mind to build on Metaplace, or are you working on
anything else right now?
There isn't enough space for me to tell you about all of the game ideas I want to play around with on Metaplace. The issue isn't ideas more than time right now.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I'm a senior studying game design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I've been interested in game design ever since I started playing desktop role-playing games, such as D&D, at the age of 8. I spent lots of time playing games and interacting with people through games. It's one of the reasons I have such a large interest in virtual world design.
