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Roleplay:  this will be essentially like a campaign.  There's a story, and your character is thrown into it.  The game will be more combat oriented, so don't expect Neverwinter Nights roleplaying, but we can probably do better than, say, Diablo.  This gameplay mode will feature long-term character development, parties consisting of NPC's or other player characters, and different approaches to the same story.

Gladiator Mode:  either single-player or multiplayer, this allows players to pre-select a level of experience, create characters to match that, and then duke it out.  There are a variety of settings available, allowing for either kill-based point schemes, or last-man-standing survival battles.  There are also cooperative settings to survive waves of weaker enemies (or a single overpower one...).  Experience gain can be turned off or on inside gladiator mode, allowing characters to either stay at one strength or gain in power from fighting.

Campaign Mode:  this single-player or multiplayer setting allows players to take part in a series of military battles in teams, trying to kill each other and capture strategic points.  The game consists of a series of battles that play out until one team has won the campaign.  Players can attain personal and strategic accomplishments as the campaign wears on to increase their experience (making them more powerful) and rank (giving them more planning and organization options) respectively.  "Individual battle" mode is also available to accommodate an itch for this type of gameplay without having to play a campaign through.

The Armoury:  the armoury allows you to build and test character designs.  The armoury allows you to test a character as you add abilities - and step back on your decisions if you find they're not to your taste - in order to develop the design of your choice.  When you're satisfied, you can save your character design, and it will automatically be followed as your character levels up in any other game mode, so you don't have to take time out from the faster-paced game settings to level up and plan your advancement.

Tutorial: learn how to play the game.

A wise move to include the Armoury mode and the optional automation of the leveling according to your design will be loved too.

Solinx

The armoury is something I've always wanted in every game, from Diablo to Neverwinter Nights... except in NWN I actually was able to build the thing (admittedly, it's little more than a room with a whole bunch of merchants selling every item in the game, as well as a gold and experience dispenser).  Taking it one step further, this concept has the character design and levelling patterns are saved for future use.  If we want to really be thorough, you could even have little macros run to change your hotkeys when you unlock critical abilities.

The armoury is something I've always wanted in every game, from Diablo to Neverwinter Nights... except in NWN I actually was able to build the thing (admittedly, it's little more than a room with a whole bunch of merchants selling every item in the game, as well as a gold and experience dispenser).  Taking it one step further, this concept has the character design and levelling patterns are saved for future use.  If we want to really be thorough, you could even have little macros run to change your hotkeys when you unlock critical abilities.

hehe, yeah, making a module to test characters is probably the sort of module that is made most with NWN
And for Diablo, well, to test builds I just modded the game to give me a level with each kill, things like that ^^
Not having to go through that hussle will be more than welcome.

As I said earlier, the automatisation is certainly nice, but changing hotkeys is one step too far I think. And be sure to give players a notification of the new level and the abilities they gained with it. Of course, that wouldn't be a flashing message in the center of the screen, a sound to signal a level and a list of the abilities at the side of the screen would be nice tho.

Solinx

i'm not familiar with the genre (i've played RPG's like pokemon, zelda, paper mario, but they seem to be quite different), and have no idea what you guys are talking about

It's the equivilent of sandbox mode in a RTS, letting you explore the tech tree at your own pace.  In this case, however, you could then save the build order you used, and have an AI pull it off automatically as you gain the resources for it.  The difference would be that instead of buildings or units, you get new skills and abilities, and instead of resources you require experience.  That's the best analogy I can give.

Anyways, notifying someone they're attained a new ability should go without saying (and there should probably be a message log in the corner of the screen somewhere that would serve this purpose well), and I don't see why a player shouldn't be able to automatically have their hotkeys be updated for a new skill they've earned if they want.  That last part is the critical qualifier.

Hmm, yeah. My issues would be: interface and development resources.

You are already planning on a lot of things here, enough for decent game before you are done. Making it all will cost time. A year is good, no problem with that, but if you go into details this much in every aspect, then you can expect it to become two years before you are done.

Second is the interface. Optional yes, but it has to be a part of the interface to have it available. It's possible to put it in it's own tab, hide it from the regular stuff, but if a player sees a tab, it will take a look at what it is. The tab adds to the complexity of the interface, whether the player decides to use it or not. The less buttons there are, the less buttons there are to getting lost. This may sound silly, but not all players are in the twenty's, and not all players see things as easily as you do.
Main point: The less interface, the lower the learning curve, the easier the game is to handle, the more popular the game will be with the main player base.

I love options, but I have come to see that options are not always a bliss.

Solinx

As far as technical work goes, I think that getting networking to work flawlessly will be harder than this skill system!  I'm not so much saying that the skill system is easy as I am saying that networking is going to be hard.  With that said, the goal here is to build one piece of code that puts together different aspects to form a full skill.  Once that code is working and working well, we can easily whip off hundreds of these "aspects", because each is just a very simple idea that is combined with others.

As for what's being planned, I don't think having a gladiator mode or campaign mode will be so difficult compared to the roleplay mode.  I'd expect building even a half-decent RPG would be far more difficult than all the other modes I've described combined.  The real complexity is getting that skill system working, and once we have the system to put aspects together into a single ability, we just rip off hundreds of aspects and we have ourselves a complete system.  If we can balance THAT at the end of it, well, an RTS with 5 factions should be a piece of cake compared to a RPG with billions of possible skills ^_^

Good point about interface.  We have to keep a balance between simplicity versus capability.  Interface will doubtlessly be one of the biggest difficulties in this game, since being able to use the skills (and combinations of skills) you need when you need them will really define the experience you get out of the game.  Speaking of which, there's one game mode I forgot to list: Tutorial.

Alright, I trust you on the technical stuff, you are the programmer of us two afterall

The interface shouldn't be too revolutionary either, best if it's only incrementally innovated. Innovation is good, but most often you loose more than you gain if you alienate the user group of the previous version of the product.

The interface should be recognisable for most players, it should be inituïtive enough, without tutorial, so that we can innovate on other area's, without leaving the players with questions about how things operate.

btw, That goes for all demo's, unless the last one will be focusing on a revolutionary interface.

Solinx

if you want a good example of a bad interface, download Second Life 

When we're in the stage where we can build an interface an add menu's and windows to the interface. It won't be a big problem to for us to build it simply or complex.

I'm with Solinx in keeping the interface as simple as possible, less is more. We've got some time to spare to think about the layout of it. But desiging a good layout will be difficult though.

And for the network part. It shouldn't be to difficult to send the data from one client to another (next course at school for 2play and me should cover sending data acros a network anyway). The problem is the latency wich packets have (ping). You should keep this in mind while coding. It's also important to know what's the maximum of players supported in a multiplayer game.

Also don't look at it as one big problem, but smaller sub-problems. Things won't look as bad then

Let's move this conversation to the main thread for this project, and leave this thread for discussion about the gameplay modes.  I think there's more or less agreement that the ones detailed above are a practical selection.

How do you imagine battle? Real-time or turn-based?

Battles would be real time; it's the same game played in a different way.

Essentially, each player would act as a captain within their team.  They would pick a party of NPCs to act as soldiers under their command.  These players would then go out into the battlefield with those soldiers to try to capture victory locations from the other team.  In a way, it's a blend between RPG and RTS.

How do you see the creation of stories by users? Are they like completely new games (along with new character outfits and weapons and stuff, possibly in an entirely different world e.g. a modern one) or just stories using the same characters and global world? I.M.O. the latter would make much more sense.

The latter, of course.  I'm envisioning something similar to Neverwinter Nights, where every story has its own independant module which is loaded when the player wants to use it.  The same characters and gameplay applies, but the module defines the setting.

*reads up on NNN*

ok it's all becoming clear now

Neverwinter Nights treats modules a lot like RTS games treat custom maps.  They have an editor, where players create areas, place monsters, and write scripts in order to tell their story.  It's then loaded in-game, much like a RTS map, and can be used in a single-player or multiplayer setting.

How will we let the user create more modules? By creating Java classes which can be deployed as .jars (easy, flexible) or a custom scripting engine (harder for us, easier for them, less flexible)?

I'm not entirely certain at this point.