Pipe Dreaming

[Kendris]

 Pipe Dreaming

[MiLeah]

 Love the idea!

[berelinde]

I'd love to see it, and I'd certainly pitch in on the writing end, but that's about all I'm good for.

[mynfel]

Well, you'd need an engine for sure. I hear Unity is excellent. (and it has a free version that's pretty much ready to go out of the box.)

http://unity3d.com/unity/

But - that would also require some heavy duty programming as well as someone proficient in Maya or Blender or something if you want to have custom models. (Which I'm assuming you would.)

Startup costs would be another issue, of course, although if you're actually serious about it, kickstarter.org wouldn't be a bad place to start, but you'd have to have a real business plan in place, with actual milestones and tangible deliveries and stuff like that.

[ArianaKir]

I'm sure somewhere out there there are female programmers who would chomp at the bit to design more female friendly games. I'm not sure what the demographics are - but most of the people my husband works with (and he is a computer programmer, albeit of a different bent than game designing) are men.

I'll ask him a bit about it when he gets home.

[ArianaKir]

Ok, so talked to the spouse a bit about gaming companies and female programmers. According to him, roughly 10% of all computer programmers are female, and in the gaming market that number drops to less than 1%. So yes - it's an all boys club out there writing code for games.

Women apparently take up a much larger section of the graphics and art part of video game design - which is one of the key components of a good game. A physics engine you can lease from bioware - graphics? Yeah you'll need someone for that. Then you'd need someone familiar with programming to marry your graphics and story to the physics engine.

[MiLeah]

Between that article I just read claiming to be a game for girls, and that video of pootards with their so-called presentation, I would so love to be able to just do something that could just kill all those negative stereotypes and images of female gamers and games that's suppose to be made for us.

It would be nice if maybe we could just test the waters of what it would be like to work on such a project by forming a small group and maybe just modding for a game that's already completed and pretty popular amongst females. I see here at this site that we have plenty of talented writers and artist, so the load could be shared equally in that department. Though, the other (more harder) task would be to learn the coding for whatever game that's decided to make an expansion pack/mod for.

Maybe this small group could add in female characters that you just don't see in games, with rich storylines, quests and such. Like: An older mother that's a tanker, or a comic relief that's not a blond or a child.

Anyway, that would be nice to see. And maybe it could be a small step in: made for us, by us.