Making a Game Without Graphics?

Question

Is it possible or even constructive to make a game without any graphics (but is intended to become graphical)

I'm not good with graphics at all, so I'd like to write the skeleton for the game then have a graphics programmer/artist fill in the rest. I could write up all the major classes, and their interactions, and all the major functions/parts of the game.

If so, what should I do to make it easier to integrate graphics into the game later on (every drawn object should have a Draw, Rotate, Collide, etc method) ?

Answer 1

Speaking from a non-game dev background the UI is almost always the last part of development. If you guarentee there will be graphics coming then defintely accomodate this to fit.

You could even look at a plugin type approach where you can have a non-graphical version of the game and have a plugin which accomodates the graphical version.

Answer 2

Generally:

You might want to have look at this:

Game programming wiki

This should get you started up.

Specifically, What kind of game do you envision?

Update:

Since you dont want to do any graphics programming at all, you might want to give your drawable objects a draw() method stub, and leave these for your fellow graphics developer.

I would expect that you need Move, rotate and Checkcollision methods for the basic functionality testing, but as you wrote you would only build the foundations of the game system, a simple setpositon might be sufficent.

You should allow your objects to store theire position (and direction if applicable).

Another approach could be to build a list of objects and there positions in game world later on. This would enable you to develope your interaction event handlers (like On GunFired, OnHit, Ondie,...) and test these in some kind of testbench.

Answer 3

Use placeholder graphics. Anyone can draw up boxes and stickmen in Gimp.

Or just use Google, should give you access to a vast repository of graphics you can freely use in your game, or at least "borrow" until you get proper graphics in.

Answer 4

I used to play NetHack (ASCII Characters), Castle of the Winds (top-down graphical), and Diablo (2-D but viewed from an angle). The gameplay for all was similar. They were all tile based. They all had similar equipment, spells, fighting, exploring, random maps, etc. However, the graphics increased in quality.

The game, Adventure was a text based adventure game with text commands for "go north", "look", "get rock", etc. Then, the King's Quest games (all graphical) started with walking around but still typing commands. In the later games, you had a standard menu icon for "look here", "walk here", "pick up object", etc instead of typing.

This doesn't really answer your questions, but some examples of games with similar gameplay but added graphical features as time went forward.

Answer 5

Certainly it's possible. The games that founded the "adventure/RPG" genre had no graphics and were a load of fun. Here are some great examples:

1. The Colossal Cave
2. Zork

Answer 6

Some games use the MVC(Model View Controller) pattern. If you did the same, it should be possible to do the MC parts with multiple views(text based, 2d, 3d).

Answer 7

Prime example what is possible without graphics is Dwarf Fortress. Incredibly deep and complex game represented merely by bunch of ascii characters. There are fan created visualizers (isometric 3d, full 3d world). So yes, it's possible to do a great game without bothering to program complex graphics.