Is it’s name. I pronounce it Tiggers, not Tigers, not Tigris. Tigger.

The Independent Game Rating System is an inevitable thing. With all the republicrats running around screaming “What about the children? What about the baaaabies?”, and with all the concepts of classifying the damage to kids’ poor tormented psyches that video games do, someone had to step up and try to appease both sides.

You know, sometimes confrontation is a good thing and sometimes capitulation… excuse me, compromise is bad. TIGRS is an effort to appease the jerks, and it’s a good faith effort. I don’t know Daniel Kinney, but this seems to be a genuine good attempt. At least the designs LOOK cool.

With a rating system, as a business owner, I reduce the level of risk to my business by posting. So without further adieu, here’s the TIGRS for That Cult Game.

Mild Language Intense Cartoon Violence Animated Bloodshed Suggestive Themes Crass Humor Drug Use

Not Bad, huh? Personally, I think it’s sad that parents can’t get it through their heads: If you BREED, YOU’RE the one responsible. Not society, not the neighbors, and not the police. Do your best, but don’t blame others for your or your kids’ failures. Do your very best, because the kid deserves no less, and if the kid turns out to be a brainless monster, deal with the monster. Sometimes, through no fault of our own, people are broken.

But don’t blame a GAME DEVELOPER for it. That’s just weak thinking.

[That Cult Game] Style Guide

[That Cult Game] is a game of how religions er, CULTS operate as a virus on the globe with some tongue-in-cheek religion is the root of all evil.

GOAL:
The player’s goal is to bring about and/or survive the End of Days (aka “win”), an apocalyptic event that destroys all life on Earth.

MECHANISM:
The player manages a cult by making decisions, grows the cult in health, wealth and size. The player’s actions gives hints on how the End of Days (the apocalypse, ragnarok, the big global warming dirtnap) will occur, and what they can do to fend it off/bring it around.

The artwork for [That Cult Game] is the identifying image for the player: the cult leader. Since the player can make their own cult leader, with their own cult “flava”, we want the player to choose a head and a gender of the cult leader. The figures will have standardized shapes so that they are interchangeable (like pin-up doll dresses, etc.), the same clothes match all head choices.

Based on decisions in the game, the image will change based on cult attributes (or “cultributes”) that the cult focusses on. The cultributes are
- Gender: what is the bias of men to women?
- Philanthopy: how kind-hearted is the cult?
- Greed: is the cult money based (aka Tony Robbins)?
- Machievellian: how power-hungry is the cult?
- Xenophobic: how much does the cult hate and fear others?
- Luddite: does the cult endorse technology?

I expect other “cultributes” to be created over time (the game is open ended) but these are the primary five. Cultributes measures will map to attributes on the figure, such as Greed could map to the left hand of the figure and if the cultists are extremely greedy, the left hand would hold an offering plate with a large dollar bill (or a bunch of money, or gold and jewels - the artist is welcome to propose iconography).

So what is the artwork supposed to do?
0) Serve as black humor: Hajibs, ninja masks, tattoos, preistly robes, suicide vests, a bevy little children to abuse - there’s nothing good as a sick joke.
1) Depict the cult leader as primary player identification
2) Will reflect the cult’s origin (how the cult originated)
3) Will reflect the cult leader’s gender (chosen by the player)
4) Will reflect the results of the cult leader’s choices

Graphic restrictions:
Strict black and white graphic (2 color), expected on a white background. Would prefer vector drawing, but will work with whatever works.
Agreed upon layering effect so that pieces of the “cult leader” image will fit together correctly.
Size of the files must be restrictive.
Due to requirements above, designing for spotty graphics

Things I’ll probably have to do:
Create an “import” tool for the artist to test out their art for quality assurance.

Down With Flash; Long Live the New Flash…

Gah, can’t stand it. I’ve been trying to make an interface with OpenLaszlo which is great and has a lot of promise, but the thing I need most is dynamic creation of objects.

Let’s say I want to create a field of 10 x 10 objects, 50 pixels each. I’d create a row of 10 (horizontal) and then another column of 10 (vertical). Viola, 100 objects. Each object needs to be able to be referenced externally, so the program can tell box row four, column 3 to turn blue (green, purple, shimmer… whatever).

That I can do. Relatively easy.

However, if I want rows and columns to be configurable say 6×12 one game, then 12×20 the next - well, that isn’t easy because it would require dynamic building of objects.

For example (pseudocode):

for (i=0; i < [ConfigurableNumber]; i++)
{
   objId = "MyObj_" . i.toString(); // create a unique name reference
   this.object[] = new object(objId); // create a new object that has a unique reference
}

Looks simple enough? Apparently, it’s not.

So, now, I’m looking at Adobe Flex, because all the cool kids are doing it. More importantly, I’ll have to pay for it.

*Grump* *Grump* *Grump*

Also, through out my PHP code, refactored it to be SIMPLE. Or simpler. Either way, it is and is running very cool. Need to implement a java servlet tho. Also, I’ve finalized on a name, and I’m seeking a graphic artist to implement the look and feel artwork.

Once artwork is cut, then I’ll announce the name. Clever people will know how to find out what the name is tho.

Tweaking the Math and Gameplay
First may I say, thank god* for Google Spreadsheets. Basically, I needed to do some quick math of growth patterns, for instance: x population with y resources over z time = XYZ growth of population. It’s a basic data model that players will be able to mess with as part of the game.

Basically, I had a choice between pulling out a calculator, writing my own program logic or grabbing a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a Model-based game, I recommend at least whiteboarding with spreadsheets. And Google Spreadsheets were free and allowed me to work from different locations.

So, step one was to wing something: put a bunch of numbers roughly where I wanted them. Step two, create a basic model: X * Y * Z. Step three, have to create gate and modularity. I am wanting a model where the smaller the cult, the easier it is to recruit and the resource generation is more efficient. At the later points in the game, the larger the cult, the recruiting is harder and less efficient the resource.

I am wanting the gates to be at ~ 10, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 20,000 followers. Hitting 100,000 would sorta be a win by default. So, looks like a logarithmic progression minus a delayed logarithmic progression with a faster growth combined with a 1/sinewave for gate keeping, don’t you think? What’s worse, I had to go to Wikipedia to double check my math on this. I feel a bit like Barbie when I say, Math sure is Hard!

So, that gives us an X^n * log(X) * Y * Z. What will the time interval (Z) be? I could go for a similar algorithm that WoW has that the bigger you get, you have to work about 4-6% longer to jump to the next level. If you start, say, near the 60 second mark of jumping, you should be able to get to 20K followers in ~50 steps, which results in a game that’s about 1.5-2 hours.

All-in-all, not a casual game… but wait, I have a SAVE feature, so the player can quit at anytime and return at anytime.

Now we need Player Differentiation
After a few good discussions with AM and JVL, I had the basic patterns out, now I needed to develop what would make each player a little different. During the creation of a player’s Cult, the player will answer a series of questions that result in a negative to positive modifier from (-1.2% to +1.2%) effect on gameplay generation of resources. I’m hoping this range will give enough variance to affect the player’s style of play. If not, I’ll have to extend the ranges and see what bubbles up from repeaded gameplay.

Formulas:
Next Population Count = Current Population + Previous Recruiting - Current Burn
Recuiting =

* By god, I mean an Internet-based busienss model of application development

So That Cult Game is getting a face lift. I’m looking for artists to work with me on a design. I guess my big problem is the interface. I mean, I got one, and I like it… but I don’t LOVE it. It’s just not the convention-breaking look and feel that I expected from this game.

But, as we all know, it’s more important to get things done, more than get things done perfectly.

The OpenLaszlo w/ PHP will do fine for starters, using apache-php-mysql as a threaded backend server for a multiplayer solution is.. well, silly as silly can be. Java would be the way to go, however, my learning curve on java is something I don’t have the patience for right now. PHP outputs just fine, and with a template engine like Smarty, it gets the job done for XML very quickly, you can effectively use the DTD itself as the template.

WOOT!

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting the game play together. Have pencil and paper version of the game - sorta - and have figured out things like the gestures (circle, square, triangle, pentagon and star), what they represent (recruiting, operations, money, military, and “soul”), and their sounds (specifically how the sounds are going to work).

But DAMN I’ve got a lot of work to do. This one is gonna be a long development time unless I can get time off of work. I was hoping I could get done in time for the IGF awards as a submission to GDC, but prolly not.

I’ve got the name, the domain name, the server set up, so that’s easy. Now I gotta get the rest of them done.

Also, a web-flex solution prolly aint gonna cut it. It will work for solo play, but definitely not MMO play, so we’ll do solo first, then dabble with MMO soon thereafter.

The biggest problem of design vs. development is that development takes SO DAMN long to get out the door. Highly disappointing.

The Game play has been eluding me for a while, which means I’ve been losing sleep over it. In the Theory of Fun “cast” of gameplay - colision detection vs. simulation, I’ve decided it’s a simulation. Basically, I’m creating a mathematical model of memetic infection with resource constraints - thereby forcing players to establish footholds on resources, and keep control of them.

Also, have a name, first pass on logos (I suck at graphics) and the rough IDEA of how teamplay is going to work. Taking the spinning plate theory and a bit of Rag Doll Kung Fu type of play should work out as the “toy” part of the game. You group your members together and start them spinning - once they get enough “power” in the spin, you can use it for something. The amount “energy” you can store is limited, so it’s use it or loose it. With expenditure caps.

Memetics engine:
Transmission vectors - the number of vectors (mouth & pamphlets, seminars, radio, TV, internet).
Vector Spikes - (events of conversions, etc.)
Message - the core message that inspires the modification of behavior. Note that behavior modification is more important than the message.
Mods: the actual behavior mods that impact the spin of your members.

So, some of the resources you can spin are:

• Promise - measures how appealing your cult is - too weak and no one wants to join, too strong and too many join
• Burn - Effects Spin and Mods - How much damage being in the cult is causing your members - too much and you’re starving them, too little and they will have energy to do other things - affects Resistance
• Resistance - the membrane between you and the rest of the world - too weak and you lose cultists, too strong and it’s hard to recruit (includes things like “copyright”)
• Atrocity - Every cult has deaths and atrocities. Too much and you attract attention. Too little and your followers will not endure for you (and change their behavior)

Members have the following

• A Health - amount of burn a member can endure
• A “spin” value - the length of time a member can be “spun”
• A “gen” value - for each game attribute, basic is 1 member, 1 attribute gen, longer the spin, the higher the value, the more burn is done.

Game Gen Attributes:

• Money - allows for extra vectors and purchasing of events and resources
• Genius - creative ideas
• Soul - the mystical essence of the soul, related to magic and miracles

Resources:

• Base of Operations
• Recruiting Centers
• etc.

Now that I know what I’m gonna do, I’ve gotta go find a framework. My biggest problem is that I’m slow on the uptake.

So, first design was using Torque - then I realized I wanted a web-based interface for ease of development. While Torque can do it, I’m not wanting to develop that interface yet.

For website stuff, Nucleus installed quickly and works fine - none (and I mean NONE) of the mods work and the project looks sorta dead.

Seagull installed except when it said “directory not writeable - please chmod 777 /usr/share/pear/Seagull” - did that - not working. Looks great - also looks like it’s php 5.0 compatible and I REALLY don’t want to reinstall PHP.

WordPress, great working thing - like friggen hell to develop for (develop - not slap a skin on).

So.. fuck it, I’m creating a framework from scratch. Dammit.

OK, pen and paper design is done. I don’t like it only because it doesn’t capture the image I have of the game and some of the details are very kerblewy.

The goal: Grab Power, Brainwash Followers, Spend Power to Risk Gaining More Power, Sacrifice Followers, repeat until you meet your secret goals.

It’s a strategy game in the fact you have to manipulate or control map resources, with an RP twist.

Power comes in various resources - basically money, politics, and “manifestation”. Players can choose their manifestations or create their own.

First prototype will be via the web. Long term goal is to migrate to a client-server architecture, but a website prototype is good enough.

Anyways, more later…