Rule number one of traveling: Never show up in the middle of a Chinese New Years Day Parade. The taxibus couldn’t get me to the front door of the hotel, so, I went down Market street to Broadway, then up through Chinatown to the voila! the Hotel Triton…. which is an nouveau Art Deco meets post 1990’s Apple Macintosh design.

Once I got here, the color patterns alone frightened me back to life. In short, the rooms are good looking, and big if you’re a Lilliputian. I don’t mind so much because there’s so many mirrors I can see myself from any angle… A visage that always puts a smile on my face… but enough about how the room makes me look good.

Unlike last year, I came in two days earlier to work get a lay of the land, figure out how I’m going to get to the convention, where the best food is, and where the best Starbucks is. That’s a joke for those of you who haven’t been here. From my window, I’ve got 1 in view, and 2 more within a block of me. And there’s a Peats, and a few others.

Traveling rules #2: I’m lucky I don’t have cable - even though I’ve run all over the place, today, the History Channel frigging rocks. Last night it was wonderful History of Sex (Love the Greek urns… and both the Samurai and Greeks were a bunch of perverts). Right now, I’m watching Barbarian Battletech and the “Dark Ages. Gotta love those Goths. If I had a working TV at home, I’d never get anything done.

Third Traveling Rule - Holy shit you people watch a lot of commercials about erectile dysfunction and herpes. Both include side effects of sudden loss of blood pressure if you stand up too fast. Funny as hell if you think about it.

Off the Irish Bank in a couple minutes. Cya2morrow

The TV show Day Break is a RPG Game dream. The biggest problems with RPG game play is that the player is locked pretty tightly to a script. Event one needs to follow event two, the direction is very brittle, and once you’ve played the two events, you can’t go back and play it again without reloading the script and starting over.

Granted, the plot is “Groundhog’s Day” with a fairly decent murder plot.

Day Break has that loop built inside of it. You wake up, you take action, you learn things. If you screw it up, the clock resets to zero, and you can replay shades of decisions, to tweak things just right. Once something is 100% solved, the game play changes subtlety.

Players’ rewards are new choices and locations that unlock once a specific thread is solved to satisfaction. Threads could be replayed either via video playback or interactively, but leave the choice open for re-experience. Thus, the player failure is a result of resetting the game - providing the “death scenes” (failure scenes).

Add a few good characters that the players have to earn their trust, then lose their trust then gain them back is another series of rewards that have emotional experience.

Thank You Nintendo Wii, for bringing in the ideas. No one expects someone to take a Wiimote and make it control your roomba. They don’t expect you to play WOW with it. And they definitely don’t expect you to become a Wii-J DJ.

But we do it anyways because the barrier of entry is a lot lower than it’s ever been before, and because swinging your arms around is cool in a crowd of techno music. Now, soon, I expect people to have excellent fun with it.

What I foresee:
- Being able to execute gesture commands that interface with games will open up standard user interfaces with operating systems
- Faster processing of scripting with higher language functionality will allow end users to efficiently program any interface
- Standardized wireless interfaces with every things will allow us to interface at a consumer level
- Artists, like our DJ WiiJ, will lead the way, by creating functionality and terminology (flickstart and beatmatching)

Man he’s got some intense stares in that video! There’s entire hair product markets afraid of that doo!

Add into the mix, all it takes is one sexy woman dancing and DJ’ing and interfacing with household appliance with some sexy dance moves (did I mention a sexy woman?) in a YouTube and/or commercial.

Just as our parents saw the advent of color TV, the rise of personal computing, our children will never know that wireless interfaces with nearly everything never didn’t exist.

I think this adds to my theory that as the singularity becomes actionable, witnesses to the singularity will not be able to know it’s occurring due to the rapid rate of change around them.

[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.

We’ve seen a perceived lack of resources cause MMORPG players to steal and mug “virtual” things. And now, in the equivalent bigger-nerd (”bigger dick” even) contest over an online chat, and being egged on by their peers, two Koreans met at the playground and kicked each others’ ass. This behavior of virtual chat bleeding into reality with fists is called Hyonsil-P, a combo for “Reality” and “Player-Killing” or PKing.

As an observer of behavior, humans are physically fighting over anonymous audience prestige for virtual resources. Reality-locked sentiences will not understand the need for either, and see the fights as ridiculous. Humans like excuses to fight and prove their dominance. What I am expecting next is that a group of Horde members (or a future equivalent) will meet one or more Alliance members and slay them.

And I believe it will happen within 5 years. Once this starts, we will have MMORPG publishers using this behavior as a back-handed way to promote their game, much like Rockstar games tries to bait parent groups to ban their games (Bully, GTA). In fact, this is very similar to the way alcohol manufacturers and drug dealers name their products: invoking death to incite interest.
Maybe we need a Mortal Kombat MMO that really knits players together under law and chaos, so they can bond together? How about events that record the movements with MoCap functionality to create a real battle on 3d frames?

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

Crossposted this over at Chris M’s But Is it fun on the Master of Magic thread. (Sorta… got a socket error)

There’s been 4 classic Expand, Explore, Discover, Conquer games: Civilization [Civ](the archetype), Master of Orion [MOO](sci fi galaxy), Master of Magic [MoM](magical version) and Alpha Centauri [AC](sci fi singularity).

Of all of these, only MoM appears to have DIED a horrible death of obscurity. Civ is going strong and deserves to be reviewed. MOO is succeeded by Galactic Civilization, which gets a big thumbs up from me. (Friends do not let friends waste money on MOO3). And AC looks to be dying a graceful death.

So why is MOM so hard to repeat? Why is it not sexy enough for a game?

Let’s look at the basic design challenge to do a EEDC for “Magic Genre”.

1) Have to introduce a brand new fantasy IP in an overloaded market. Meaning: the learning curve cannot be steep, potentially “lightening” the content. The content is the standard how many races and what types (GO KOBOLDS!! DOWN WITH ELVES!!!) and how does magic work.

2) Clearly identify the goal - just like Civ/Alpha Centauri. MoM had Tech Tree (Magic) win and Conquer win. I suggest adding a “Mana Market” win, a Diplomacy win, and 2 unconquerable threat loss in the game (after so many turns, Magic dies and super apolitical race gets stronger, conquering all).

3) Decent AI. “Cheater” AI or “True Strategy” AI doesn’t matter - but just make it decent. Yeah, lots of people whine the cheater AIs, but they’ve never designed a game.

4) Turns that DON’T waste the player’s time. Fork a process that is deciding actions while the player is performing his/her turn. The problems with Turn-based now is that players are bored while the game is playing. Having that not be the DEFACTO way that turn-based works is a waste of players’ time. Design it in from the start.

5) Online interactivity. Wouldn’t it be cool if players could design races , units and spells and share them? Give them a toolbox (Not an SDK) to design and then post for others to try out? With this, you have a viral effect of “Come see what I built and try it out” that they’d be able to share with others, and between games. For example, a player could design a Orc Geomatic Rotdamerung Eviscerator unit, and post that unit to the IP-branded website. Someone else would then create a Gnomish Epedited Velociraptor in retalliation… you get the idea

6) And multiplayer. *Sigh* The bane of our existence. You could drop this if you definitely had #5, but publishers would be nightmarish about it.

Now that I’ve spent 20 million on the game already… Does anyone know if the Civ4 engine is something that could be licensed and adapted for this?

It’s the Mel Gibson Drinking and Driving game…

Here’s my Question

1) How come I can’t run over the rabbis?

2) Where’s Danny Glover?

3) Where’s Danny Glover’s Hot Daughter?

4) How come you can’t drive through a building? Fly a helicopter?

5) You should be able to make a movie about torturing someone for 2 hours and get some of the crashes erased, or some pro-republican propaganda.

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.