Dystopian Fantasy World

There’s plenty of dystopian scifi worlds (George Orwell’s 1984, The Hung Gamers by Suzanne Collins, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, and plenty more.) However, there are very few dystopian fantasy worlds.

Common themes in scifi dystopias are:

• Surveillance
• Mind-control
• Propaganda
• Large Class Divisions
• Low Standard of Living for the Majority
• Authoritative Anti-Democratic Government
• Lack of nature
• Oppression/suppressed creativity, individuality

It would be interesting to explore these themes (and others) in a very different style than the typical.

I’m going to try working on something around this as a project. In the event it works out, I’ll keep posting about it on the blog.

Why Aren’t Games their own World?

Hello again, followers, visitors, guests, and webcrawlers!

I’m making this post to talk about some concepts that I think are close to being accomplished, but no one seems to want to finish.

Why is it that adventure or RPG games fall into a narrative story? Yes, puzzle solving is nice. I don’t think that’s a problem. But at the same time… Why should you play? Is anything different in the game for you having played it? What makes the final product any different from your friend finishing the same game, or a random stranger? Why does it matter that you played?

It’s true that some games create a small amount of involvement- “A dragon burned our city down. Dragon is dead and city is half-rebuilt, so we’re coming out of hiding. Yay!” Solving a prescripted quest produces a somewhat realistic prescripted result.

Why? If the game is about telling a story, and letting the player be a part of it, become the hero, and solve puzzles along the way… why is it that almost every entity in the world is either a static wall or a cardboard cutout attached to a broken record player?

I’m going to review three qualities that adventure games (RPG’s, roguelikes, Minecraft, platformers, etc.) ought to incorporate.

• Immersion
• Dynamics
• Complexity

Ludum Dare

Hi! I’m participating in the Ludum Dare, a 48 hour game design competition, starting on the weekend of August 20.

The Ludum Dare is a game-making competition whose reward is the project it spurred you to generate.

Currently, voting for the theme is underway. There are a lot of possible themes, some general, and some specific. Some are even the same (genetics, evolution, adaptation).

It might be too late to join this Ludum Dare (I don’t think so yet) but it is in 1 day, and you only have 48 HOURS to make a game.

The Ludum Dare typically has a good turnout, with lots of original games by small game developers.

See for yourself:

ludumdare.com

“Smooth” Terrain Generator

I’ve recently created a simplistic terrain generator type applet.

The basic idea is this: I want an arbitrary, random terrain which satisfies the property that the absolute value of the slope at any point is less than X.

This prevents sharp features, like mountains, from being present, but it also stops random jagged structures from showing up and produces a large diversity of results. I imagine that adding several layers of the noise will result in a nice-looking mountain region.

Masjin

Fun Fact: I REALLY like this game.

It’s called “Masjin,” by Hempuli. It’s a 2D platformer shooter you play online on two teams, in a variety of game-modes.

http://www.hempuli.com/

You can download it there, in the first column of games at the bottom.

At the time of this blog post, I’m also playing it. Feel free to join me.

Abstract Constructor – Cellular Automaton

A little while ago I made a little applet for simple generative design.

 

Social Gaming Concept – Haunted House

So I was pondering some ideas relating to game design, and I was struck by this little concept:

A “haunted house” where all of the players in a server are stuck. The only thing is it’s not haunted, and everyone thinks THEY are the only player in the house.

What’s in a Game?

The title is punny. If you don’t get it, we don’t need your kind here.

Nah, just kidding.

Well, I’ve been trying to make games for a long time. I’m a decent programmer, I have plenty of insight in design, and I culd quickly whip up a game as soon as I was told what to do. The problem is, I can’t think of any interesting games for me to make.

So I decided to make a blog post about what game design is all about. There’s a couple principals behind it. However, I really think it all comes down to psychology.

Game theory analyzes the best choices that players can make in multiplayer games with various payoff values. But most games are primarily singleplayer. When it comes down to it, I think there are some basic aspects of game design that determine how people react to games:

Questions every Creationist Needs to Answer

I already posted about ID, but I have some extra things to say about it.

This is hopefully a fairly comprehensive guide to determining exactly how creationist logic works.

On Artificial Intelligence

There’s a deep, philosophical question that’s asked a lot. I don’t pretend to know its answer, but I do have something to say about it.

What is the difference between the human mind and a computer?

Well, that’s a tricky one. I think tbe best way of looking at this is: What can the human mind do that computers can’t, and vice-versa.

There’s a couple of old problems. I am incapable of providing their answers, given that hundreds of years of debate sometimes aren’t enough.