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Though my time budget will probably rue the day, I have heard about an application called RPG Maker, where someone has already created the interface for a JRPG, and so you get to supply the content. Ideas for an RPG are already bubbling inside my head, and I'm starting to take notes on Georges Polti for threads I can weave together. 2 comments | post a comment
I've long debated the idea of using agent-based models to generate a living world for a player to explore and generally muck about in. The idea has gone through many incarnations: a Privateer like game, a simulation of high school social stratification, a game on gang wars.
For world creation, the idea is that the agent-based dynamic system will replace the scripted RPG plot. This can be good and bad. Good because the game is, in theory, replayable because a new one is generated every game. It also saves me the trouble of coming up with an elaborate plotline. The drawback is that there will be no elaborate plotline as the randomly generated computer world probably will not come up with any events as complex as a human can dream up. One compromise to use the agent-based model for the low-level activity while an overarching plotline is driven from a higher-level. As for the social aspect, again the canned and scripted events will be replaced by agents doing as they will. This means no more NPCs standing still while waiting for the characters to trigger interaction with them. But it's not likely the agents will do much that is truly interesting to the player. Do something they'll have to react, yes, but it's a bit much to hope they do something inspired. I'm debating whether to keep the sci-fi setting of the space trader genre or do something else, like trade and reconstruction in a post-apocalyptic world. One of my main concerns is that space travel is so expensive, I have no idea how trade would be practical except for things that cannot be grown or manufactured at the destination, but I guess that's something that's usually swept under the rug. post a comment
An idea for a game: a full description of siege warfare, not just the final assault. The attacking player has to manage the reduction of fortifications (by bombardment, undermining, or by direct attack) while keeping in mind forage (and thus seasonal weather) and possible relief forces. Or just starving them out. Meanwhile, the defender manages repairs, sorties, and other countermeasures.
I'm in the process of downloading 2GB+ of GURPS sourcebooks and have already wiled away many, many hours reading them. And the sad thing is I'll probably never play GURPS as I find the system kinda cumbersome. And porting the sourcebooks into another system also takes work. post a comment
I'm in the middle of reading Collapse by Jared Diamond. Between it and Guns, Germs, and Steel, I have a vague urge to design a strategic, civilization building game with all the difficulties of feeding a governing and religious class; spread of technologies; controlling, protecting, and expanding an empire; how to survive the good years and bad years; dependency on trade; environmental impact of human occupation; the desire for those in power to create monuments to themselves; etc.
http://www.alanemrich.com/PGD/PGD_Cours
Games I've considered buying for a long time:
And it seems like they're all (or some expansion is) about to hit the shelves soon. Roll for wallet and shelf space check. 3 comments | post a comment
Silent War has made a splash, at least among submarine enthusiasts, solitaire gamers, and campaign recreators. While the player is nominally the commander of submarine operations in the Pacific during WW2, he resolves every patrol of every Allied submarine in the Pacific in weekly rounds. At the rate my free time goes, this may take longer to play out than it did to fight the war...
David got me playing Freelancer, which is much like Wing Commander: Privateer. It is touted as allowing the player full reign to interact with a responsive universe. The first half is true; the player can take missions for a huge number of factions, ranging from authorities to corporations to criminals. As for the second half, it happens to some degree. A player's actions will raise his reputation with respect to a particular faction, improve it with respect to the faction's allies, and reduce it with respect to its enemies. And hurting a faction probably does weaken its presence in the area. However, control of the permanent stations and planets never changes hands, no matter how much you help one side.
Since I can't remember to update regularly, here's everything in one spurt. And I've probably left a bunch of stuff out. This is what I've been up to over the past month or so.
This brought me to looking at computer air combat games, so the computer can handle the numbers under the hood. In particular, Flight Commander 2 which, according to reviews, plays a tactically intelligent game. However, I can't seem to download it from Home of the Underdogs, so nix that. Meanwhile, I came across the Puerto Rico Evolver (PRE), which plays a mean game of Puerto Rico. Correction: it plays a mean game of 5-player Puerto Rico when most of the players are PRE AIs. This is because each PRE AI is a strategy: what buildings to build, what plantations to pick, etc. It has very little knowledge of the tactical situation and doesn't look at its opponents' states at all. Thus it neither consciously exploits or hinders its opponents. This is unfortunate as good human players agree that PR is a very tactical game. Humans probably find it hard to win against a group of PRE AIs because they do not play entirely rationally, and the eventual winner benefitted from the moves of another AI who wasn't aware of his tactical mistakes. The state of the art in tactical game AIs (chess, checkers, othello, backgammon) all use an alpha-beta method to search the decision tree, and I think I can do the same for PR. What I currently envision is that each decision node is the active player's role selection. The resolution of the role isn't fully branched out, which would massively increase the search space, but perhaps resolved in a mini-game to get an end state upon which to base the next role selection decision node. The problem I immediately ran into, however, is how to handle the random draw of plantations. There various things one can do (use the most likely draw, randomly generate several draws, etc.), but they either have bad predictive power or increase computational requirements. The alternative is to design a metric that estimates player position based on current game state rather than playing it all the way through, but that has complications of its own. How much is early gold worth? A trade good monopoly? The same trade good being produced 2 seats to the left or right? I'm currently corresponding with Tony Mitton, the PRE writer, to pursue this line of thought. Meanwhile, browsing boardgamegeek, I ran across Attack Vector: Tactical, which is the most realistic 3D space combat boardgame ever printed. When I say it borrows the Attitude/Vector Information Display (AVID) from Birds of Prey, you should have an idea of how complicated it is. It has physics up the wazoo, from Newtonian physics for motion (though the angular momentum problem of trying to pivot while rolling is swept under the rug since the rate of pivot in all directions is the same and the computer simply compensates by pivoting around the right axis), realistic estimates for reactor and weapon performance, fuel consumption for accelerating a lighter ship, thermodynamics for heatsinks, crossing vector issues for firing solutions, etc. I'm tempted to buy the game just to read the rulebook. In particular, I'm interested in the fact that mass drivers are not used to damage the enemy, per se: the target can either maneuver away from the slugs or brave them and use lasers as a point defense system. On the one hand, the target has constrained maneuver (and probably heads in the direction the attacker wants) or has to use its lasers (and limited energy) to avoid damage. This leads to some interesting ideas and philosophies for ship design. Very tempted. However, this game suffers under the same problem: more paperwork than game. Which led me to go back to my space combat game design. Things I have locked in place: the movement system (at least for capital ships), shield bookkeeping, and recording which systems are used/destroyed. I think these mechanisms are pretty elegant and should play quickly. The problem is now nailing down the details and adding chrome (variety of weapons and defences, damage allocation, fighter/bomber/boarding squadrons) without overwhelming the system. post a comment
Under no circumstances touch Civ 4 if you value your sanity says the person who's been up for 30 hours and realizes he hasn't eaten in about 15. 1 comment | post a comment
David turned me onto Download This, a column devoted to indie shareware and freeware games. Among those I've found myself addicted to:
So I've been gaming at Kingdom of Loathing pretty solidly this past couples weeks, playing 5 characters in parallel. I'll probably need to cut back when the semester starts, and I've sorta decided which 2 to keep.
Fudge on the Fly: In-game character creation. Adjust number of each skill accordingly.
The game has started. It is t3h h4wt.
About two weeks back, after I got my first comic strip up, I tried to get back into the swing of gaming. I toyed with Attack Sub a little: 2 Alfa's and 2 Victor III's trying to stop a convoy protected by the HMS Invincible and 3 escorts. One Victor III got an early bead on the convoy, and since the allies couldn't launch their helicopters, forced them to resort to active searches with their ships. With some lucky draws, this spotted the Russian subs, who were caught without the means to reduce detection. So the Victor III kept trying to setup firing conditions on the convoy when one Alfa was sunk. Then the helicopters were launched and started pinging the Ruskies. They located the other Victor III and sunk him too. The first Victor III sank a transport in retaliation, but the Russians were in a bad position, so I stopped the game.
I have also "acquired" Unearthed Arcana, 224 pages of variants and house rules for d20. The word "evilgasm" comes to mind.
I have "acquired" v3.5 DMG, PHB, and MM. I also have the Complete Warrior. Gears are spinning... 1 comment | post a comment
I joined a d20 play-by-post game called Demon Rising. Here's my character: a Gnome Wizard (Illusionist). post a comment |
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