I should have mentioned that I built an MMO (or the beginnings of an MMO) for TIGSource’s Assemblee competition (part 2).

You can play it here: http://hubris.simple-syrup.info/ - links to Help and the Assemblee thread can be found off of that page.

I’m continuing development of the game post-Assemblee, with SirNiko of TIGsource onboard to tackle game design. Should be interesting.

An interesting thought occurred to me while reading about the tepid sales of SYNSO! on XBL Indie Games. (See http://www.xnplay.co.uk/2009/11/19/squid-yes-not-so-octopus-sales)

XBL should provide a Twitter-like stream of updates from your friends, which would include things like “FriendX bought SYNSO! and rated it 5 stars! (X) to see SYNSO!” There could tremendous viral/auto-word-of-mouth effects with such a system and really let great games bubble to the top… or at least make you aware of their existence.

Well, anyway, $1 well spent on SYNSO!, I suggest you purchase it too if you haven’t — http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8025855035b/

What is your favorite Rogue-like?

Farmville started off as a game that was quickly enticing to me - “I like food! I would like to design my own farm! Ooh, I want to build such a cool looking farm! And grow soybeans and chili and and and…” I pictured a story in my head, and that was my motivation through the slow grind of plow, plant, pick, plow, plant, pick.

But it quickly became apparent that creativity and individualism are not to be rewarded in Farmville. Soon enough, I devolved into planting strawberries or raspberries during the day, and pumpkins at night before bed. I sold all my decorations, trees, animals, etc — inefficiencies impeding progress. In optimizing my play, I had abandoned what motivated me to play the game in the first place.

Of course, my feeling of “fun” was also lost. Was it because I was just grinding versus building a creative farm? Or, as the Kosterian theory of fun goes, had my brain “figured out” Farmville and thus no longer found it interesting/stimulating/”fun”?

Farmville fails for me because the optimal strategy does not appear to change as you grind. I’m still planting low-level seeds because they simply provide more xp/$ per hour than anything else. Decorations, animals, and so on seem to provide no benefit. No thought or decisions have to go into their use. No drops, no loot, no special items. Grind grind and more grind in the same way I was 10 levels ago.

Gameplay concepts I’d like to explore or see explored:

• Maintaining emergence in spite of simplicity/low time commitment — e.g. how can we get the emergent gameplay of something like UO or Eve Online in a more casual milieu. (Bonus thought: why are “social games” so anti-social?)
• Play with exploration for exploration’s sake at its core. There is something very powerful tied up in the experience of discovery.
• Procedural content. Not an original thought, but I’d like to see where it can go.
• Decentralized MMP. I won’t call it P2P MMP; rather, the idea is that anyone can own a computational bubble in an MMP universe. Your own laws apply in that computational bubble. It’s your domain. Your domain may be impermanent (e.g. hosted as long as your computer is turned on), or you may spend more and perhaps own dedicated computational space (e.g. a leased EC2 node running your domain). I don’t know if this would be a game per se. I miss the sort of Gibsonian view of cyberspace that this idea recalls, or Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone” if you want to get esoteric.

There are others but I’ll leave them for another time. What’s interesting is how many of these ideas could be combined (exploration game would be a massive content problem with out proceduralism.) Thoughts?

Since I hand rolled my physics, now I can start to do some fun stuff, like walking over uneven (bitmap-based) terrain. Basic collision detection with arbitrary sprites (happens to be a simple ground here but could also easily have had a floating irregularly shaped sprite to interact with as well) where the movement code will properly step you up - within a certain limit of height. Also implemented a Dinorun-esque steepness penalty which I think you can see in this video - you slow down as you climb up a hill, proportional to its steepness.

Hand-rolled physics are working well inside GameMaker. More tests are in order, but no major glitches to be found in the first basic test. Plenty of features to add of course. :) Mental note: Get a better screengrab program, preferably something without mega watermark from hell.

I needed to animate a dog (okay, a dingo actually), and found these stills of a dog in motion. Definitely a good tracing guide for hapless programmers trying to make quadraped sprites. (via http://www.tucdogtrak.com)

A full map of Green Sky from Windham Classic’s 1984 Below the Root. This was an epic and mysterious place to me during my childhood. It’s odd to see it all laid out at once, bereft of any sense of accomplishment for exploring the space. I remember quite vividly the exhilaration of finding a little hollow in a grund while floating to earth via shuba. The game also featured a much more robust ambient population than I can remember in any other game at the time.

This game is hugely inspirational to me, and I intend to build something based on this inspiration, but not immediately.

(Full image courtesy http://www.thegreatness.com)