The focus of my work on Monday was to take two my previous projects and merge them.
The first was Project Cyberverse, which was built around the idea of various corporations bringing resources back to earth for a profit. I had shelved this project awhile back. (Coincidentally, I found out today while browsing MobyGames that it turns out that concept has been done at least once before.)
The second was Interstellar Defender, which was built around the idea of building a crew of space cadets and exploring a hostile galaxy. (A lot of this was motivated by having played Star Command and thinking that'd be an awesome concept that BYOND can do handily.)
I basically ended up gutting the majority of the Project Cyberverse code while integrating Interstellar Defender's code (which was mostly just the solar system generation routine you can a screenshot from late last month).
Sometime around Monday Afternoon, I was in the process of creating a host GUI harness that created a universe to the host's specification, and my motivation suddenly lurched to a halt.
A very strange afternoon and evening resulted as I puzzled what the problem was. I wasn't particularly tired, I actually didn't have anything more exciting to do than developing this game, but there was something keeping me away from developing this. I took a nap. It didn't help.
Late Monday and early Tuesday were largely frittered away checking out Ultima 7 walkthroughs. Mid to Later Tuesday was spent getting a copy of Exult up and running and playing a bit of The Black Gate. (Funny enough, when I finished the game before, I just sort of happened across the end game by accident.)
Wednesday (today) I did indeed avoid my beta testing obligations to focus on development, but somehow spent the entire day composing meaningless messages for comment threads and forums.
Finally, about 8pm I return to byond.com with a relatively good plan to just hang around this site amongst fellow BYOND developers and that would put me back in the mood. Now, I'm blogging.
Overall, I'm not sure what the problem is, but I suspect it comes down to one fundamental: The Muse Disagrees. Something about the merging of Project Cyberverse and Interstellar Defender is rubbing me the wrong way. It's going to take a bit of soul searching to figure out what.
Good stuff - I'll make a mental note about Floyt & Fitzhugh, sounds like a great backdrop for space.
I'm a PvE player at heart. However, I'm no carebear, I just find the typical PvP online game to be an unbalanced travesty. So what I'm looking at is very much an exploration-based focus over the competition-based one unless I figure out a way to really well balance it. I've had some thoughts along those lines, such as mercenaries that support the underdog. So I'm sort of stuck halfway between PC and ID. Typical altaholicism. Choose a class? I wanna do em' all! I don't know. Muse conflict or no, I should probably Just Do It, but I'm real good at getting distracted. Same old addiction to thinking. | |
Every once in awhile, I drag The Now Habit off the bookshelf to try to productively solve my procrastination problem.
Now, unlike a certain loony I deleted a comment about (looking further into him I discovered he had tips related to psychic power - such as flat out telekinesis - and using dead friends to win at gambling) Neil Fiore is actually a PhD Psychologist. He does approach these little mental hangups of the human character with some level of scientific discretion. The bookmark I was at when I last put this down (presumably because I was now primed to do something productive) was at about page 66. Here, he took the standard statement I'd probably be saying to myself, "I have to finish something big and do it perfectly while working hard for long periods without time to play" and changed it in 5 profound places. * "I have to" becomes "I choose to" because the former invokes a sense of entrapment while the later invokes a sense of empowerment. * "Finish something big" becomes "start on one step" because it's a whole lot less intimidating for the psyche to approach. * "Perfect" becomes "imperfect" because perfection is also a very intimidating aspect because we're all human and perfection is usually an impossibility. * "I don't have time to play" becomes "I must make time to play" because not only does work and no play make Jack a dull boy, it actually ends up making him a listless unproductive one in the long run. (Of course, if Jack's doing what he loves, if his work is play, that's something else.) Roll it all together, we get "I choose to start on one small imperfect step knowing that I have plenty of time for play." Now, doesn't that make one just want to open up Dream Maker and start typing away? It does for me. What happened in this case (and I didn't mention this earlier) is that the code gouged me neatly in the eye. I created a map that was going to act as a template, and suddenly for some reason the game seemed to lock up when I brought it up. I had no idea what was causing that lockup and paniced and deleted some of my changes. It didn't work - I was suspecting corruption at this point. Turns out it everything was working as intended. I didn't bother to put those tiles down the tiles of the map I created for templating, so Dream Seeker was basically going through 10,000 tiles (100x100 map), cross-referencing with world.turf what the tile was, then placing the tile and doing about 12 lines of code I had in place to make the tile look varied. By the time I had figured that out, I had lost a bit of coding, and a subconscious fear of failure reared its ugly head and now I was off to other things. Now, I've just got to jump back on that horse. | |
Geldonyetich wrote:
Good stuff - I'll make a mental note about Floyt & Fitzhugh, sounds like a great backdrop for space. The series is out of print but still available in some places. The three books are: Requiem For a Ruler of Worlds Jinx on a Terran Inheritance Fall of the White Ship Avatar I ended up reading the second book in the series before I knew any others existed, but it reads plenty well enough on its own. | |
Requiem For a Ruler of Worlds is on its way from Amazon now, I should be able to give a read a week from now.
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I think you'll like it. Daley's writing is infectiously fun. I really wish he'd written more than just the three books about Floyt and Fitzhugh.
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I notice he wrote quite a bit about Han Solo Star Wars stuff. Han Solo's exploits do have a certain synergy to what open-ended game developers have been trying to reproduce for years.
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My source of inspiration when it comes to space-driven sci-fi is Brian Daley's Floyt & Fitzhugh trilogy. The backdrop is a universe in which humankind has had centuries to spread to the stars and diversify their cultural and genetic traits, but where fast, cheap interstellar travel is really bringing those groups into new contact again and bringing a lot of new opportunities during this (relatively) peaceful period. Alien civilizations exist with which there has been little or no contact; and with all the changes that have befallen the race, humanity itself has become something to explore. This is a world where there is much frontier, but there is also much civilization. It's like a more colorful version of the setting of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy; in fact based on a few references throughout the series I think it's likely Daley was a fan of that book.
In '01 this idea inspired me enough to start a webcomic about a merchant ship. There has not yet been one panel of art produced for this comic, but I have kept up writing scripts because it's a lot of fun. These merchants mostly stick with civilized planets but the region in which they travel is rife with piracy, slavery, etc. There's plenty of room for adventure in a setup like that.
But mostly I guess it just depends on what you want out of the game. A game of competing for resources to bring to Earth is defined more by competition than adventure. A game of exploration is the very opposite, and even then it's a wide field because adventure can take so many different forms.