Hi! How ya doin?
I’m fine, thanks.
Ok, so there are only four or five of you “regular readers”, and I’ve known most of you longer than my first marriage lasted and since before my second marriage started. It wouldn’t be much of a bother just to email each of you individually.
But then it wouldn’t be an impersonal message, would it?
First: a bug with either WordPress 2.51 or Akismet prevents me scanning most of the spam-trapped comments for false-positives. Worse, my comments are being slammed with spam worse than ever.
If your comment fails to post immediately, there’s a very good chance that it never will. If it fails to post within a few days, then it almost certainly never will.
Second: I haven’t been posting much original content lately, and don’t expect that will change any time soon.
I have been working on the game mentioned here. That’s a hobby-level side-project for me, and I hadn’t been motivated to work on it for months, but seeing the enthusiastic reactions of Old Bald Angus was all I needed.
that game idea of yours is actually about the most awesome thing I’ve heard anybody come up with in like ten years, man
‘Cause, I mean, yeah… it really is.
Apparently it inspired Angus to consider committing the most sincere form of flattery, or as he might describe it, to “rip-off my idea”.
The only thing holding him back is a fear of achieving a goal of being too outrageously popular, if I’m reading this right. It sounds like he’s dropping the notion altogether.
But then just a few days after that post, blammo, there’s a screen shot.
Not working on it any more, eh? Oh, man, he’s way ahead of me.
Well, that’s alright.
I disagree strongly with the concept of owning an idea. Copyright law cannot be applied to an idea, but only to specific expressions of that idea, and the reasoning behind that is sound. Essentially, the reason is because the concept of owning an idea is stupid.
I might be able to claim ownership of an idea or two with a software patent, as apparently some do, which would leave copyright law out of the picture… but see, it’s not just the law that I think is good there, but also the reasoning behind it. Owning an idea is a stupid concept whether it’s legal, enforced, and real (via software patent) or not.
If some company tries to patent “my” idea, then I might make a stink about it. Otherwise… Well, ok, so if a company offered $10 million for my work so that they could patent some of the ideas expressed therein, I admit I would sell-out faster than the Republican Revolution.
But other than that, I consider any idea of mine to be an idea and not my idea.
Anway… about the game I’ve been working on: It’s once again hidden behind a login screen, and won’t be public until I’ve done a bit more with it.
But it will be public long before it is “done”, and I’ll be a bit more collaborative with the design. I just want to make sure that the creative direction is more solid prior to expanding the design team, for all the reasons why that’s also a good idea for commercial game projects.
In the meantime, you have my blessing to rip-off my idea and go nuts with it.
And Angus, don’t worry about how to handle an overwhelming success ’til it happens. If everyone let that stop them, there wouldn’t be any overwhelming successes.
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I hadn’t read your game idea before, but it sounds like a hell of an idea for a Metaplace game.
And hey, unless you’re also counting RSS aggregated readers among those 4 or 5, you might have more regulars than you think!
Good thoughts on “an idea” vs “my idea,” and I say that even more so since I had essentially the same game idea a few years back and never did anything with it. It’d be the first TRUE “Internet” game in my opinion…
I’m very serious about wanting to help you do this thing of yours if you are actually gonna do it.
And I’m also serious when I say that there ain’t no way I’m gonna do this kinda thing unless I’m helping you do it.
My powers of unregulated chaos don’t work the same as your powers of hard work and perseverance, I’m more interested in drinking and eating sammiches at the bamboo bar and grill on the tropical island than I am interested in games, ’cause there’s a lot more earthly sources for me to tap into for power there, I’m an animal, I need to smell the cocoa butter and see the bikinis and feel the sunshine to get motivated heh.
I mean, if I was some guy like Smed, and not a train hobo, I’d have to hire YOU to keep me interested in all that game crap, I mean, you keep me interested in that crap on ACCIDENT heh.
Ugh, I’m starting to go off the rails with the “not being serious” thing again.
I’m sorry, man, its hard for me, I actually DO understand that you may be under a lot of constraints and stuff, but thats just abominably frustrating for me, ’cause its in the way of what I see as maximizing potential and progress with a limited amount of time to play with.
And I also understand the way you need to work quietly on your own and not be pestered and distracted, after watching you do the obsessed-like-Ahab workaholic thing with that UO emu of yours, but that’s really the only “trick” that works on me, y’know, to win me over to some cause you gotta prove yourself to me by example.
So really you are one of the few people that could actually get me to work hard.
Meh, I’m just jealous of the Parallel Universe where I get to help you do this thing, driving around in a Post Apocalyptic Recreational Vehicle and going door to door using all my super-adaptive Train Hobo of Chaos Powers to convince people to give us money and help us build it and all that other Cool Adventure stuff heh.
Heck man, we could prolly make a ton of money off the Documentary for that if we just hauled a video camera around with us ahaha.
I ain’t all boring and nice like all these game dev losers that put “Making Of” DVDs in their Collector’s Sets, that junk would have to be Rated R in MY case, baby.
I’m gonna *censored* make the *censored* show us their *censored* and *censored*, give the *censored* what those *censored* want and *censored* ahaha.
That *censored* is gonna put those *censored* *censored* *censored* in SEATS, *censored*.
Right now I’m just hooking up the image-search stuff to the DK doodad. Then I want to swap out the map. After that I’ll look into doing a data-entry interface. Maybe something password-protected at first, but eventually exposed to regular users with some kind of voting system so good content rises to the top.
Then, the quest system, etc. But I don’t want to think too far ahead ’cause when I think about all the work ahead, it’s discouraging. Heh.
Hey man, I just happen to know someone who would be willing to assist with any graphical, artsy, texturing, rendering, surfacing stuff you might want done.
I can chip in on quest writing when it gets to that point, for that matter.
Seriously, this thing must be done, if for no other reason than to give us the opportunity to draw information out of Angus…specifically, whether “I need to smell the cocoa butter” means “hang around sunbathing babes” or “Stick my nose between the toes of a chick named ‘Cocoa’.”
The answer may seem obvious, but remember…we’re dealing with “Captain Chaos” here.
I can send you some Cheetos to consume while working on this project.
And where can I buy a Nailgun Monkey t-shirt (male)?
Wait, Mego…do you want a shirt for a male, or do you want a shirt with a male Nailgun Monkey on it?
Actually, there’s a good twist…if you roll a female Nailgun Monkey, then once a month you autofire at everything for five days.
And yes, I went there.
Inhibitor, what about voice work?
Did someone said cheetos? I will work for those too.
Jeff, I would be willing to do some voice work. I also can do some motion capture action stunt work, I made my own black motion capture ninja body suit with ping pong balls on the target points
If you want it, I’ll be glad to do whatever voicework you need, Jeff.
Dude you got Mego the Blues Traveling Master Roleplayer GM Guy, Inhibbity Bibbity saying he’ll do quest stuff AND voicework and James the Ninja Graphics Guy willing to do stunt work for cheetos man c’mon wtf it ain’t get any better than that!
Is James Winst?
‘Cause I know Winst is studying to be a game dude, and he’s got that Barry White - Burl Ives Voice thing going on man that’s some good shizzo too, I bet we could make some money off a Nailgun Monkey Online Christmas Album or something if WInst signs up.
And if James IS Winst, then he’s an Orson Welles-Narrator-sounding Ping Pong Ball Ninja Graphics Stunt Man Willing to Work for Cheetos, holy shnikies, that’d be a good thing to have around on rainy and boring days at the Bamboo Bikini Bar and Grill on the Tropical Island heh.
yes I am Winston, a.k.a. Barry White / Burl Ives / Orson Welles, and not too long ago a buddy said I sounded like Vin Diesel.
Heh, yeh… kinda weird how stuff like this comes together. Should have said “LET’S MAKE A GAME!” a long time ago, I guess.
I think I should setup some forums for us, ’cause blog-posts and a comment thread aren’t the best for organizing anything. I might look into google’s source code management thingie, too. So that’s one more thing to do.
OBA, I noticed you posted something about java and not using it to interact with a db. No worries. Javascript runs client-side, and server-side is all PHP. Microsoft has some kinda server-side java doodad, but I don’t think even they are very keen on it, so hell if I’m gonna figure out how to set it up.
The backend we’re using is LAMP. I’m using XAMPP on my local machine, running PHP4 (there’s a batch file in XAMPP to downshift to it) because that’s all Yahoo web hosting supports. If I hit a point where using PHP4 is going to take a lot of extra work, or make upgrading to PHP5 in the future a lot of work, then I’ll just switch hosts. Everything should work under both, but my preference is to develop, debug, and test in the same environment that’ll be running live.
Note that you can install XAMPP on your local machine and set all this stuff up without having to run anything that’s actually on the internet, and it’s all opensource.
Ok…
I’m starting with the Dragon Knight back-end. You can wander around a world-map, chat with other player, buy/sell in towns, kill monsters encountered randomly, and loot items and equipment. That’s a big chunk of the core gameplay right there, and it’s all written in PHP4. If you install XAMPP, you could also download and install DK and play it locally.
I had been using Yahoo!’s image search API to fetch images, but I’m re-engineering that to use javascript. This is because the API is limited to 5,000 queries per month. Scraping image search results without using the API bypasses that restriction, but just ’til someone notices (plus it’d be dishonest). Currently all the queries originate from the server, but by using javascript the image searches will originate from the users, for whatever images they need to fetch.
We’ll still be able to override random image search results for specific images that we want to use is specific places. e.g. we might have static custom images for the towns or other key points of interest, but use search results for “generic forest 01″.
DK already has a huge library of mods that we’ll probably want to either use, or further modify to fit. For example, there’s a monster image mod that does what we want in terms of providing an image for each monster. It just needs to send a bit of javascript instead of an image URL for us.
So, I want to do that code, and swap-out the DK classes with the QuestRAGE classes (monkey, ninja, pirate, robot, fairie, princess) before opening-up anything to play. Otherwise it’d just be DK we’re playing there, and migrating characters from their three classes to our six would be irritating. Actually there’s just a little bit of design I want to do before any characters are made so as to avoid conversion headaches even much later… setting up some db fields for future use at least.
Meanwhile, if you grab the DK dev kit, you’ll see that DK doesn’t come with a whole lot of variety in terms of critters, loot, and spells. Also that none of it is as appealing to a nailgun monkey as it should be. The idea is to have users expanding that data as the spirit moves them eventually, but we still need some seed data to get the ball rolling and to establish the tone of the game.
And of course, for anything that will have an image associated with it (treasue, equipment, monsters, terrain/geography, etc), one of the most important attributes is what kind of search results does a query for it return. Maybe items need an image search term as a separate parameter (and an optional image URL).
I think all those sorts of details are what the production guys refer to as establishing a content pipeline. Maybe the schedule-monkeys are onto something after all.
I also want to change that default map. I used this map of the imaginary internet for my little travel movie thing and that lends itself to a lot of internet-humor in terms of locales and encounters… but so does the real world, so I could go either way there. I don’t want to use a generic fantasy-world sort of map, though (unless it’s an obvious parody of a real-world map).
I love OBA’s idea of embedding youtube videos sometimes, rather than limiting ourselves to images, and as long as we’re out of the box thinking, there are other places where audio alone might be most appropriate. I didn’t have anything specific in mind when I asked if you’d be willing to do voice-over, Inhib… It’s just you have that crazy morning-DJ voice.
Alright, so… well I guess this comment is plenty long-enough for now.
Dude I was just about to say I was glad it was Winst ’cause OH MAN that woulda been awkward and horrible y’know if James was a totally different guy with a weird little voice that wanted to sing on a Christmas Album?
And then BLAM the Mad Scientist Strikes with even more than I was actually hoping for.
It all sounds good to me, man, and I like that forum idea, too, I don’t wanna have to talk in public monologues and feel like I gotta keep my things fluffy and interesting for lurkers and misadventurers and whatever, and that’s not any good for you either, y’know, where you gotta waste time and energy walking on egg shells and being diplomatic for strangers so you don’t look like a jerk or something when what you REALLY need to be able to do to get to max speed and maximum gain is be able to express your opinion quickly and honestly and accurately and not worry about all that.
I’m more than happy to help out in any way I can, though I don’t know how helpful I can be… It’s been a long time since I coded anything, as I’ve mostly forsaken that skill years ago. I do have about 6TB of bandwidth, and almost 300GB of webspace I could hand over to the cause… Though I imagine you guys have plenty of that stuff lying around yourselves.
Oh, and I know a dedicated community of lovable assholes who’d probably eat something like this up, and help string together themed content (evilavatar.com.) Guys’d go crazy to make a hardcore zombie-themed world, and maybe even a community-based one for EvAv users. (That was an idea Angus tossed out, anyway, and I think could work.)
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