Posts published during March, 2009

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March 31, 2009

SW: Plasma Weapons

Plasma Canon core mechanics:
A plasma canon is almost always smooth bore. Canon cartridges are two layers of cylindrical crystal formed from a mix of readily available quartz and biomass, surrounding a gaseous chemical compound with a base of Xenon or a similar heavy gas. The rear of a cartridge contains a segment of explosive solids used as a propellant.

When a cartridge is loaded it is immediately given a short electrical charge which the crystal naturally maintains and prolongs. As the charge travels through the gases, they are converted to plasma at a rate relative to the amount of charge applied. This reaction causes extreme amounts of heat which the crystal conducts across several layers of varying resistances and surface area, insulating the worst of the reaction from the barrel of the cannon.

The charged cartridge is then fired by the application of a second electrical charge to the propellant. By maintaining the cartridge in the barrel, the user can allow the crystal’s inner surface to disintegrate while the reaction builds more heat. This allows for a hotter cartridge that loses less energy in the destruction of the crystal on impact. However, as the crystal breaks down so does the built in heat sink, prolonging it too far too often may result in permanent barrel damage. If the crystal is completely destroyed prior to firing, the plasma is likely to destroy the entire structure of the gun when the propellant inevitably goes off.

Plasma Rifle core mechanics:
A plasma rifle is generally long and thing, with a rifled barrel. The cartridge is usually smaller than cannon cartridges, and uses only a single layer of crystal. Rifle cartridges do not have a propellant component on the back, and also have rounded or sharpened tips.

Rifles do not apply an electrical charge to the plasma cartridge when loaded. Primarily, this means that a rifle cartridge cannot be “overloaded”, however it allows for a variety of accuracy enhancing attributes. In order to fire, a brief electrical charge runs down the length of the barrel, charging the cartridge and powering an electromagnet which slings the shot out of the barrel at very high speeds.

Most rounds have an ideal range of roughly two hundred meters, where their chemical reaction is at it’s hottest. Beyond that range the chemical reaction is usually in decline and the crystal sheath is beginning to degrade and loose it’s aerodynamic qualities.

—

Notes:
I love it when setting and game play come together in a happy medium. This provides a good solid explanation for some game play mechanics, and works well with the proposed resource model.

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March 30, 2009

Referrential Scrap

Memetic revolutions are on the rise apparently.

It seems I was just awarded the Honest Scrap award for blogging brilliance from not one, but two of my fellow bloggers. Copra of Bull Copra and Ardua of Echoes of Nonsense.

This meme has a few guidelines to go with it. Namely that if you are going to participate, then you should write a post celebrating you’re getting it, including the name of the person who nominated you. From there you need to hand out the award to seven more bloggers who you feel deserve it. Finally, the meat of the meme is that you then have to write 10 honest facts about yourself.

So first the awards ceremony… This is going to be rather difficult, since I’d prefer to find people who haven’t already been tagged.

iMMOvation, is a blog maintained by Wiqd in which he details his thoughts on a Harvest Moon inspired MMO. I personally enjoy reading it, especially as he deals with many of the issues that are best faced by looking outside the core combat focused sensibilities.

Raph Koster’s Website, honestly, if you don’t know who he is, now is a great time to learn.

The Ancient Gaming Noob, Wilhelm is a fellow EVE player, though much richer than I am. He’s pretty much always a good read in my opinion.

Construed, it’s always good to read about the rest of geekdom that I don’t usually spend tons of time reading about.

Kill Ten Rats, Ethic, Zubon, Ravious, Oz if one of them isn’t writing something you’re interested in, just wait.

Anyway Games, I don’t comment enough, but it’s so much to think about.

Stylish Corpse, I know she’s already been tagged, but I just can’t make this list without including her.

On to the meat, the honesty.

1. I drink 6-8 cans of Mountain Dew a day on average. I still have only a few usable hours of energy a day.

2. When I was in sixth grade, I was the alternate for the Math fair and it so happened someone was sick the day of. Wound up taking home 9th in city. That was strange.

3. I’ve never failed any of my four History classes in college, in fact I got a B in each. Which is strange since I also failed to show up for my final every time. I liked that professor, for his excellent lectures… honest.

4. I’m mortally afraid of heights, job applications, crowds, people talking to me while I’m cooking, and driving on the freeway.

5. I’m ten to fifteen minutes early to every appointment. Only broken when I’m even earlier because I allowed myself more time in case I got lost, and in this case didn’t.

6. When it comes to time, I generally have no idea what time it is, or what day it is, which means every appointment rules my life for hours before hand as I have to remind myself to watch the clock.

7. I haven’t read a book in a couple months. I don’t know why, just haven’t been down to the library lately.

8. Despite knowing every trick in the book for self organization and time management, I honestly can’t get myself to stick to any of them.

9. I prefer to sleep on the floor.

10. My singing range is from low bass to high alto.

I have no idea if anyone is even going to care, but yeah, that’s ten true facts about me.

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Q & A: Shattered World

I feel like having another Q & A. Let’s take this opportunity then to get on the same page about Shattered World. Ask any questions you may have about it, or relating to it, please. If you don’t have any questions about it, then this is the perfect opportunity to go back and read up on it so you can have questions about it. ^.^

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March 28, 2009

Quest Text

I feel like writing right now, so why stop after that last novel, let’s write another one.

Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Quest Problems, Admits to Designing Stranglethorn Quest via Cuppytalk

I think Kaplan hit the nail on the head with point two. The effects of this one point radiate out into the entire rest of the talk, whether he means it to or not. Point nine is another example of actually being one way of looking at the very core of the issue. Personally I like good understandable examples, and I’m kind of sad I don’t have a workable prop here for this.

Imagine if you will that I’m standing in front of a white board with ten big A3 (8.5″x11″ for Americans) buttons on it. Behind each of those buttons is one page of Coraline by Neil Gaiman. To the left is a scoreboard with a bunch of zeroes showing on it. So here are the rules, I can press the buttons in any order and get one point per press, per button. Once I press all ten, I get ten bonus points and all the pages move forward so that I have the next ten pages. However, I can’t get back to talking to you, or take any breaks until I reach 100 points. Additionally, if I can’t get back to it tonight, this post never gets written.

Now, I’m kind of tired already, it’s been a long night and any more delays and I’m just going to fall asleep. But I really care about this post. I’ve never gotten to read Coraline so those pages are looking interesting, but I’ve got this point just banging around inside my head waiting to get out. Take a moment, and given all the information, just try to imagine me pressing those buttons as fast as you think I would press them.

Personally, I imagined myself tearing through them with the occasional pause to read something that caught my eye. Why? Because it’s not a book, it’s a button pressing machine and I have something really important to me get to. I don’t think there are many people who view quest text skippers in this light, not ADD thirteen year olds, just someone who’s friends need them at a higher level to play with them, or whose guild needs them at max level, or who can’t wait for the raiding game play that they really like. Just because the button has text does not make the button game a novel.

Fixing this requires us to look at something more basic about quest text, it’s purpose. When I walk up to someone in a starting zone and they ask me to reduce the overpopulation of the bears in the zone, the text is giving me the reason why I’m doing it. To reduce the overpopulation of bears. I kill eight bears, eight more spawn, the population is the same, I walk back to the quest vendor and find out something funny. They lied to me. I did not kill the bears to fix the overpopulation, I killed the bears so they could give me stuff. If I had done it to repair their ecological situation, it would not have been considered complete until the implied task, thinning their actual numbers, was completed. That is not the case, instead it is simply asking me to push a button a certain way, in this case kill x bears, and collect my prize. It is soon discovered that the faster you push buttons, the more reward you get, and the closer you get to whatever goal you yourself have actually set. And so it is never actually explained why you bothered killing x bears, except in the meta sense of “to advance”.

Now imagine that the buttons have been replaced with an adlib sentence. _____(Proper noun) is _____(adverb) _____(verb – present tense) because _____(proper_noun) _____(verb – past tense) the _____(adjective) _____(noun). I press button one, a list of 10 names come up I choose one. I press is and ten choices of possible replacement words come up. And this continues until in short order I’ve formed the sentence, ‘Jay was pretty pissed after Milley lost the good sword.’ The points rack up, it rolls over to a new sentence.

Before anyone even suggests it, I’m not saying we need to make them choose your own adventure. I’m saying you need them to be one word. One big bold visible word that the player interacts with as they play. Rather than sending the player to kill the bear overpopulation, set a trigger the first time they enter the woods for a group of bears to spawn in and attack them. A guard runs over, thanks them for helping with the bears that have been overpopulated lately and gives you the quest reward. What you’ll see here is what isn’t written. No ecological survey in your quest log, no long quest intro. The player instantly understands that the bears are hostile and wonders why, the guard answers why, the player sees the problem is solved, but has a viable reasoning for other people to be having a similar problem in front of him. And they know why they did it, to protect themselves and luckily to assist with the bear population.

Text cannot be your hook. Any number of people will sit down and read the text once they are hooked into a story. However, there is little chance of catching them the first time around if they have to read text to enter the story. On top of that, you want people to enjoy their time spent questing as a non-grind and to get a story with it, if you can encapsulate the story into actions, into showing them what is going on, you will have succeeded. If you try to keep it to telling them, you will fail. I think a truly great novelist or writer-director, if tasked with designing the quest layout for an MMO will probably tell you the same thing. Show your audience, don’t just tell them. Don’t lean on them to write their next great novel in your game, or to fill your game with their brilliant cinematics, work with the strengths of our own medium to not just tell the player the story they’ve helped with, but to show it to them.

The move has largely been made in single player games. There isn’t that much stopping us now from adding this in MMOs other than getting people trained to do it. I firmly believe that TOR will succeed or fail almost solely on how well they grok this principle.

P.S.
I’m pretty sure if you noticed a massive jump in quest quality with phasing, it’s because they can now show, not just tell the outcome of your actions. It’s amazing how powerful this particular jump really is.

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News Flash

WoW still at the heart of every major MMO debate that pisses me off to no end.
Could be due to WoW being at the heart of almost every MMO debate outside of a small group I follow religiously.

I read this:
50 Million Dollars Are Bad For You – Tobold
Then this:
A Final Trip Into The Mind of a WoW Tourist – Syncaine
Then this:
Darkfall Final Impressions – Ixobelle

Let me get some things out on the table in a sense of fair play. I do not like WoW. That isn’t to say WoW is terrible or that I hate it. It means I do not like it, play it, or have any desire to play it again outside of maybe using it as a colorful chat room to catch up with some people I know and like.
I have played WoW. I have a level 40 Tauren Warrior that has been abandoned for a very long time now. I played a lot of battlegrounds and played the auction house. I was guilded, I did run a freaking lot of pick up group instances, and I when doing so I always played tank to the best of my ability. I quit because I didn’t want to make it to 41, in fact I was regretting having even leveled to 40. When faced with either going another 9 levels to get into workable BG form again, or leveling another character to 39, I seriously examined why I played the game, what I wanted from it, and what it would actually give me. These answers were more than unsatisfactory, I found instead the thought of staying in WoW downright painful.
When I sit down to work on my designs, I do ask what I can learn from WoW. I also ask what the fuck was wrong with it, and whether any particular feature was at all useful to the goals of my design. You can examine for yourself my writings from February and March of ’08 to see what, if anything, actually made it over though I don’t believe it to be very much.
Lastly, I like Syncaine’s writing. His bias is a bit more extreme than mine, but he is funny in how he says it and I generally agree with him on most issues. WoW tourists is not one we see exactly eye to eye on, though certainly closer than Tobold or Ixobelle. I also occasionally read Ixobelle, though our basic thought processes are often too far different for me to follow regularly. Disclosure over, on to the post.

One thought at a time. Yes I’d turn down 50 mil for better word of mouth and opening press. You have one shot at a first impression and three hundred thousand players will pay that back in a year. Three hundred thousand players and growing will net you a great deal more and provide you with much better income and a longer product life overall. Three hundred thousand players left from a massive rush and declining with four hundred thousand players worth of bad press can destroy the game and net your company a significantly smaller profit margin over five years. It’s 50mil up front, but I’d estimate 150-200mil straight down the toilet.
I don’t think Mythic’s problem though was that they were unwilling to say this to the board. I think EA, and perhaps Mythic to some extent, actually believed their own hype and seriously thought their retention would be much better. A mistake I myself was guilty of, and am therefore probably biased towards projecting on them, if you look at my response to this post by Tobold.
Back in August and September, when WAR wasn’t all released and everyone playing were beta participants, and even that first month or so I went through an up swell of optimism. Optimism for WAR, for the MMO market, even for my own playstyle, “this time…” And then the following months came, it was not different. I think if you looked at most of those blogs then, and now, you would see an impressive hardening of people back to their basic concepts prior to release. All of us walked away with a lesson from it, usually that we were right about what we were saying before the optimism caught hold. I can’t tell you for sure who was right on that one, maybe all of us, maybe none of us, probably whoever understands the industry the best, whoever that is.
Back to the “WoW tourists though”. I had a model for dealing with ‘WoW tourists’ before I had ever heard the term, and frankly, I didn’t build it off what ‘WoW tourists’ means. In my model they were called Nomads, people like me who were likely to buy every game that came out but unlikely to stay longer than a month. The way I see it, a vocal segment, minority or majority is hard to say, of that group happens to be people who come from WoW and are simply on tour because they like WoW too much to stay anywhere else. Or rather, they want “better than WoW” but don’t have any working definition of better that is also physically possible for anyone else to actually create. Contrary to what many of those who I would term as WoW Tourists are saying, you cannot bring fewer people, less money and significantly less time to the table and walk out with more content, denser content, better content, fewer bugs, and a team with significantly more experience dealing with your final engine and tool set. Well, unless your name is The Doctor.
Content churn has basically no effect on that, since you can still experience the vast majority of the content churned out of standard use if you want to. Also as I hinted before, new content by people inexperienced with the tools that they I’ve only had finalized for under a year or two will not be able to come close to the polish of people who have spent four to six years working with their tools. Content density will also be higher, which is something that can be seen at a glance and will make people feel more comfortable almost immediately.
I guess I’m saying it isn’t the player’s fault that there is this flood of users in the first month. But also isn’t the developer’s fault that those players aren’t even looking for anything they can actually provide. To use a more homely analogy, it isn’t someone’s fault they associate the smell of shit on the air with cows, but it isn’t the pig farmer’s fault he can’t sell you a side beef. It’s a blameless situation, but one that must be dealt with all the same. I’ve theorized how, but I won’t go into that here.

As to the undertones of Syncaine v. Ixobelle… Listen, I know if you like WoW you’re going to get tired of people bagging on it. Too bad. Unfortunately there comes a point where you have to learn someone’s bias and tune them out, most of us on this side have already done it to you. WoW is the big kid on the block, which means the rest of us have to deal with little shitheads bitching at us about WoW this or WoW that. Personally, I think WoW is one example of something that when taken alone is interesting. Outside that small field, MMO dungeon crawlers, it isn’t any more applicable than a bolted down electron microscope is applicable to bird watching.
All of this being said… in my own tainted view I rather feel like Ixobelle got a free pass from most of their own readers for flat out stating:

I think this is an unexplored genre in the MMO department that needs to be fully tapped. If you could make a game cheaply enough, with few enough people on the dev team to just implement a character creator and maybe one town and one dungeon, you could probably sell a few hundred thousand copies of the box alone to the ‘at least it’s not WoW demographic’. You wouldn’t even need to set up a billing department, since no one would actually SUBSCRIBE to your game, they’d just buy the box, spend a week with it, then move back to whatever they were playing before.

Darkfall and Age of Conan fit that description perfectly, and Warhammer got maybe one month out of me. LotRO is probably the only other game I really respect out of the ‘non-WoW’ batch of MMOs I’ve played (but I never subscribed to LotRO, so there you go), and I have yet to actually even make it to the character creator in Coh/CoV. I signed up for a trial, and the downloader was so fucking slow that my free trial ran out before I ever actually got the game installed. Don’t even get me started on EVE. Hoo boy.

People in Darkfall are doing the same thing I saw people doing in AoC, and it won’t be the last time I see people do this. They’re punishing themselves, and forcing themselves to play a sub par game, BUT AT LEAST THEY AREN’T PLAYING WOW. They repeat this mantra over and over on the game’s official forums, in the game’s public chat channels, and somehow decide this makes it all worth while.

What kind of putrescent bullshit is this? It’s not good in the ways I like so it’s all one big scam to sell bullshit to people. And of course all those player’s are just poor masochists who hate themselves only slightly less than they hate WoW. And this doesn’t sound even slightly… condescending, assholish, flat out stupidly wrong, and impressively myopic to you as you’re writing this? I’m not going to give Syncaine a free pass on his response, since he does go overboard a lot in a very asinine way, but when I see what he’s responding too… well I can tell you which one seems like the worse offender here and it isn’t him.
What can I even say to this. Thank you god master of all things fun, I had no idea that by preferring certain things above others I was so punishing myself. How dare I play EVE and be glad that it isn’t WoW! What a terribly masochistic person I could be, think of all the FUN I could be having in WoW if I only listened to you. Perhaps I’m reading your comments strangely, but I actually understand how you can say both that and this “I guess I’m a bitch, because I prefer the WoW ruleset. it’s not *better*, just different… and the one I prefer. : /” and not be really contradicting yourself. Since you can say ruleset, and all of a sudden every other thing that is so big, important and terribly done to you, but that so many others may be quite happy to forgive or even enjoy, is right back on the table as somehow more objective.
Quick lesson here, EVE doesn’t have WoW’s UI for one very basic reason, it doesn’t work like WoW. It has a totally different set of information it needs to show. A whole lot of it has intricacies so deep that it needs to fit a ton of information that can be entirely useless or vitally important to your present situation side by side because the designers can’t tell which it will be at all times. Some people enjoy this, it may just work well with how their mind solves problems, or they just might honestly prefer the feeling they get from working to learn something more than they do from not having to put in that particular kind of work. You don’t prefer those sensations, great, doesn’t make them a masochist. I haven’t had the chance to play Darkfall, but a lot of what I’m hearing about the UI is stuff where even when it’s something you would just as soon need to do in WoW, it can’t be done the same way or your own rule set would eat you alive. This is why we use different UIs in the first place, sometimes you just can’t do it the other way or the core of your own game will kill you. Instead of ascribing this to designer idiocy or arrogance, you may want to take a few steps back and realize just how brilliant and sublime some of their choices were. Of course this would require recognizing that not only is their core goal different, but worthwhile.

Strange, I’ve managed to talk bad about WoW all this time and never do it for street cred. Insanely enough I did it to let people know my opinion on it, and how it would effect my views. Perhaps it’s because WoW wasn’t my first MMO, and in fact my first MMO had peaked at 10k players and had no 3D modeling in it, at all. So not having any honeymoon feeling, not having it as a first love, or even a second love since I played a UO trial for a couple hours before I ever got around to playing WoW hopefully comes across in my post. When I talk about it, it’s just because it’s the biggest elephant in the room, not because I could give two shits if it’s good or if it sucks. I don’t see how it could ever give me that feeling of being a soldier sacrificing for something greater like Neveron did, and it did it without scripts, it just gave me the chance to serve under a commanding officer and sacrifice everything protecting him in battle. Was that fun? I wouldn’t say so, but it was a thousand times more valuable and a precious memory to me that I have never forgotten and in fact remember in exquisite detail.
But then, what do you care if one jaded misanthrope proves you wrong, you’ll just keep generalizing out to everyone because it’s easier than being honest and specific. It’s easier to say, “well I was only talking to people who think that way,” than to say you’re sorry and actually challenge your own thoughts on the matter.
Final thoughts, more aimed at Syncaine here. I don’t think it’s about how WoW something is or isn’t to them. It’s about their measure of quality, though as you are probably lampooning, it is more than a little warped by what they happen to like about WoW. I’m not sure I blame them though, it took me a long time to unwrap my preferences from my objective examination, and I still don’t always succeed though I do try to mark and learn from my failures. It wouldn’t surprise me if they are a little new to the game.
We all suffer from some amount of perception distortion, it’s a requirement of life. I don’t know how to fix that, or even if it’s truly that bad of a thing considering what it enables us to do. Unfortunately, this whole pile of shit stinks of terribly distorted perspectives being laid down as some kind of objective factual base. That way lies a few yes men, some bad arguments, and a whole lot of regret. I don’t recommend letting it continue, doctor says take some introspection and self cross-examination and let the world know in the morning.

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March 26, 2009

Frustration

I’m sorry to any of my new readers, haven’t exactly been in best foot forward mode lately. This post, probably isn’t going to be a great exception, but it’s just eating away at me inside. Every post, every comment, everything I write is colored by a certain amount of snark over these same underlying issues.

It’s funny, I’ve been working with clay again lately. When I was a kid I worked with clay to relieve stress, you see I never argued with my parents even though I often disagreed with them. In fact I never argued with anyone. I hadn’t started seriously drawing yet, had done some poetry but I didn’t like frustration poetry, I still don’t like my writing when I’m frustrated. So I molded clay, some air dry, some kiln fire, all mixed together into this sort of blue-gray mess that I’d work around in my hands, never really wanting to fix into any one shape too long.

Lately, I’ve had drawing to help me along. I always figured it would help me with my work, and be something I could share. For a while I thought about working in art, but I’m not competitive, just plain not that good. So it’s been subsumed into a greater pursuit. And it is a great pursuit, there are days that all I wish for is that I could let someone else see inside my mind. Then I realize what a jaded misanthrope I’ve become. I’m not sure I’d wish this on anybody.

I’d work with the clay at night in bed. In the dark, just seeing with my hands. I liked people, but I hardly had enough for huge amounts of detail. Legs, torso, I liked working out that big shoulder bone on the back, and the ankle was always interesting. I suppose that’s how I was able to make the skull I made the other day. Hardly what one might call brutally realistic, but understandable, all the right pieces in pretty much the right places.

I was raised to be a problem solver. See the problem, examine the problem, learn what you could about why something worked to begin with and why it wasn’t working now. A broad knowledge base helped, a solution to a problem could come from any number of fields. After coming from Neveron into WoW, I saw my own growing dissatisfaction. Things I didn’t like, things I hated, things that just got to me. Problem found, and better yet a problem in an area I like. Information began to coalesce, forming into a new stream of consciousness merging old, sometimes original sometimes not, settings and mechanics into a new form as I plumbed the depths of my knowledge for working answers.

The funny part about clay is that I use a lot of the skills initially developed in it in Maya. There is one particular shape that has always evaded me in Maya. I’ve only produced even a close facsimile once. The shape of an Angreal’s helmet. I can produce it on paper in an instant, perfect in every detail. Voluminous, three dimensional on the paper, but not in Maya. I’ve been trying for a couple days now to make that helmet in clay. It’s just not coming out, even though it should, it simply is not taking form.

It was August or September of 07 when the final setting emerged, perfect in every detail for a virtual world. In world explanations for immortality, for why the players existed, for why they would not understand or have already been part of the existing lore. Trans-dimensional travel at it’s very core, allowing for every server to have a forward moving timeline, for them to have events that fundamentally change their very nature. And allow server transfers, hell for a while I was thinking it could be as simple as walking through a portal any time you wanted… now I can’t decide yea or nay on that one. One shard, many shards, I’d have a working answer for both, and a working middle ground. Combat made sense, ARMOR made sense instead of being the puddle of half understood garbage that plagues rpgs. It was magic incarnate, and it wasn’t until February of 08 that I penned it into existence for others to see. The final problem stood before me, creation.

The great insoluble problem. I threw myself into design projects, knowing I needed more design know how, more skills before anyone would take me seriously. The knowledge from my early prototypes of Birth were fresh in my mind. A character who’s conceit allows the minimum friction between player and character, because they are a blank slate and don’t have amnesia. I made mercenaries, and it died as nobody play tested it. Too complex, too inaccessible, I could do better.

Of course in the mean time I talked a bit about what I saw in the industry. For instance I stated that anyone who competed with WoW was going to have to handle a max of 500k players. I think Age of Conan and WAR disproved the exact number, but not the idea. They did prove growth in the market though.

So I created a management game. A few bugs, no ending state, but more accessible. It was a toy one could play with, but I never did complete the design… I don’t remember why exactly. I began writing more, drawing more, programming more. I could do all to begin with, but not enough for a project of this size. More, and better, all of them, hour after hour, sometimes in states of mania or utter catharsis. My writing improved, my drawing improved but I lost a key element… my scanner. I no longer had a way to display my hand drawn works, my best works, for people to see or critique. Only those I was making in a brand new medium on my pen tablet. Far too small for drawing, it was more like painting and the bad news was, I knew jack shit about painting. Slight tremor in my hand being magnified far beyond what could ever be seen on paper didn’t help much either.

I went to school again… I’d consistently failed out of all but five classes my first two years. This time was different, straight As in three classes, and then the money ran out. No job, no school, more time to work, and more time to let depression sink in. It’s strange how these days I have so much time, and yet can hardly use any of it because I simply don’t have the energy. Part of me thinks I should be out there job hunting for a part time job, it’s the right thing to do after all, get work, support myself. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Can’t bring myself to come out to a new set of people, not knowing if I’ll get to keep the job. Having just enough money to start thinking about transitioning and putting everything else in life on hold for the next three or four years. Or worse, trying to do it in my parents house and dealing with that stress every day. Watching myself waste every paycheck staving off depression and spending all my free time recharging so I can face dealing with people I don’t know or even like on somebody else’s terms. Dealing with the fact that it is just a delay tactic, that I could easily enough end up like my mom, delaying my whole life away.

School has crossed my thought sometimes. Not the one I went to, god I couldn’t walk into that building and face those people again unless my life depended on it. But school has a cost I can’t ever recoup, the years spent in it. My dream is ahead of the curve now, but I’m already seeing pieces that I put real soul into creating slipping out into the games around me. Chronicles of Spellborn released in Europe last year with only minor differences from my parallel thought based combo system that I finalized last October, but had in rough draft form for several months before. Free Realms took so many of the same questions that founded Shattered World, and simply found different answers for them. Answers for a different target audience. I thought I might still be ahead of the blog-i-verse, but not as certainly anymore. Any more delay and I’m going to have to watch pieces of my dream taunt me from every side for years, maybe decades. I’ve seen that too, in my dad, and I’ve seen what it’s done to him… what it’s doing to me.

And so I have the great dilemma. No route to success, no palatable road to tomorrow. Just a big lump of blue-gray clay all molded up into a lumpy sphere, taunting me with the vision of what it could be… what I should be able to make it. Here I am, though, writing a fucking blog post. Wasting my time pondering how to make an interim project whose prototype was so stunning it spawned complete and utter silence into something that can fund some sort of start up.

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March 24, 2009

Ventrair

The t is not a standard t sound, it’s somewhere between t and th. You press the tip of your tongue against your top teeth and the sound quickly and harshly. Don’t worry if it’s hard to get at fist, I’m still practicing.

For as long as I’ve been working on Shattered World, Ventrair has been my one great constant. It was born from my frustration with places like Stormwind, Ascalon and well most any MMO capital city I’ve ever seen. Most recently some thoughts of it’s underlying content have been informed by The Inevitable City, though primarily on the lower level as the high level hasn’t changed at all.

I could give a dry talk about how Ventrair is big, gothic, and bustling. But that’s not what makes Ventrair the dream worth fighting for. Not what brings me back to it again and again. It’s so much more than the scale of the city, or the design of the architecture. So much more than the density of content and NPCs.

Ventrair is a society, a living, breathing society that’s still unsure of it’s identity and it’s role in the world. It’s people huddled in stadium seating in a massive cathedral to see and pay respects to a woman who has been a vegetable for ten years. And they do this because it was giving them their freedom, their emotions, and the whole of their lives since her appearance that left her in that coma. Their mysticism steeped in duty and sacrifice, in this deification of the role of a parent, the role that has been fundamentally missing from their culture for millions of years.

It’s a dozen factions vying to be heard in the council and on the streets. Each with something important to say, each with something important to contribute, but all screaming at the top of their lungs to not get drowned out by the hoard. A fertile political ground, waiting for the rise of it’s great leaders.

Thousands of people mulling about the two main streets of the market district, hawking wares in bazaar style and opening disparate shops right next to one another. The deals made and broken up and down this street deciding the future for so many of it’s citizens. But also the occasional rickety shop or eccentric salesman, that makes shopping with them more than just a matter of consumerism.

It’s the story of a brand new influx of people, full adults who may not have existed the day before. Citizens who may not have had any concept of life before Ventrair, who have no appreciation of what has been built for them. But most terrifying of all is that they are the future; their decisions will shape the entire world that all of them will have to live in for better or for worse. Two generations of beings attempting to coexist as their entire concept of the world and what it means differ by huge extremes.

There is so much to this city. Their four sports teams that regularly compete in front of massive audiences. The Mercenarium training sim centers. Residential housing standing in rows of mismatched buildings, each one representing not only someone’s personality, but a serious investment in their own ability to produce and compete. A city should mean many things, to many people, it doesn’t belong to just one person or group. Everybody who inhabits it should have their part in writing it’s story, line by line, event after event. Those are the stories worth writing, the stories worth remembering.

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Not The End.

She leaned against the railing of her summer home near Milan, surveying the lake front expanding out before her. It wasn’t a new sight, nor a particularly stirring one to her way of thinking. A view that had been built one molecule, one generation of erosion at a time as she had watched. Fine silk slid comfortably across her skin, but in itself it brought no comfort. No amount of warmth clinging to her lithe form could penetrate to the core of her being.

Behind her the woman cleared her throat. “What are you going to do? Are you just going to lounge around here and let them do this?”

She stretched ever so slightly, unsure as to whether what she was feeling was guilt or simply mild annoyance. It had been so long since she had felt anything at all. “Perhaps. I’m still on holiday after all. Five hundred years of holiday left.”

“So what, you’re just going to stay here for five hundred years? What will you even do if this entire world is completely destroyed? How will you go on holidaying then?”

She drew herself up, having expected the woman’s childish tantrum all along. “I will simply move to another world, another lake, a more beautiful sunset perhaps. You feel sad because this is an end. That is not true though, this is not an end, not even a beginning. Just another in a sequence, the three hundred thousandth failure according to my count. Saddest of all, you’re just a pawn in a game that I will be rejoining once this holiday is finished. Your world could be saved at a word from any one of us, but it would destroy plans built over countless eons. Place assets paid for in the blood of entire galaxies out where they will almost certainly be destroyed.”

“You mean, we’re just not that fucking important. You’re telling me that all this sweat, blood and warfare that we’ve gone through just wasn’t enough for you fuckers? The sum total of our existence amounts to a pawn sacrificed for shit all.” The woman simply deflated as she spoke the final sentence.

A tear rolled down her cheek. “Well, at least you understand.” She looked up at the silent specter of death hanging in the sky, knowing without being told it’s odyssey of years of travel and millenia of hand guided innovation. A subtle pop and another, larger, vessel appeared alongside it. The battle was short and ultimately one sided, the larger ship easily decimating the smaller one.

As the larger vessel began to depart a single white streak appeared across the horizon, cutting across it’s length. The explosion lit up the entire sky as the ship scattered to pieces burning away in the upper atmosphere.

“They were the last of their species. Once one of the greatest military powers in the galaxy, and to be honest their ship was still one of the finest warships ever constructed. What a pitiful end to such a proud race.” The woman’s sobs interrupted her. She turned, perfect serenity and composure as the woman broke down in front of her. For hours the two remained exactly the same while the sounds of celebration from the nearby cities filled the air. A few more layers of erosion contributed to the shape of the lake.

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Dragon Scales

Everyone who has ever wanted to draw fantasy creatures, has drawn themselves a dragon. Those who fancied themselves something with a pencil, or found themselves very, very bored, have continued on to draw scales. Personally, it was probably one of the first real detail techniques I ever learned.

There are two major methodologies in creating those scales. The first is the long way, render every scale. The second is the short way, figure out the basic texture formed by the scales and then scatter a few hints of that texture about. If you aren’t really going to be rendering anything, it’s always preferable to just take the second method. You first need a bit of practice drawing scales to figure out the texture, but honestly once you about know the forms you’re trying to get across it’s pretty simple.

Drawing a full set of scales though, well you can do it pretty easily actually. The difference is, you block out where the scales should be and then go to town. You make a single mark, roughly circular but not truly needing to be. After that you make a second circle touching it, then you create an arc traversing a short angle between the circles. The real key, is just to make one scale at a time. If you try and produce entire rows or sets at once, it’ll come out bland and probably too large. One small arc, one small scale at a time and the whole pattern just eventually works out. Personality is immediately apparent as each arc vies for it’s place in it’s microcosm, sitting next to those that happened to be drawn slightly larger or slightly smaller. Most with their entire shape predetermined by the minor variations in the scales around them, but seen from too far away to appreciate. At the same time, they are seen too close to understand how that one circle so far back in line had it’s own secret hand in it’s final shape.

An entire complex and deeply detailed structure, made from simple rules and some minor variation. No thought or design into how they would all fit, no thought put into the last scale in line and not made thinking of the next. Just a simple rule and a margin for error.

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March 22, 2009

TV

This should probably go on twitter, but I’m uncertain of the language rules for the medium. On to the micro blog message.

I keep reading about BSG and Dollhouse, and think, “maybe I should plug in my cable…” Then I remember the rest of TV and think, “fuck it”.

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