Update and This Winter

Not much to say for now, but just wanting to give a quick update before school finals are over.
1) Current Projects are going to remain in their design documents as other passion projects take precedent.
2)My current design problem is to follow an idea similar to Codename: Horned Hat. But, now in super-concentrated form. Game Grump's, Jontron and Arin Hanson's brainchild series has a good amount of factless, but strong willed opinion on how games should be designed. My goal for the week after finals is to take a series of videos from their channel and to practice making design documents from what they say. It might be useful to someone somewhere to know exactly where the two most general of game players will be frustrated and right when it happens.

-I will spend more time fixing this up later, but for now, that's all :)
-M

Music Software: An Assessment.

So, in working on two pieces for my colleagues at BSU, I found that there are many possibilities in augmented  live music performance and assisted music education left unturned. For one, many professors and instructors are still clung to the subscription model Make Music's Smart Music application puts forth. It is a wonderful model for licensing out good repertoire for middle school and starting high school students to play. My music mates from last semester even used it in their instrumental techniques class where they tore through the instrument families in a semester. But here is my major problems:

Upcoming Work: For Flash Contest

http://playerio.com/competitions/ega2012/

A new Flash Contest is out and about, and I must say it is quite ambitious. I am putting preliminary info here, but soon I will give more details and take questionairre from the public.

Engine: Away3D
Interface: PlayerIO
Genre: Medium Multiplayer Online Long term Strategy and Short Term RPG
Camera: 3rd person over-the-shoulder, 3D
Mode of Play: Faction Building Strategy game with small battles in an overarching war.
--NPCs with Object Permanence
--Resources allocated from PVP and PVE combination.
Goals: Timewaster, skill building, cooperation, no player controlled building, deplomacy sim.

Timeline: Alpha by December 2012.

We'll see how it goes. More specifics to come.

Ludum Dare 24: Compo

Oh man.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

I love these competitions. It seems I need something like this to get creativity going. It makes me so happy. But, alas, I probably wont finish in time: but here is my advice.

Nape + Flixel > java physics engines. You can make wonderful 2D games in java, but last time. My team and I took 3 days just debugging the java engines we had at our disposal. However, we were able to get AI up and running smoothly in like 2 hours with flixel. I learned my lesson. so here is hoping I can make something.

Is anyone else giving it a shot?

Edit: Well I am doing great with nape but lifey type responsibilities are getting in the way. They are programming in nature though, so it isnt too bad.. Hope everyone else is doing well! My idea that I was doing though was one I had from the last ludum dare of going back in time and killing monsters selectively so that you could tame their present and future day counter parts. It was neat but I don't want to waste it now that I am so behind. It was fun playing around with flash though, expect more of that in the future.

Codename: Horned Hat 003

Hello!

Long time, no post.

This is just a small update to say that Horned Hat has got an official writer/designer. I am working on something concrete to post about the development processes, but what I can say for sure:

Review Corner: Babel Rising 3D

Welcome to the first of hopefully a good many of my game reviews!

This week, I am reviewing Ubisoft and AMALtd's latest game for the Google Play Market: Babel Rising 3D. A biblical allegory game where your job as God is to strike down the Babylonians as they try to build the Tower of Babel. I won't go into the religious politics involved in making a game based on scripture tales, but I will say it was much more fun than Bible Blaster Spiritual Warfare.

Magic Casting in RealTime combat, A Survey

When talking yesterday about my idea, it made me think a little more about the common state of the mage. The best parts of fantasy roleplay on the tabletop are the limitlessness of a character. Terms are invented to fill in gaps that traditional cannon makes, and you are left with things like battlemage, archwizard, etc. We confine this type of gameplay in most of our modern fantasy rpgs either for balancing or simplicity of gameplay.

I hate to notice, though, that in over the decade of the mmo we are still a slave to the charge/cast bar. An imaginary timer set to keep up from a limitless supply a power. This is what made me think of alternatives, as well as giving the mage more action oriented gameplay. Most of what I come up with boils down to poor attempts to be innovative, unless supported by core gameplay.

Recently, twitch combat has been pushed to mmos due to improvements in calculation and rendering technology. This is great for those of us that want to play a combat game, not a spread sheet.Strategy oriented gameplay is a great tool to have, but in games where you control single characters it can become mundane to wait the 5 or 10 seconds between each move, for no reason. Many games like Fantasy Earth Zero -- now defunct in the Americas -- have made their valiant attempts to bring mage combat into realtime. Many, however, play like slower, but stronger ranged classes, which isn't quite the point of the class. Others, to alleviate combat and strategy at wartime, pick apart what makes being a caster type good by limiting spell choice. This clears up UI, but also forces gameplay on the player -- rather than the player deciding for themselves. I propose a test of implementations then, to see if anyone can come up with new caster gameplay that solves the above problems without limiting the player's play style.

1) a visual method like I stated in the last post about intelligent motion tracking and signal recognition.
2) a vocal or text input method, that uses incantations from a tome or library of commands
----if you believe this to be mundane or hard to train the player, think of them learning to use the complicated ui and menus that are visual to "help the player" but end up just being a new keyset to learn
----or alternatively, the macro system of ffxi, where users got to combine tasks for themselves, but ended up being locked in as a result.
3) I haven't thought this far. My current projects revolve around virtual and augmented reality. Which is why I have come up with the above two methods. They ft nicely in my current projects, but there is no use keeping the ideas to myself. Simple implementations and demos to come soon.