4 Future Projects

There are a few things that I've been holding on to, in the hopes that I'll be able to get to them even though I don't have the skills or experience or time to tackle them right now. I don't know that these totally count as brain crack, but they're close enough. So I'm going to put them up here and make them projects so that I can stop thinking about them and maybe get some stuff done as well.

These are all pretty long term projects that don't fit in right now, which is why I'm putting them up here together. Until I'm really ready to do things with them I'm not going to give them deadlines through.

Project 8 - A Space Station Simulation Game

So I like management games. I may or may not have spent the petter part of 2 months last year planning transit routes across various cities. I've certainly manage the living daylights out of all the historical railroads and a fair number of amusement parks. I've commanded revolutionary Chinese armies and built them into thriving kingdoms. I've also built quite a few successful airlines. All that, not to mention the booming megalopolises I've guided along the way. (And dwarves ... there was some time with the dwarves.)

Most of these games have a pretty low level when it comes to AI. And I've thought it would be interesting not only to do the planning, but also to manage a staff/crew that has to help get the work done and administrate themselves.

I've been thinking of various games of this sort for years. I've wanted a  version of Tie-Fighter, where you still pilot all the missions, but as you advance in rank (which is a skill based system as I recall, not just based on the number of missions flown) you take a larger and larger role in planning the missions. But that's another story ... or game.

In the game I'm thinking of for this project, you take on the roll of a recently appointed station master assigned to a newly opened sector. Each sector will have a primary theme, mining, settlement or military which will steer how your station develops. 

Ships will arrive and you'll have to provide services to them, including cargo services, fuel and supplies and shore leave. You'll have to cater to your onboard population, who will have jobs on the station, or work near the station or just visit coming back from the frontier. You'll need to keep your station running and expand it to meet growing needs of the station and the sector. You'll have to police the station and work with the military to make sure the station is safe from pirates and other unsavoury folks with space ships.

You won't do this alone however, you'll have a staff. You'll have senior administration which will take care of the operations of various parts of the station, but you'll have to make sure that you've given the right jobs to the right people. If you get things right over time you'll all get better at running the station.

Now I'm not 100% sure that this will actually be fun. I have a passion for games that tend to play themselves. I like the management genre, so I feel like there's a seed that might actually be able to blossom into something cool. It probably won't be for everyone even if it works, but hopefully it will be fun for someone.

It's also worth pointing out that Spacebase DF9, developed during the Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight, seems pretty similar to this. The flavour's a bit different and it's developed by people who know what they're doing, so it may turn out to be way better and way more fun. I have honestly been thinking about this game since before the Fortnight (and I'm not apt to be on the level of Double Fine to begin with).

Project 9 - An Action RPG

I've loved Secret of Mana for more than fifteen years now and one of the things I'd like to do is see it revisited as a grown up game. Basically I'd like to make a 2d 16bit-esque, controller based action RPG that's as fun as Secret of Mana, but addresses some of my pet peeves about the genre.

The feeling of playing Secret of Mana was always one of it's biggest draws for me. Particularly as you get more powerful, charging up an attack and landing it just right feels like you're really accomplishing things. This is reinforced by having the nice colourful numbers pop out and then bounce on the ground before disappearing and of course as you do bigger damage the numbers get bigger (as in they show up in a fatter font with larger sprites).

Traveling in Secret of Mana was also very nice. You start out kicked out of your village with the whole world to explore and as you go you get destinations that are farther and farther away. At the beginning you might hear about a place but later you get the chance to travel there. At the end of the game when you get to fly then there's a whole other set of explorations where you get to find all these tiny and surprising locations (which sometimes become much larger).

I love Secret of Mana for more than just those two reasons but they're the primary ones I'd like to recreate in my own game. There are also some things I'd like to include.

The first of those is that the size of the world is always weird in computer games. If you look at Secret of Mana the largest city in the world has maybe 50 people in it. You come from a town with maybe 8 people. This of course makes sense for the limitations of the technology at the time, but it still makes the world feel a bit strange.

My proposed solution to this is to not use the whole world, but only a little bit of it. You can't walk across the whole of the world in Secret of Mana, but it only takes 10-15 minutes to walk between most major metropolitan areas and less if you're not intent on murdering everything along that path. When you can fly you can make it around the globe in a minute or less. My thought it to limit the world to an island. It will still be smaller than the real world (I'm not Rockstar) but at least the scale will make more sense. This should sooth some of the over thinking that I for one tend to do about the world and it will also help focus the story.

The second thing I'd like to address is the amount of combat and killing in rpgs. This one I'm a little less sure about since for most games this makes up the majority of the game play, but I'd like to put a little more weight and consequence into the game. You will still be a person with a weapon, who has to fight to survive and to right wrongs in the world, but I want it to count if you kill something. Given a recent article on Gamasutra about RPG genres I think this will also help focus the game, and keep it about the story rather than about being the right level all the time.

As far as the story goes, I'm still working it out. I know that there will be a fight between the forces of the wild and the forces of civilization. This isn't a fight between good and evil (in itself), but a fight between the wild island and the invading forces of an imperial civilization from the mainland.

There's a few ways I want this to manifest, one of which is in the architecture of the buildings. You will see in very wild areas very green colours and wood and somewhat organic shapes to things. In very civilized areas you'll see much more regular shapes and stone and golden yellow colours.

I'm also interested in having more mature characters in the game, rather than the jrpg standard of teenagers with spiky hair. I see the story of the game being told from two different perspectives one of a retired soldier who is working as a shepherd in the very north of the island and the other is a young merchant in the south. At the beginning of the game I see the soldier having to react to a sudden attack on his flock by dire wolves and the merchant will have to react to an attack on her caravan by bandits.

Over the course of the game the player will switch back and forth between the two characters until eventually they meet in the middle of the game and the middle of the island. Towards the end of the game they will have to work together to resolve the tensions on the island in which ever way the player chooses.

Project 10 - A Sci-Fi Novel

I started writing this novel in junior high school, which was a very long time ago now. But it's sat in my head and been mulling and melting around in there ever since. This is the story of John Onoray and Jorris Boss and The Third Imperial Commando Group as they fight to defend and then reclaim the Terran Empire.

If that sounds a bit tropey, well it's because I started writing it when I was in junior high school as I mentioned. It's better now than it was then, originally it was mostly about space warriors with incredible powered armour that was loaded down with missiles. (For the record, I didn't actually base this on Starship Troopers ... I actually tried to make Robotech more reasonable...) Eventually I realized that books need things like antagonists so created some super clones that were designed specifically to fight them.

The characters are still with me and I still have the skeleton of a story that isn't quite as terrible as what I started out with. I'm also interested in the idea of a character saving the world despite being unsaveable themselves, and this is a story that explores that. So I'm going to write it, even if it sucks and do my best to see it through to the end. If it's really terrible (and it'll be my first novel, so it will be) it can sit in my desk and at least I can finally think about other things.

Project 11 - A Fantasy Novel

This book is motivated a little bit by the movie Hero. Not anything to do with plot mind you, but I love the purity of colour in that movie and wanted to try to do something that evoked that same feeling. The problem is that while I have a feeling I want to evoke and a setting I've derived from that feeling, I don't really know what the story is yet.

So far, I know that the story starts in the city of Rooves, which is a city that grew up out of the coalition of five tribes that came together from the planes and coast to build a strong city.  Each of these tribes is represented by a different colour that is shown in the way they dress and their building (hence the rooves). Each of the tribes has a particular area of strength, but all economic and social activities are common across all the Rooves. The White Rooves are mostly focused on mining and metal smithing, the Blue Rooves are focused on land-based agriculture, the Yellow Rooves are focused on sea-based agriculture, the Green Rooves are focused on on sea trade and the Red Rooves are focused on military.

Within each of the Rooves people have a personal name, but also an animal that is representative of the work they do. So a general might be Eran the Red Tiger or a smith might be Marik the White Bull. Each house is lead by the Colour Dragon. Exactly how I'm going to make all that fit together without being weird is something I'm not sure about. I want the society to be egalitarian and merit based, but I also like having a certain amount of hereditary nature to the families.

The city is ruled by the Council of Dragons, which is made up of the Dragons of each of the Rooves. For each of the matters of the city which needs organization there is a council with representatives from each of the Rooves.

Finally there's a somewhat secret 6th tribe, the Black Rooves. They're extremely reclusive and seem to function as fortune tellers, but I haven't nailed down exactly how that's going to work either.

The main character is Cassimi the Blue Falcon, a young lady just starting her career in the Messenger Guild. She's the niece of the Blue Dragon and the Daughter of the Blue Tiger (who is the general of the cavalry in the city). She's intelligent, energetic, but young and inexperienced. I want her to be tough, but I'm not sure if that's something she'll have to develop over the course of the book. Beyond that I'm still working on how to give her a good arc that makes her interesting.

The story starts with her on her first day as a messenger,  then continues as she has to unravel a mysterious attack, eventually needing to travel to find out that dragons have returned to the world. Then ... something, possibly she has to rush back to save the city from something, but that seems really boring.

So there's still a lot to do, but if I write it I can edit it and maybe get something good out at the end, like the Sci-Fi Novel. And, if there's not too much good to get then I can enjoy the experience, let it lay in my desk too and go on to do other things.

Blog: Thoughts on XCOM

I recently finished my play through of Firaxis's new XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I didn't play the original X-COM when I was younger but picked it up a few years ago and fell in love with the sci-fi, grid and turn based tactical   game.

The new game is a nice reimagining of the original idea. The new concepts introduced change the mechanics, but the style and flavour of the game remains very similar. I've also backed the recreation of the original Xenonauts, so I'm totally happy to see a different take on the X-COM knowing that I have access to the straight modernization as well.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown ... actually the enemy is that thing over there!

Things I Liked

The number one thing I like about the game was the game itself (he said somewhat redundantly). It's a lot of fun and it's easy enough to play (although I haven't tackled the higher difficulty levels yet, nor tried the ironman mode). There are moments of great satisfaction when you kill a bad guy cleanly and exactly the way you meant to.

Fast-lane ready to damage an xray.

The class system is nice, not a new concept in gaming, but new to me in X-COM (I haven't played the original sequels). In the original game, especially at high equipment levels late in the game, you tended not to have any real difference between any of your team. One giant armoured turret was basically the same as any other. With the classes in XCOM it makes the game a little easier in the early running and a lot more fun.

The armour types were also fun, especially the ones available later in the game (although some of them I could have picked up a little earlier if I was smarter going through the research tree). In particular the armours that let you grapple around the map are a huge amount of fun. There's nothing like jumping across a giant gap to put your rifle up to the final boss's head and blowing him (it?) away.

Look, dude ... I like it too, but could you take it off to shower at least?

Things I Didn't Like

The number one thing I didn't like about XCOM was the voice acting. XCOM is based on the concept of a military created from volunteers from all over the world. My final team included an Israeli, an Argentinean, a Japanese, a Nigerian, an Italian and an American. All of these sounded like they were recorded by the same person, who lived in LA. There were no accents, there was no local flair. In the character creator there are only 5 voice choices per character and they're all completely interchangeable. Given a game that has a strong international flavour, this is really disappointing.

It's also worth noting that most of the credits are localization teams, meaning that there are tons and tons of INTERNATIONAL VOICE ACTORS voicing the same game. It makes the lack of diversity all the more annoying knowing that if the internationalization teams had just switched up some of their work it would have made the game so much stronger.

We're ready to go. From all around the world, just don't listen to us.

The next thing that I didn't like was the memorial wall. It's a nice concept, your soldiers put up a memorial for all their fallen comrades. You, however, are not allowed to see it. It's always behind the UI where you can see how many kills the soldier got before they died. You can't even sort the UI to see when they died, only the number of kills mattered. Again for a game where you're encouraged to care about your soliders this is disappointing.

Just let me see the wall too.

The rank system the game uses to give soldiers new powers is good (although I'd love a few more options for customizing the team, but I'll always have Xenonauts), however linking it with military rank is slightly annoying. I took 4 Colonels and 2 Majors on my final mission. This is weird, but only in terms of the story that I make in my head as I play, not in terms of the game's systems. I would have much rather be able to organize my command structure separately from my skill selection. The way the original X-COM organized rank (where you had 1 sergent per 10 soldier and 1 lieutenant per 3 or 4 sergents) felt much more appropriate, but that wouldn't suit the style of this game that well.

I also found that in this game they didn't make as good a use of the interceptors which shoot down UFOs as the original game did. In particular you used to be able to team up into squadrons to take down bigger ships as an interm measure before you got stronger interceptors and they left that out. It doesn't detract from the game, but was an element that felt missing.

The last thing I didn't like is much less important than the others, but probably bugged me more actively during the game. In order to help you know where to look for the alien scum, they developers included an indicator which shows where "noise" is coming from. The problem however is that every time the indicator goes off the solider nearest the noise asks some version of "What's that noise?" It was aliens, it's always aliens.

Things I Noticed

I haven't played another tactical game with cover implemented this way. On the whole I really liked the way it makes things easier to manage, I know soldier X is pretty safe because she's standing in the right position. I know I'm taking a huge risk with solider Y because he's out in the middle, but hopefully he can take a reaction shot and keep himself out of trouble.

I know where they are, and my guns are loaded!

Things I'd Include in a Game

The number one thing I'd take from XCOM is the feeling of the combat. You always feel powerful and in control, but never invulnerable. Even with your normal weapons you can fight any alien, although it may be harder, you're never out classed so badly that the game becomes impossible. On the other hand then you're never so secure in your position in the late game, no matter how good your armour or your arms that a lucky shot from even the weakest enemy can give you trouble. You always have to play smart, but playing smart is always rewarded.

Final Thoughts

XCOM is really good. I'm certain I'm going to play it on and off for years to come. Fraxis took X-COM and made it modern, easy to play and fun without losing the fundamental aspects of the original games. I always felt like I knew what was going on.

We will be watching you.

Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 26)

This volume of my favorite YouTube videos is a bit of a testament to the cool things people can make.

• So have I mentioned that George Watsky is a pretty boss poet?
• Have you ever considered building an economy based on things you can cut with a sword? It's worth thinking about. Also Jayne!Hank and Kaylee!Katherine is pretty damn adorable. 
• The next video is another from Fruity Ukuladies, furthering my belief that is possible to make anything better through the power of covers. 
• Sometimes an inside joke just has to go to it's logical conclusion. Here we see Corey and Katers finishing this one off.
• Finally we see the ways in which certain video games could have been significantly faster. If you're interested you can see some of the filming in Kater's blog.

Project 7: A Hockey Card Game

I vaguely remember from my childhood playing a card game based on a game of hockey. Luckily thanks to the Internet, I've managed to find some record that it existed.

Still I've been kind of inspired to try to create a game out of this. I've had some discussions with some friends over the years and I feel like I want to try to make my own card based hockey game for two players.

Right now I'm not sure how all the pieces will fit together, but my plan is to have a rink between the two players with a puck that can be either in the neutral zone the defensive zone or the offensive zone. One player will play cards to try to move the puck down the ice and get it into the net. The other player will then try to play cards to stop the first player and get hold of the puck on their own. When they do then they switch and play goes the other way. Each card will have a situation in which it can be played,  and will indicate the situation that results after the card has been played.

I'm not sure if I want to create this as a physical artifact or a computer game, but I think for the first testing stages I'm going to create the cards in real life. For my first outing I'm going to do a smaller set of cards and then expand them over time if things are actually working. This will also let me know if this is actually any fun at all.

Given that Table Top Day (March 30) is coming up soon, I'm going to try to see if I can round up some friends who were going to play board games anyway on that day and trick them into doing a little play testing of this first round for me.