Friday, June 27, 2014

Who are the Dunyain?

Imagine a vending machine. Now imagine it has legs. It walks around, sloshing it's contents around inside itself as it waddles across the landscape, gathering more contents. You can go up to the buttons, press them - maybe put money in or maybe you put money in but you've jimmied the coin collector so it simply pops out again into your hand. It's rather like those beetles that have learnt to simulate the antennae movements that will prompt an ant to give up it's crop of food to a fellow ant, since that helps the collony - but since it's a beetle, one who takes while only aping the gestures of giving, the circle is broken.

Is that what the Dunyain are?

Oh no, that's how the Dunyain see you!

You better understand what they are by understanding how they see you! Because from outward appearance they are just another ant...sorry 'person'. All benign, all loving, all waving their antenae in just the right way for you to open your wallet to them. To hand over your children to them.

Also they are part of the speculative fiction (speculative fantasy fiction, no less) 'Prince of nothing' series, by Scott Bakker.

Here's the fan forum and the link, for a few more twisted perceptions on the idea:
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=1363.0

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Looking into Stencyl

Found this tutorial by a user the easiest to get into, in programming with it for the first time

http://www.stencyl.com/help/viewArticle/102

It shows the tutorial in flash with the game at the end of the tute, so even if you're just curious you can load it up to see how it ends.

It's slightly out of date with newer versions of Stencyl, but I managed to muddle through. So if you have trouble post a comment since I was able to get through it I might be able to help you do the same.

Anyway, I kind of want the flash capability but at the same time if it's more of a struggle than using Unity is, then I dunno about pressing on with it.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Watch Dogs : Did hacking just turn out to be a gimmick? Do all sandboxes suffer from gimmickdom?

So it appears that perhaps just classic old GTA style driving can get you away in Watch Dogs. And even if you do hack, you don't see it because it's behind your point of view, or if they show an exploding pursuer in slow mo it tends to make you crash because of the disorientation from the camera going from the explosion back to driving.

Do all sandbox games have this trouble? Dishonoured seemed to have this problem too, where just a few powers were needed to complete a mission and anything else was just getting baroque about the matter. And the sandbox - if it doesn't force the use of hacking, then hacking becomes a throw away, unnecessary gimmick. If it is forced, then you get less of a sandbox!

That's the thing about a sandbox - it tends to make everything not matter. Just another thing amongst many things. A bit like real life!

But seriously, do sandbox game makers need to start thinking about how they implement these things, giving a secondary layer of rewards for using hacking. So someone could be rated a supreme hacker if they wanted to, or maybe they might focus on conventional escapes and fighting.

But ultimately it's the audience that might have to accept that any new thing in a sandbox will, at best, have some incentives and ratings for it - it's not going to force gameplay to be entirely different, all by itself.