Driftwurld - current stuff in development - escape forts and automaton attacks, oh my!

I've been working on a world map sort of thing. Using a string in each grid entry to hold a series of data, then the explode function to extract them for individual use.

Just on the test server (my computer! heh) at the moment I've got it that goblins send out magically animated wooden automatons, to steal from and even try to kill villagers - and you have a choice of fighting it directly, or trying to keep safe and just help villagers get past it without sticking your neck out (though the villagers will get hurt...). Which ever you choose, it records your game name along with the result.

Also I've made it that you can build escape fortifications - these are for escaping from raptors and drift monsters, who can bite or claw through a car engine block in one swipe, so you seriously don't have the armour to stand there (let alone hit points, you'd just be cut in half). You can choose to do a quickie job or really put in some effort make a safe set up. Again it records who built the escape fortification.

Latter I'm hoping to impliment a way your character can gather the ingrediants for thermite, then when a raptor or drift monster assaults the escape fortification trying to get at the player to eat them, they can attack back to some degree (the creatures skins are, through mystical enhancement, steel tough)

Still haven't implemented Jacks suggestion of climbing a tree! LOL. Will get to that, as it'll let you see if there are escape fortifications in neighbouring grid positions (ie, a safe route to take), and a chance to see any raptors or drift monsters.

Buying sparkle ponies and levels

Ahhh! What happened!? Will this give me cancer!?

I wrote a comment on Tesh's blog which warrants it's own post

Apparently warhammer are letting you buy levels now, if you want. I think, much like going on a long journey on foot is an accomplishment (yet just involves grinding footsteps), so to are levels an accomplishment and this is a way of buying an accomplishment. But to me - it doesn't seem that big a deal of an accomplishment so it doesn't seem that much of an issue to me.

For the people complaining, it'd be interesting to find out if there is any level of accomplishment they wouldn't care about losing? Like, a really minute accomplishment? Or like someone with a nut allergy, does any tiny bit of accomplishment taken away from them cause massive swelling?


And on the matter of sparkle ponies, it's a kind of interesting (in how it's twisted) situation of supply and demand.. Prior to selling the sparkly horses, there was no supply of that commodity. That increased demand (yes, for an, as yet, unmade product). People wanted mounts. They could not buy them. All demand, no supply. But as it's supplied now, so does demand taper off.

The perverse thing here is that throughout history supply has been controlled by environment - how much food you can grow depended on the weather. Now, how many sparkly ponies you can supply depends on how many you want to release. It instead becomes a corporate game of psychological manipulation of the feeling of demand.

Unconcious Vs the total toughness of being like totally killed...then cloned...

There was a post over at mmocrunch, which mentioned this, and it was worth making a post of here...
"Honestly, I don’t care what Bioware chooses, as long as it’s not this sissy “oh you don’t actually die you’re just unconscious” garbage."

If this is garbage, then the whole 'oh, your cloned' is absolute sewerage! How dumb is cloning - hey, do you treat identical twins as being the same person? No? Then a clone of your character is not your character. You cannot continue to play the guy as if your continuing the characters story (sorry, EVE, you can't), because as much as identical twins have their own seperate personalities from each other, so would a clone. Your character died and anyone who's playing the character as if it's the same person is really missplaced in their fantasy. Hey, instead of Luke getting his hand cut off and going semi unconcious (which is lame apparently), he dies - and the rest of the story is about a clone of his. C'mon, you know that's even lamer!

Seriously, if going unconcious is bad, cloning is about twenty times worse. Even if you buy it, what's the point - there is no real death in that case. Why bother having death in the game, then adding rediculous setting elements to basically remove death again? It's a pointless two step dance! Just don't have death in there, then you don't have to tack on this cloning malarky to counter that first bad move.

There's no hard, macho thing about death if you clone factory it all away a moment latter. Don't bother trying.

If you come back, it's not death. You can't have death be in the game, yet also get to keep playing your character no matter what. Make a choice, instead of a weak ass 'Oh yes you can die...oh, but then there's clones'.

Eve, I'm looking at you as well.

Endless Running...

Endless running? Does it, under the guise of exploration, let developers pad out the time of a mmorpg or even a single player RPG?

One of the things about grand theft auto is that if you wanted to get out and jog amongst the roses, you could. Or you could steal a car and put your foot down on the accelerator. I think that choice is pivotal myself. I really hate seeing the opening of a cave mouth, for example, and knowing all I'm going to be doing is waiting for it to come, then outside there'll be a stretch of empty land no doubt, which I'll just be waiting for that to go past.

I guess in fallout 3 I went with it, but there seemed to be more stuff crammed into a smaller space there. Mmorpg developers think making a world means simply incrementing the space between interesting things by ten or twenty times what it was before.

World of Crevice Craft!

WE HAVE CREVICES!

I was going to post the video and then caught myself, realising I was passing around the advertising. So I'll just link it, which is entirely different (not)

I mean, watch the video. This is the real voice over.

"See this!?? THIS!?? WE PUT A CREVICE THERE!!!! And that? That!? WE PUT A CREVICE THERE AS WELLS!!!!!1!!!"

$60 at a retailer near you. And buy our newest sparkle pony....NOW WITH A CREVICE IN IT!!!!1!!!

Crevices! Because an absence in the ground makes for content, not a hole!

I think the rest would be better if a guy with a ripped shirt, a chick and a plucky little kid hid in the mouth of a cave while two slightly badly animated dinosaurs had an awesome fight. Because B movie is good when you embrace it, rather than try and pretend it's something bigger.