baxil, posts by tag: games - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

September 19th, 2010

06:11 am

So that teaser from a few days ago? Here's the game!* I was REALLY hoping to post this, like, two days ago. My sleep schedule has been pretty effed up this week.

Egregore** is a game about mages exiled from reality into a world of their own making, trying to discover the secrets of a deserted city before their own phantoms and emotions drive them over the edge.

(WARNING: This is a game about self-confrontation with inescapable inner demons. If that might be triggering, please feel free to give it a pass.)

--> Download Egregore (final Game Chef 2010 version) (~750kb PDF) <--

(Edited, 2010/09/19 3pm: Goals section complete; only the Scene rules to go.)
(Edited, 2010/09/"19" midnight+6 pm: Well, it's complete and in, and hopefully still qualifies on the "when I get up on the morning of the 20th" technicality. Even if not, I still wrote a game in a week! The contest is only for bragging rights anyway, so the fact I did it is the important thing.

* Egregore is, as I type this and drop to bed for a nap, in a not quite playable state. I need to get the meat of the actual gameplay rules down. Which we can all agree is a pretty shitty thing to leave for last, but in between procrastination and lengthy design hacking, it's mostly pinned.

What is finished is all of the game structure, including character generation, mechanics, overall play arc, setting (is the conceit of the game clear enough?) and story (which doubles as mechanics-free sample gameplay). Typesetting is, well, um, at least not a complete embarrassment, which meets the standards for a one-week game quite adequately.

At this point I don't expect there to be a great deal of time for productive feedback (it's due Sunday night), but if you happen to flip through it on Sunday, let me know if any of the (existing) rules are unclear, broken, or Way The Hell Too Long Jeez Bax You Could Trim Six Pages Off This Thing. I'll post a complete, revised version once it's written.

** Thanks to tangyabominy for the naming inspiration. :)

Current Mood: busy deadlinin'
Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Tags: game dev, games, roleplaying, ttu, writing

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September 16th, 2010

03:39 am

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Exile - Preview

Well, now I've done it.

I went and committed to Game Chef 2010 - posted on the forums and declared I'd submit an entry. It's a matter of pride now. I've got to finish writing a short RPG system by Sunday.

This is only slightly crazy -- it's sort of the NaNoWriMo of RPG designers, except with a set theme ("Journey") and ingredients ("city", "desert", "edge", "skin"). But it will be good practice. I've been slowly moving forward on my TTU RPG for a while, and designing a simpler game start-to-finish will help me focus on the process and give me a little experience in putting together something that's basically playable.

Plus - this one is ending up being a Tomorrowlands game, too. :)

I realized the theme ingredients were right in the sweet spot of TTU's flip side known as "The Shadowlands." (You may remember several mentions of that setting in Legend Of Hero.) And so I have been assembling a game about mages exiled from reality -- trying desperately to find and fulfill their purpose in a world assembled completely from their subconscious mind. That world begins manifesting according to the mage's guilt/resentment over the sin that sent them there, and so it's a race against time as reality itself tries to kill them or drive them insane.

Once I get a finished draft written (probably tomorrow night), I'll need some test readers, and ideally some playtesters (but I doubt I'll get the time to do more than a cursory job of that). Any volunteers? Until then, I'll leave you all with the story snippet I wrote as flavor fiction for the RPG. :)

----------------

The phantasms were brushing past his senses ever more often, now. Half-remembered scents floated on intangible breezes; distant voices buzzed and whispered and roared from around corners; imperceptible forms flitted between the bright but indistinct areas that passed for shadows.

Ben could almost mistake the city for alive.

But these latest voices troubled him. The mocking laughter of children. It was close - in the alley around the corner. And there was one voice not laughing. A young, tormented voice - all too familiar.

He glanced into the empty parking garage, sighed, and abandoned his post. He had a few minutes before Emily returned, and if she ran into trouble, he'd still be in earshot anyway.

Rounding the corner, he recognized the scene instantly. Half a dozen sixth graders encircled a younger boy, almost within arm's reach. He'd been that younger boy, once upon a time, a world away.

One was holding the boy's lollipop tauntingly overhead. "You want it back?" their ringleader sneered at the frightened kid. "Fight me for it. Or are you too chicken? Ben the hen."

"Hey," older Ben interrupted, drawing himself to his full height.

The alley went still. Seven pairs of dark eyes lanced into him, and a long-forgotten fear chilled his bones. But he met the gaze of the diminutive bullies. A bunch of pathetic kids. I don't have to be scared of them any more. I could kick their asses with a wave of my hand -

He stopped that thought in its tracks. No. That's exactly why I'm here.

"You guys must be feeling pretty good, huh?" he asked with forced gentleness. "Taking that lollipop away. Makes you feel strong." He crouched down and locked eyes with the leader. "But you know what makes you even stronger? When you're able to give. Taking means you're ruled by your needs. Giving means that you've conquered them. And once you've conquered yourself, you've beaten the only opponent who ever mattered."

"I don't care what you say, mister," the bully retorted. "This is my sucker."

"And so are these." Ben reached inside himself for power and outside himself for raw material. Six more lollipops coalesced from darkness into substance in his outstretched hand. It was a risk ... but one he knew he had to take.

"Take them," Ben said, and the bully did, suspiciously. "No, really. They're yours. No strings attached."

"I know what you're going to say, and I'm still not giving any of MY suckers to that kid," the bully snarled.

"You don't have to," Ben said with a smile. "There's more where those came from. I could give him one myself. Even if you take it, I could simply give him another one, and another. I can make more lollipops than you can carry. But all that would do is humiliate you in front of your friends. Is that what you want? Or would you rather show everyone here that you're strong enough to decide who goes home happy?"

The bully stared in defiant silence, then dropped young Ben's lollipop on the ground. "I didn't want it anyway. C'mon, guys, let's go."

The children shimmered and faded away, mirages in the asphalt desert, and Ben let out a long breath.

He had won. And maybe - maybe -

- no. He didn't dare to turn around to check. But he didn't have to. He knew she was there.

"I hope you weren't expecting to hide the scent of your magic from me," Jenny's voice said.

"Mahathallah, archangel of the ancient temple." Ben began the invocation for the ritual of banishing, already knowing it was pointless. "Great Lady of Deception. Mother of the succubi --"

"Is that any way to treat a guest you just invited over?" she interrupted, feigning insult. "And after you've just sacrificed some of the last of your magic for the fleeting happiness of a phantom, too. If I didn't know better I'd think you're going as soft in the heart as you are in the head."

Ben turned around to Jenny's form, leaning casually against the building, looking the same as the last day he'd seen her. But no - it wasn't Jenny. Another phantasm ... one he couldn't shake. And she was becoming more and more substantial, more her, with every visit. Twisting the knife.

"It's not about real and fake any more," he said. "It's about right and wrong."

"Is it?" Jenny said, eyes twinkling. "Is that what you're going to tell yourself when you help your friend blow up the city?"

Current Location: ~/Brainstorm
Tags: game dev, games, roleplaying, ttu, writing

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July 25th, 2009

01:38 am

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Epic Gaming Tales: The Crater Lake Mansion Of Death

Hello, readers! I have a birthday present for you.

Now, I know that's not how this is supposed to work. I turned 32 on Monday and tradition dictates that I receive presents. (I did get some good ones -- from family and boss -- but that's a tale for a subsequent post.) But you know me -- since when have I lived by the whims of tradition?

Case in point: 32 is a power of two; in binary, it's 0x100000. A neat digital milestone for a digital era. And yet my gift to myself for my bithday weekend was to drive out to a nearby mountain and hurtle myself up a very analog hiking path. (Also a tale for the subsequent post.)

So: Birthday present. As you could probably guess from the post title, I got you a gaming story. As befits the digital milestone, it's a story about a computer game. I know this is not usually an auspicious start to a story*, but considering that the mere mention of the Crater Lake Mansion of Death I built circa 2002 has already spawned three earnest requests for the tale, apparently I'm onto something here.

* * *

The Crater Lake Mansion of Death began when I tried to dig a basement.

Our tale is set inside the digital suburbs of The Sims -- which is less a computer game and more a way to replace your daily life with an idealized digital equivalent. You are given a set of house building tools, and then a few manipulation options for the little avatars that inhabit the house you create. As Yahtzee observes with his trademark snark, the limited range of activities basically allows for two styles of play: a simulation of exactly the life you're trying to escape via playing computer games in the first place, or creative breakage.

Every Sims player goes through a phase of creative breakage. 99 percent of the time, this comes out in vicarious sadism (as typified by walling up your Sim avatar in a meter-square room and waiting for them to soil themselves and starve to death). But I had bigger aspirations. I didn't want to break the avatar. I wanted to break the game.

Sims houses (at least in Sims 1) had a fairly impressive range of building options, but programming choices and/or CPU-power limitations forced some arbitrary, hard-and-fast rules. You could have a one-story house or a two-story house, but never more. The only available stairs were straight, single-flight sets; no landings, curves or spiral staircases. And there was no option for a basement -- only building upward to a second floor.

"No basement? Well then," I said, "I'll figure out a way."

After discarding a few unworkable ideas, I started trying the only thing that would give me a "down" staircase: build up the dirt surrounding the house until people could enter directly to the "second" floor, and then use the "first" floor as the subterranean level. I first tried this with my main character David's residence, but the terraforming options (raise/lower land) stop at the property line and the outside edge of the land has to remain flush with the original ground level. There's an internal game limit on the slope of hills, and I didn't have much approach room in the yard, so I was unable to add enough dirt to bury the first story.

"Alright!" I said. "A challenge!"

I created other families in the neighborhood for David to schmooze with -- because in The Sims, for some ungodly reason that is simultaneously realistic and blisteringly cynical, your job promotions are determined by the number of neighbors who like your avatar. David spent a while working and climbing the ranks, accumulating more and more cash, and finally bought the expensive mansion at the edge of town -- the house with the largest plot, something like an acre in size. Now there would be no space constraints stopping my land-raising plan!

But buying the house ran David out of money again, and terraforming costs money. I was getting fed up with the tedium of fast-forwarding through the game just to wait for the paycheck that would let me add another tractor-load of dirt to the property. Clearly I needed a more efficient way of constructing his underground secret lair.**

Then the solution hit me.

And the first step into Dante's Simferno began.

When you create a new Sim family, they start with a bankroll of cash big enough to purchase a tiny house -- if memory serves, $20,000 Simoleons per family. Sims can't simply transfer money back and forth, so there was no direct way to cheat by having random strangers show up and give David money. However ... terraforming costs money without adding value to the property. If I could simply find a way to move new Sims into the mansion, I could have them sink all their bankroll into dumping dirt on the hill, move them out again when they were broke, and repeat the process until the hill was built, since the property value wouldn't change. Endless cash without once having to deal with their tedious daily lives!

The mansion itself cost way beyond a starting Sim's bankroll. But the price of moving in was largely determined by the cost of the house materials plus the cost of its furnishings; lot size was only a minor factor. So! David tore the house down, mercilessly eradicating every shred of building and landscaping, until it was nothing but an enormous, flat dirt lot with a single tiny outhouse in the center. He promptly sold the worthless dirt field and moved back into his original house, and I checked prices on the mansion lot: Move-in cost, $9600.

Cha-ching!

So several eccentric, reclusive Sims moved in, poured dirt onto the property and immediately moved out broke. And I grew bored with the process again. Now, remember how I said 99 percent of players' Sims-breakage comes in the form of gratuitous avatar sadism, generally by walling them up in a tiny room until starvation kills them? Everybody goes through that phase. Everybody. You can't look at a sandbox game like that without wondering what happens when a Sim dies.

I was no exception. As I grew bored with the old move-in/terraform/move-out, I finally succumbed to temptation and walled in a Sim to starve to death. They whimpered and turned in circles and tried to sleep standing up and soiled themselves and finally keeled over. The game chastised me with a strongly worded notification ... and dropped a tombstone where the Sim had been. I blinked, had someone new buy the lot, and walked over to the tiny death room: the tombstone was still there. I checked the building components menu: No tombstone was listed. I could sell the tombstone for a few Simoleons, but there was no way to buy them. The tombstone was a permanent yard decoration, but the only way to get one was to fall down the path of sadism and kill a Sim.

I spent all of the new guy's money on terraforming (raising the back side of the lot, away from the tombstone), and decided for kicks to wall him into a room too. I absent-mindedly set the game time on fast-forward, shuffled some papers around, and glanced up at the screen two Sim-nights later. Blinked, and lunged for the space bar to freeze it.

There was something walking around on the property.

With the game paused, it quickly became clear: The previous occupant had returned as a ghost! (In newer Sims, ghosts are apparently a little more random; in the first one, they were an easter egg tied to having that person's gravestone on your property.) She wandered around a little, scared the crap out of the current resident, and disappeared at dawn.

And suddenly, it all fell together ...

I wasn't just going to build a basement. I was also going to build a charnel house.

I was already planning to move at least 30 families through the property in the span of a few game-months. The place was clearly cursed, because it was a giant money sink that drove people mad and demanded giant dirt sacrifices. But suddenly, the lot's ancient, malevolent spirit had awoken -- and now it was no longer content to bankrupt its owners. It needed their very souls.

Resident #2 died, and a second tombstone appeared. I discovered that you can move tombstones around from place to place, which meant that I could shift them to keep them on top of the ever-growing hill, and use the entire lot for terraforming.

The new owner Bobby Joe made the mistake of sticking around just a little too long after the money ran out, and suddenly found himself surrounded by impenetrable walls. After a short time, he too fell silent and another gravestone appeared.

The next owner was a family with a child. They too succumbed to the lure of the death outhouse. I then discovered that childrens' tombstones were a different size than adults'. (I also discovered that, bizarrely enough, having a haunted house with a track record of mysterious owner disappearances causes a tiny uptick in property values. I guess there's slightly more cachet in owning a Death Outhouse than there is in owning a boring old regular one.)

The hill grew. The tombstones mounted up, in both small and large sizes. As more tombstones landed on the property, the hauntings became more and more frequent. It became rare to have a night without a ghost -- and then statistically impossible -- and then the ghosts were wandering in threes and fours, sometimes half a dozen. None of the owners could get any sleep, which probably helped to drive them slightly more insane before they died in their tiny-walled up outhouses. "For the love of God, Montresor ..."

Soon, viewing the property in the (isometric) world map revealed a towering hill of dirt, a huge half-pyramid whose apex cemetery somehow managed to tower above the two-story houses in the rest of the neighborhood. I planted some bushes on the camera-ward side to spell my name for posterity, and kept raising the top outer edges of the hill -- leaving a depression in the center where the "basement" was going to go. Since the tombstones either wouldn't sit on a sloped hillside or looked retarded there, I packed most of them into the center of what quickly grew to look like a volcano.

Finally, one lucky batch of sacrificial victims got to start house construction. At long last! The basement I had toiled so long to create -- the basement that had bankrupted an entire small town -- the basement for which so many Sims had given their virtual lives ...

Well ... the basement wasn't happening. Neither wall nor porch on the second story could extend out to the hill's edge. I couldn't even get it close enough to make the gap invisible in world-map view. I experimented a little more, but quickly figured out the basement dream was dead; the programmers simply hadn't anticipated any sort of abuse like what I was trying to perpetrate.

So I was left with a big volcano-thing with a lot of gravestones and a cramped two-story house-like thing inside of it. What else could I do? All this work had to count for something.

Clearly the graveyard had to stay; too many Sims had given their lives to dishonor their sacrifice like that. I crowded the tombs all together in the crater, added some landscaping, and (to keep the Sims from spending all their time wandering around the graves and weeping for the fallen) threw in a circular lake around the whole thing. Now the ghosts could wander the property freely at night, safe from the meddling of future owners.

But what to do about the house itself? The building couldn't go on the outer slope (the game forced the entire house to be on the same ground elevation), and there was very little room left after the graveyard. After some deliberation, I built a tiny kitchen and workout room in the crater and added a few external staircases along their walls. With judicious use of support pillars at lake's edge and in the graveyard, I was able to build a modest second-story-only house that acted almost like a roof over the graveyard, leaving it in spooky eternal shadow.

Fortunately for David once he moved back into the Crater Lake Mansion of Death, I discovered that Sims ghosts cannot climb stairs. After he got home from work and ate, he would retire upstairs for leisure activities and/or sleep, and he would do his thing, blissfully unaware of the half-dozen ghosts marauding through the property underneath his feet.***

At least until he went downstairs for a midnight snack.

--
* There are some notable exceptions to this rule, such as my discovery that under the right conditions, you can cause enemies to lose their turn in Final Fantasy Tactics by shooting your own allies in the back. This is my favorite gaming story OF ALL TIME. I'm pretty sure I've told it somewhere, but I'll have to dig it up again.
** Appropriately enough, by this time David had climbed the Science career path all the way to the top rank, Mad Scientist.
*** This really cries out for pictures. Unfortunately, the CLMoD was created on elynne's computer something like 7 years ago; my suspicion is that it's long lost to the ages. If she still has access to that old computer, you should totally bug her to load it up again, get some screencaps and upload the results. :)

Current Mood: accomplished 32
Current Music: Oingo Boingo, "Heard Somebody Cry"
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Tags: best of baxil, birthday, games, roleplaying, writing

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September 14th, 2008

09:33 pm

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Video game poetry

THE HAVING OF GUNS

(From "Old Hero's Book of Practical Guns," by T. R. Iggerman)

The Having of Guns* is a difficult issue,
For a hero in video games that are fun;
Many guns he must tote, lest he shoot and then miss you,
So I tell you, our man must have THREE DIFFERENT GUNS.
First of all, there's the gun that he shoots if he's near you,
like a flamethrower, shotgun, a D'eagle or Uzi,
If need be, a crowbar or chainsaw can smear you,
All deal death at close range; don't be choosy.
But I tell you, a man needs a gun in distinction not lacking,
A gun that shoots farther, and less broad and wide;
How else can he snipe from afar while wall-hacking?
Or clear out a level before stepping outside?
The guns of this nature will now be highlighted,
Such as his sniper rifles, or railguns, or AWPs,
Such as guns that shoot lasers, or by lasers are sighted --
All guns that at long range I promise are tops.
But above and beyond there's still one gun left over,
And that is the gun that no shooter omits;
The gun that makes game players sigh like a lover,
The gun that kills HALF OF THE MAP when it hits.
When you notice a gunhaver laugh with abandon
Then, no matter the game, you will know what he's done:
His mind is fixated on firing at random
With explosives, explosives, explosives so fun
With unbeatable, l33table
Bee-eff-gee-eetable
Blow up the map-able
Havable
Guns.

--
* If the "Gunhaver" reference for video game shooters hasn't crossed your path yet, then at least there's this for some context.

Current Music: "teh noob song," teh pwnerer
Current Location: ~/bedroom
Tags: best of baxil, games, geekery, wordplay, writing

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February 27th, 2008

09:32 pm

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"Old-school" gaming: A moment of perspective

(Reposting this from a friend's journal, where a pet peeve was brought up -- use of the term "old-school" to refer to things within our lifetimes.)

I respectfully disagree that "old school" is being inappropriately used -- at least in proper context.

2007:

("Call of Duty 4", Gamespy's Game of the Year)

2002:

("Metroid Prime," Gamespy's Game of the Year)

1997:

("Myth: The Fallen Lords," Gamespot's Best Graphics pick for the year)

1992:

("Street Fighter II" on Super NES, one of the year's biggest hits)

1987:

("Legend of Zelda," American release)

1982:

("QBert" in arcades)

1977:
Space War (not embedding due to image resolution)

Consider.

I am 30, and I virtually outlive modern video games. The outside edge of "old school" for video games is 30 years old. Look back 15 years, or even 10, and you wouldn't be able to believe these games were cutting-edge if your only metric was what's commercially available today.

This is why we can talk about older games as if they're relics from our grandfather's generation: because, in game years, they are. If civilization developed in the same time scale as video games, then firing up an emulator and playing an old Super NES classic would be like talking to someone who was alive in the time of Jesus. Sitting in front of an Asteroids arcade machine would be like shaking hands with the hunter-gatherer who invented bronzeworking.*

I would say the "modern" (new-school) video game era began sometime around the Playstation's success in the late 1990s; that was the time that the real transition from 2D to 3D took hold. "Old-school gaming" properly refers to the previous era, or (the sometimes newer but excellent) games designed under those principles. And it's pretty easy to see not only the graphical difference but the design difference if you've played both old-school and new-school video games.

P.S. Feeling old now.

--
* And the board game "Monopoly" would be a literal Neanderthal, walking in circles with his little dog while the rest of us are building cannons and cars.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: ~spiral
Current Music: "Storm Fortress of Kh'Lar," Skyblazer OST
Tags: best of baxil, games, geekery, multimedia

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