Challenge for Thinkers, Designers and creative individuals.

[skuzie]

I am going for singular character exploration in an approximate human lifetime, he goes across ages.

 

Sounds like matrix to me :Guns:

Seriously create an abstract interaction model that can encompass any idea/meme that is thrown into the game in the future, basically create an environment, then decide what the goals are for your character in each new meme added to the environment, and think of ways your character can achieve those goals. A game where massive amounts of people are feeding in content to what the purpose of the game really is .. is really like mocking reality .. wouldnt it be great :hihi:

[IDMclean]

Chapter 5

 

Game design is primarily an artistic process, but it is also a technical process. The game designer pursues grand artistic goals even as she grinds through mountains of code. During the process of developing the game, she inhabits two very different worlds, the artistic world and the technical world. How does one manage the integration of such dissimilar worlds? In short, how does one go about the process of designing a computer game? In previous chapters I have touched on some of the questions related to this process; I have also laid down a few precepts. In this chapter I will suggest a procedure by which a computer game could be designed and programmed.

 

The procedure I will describe is based on my own experiences with game design, and reflects many of the practices that I use in designing a game. However, I have never used this procedure in a step-by-step fashion, nor do I recommend that any person follow this procedure exactly. In the first place, game design is far too complex an activity to be reducible to a formal procedure. Furthermore, the game designer's personality should dictate the working habits she uses. Even more important, the whole concept of formal reliance on procedures is inimical to the creative imperative of game design. Finally, my experience in game design is primarily with personal computers, so my suggestions are not completely applicable to arcade game designers or home video game designers. I therefore present this procedure not as a normative formula but as a set of suggested habits that the prospective game designer might wish to assimilate into her existing work pattern. With these important qualifications in mind, let us proceed.

 

CHOOSE A GOAL AND A TOPIC

 

This vitally important step seems obvious, yet is ignored time and time again by game designers who set out with no clear intent. In my conversations with game designers, I have many times discerned an indifference to the need for clear design goals. Game designers will admit under close examination that they sought to produce a "fun" game, or an "exciting" game, but that is more often than not the extent of their thinking on goals.

 

A game must have a clearly defined goal. This goal must be expressed in terms of the effect that it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience. Since many games are in some way educational, the goal should in such cases establish what the player will learn. It is entirely appropriate for the game designer to ask how the game will edify its audience.

 

This is our current challenge in the process.

[arkain101]

what if i want to take over the universe as a simple bacteria rather than some goofy looking creature that has x amount of legs and y amount of arms

 

There is a topic here which is aimed at discussing what is the most likely scenario for an alien capable to make it into space and eventually travel the universe.

 

You start with something simple. That thing needs to have the skill to survive the stages of evolution. It needs to become multi celled, then grow and survive through the other types of life and enviromental dangers. It needs to then develope smarts to communicate. Dexterity to use tools and create and etc. It needs to be able to craft and teach and library information. It goes on and on, in order for something to go from point a to z.

 

Anyhow, I would like to spark up that topic again, maybe I can describe it better this time.

 

Spore looks interesting, but as I read through it I thought it seemed kind of rediculous. Since no one has yet described a tree of life for a creature, at least The 'Spore' team could of pretended how bacteria could join into multi celled, then into large multi celled, onward into somethin else.

 

I read it goes from bacterial pool then BAM a creature, just like the theory of evolution...:eek_big: :doh:

 

I could be wrong how the game works.. but anyhow, as great as evolution sounds, my point is its incredibly more theoretical than factual.

[skuzie]

I would ask that all Spore discussion would be moved to the Spore thread.

--Alex--

[IDMclean]

Alright, So now that we have a rough concept, let's constrict possibilities further.

 

We are defining our form of course as a video game.

 

Let's see what we mean when we say video game, well start by examining core elements, that one can find in any game.

 

Games are:

interactive

representive

problem oriented

choice-causal

strictly bound senarios.

 

Further we have defined video gam, RPG.

The elements of such a thing are greater, but more specific.

Videos have:

Graphics

Music

Sound FX

 

RPGS have:

Narrative

Characters (player and non-player)

Conflict

 

They share:

Theatrical form

 

So we can confidently assume (axiomaticly) that our game must contain:

Protagonist

Antagonist

Plot and subplots

Drama

 

What else? How do we fit the form to the content?

 

However there is a part of this which is hard to place down.

 

What is interaction, and how do we use it for our message? Why must a game be interactive at all?

 

What are the technical concearns for structure, when we take a static medium (like books or movies) and make it a dynamic medium?

 

Technical game studies source:

Formal Model and Game Design

Gamestudies.org

[Jay-qu]

Why must a game be interactive? otherwise it would be more like a movie.

 

We need to choose how the interaction will take place and on what scale. The player should be able to move freely in the world, should they be able to choose how talk to people - what they say, with what tone how loud.. etc

 

The player should be able to perform some 'attack' function as most games involve some form of violence :) also be able to jump, climb, sprint - all the basic controls over the character itself.

 

But what else? should the player be able to climb trees, pick up rocks, snap branches - the degree of interaction can be unlimited.. we just have to choose a level that is plausible to code but still produces the drooling effect we are after.

 

There are also other forms of interaction to consider. Economy, relationships and communication with computer players are three that I all to often see implemented poorly.

[pgrmdave]

Just to give you an idea - I have in front of me the credits for a painfully simple cell phone game. It is a boxing game - 2 dimensional (almost more like one dimensional). Something that could easily have been from the early 90's on Sega. There are two producers, two programmers, three artists, six people porting to different phones, and two people testing. This game took a few (5-6) months to create (as far as I know - it may have taken a year or so). I know that KAC understands this, but I don't know about anybody else. And yes, I will always push for a simpler game assuming it is going to be developed on a shoestring budget. The big, great games are developed with millions of dollars of a budget, they have huge teams of people working on it, people co-ordinating everybody, artists, programmers, testers. Look at the credits of some games that you have - you might be surprised at how many people it takes to make a game.

[IDMclean]

The big, great games are developed with millions of dollars of a budget

 

This is the conventional, modern industry. Yes I admit that to make a game like Mass Effect you need a diverse staff like that of which BioWare has. However, once again, Development and Publishing should not be confused for Design. Though these things are of concearn to the project overall, they are not germane to the task at hand, which is conceiving of an idea worth planning out to develop.

 

Plan, then Execute. Now your assumption of a shoestring budget is not justified. As I have stated, if the design document is of good enough quality, the project can be picked up by a developer or publisher, and funded in that way. Like that of a movie script.

 

Before assuming a roster of who is going to actually implement the ideas here in, I have to ask. Whom here has the technical know how to develop, to real world standards, a fully functional commercial grade 3D game engine? Preferably from scratch?

 

So my point, and this has been my point for quite sometime, though it doesn't seem to have been taken as intended, is that the questions of what the budget on this is going to be, is unimportant for the design document. That is Budget, number of persons developing, who is publishing, what computer language, Technical know how of the people involved, and other concearns such as business needs are not important and leave the scope of the Design step.

 

Aim small, miss small. Aim big, miss big. You aim for the bullseye and hit the target. You aim for the target and you hit the field.

 

So I would ask that if one is to discuss things such as the Business of games or the methods of Development of games, or the Publishing of games, please do start a new thread.

[Jay-qu]

I know what your mean dave, I have watched lots of 'making of' vids. I think the only place we can hope to make up on these 'big games' is in concepts and design.

[pgrmdave]

So KAC - any news on the gaming front?

[CraigD]

I know what your mean dave, I have watched lots of 'making of' vids. I think the only place we can hope to make up on these 'big games' is in concepts and design.

I think this is overly pessimistic.

 

That the current state-of-the art in video game (and most other) programming requires small armies of everything from personnel managers to artists to voice and body actors to writers and directors to coders is, reflects, I think, that the art has wandered into stagnant waters.

 

Allow me to share a (sleeping) dream I had in 1994. It was a beautiful, amusing kind of dream I term a “home movie” – entertaining, with content and format like a movie. As I became conscious that I was nearing waking, I spoke to a character in the dream, mentioning how I felt this dream would be a good movie, but lamenting that I would not long remember its details, nor likely ever have the ability to make a movie. “Don’t worry,” he said, “soon, inexpensive computers will allow ordinary people to produce movies by interacting with software agents just as a movie director interacts with live actors. Everyone who want to make a movie will, and the world will be flooded in movies, some as good or better than the professionals’. I woke, jotted it in my dream journal, noting only a little about all but the last exchange.

 

12 years later, “soon” doesn’t seem to have arrived yet. However, I’m passionately confident that the use of computers my dream predicted is feasible, and that we will someday look back at the 90s and 00s as “the dark ages” of IT, a time when people invented the wheel, and, comically, found its best application to be as a coffee table.

 

Practically, the strategy to achieve this vision is mostly focused on developing practical, near-Turing test capable AIs. It requires that ordinary people be able to interact using natural language with computer programs simulating other people, and these programs interact among themselves in similar fashion. This is no mean task.

 

I often muse that the tremendous success of computers in facilitating interaction between flesh-and-blood human beings may be among the greatest obstacles to achieving such AI. On a gut level, it feels to me that development in this area will come from reclusive, lone hackers diving deep, not polished, socially networking professionals using computers as tools in various endeavors. My wife has long warned me that she fears I’ll see my last days holed up in a storage locker with a gaggle of obsolete hardware, trying such a “deep dive”. She’s perceptive, as there’s something in this image I find troublingly attractive.

[IDMclean]

Alright seeing as I can't think of how to go about the next part I will address a previous question in a surface capacity.

 

The question of the Belief System Engine, which for now I will simply term the Faith engine. The idea behind it is that each idea, each thing that a person can believe in can be contained as an expression. What the Faith Engine would seek to do is weed out the inconsistent beliefs of the Psyche. That is it would be implicitly a democractic process.

 

The algorithm for how to percisely implement such a program escapes me, however I am ever confident that such an algorithm exists, or can be designed.

 

As it was noted earlier, this glosses over the details of the mind of the AI for our NPCs, which as I have hinted at I will term simply Psyche, or in plural Psyches.

 

The model of the psyche that I hold is somewhat simplisitic. I however am confident that when the details are fully worked out, the model will work within parameters.

 

The psyche is divided up into five major parts. They are:

Perception (Sentience, six senses, Input)

Conception (Consciousness, manipulation of the senses, Expression)

Psyche State Log (Memory, storage of the experiences, Internal IO)

Drive (Ego, Conceptual Sensory needs and wants, Forced Internal-External Iteration)

Identity (Self, active self-referential pattern, Sum state manipulator)

 

There purposes are both clear and obscure. I apologize for this, but I hope to make clearer my meaning.

 

The Perception consists of the Six senses of the psyche, the six methods of the psyche to take in external information, and otherwise interface with their enviroment. We can consider 3 of the six senses mission critical. They are Sight, Sound, and Thought. the other three are Taste, Touch, and Smell.

 

The Conception takes the input (data), and places them into expressions, or "dissolves" them into expressions if they are of complex enough form. perceptions filtered into the conception takes an entropic form. The data should be reduced down to it's useful aspects for the purpose of using (expressing) or finding (expression generation). This is where the Faith Engine interfaces.

 

The Memory logs all this, keeping a record of the state of the system, albeit drasticly simplified (a conceptual map of the state of the psyche).

 

The Ego drives the system taking concepts like "hunger" and turning them into actions to obtain sensory information, to obtained desired or necessary input. A need is something which is necessary for the continued operation of the psyche. Generally a need will always be true. A want is a created need, an opperational impartitive conceived and passed into the ego.

 

The self is the sum image of the psyche itself. It can be thought of as a mirror image. Manipulations to the self result in manipulations to the whole of the image in a self-referential, recursive way. The psyche may literally alter it's self. Therby changing the rules that it lives (or dies) by.

 

That's just a preliminary Idea of how I envision the AI system to work.

[Dyothelite]

hahahaha

[IDMclean]

All right, I had a moment of inspiration last night, and I wanted to share this.

 

I think all here will appreciate the idea.

 

Hypography University. A Massively Multiplayer Online University.

 

Character Growth

RPG, FP. You know the rep system that we use? Well take that, and revamp it into an experience style system. Players would be able to accumilate rep by deeds taken, such as posting in the forum (which would be available in the game via the player interface), completing successfully various types of quizes designed to test what you know, awarding from fellow players, content creation, and participation in special events.

 

Your Rep would be sectioned into different parts, denoting reputation in different aspects, such as Literacy, Logic, Debate, Math, Philosophy, Theology, Physics, Computer Science, and other topics.

 

The goal of the game would be to say your bit and learn as much as you can. The game system should re-enforce positive actions taken, and ignore negative actions taken.

 

The game engine itself would need to have or be a conglomerate of Internet tools and resources. As well as a content creation device.

 

No university is complete without it's departments, or it's library.

 

There are many books in the public domain, and many of which have been converted to ebooks. In addition to books available, that already exist, members would be encouraged to write their own ebooks, and contribute to the HU library. Content like this would be available both inside the game and outside on the web, to view or download.

 

The Students are the Teachers.

The system would encourage team play and co-operative effort. With real time chat capabilities and "class" orginization, so that people can effective orginize get togethers and class projects. You can think of classes like clans or guilds.

 

That's just a preliminary overview of the ideas I've had so far. I am highly interested in feedback. I am sure you, the fellow hypographer, has an idea or two that you would like to see implemented.

[arkain101]

cyber school where you can find threads in alphabetical order!

 

Cha ching! awesome idea! rep points ahoy.

[pgrmdave]

Hmmm - I like it ;) It has flaws, but it is a creative idea that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been tried elsewhere. There are, as far as I can tell, two problems with it.

 

1 - incentive. What is the incentive to gain XP? In most RPG's, gaining XP allows you to become more powerful, more influential, and opens up more possibilities.

 

2 - teams - what's to prevent a team getting togeather and continually repping each other, making them gain more XP than is truly deserved?

[IDMclean]

Incentive

Well access privllages and content tools would be some of the things I would think to use as incentive, similar to the capabilities people gain by gain rep here on the forum. The content tools would be unique to the game.

 

Another idea is individual player capabilities. I'm not exactly sure what the character capabilities would be at current, as I would need to do some research regarding MMOs. I would also need to think of what else a player can do in the world.

 

Rep System Abuse

Obviously repping would need to be limited in some way. For one, repping might be limited to contributions made. If you make a post, then that could be repped. If you make content, like a ebook, that too can be repped. The number of times you, as a player, can rep something would probably be limited.

 

 

So a problem is posed.

 

What are Player Capabilities?