Deadrock

I’ve made a little progress on the video game. A lot of it has been structural changes to include some features now viewed as important. I’ve recorded a video that exhibits these features.

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I’ve collected a bunch of stuff relating to the fluid dynamics work I did with Hardcore Computer Simulator, and from previously when I was working on a water game prototype. The end of the story was that I didn’t implement a new version of any of this, but the links are cool and I reckon that it’s only a matter of time until there are games with proper fluid dynamics that aren’t just a bunch of particles or the sand algorithm. I’ve collected them all here both for future reference and for anyone else who’s interested in this topic.
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In the aftermath of Hardcore Computer Simulator’s canning, I’ve been working on some fine code for Deadrock - proper camera frustum culling, for a start. But I thought I’d post a few things I’ve been looking at that are related to HCS. In this post you can see some games where the main gameplay interface is a programming language. I haven’t tried any of these games, but some of them look terrific.

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I didn’t finish Hardcore Computer Simulator in time for the deadline of the competition. I ran a small post-mortem on the game and posted it at TIGSource, and I’ve reproduced it “after the jump”.

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I recently finished Patapon and decided to employ the new review style in reviewing it. The review contains some minor spoilers and also assumes that you know a little about the game and maybe even have played the demo.

Creativity
Some nice creativity in here. One is encouraged to experiment with different army configurations, and different sets of weapons / hats / pies / whatever. It can make the difference between passing a level without even breaking a sweat and losing a few caps and coming home with only 4 surviving patapons. Blending different materials to find new types of rare patapons is fun. Grinding to build up the army, which you’ll do a lot (there’s even an advice screen telling you to grind if you can’t pass a level), detracts somewhat from this creativity. The mini-games you have to do to get the good stuff become extremely tiresome after only a few goes; some are downright unfair.

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I’m taking two weeks out to make a game for the TIGSource VGNG competition.

I’m starting up a mailing list for important Deadrock news. If you’d like to be added to the list, please drop a mail to and I’ll add you to the mailing list.

If you’d like to keep up to date with the blog, you should consider adding the RSS feed to your bookmarks.

Also, I’ll be posting thoughts and updates and various other stuff to the forum.

I’m brainstorming zombie-related ideas in the forum. Please feel free to add your own ideas either in the brainstorm thread or in the comments :)

Long or short ideas, unrealistic, ridiculous, funny, dead serious, convoluted, super simple, technical, artistic, theoretical, any kind of ideas or thoughts are welcome.

Storytelling in games is a huge subject, dividing opinion across the industry. Were one to listen to certain industry figures, one might quickly surmise that the industry had better decide one way or another about story-driven games and gameplay-driven stories, and games that are just games and might have stories and oh isn’t it all terribly confusing and what ought we to do? Looking at it from a functional perspective, I think that there are two reasons, with respect to stories, why people play games. One is obviously to experience the game’s story, whether it be completely linear or branching like in the excellent game Way of the Samurai.

The other reason, and this is something I’ve wrongly scoffed at before (and even very recently), is experiencing the game. People have said to me that Tetris tells a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It sounds ridiculous in the context of a plot, but where the idea holds water is in retelling this story to other people. I can’t be sure how many players of Dwarf Fortress were introduced to the game after reading SomethingAwful’s forum goons “Let’s Play” session in the fortress of Boatmurdered. I bet it’s a huge proportion. Many games become popular through word of mouth and the best way to get someone interested in something is to tell them a story about it. If a game can create accounts that are interesting to tell and interesting to hear, as well as interesting to experience first-hand, that is a powerful thing for the players and their friends.

When I first heard about Chris Crawford’s Storytron, I scoffed at that, too. I downloaded it and couldn’t make head nor tail of it and that was that. I recently downloaded it again, and tried to read the web site, and didn’t get much further than before. But this time I actually understood what he is trying to do. He’s trying to make it possible for people to create a set of data that will produce interesting stories. Imagine a game like Way of the Samurai, with its branching plots and intricate character layers, but it’s not a fixed tree any longer; each time you play the characters interact in a different (yet still predicatable) way. It would make for some excellent whodunnit style games, at least. The systems in place in Dwarf Fortress are the same, really - you have a large set of data and a simulation, and running that simulation with player interaction, even if it’s a fairly simple simulation, can produce intricate stories for retelling.

Some of the greatest game stories I’ve ever heard came from people who had been playing MMO games: Player versus Player conflicts on a massive scale in Dark Age of Camelot; epic raids in World of Warcraft; spontaneous gatherings to mark a real-world death in City of Heroes; pilots going rogue and spying on other corporations in Eve Online. Surely the draw of these games is driven by this, whether the players know it or not.