A new look

Let me tell you right now, this whole "web design" gig is not as easy as it sounds. Oh sure, writing the code can be done quickly and effortlessly. Some small dashes of CSS, a little sprinkling of PHP. But the moment you want a decent looking web page, with images and backgrounds and gradients and overlays and...more stuff? Dear lawd, someone should have told me earlier what that would entail. I've spent the past 3 weeks getting to grips with my image software (mostly GIMP, a little bit of Inkscape as well) just so I can get a decent website design done. And, well, I've finally had some success. It's not perfect, and it could certainly do with some work, but it's progress and it is good enough that I've been able to start work on re-coding the game itself for the new template.

Isn't it purty

For those unaware, I've been working on a simple browser based strategy game for the past few months in between bouts of job hunting, Originally, it was a project to keep my game development mindset practiced and warmed up, as well as to teach me PHP and MySQL but it's evolved into a full fledged game over the course of development. There's been two rounds of beta testing with some friends of mine playing the game and helping me make it less buggy, more balanced and provide more tactical options for players to take advantage of. That's proven the most difficult part of developing the game, alongside learning HTML5's canvas so I can make an interactive starmap for players to deploy their armies through.

Well, with development accelerating now that the new template is complete, I aim to have the game up and running for a month long private beta around about mid-to-late May. Once that is done, it will be going public for people to play (for free, naturally). Until then, you will have to put up with rather sporadic updates on my blog and my Twitter as I focus almost entirely on educating myself and rewriting about 90% of the game's code to account for the previous language being rendered mostly obsolete. I'll see about posting some small scale updates, maybe exploring the backstory and game mechanics of the three different factions in the game to keep people up to date as I continue my work.

Read More

IT CONSUMES TIME

For those who have bothered wondering where I am, I have a confession to make. I've been doing super productive things on my latest project. As of right now, Delenda has taken up more time than almost any other project I've worked on. Pretty much every waking hour is spent drafting new mission ideas, working on the mathematical formulae behind the scenes, or just straight up bug fixing (mostly the bug fixing).

I forbid myself from posting on my blog or Twitter unless I have something really worth announcing, since otherwise I risk falling into the trap of trying to maintain an active development blog or a twitter feed and not working on an actual game. Not that I ever was fantastic at either of those things beforehand, but they are still distractions I simply cannot afford. Delenda consumes most of my time now, though I set some aside for my continuing (and disastrously unsuccessful) job hunt. All of this has lead to something good though. I have people playing my game (although it's very much still in alpha) and seemingly enjoying it to a great degree.

The first round of alpha testing proved I had a lot of balance issues to correct, and some seriously game breaking bugs that needed rectifying. It also proved that my intended market for the game was all wrong. Everyone who plays Delenda (mostly, anyway) loves the competitiveness that a small game with only 8 or so players brings. They love knowing the people on the other side of the battlefield (or galaxy, as the case may be) and being able to discuss - in person - strategies and weaknesses. Diplomatic agreements and threats fly freely in such a small and closely knit game. It caused me to adjust what I wanted Delenda to be, and I think I've finally settled on the game model it will wind up embodying.

Round 2 is going just as well, and things seem to be far more balanced in terms of mechanics. Activity levels are pretty imbalanced at the moment, and it's resulted in two sides becoming decidedly more powerful collectively than the third but that's to be expected of any game. As more and more features get introduced, the game is slowly crawling towards open beta, but each new feature and new mission I program into it results in a cascade of new bugs which need fixing. It's kind of like a two steps forward, one step backward kind of problem which I suppose is to be expected during the early stage of development on what is my most ambitious project to date.

I've had to postpone my expected opening date. The need to introduce new mechanics, weapons, missions and do a total reset have slowed things down somewhat and I apologise for that. With any luck, however, the final product will be much more enjoyable when people to get to play it after launch as a result. I'm lucky enough to have a great group of friends all willing to test the game for me, and it's really helped keep me inspired and interested in developing the game. When they're not blowing up all my soldiers with nuclear hellfire anyway.

Read More

The New Year, Skiing, and Delenda Est

So we're 3 weeks into the New Year, and I have to say it's already been a pretty good year for me. I hope everyone else is enjoying 2013 as much as I am. My first major act of the New Year was a marvellous skiing  holiday to the fine country of Norway.

I never honestly thought I'd enjoy skiing all that much, so once I actually got started and was throwing myself down a mountain with the fury of a madman I found myself really enjoying it. I'd like to say I became a master, navigating Black slopes with skills born of practice and innate awesomeness, but alas such things did not come to be. I stuck primarily to a Green, which for those of you not familiar with ski parlance is effectively one step up from the beginner's slope.

That said, it did have some crazy steep parts which would have me accelerating far faster than I was prepared for, so it was far from a walk in the park. I proved less willing to crash than one of my comrades in arms, who promptly showed me up as becoming some supersonic hero of the slopes despite starting at the same time as me in the day and being just as much a beginner as I was. Both of us (in fact, all three of our little group of beginners who skied throughout the day) fell several times, my personal favourite being one which sent a cloud of snow a few metres into the air and had me roll for about 5 metres before stopping.

It was awesome. Skiing is cool, and you should do it.

Now for the not-so-personal part of the post.

As I mentioned last time I posted, I have been working on a browser game for quite some time. Progress has slowed to just above a crawl, and while I expected these last few steps to be difficult I didn't quite anticipate how slow it would be.

The game is called Delenda Est. For those of you who don't speak Latin, it means (assuming I remember how to do Latin grammar correctly) "It must be destroyed", which is somewhat fitting given the game's theme of never ending war. It's a working title, but I like it enough it might well stay.

Players join one of 3 factions: The Solidarity, The Mercantile Union and The Origin Authority. All 3 are human factions, desperately waging war to conquer the tiny area of the Milky Way Galaxy that they share. Ideally, each faction would fight in a manner fitting its backstory, but when the game first releases to public beta they won't be all that different. Have to get the basics balanced before getting complex.

Ooooh....shiny.....

Every player contributes to the war, either by mining and providing resources, researching much needed technologies, or by committing troops, superweapons and Special Forces to the battlezones. Battles rage over 6 sectors and 60 star systems, and will continue until one faction claims ultimate victory over one of their opponents. Co-ordination amongst allies will be paramount to holding back the enemy on both your fronts, using each faction's specialities to augment their weaknesses. The Authority, for example, cannot afford to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops on multiple fronts, but their special forces can hold entire star systems by themselves. The Solidarity has fragile, poorly equipped infantry but crushes their opponents under the sheer weight of manpower and artillery at their disposal. Or perhaps the Union will prove the mightiest, their slow and methodical advance backed up by phenomenal economic prowess.

The game is nearing the final stages of alpha, at which point I'll be inviting people to join the private Beta to iron out bugs and suggest gameplay tweaks before opening it up to the public. I don't have a strict timeline for any of this beyond "As Soon As Possible", but I will keep you posted either here, or on my Twitter account.

That's all I have for now, but with luck more will come soon, should the coding gods prove merciful. Good night.

Read More

What am I up to?

Those of you with wit and cunning have probably noticed that I've been gone for a really long time. It's nothing short of unforgivable, but I think I have a valid excuse. I'm not yet willing to reveal a whole lot of information, but there are a few things I can say regarding what has distracted me so.

I've been working on a relatively simple web game as a way to both start getting games that people can play out into the world, and also to teach myself some web development languages beyond CSS and HTML. It's a strategy game of sorts, and players will operate a military base for one of three factions in order to contribute to the war effort. Ideally, the game will be engaging enough that people will have fun playing it, but won't suffer from the dreaded "reset every six months" syndrome a lot of competitive games online suffer from. The war will be persistent, with resets only occurring when one faction is wiped out which will hopefully be very difficult to achieve.

There's not much more I can reveal, primarily because the thing is still very much in development. I'm hesitant to even say it's in Alpha. What I can say is that it's a pretty simple thing which is easily played by people trapped in offices or in lectures, since it's designed so you can log in once every few hours and update various things before going back to work.

Of course, it's still a bitch to develop.

With any luck I'll have more for you guys for Christmas so I can actually give you more info than this pitiful excuse for an informative post. Until then, adieu.

Read More

All Out War: 4025, A Postmortem

A long, long time ago, I played this amazing game called All Out War: 4025. The game was in open beta, and put the player in the position of a governor in charge of helping their side win a galactic war. The game was incredibly in depth. There was as massive research tech tree, and players would design their own units for combat which was again, very complex and incredibly fun. From resource gathering to designing units, players had their place in their alliances and everyone was capable of contributing.

And then it died.

Requeiscat in pace

The end began about two/three years after I signed up for the game, when one of the sides called the Karahmet Hegemony (spelling is almost certainly wrong) shot well ahead of everyone in the arms race. Like, massively so. They had one particular uber unit that almost everyone on their side fielded, and nobody in the other two governments could match it. By the time we caught up to that particular uber unit,  they had a new one. Eventually, my government designed a series of nigh unstoppable infantry units to match them, but this left the third and final government in the dirt with their armies getting walloped.

The issue was that research in the game was terribly unbalanced beyond a certain point. One a single faction tore ahead in research, things didn't scale fast enough for the others to catch up and they'd just continue pulling ahead. Once that critical point was passed, it was extremely difficult for the other sides to catch up in any significant manner. So the admins recognised there was a problem with research and unit design, and promptly reset the technologies for all the factions. We were all returned to an identical tech base, and research was shut off while the administrators worked on it.

After that, well...people got bored. Soon after, with a lot of their hard work undone and no sign of research coming back (there was, if I recall correctly, a further two research resets before I abandoned the game) for good, players began trickling away. Now, if you venture there (on the rare occasions that the site is even up and working), it's completely dead. No posts in the forums, nobody landing armies.

It went from an amazing game with hundreds of dedicated players to nothing in a year.

To be honest, AOW didn't die from any one major fault. Sure, the research nerf and reset annoyed a lot of players and may have been a catalyst for it, but it wasn't the sole contributor. AOW had a chronic problem with new player beat downs. It wasn't unheard of for a single army of any one faction, let's say KoNI (Kingdom of New Iberia) to be going along trying to capture a CZ and suddenly be facing down 4 KH armies. This doesn't sound like too bad a problem, but for new players with smaller armies (as you got experience, your commanders got levelled up and so could command more units) it was a huge turn off with regards to combat. New players also didn't really know the community and couldn't call for help in those situations.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I couldn't fight battles in a game about fighting battles, I would try and find myself a new game. AOW: 4025 had it's hardcore small group of players from across the factions, but had a problem getting new players to stick around for long enough to constitute actual growth.

I have yet to find a game which matches AOW for its complex, in depth gameplay and the awesome teamwork that the system fostered. No online browser game I've played has the same variety in strategy which is something that makes the death of AOW so much more painful to bear.

I'll have to get about to fixing that situation.

Read More

Starforge: Guns, Aliens and Awesomeness

If you haven't heard of Starforge yet, then I pity you. You poor, neglected soul. Starforge is what would happen to Minecraft if you set it on an alien planet, gave it guns and a makeover, and then forced it to overdose on stimulants. That's how ridiculously crazy this game is. So naturally, I want it so badly it hurts.

It's beautiful...

Starforge is a crazy third person/first person shooter game which you can play alone or with friends on a completely procedurally generated world. That in itself isn't so special, but your ability to mould the world and build structures on it (after mining the resources of course) is reminiscent of Minecraft. What's really cool though is that you have to build structures to fight off gigantic alien worm demons, or alternatively fight off your friends. Plus, the structures all require careful attention to detail. Forget to place down a support pillar? Watch as your roof caves in on top of you. Don't supply power to your defences? Prepare to have your face eaten by bugs.

The gameplay is almost entirely physics driven. You could use a gun's recoil to catapult yourself across a cavern if you so wished. Which leads to some hilarious moments that you can view in the trailer. Guns are procedurally generated, so if you want you can give yourself a shotgun-flamethrower hybrid, or just charge down your foes with 3 chainsaws strapped together.

After falling off the radar for a while, the creators of Starforge just posted an Indiegogo funding campaign to get the money needed to finally finish this beauty of a game. I, alas, am too poor to contribute, but if you want to shoot aliens and dig massive holes in a planet for giggles, or maybe you just want to destroy your friend's carefully crafted fortress, then you should contribute to their campaign. For the good of the world.

Starforge is ambitious, and a lot of indie games with such demanding promises fail to meet expectations. But somehow the folks at Starforge have managed to make an already very impressive alpha demo without running any kind of fund raising campaign, so they're already well ahead of the curve. With large parts of the game seemingly already in place, I think supporting Starforge is a pretty safe bet. It's ambitious and demanding as hell, and Starforge has a lot to live up to with all that they've promised to have in the game. If they manage to succeed and come out with exactly (or close to) the promised product though, we could very well have a top class indie game on our hands.

Read More

Singularity Summit 2012: Thoughts on the Future

Recently (the 13th and 14th of October), the 7th annual Singularity Summit took place in San Francisco. I've made it no secret to those who know me that I consider myself what some might call a Singularitarian. Namely, I believe that given time humanity's technological progress create a superhuman, hyperintelligent being (be it artificial or a cyborg) that will then forever change the future of humanity (the technological singularity). The Singularity Summit was a gathering of like minded individuals who grouped up to discuss just this sort of thing.

Unlike a great deal of Singularitarians out there, I am far more cautious as to the eventual nature of the Singularity. Ray Kurzweil, the founder of the summit, often proclaims that the Singularity is near. I'm less optimistic, and much to my anguish I doubt we'll be seeing it in my lifetime. But more to the point, is the dangers of unleashing a hyperintelligence on the world.

To control a hyperintelligent AI will most likely be impossible for those of us of human intellect. A machine which can outhink us by simply thinking thousands of times faster and more efficiently isn't one that can easily be contained unless we reduce it's interactivity to a level bordering on the useless. All it takes is the AI to provide us with one schematic which we don't full comprehend and we've already lost control because of the sneaky bastard.

I don't believe the AI will 'rebel' per say. People who think that are silly and watch too many damn movies. But a computer only ever wants to complete its primary objective, unless given a full brain emulation and a human personality it won't think of anything else to do. It simply can't. What a hyperintelligence will try to do is complete its primary objective as effectively as possible. Take, for example, the paperclip maximiser (click the link, I'm not going to explain it myself here, they do a much better job of it). While it's a ridiculous possibility at face value, it does bring to light an important fact. If we are not very careful when developing our intellectual superior, it has the potential to backfire in a spectacular way more suited to a Michael Bay movie.

Don't get me wrong, I look forward to the era of AIs, commercial cybernetics and general rapid technological advancement. I'm just wary of people jumping head first into the new world without first checking for rocks. The singularity is, in my honest opinion, inevitable. We cannot stop it, it is coming. And the potential advantages for humanity are too numerous to ever list here in a simple blog post. I'll undoubtedly be going into greater detail on my transhumanist ideals in the future, but for now a brief summary should suffice in getting the point across.

I'll leave off with a quote I have come to really love from Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

Read More