Wow … I'm amazed I could remember my password. So much has happened since I last thought about this place.
Life hasn't been too kind; going through some weird kind of PTSD thing from crazy ex (more crazy than most, I guess). Apparently mental health issues mean I can't work or claim unemployment benefits, but I also can't claim disability because I would be capable of working on a good day. The official advice from the departments in question is to lie on the forms for the other one.
 
Hi again, all these people whose names I recognise from so many years ago. My name's Angel, I'm 34, and now I'm an author. Got a couple of self published books out, and that's enough for me to get self-employment support from the government; but I really, really wish I could get more people to actually read them. I'm also a part-time spambot, because plugging links on forums (novel / short stories / mind control erotica) is the only kind of advertising I can afford.
 
Umm… yeah, that's my life. Still have crazy ideas for game making, but have pretty much accepted that I don't have the time to teach myself to art. Maybe I'll make something at some point soon.
Congrats to everyone who's got through the last decade without having any bits cut off and has found a place in the Real World ^_^

Thanks I'd heard of that one, but not about the world-making aspect.


I think my idea was probably spawned by Entanglement, and partly by an actual card game I had as a kid, called "Connect".


Other tangential ideas for this were the possibility of an 'unlimited' RPG-style game. If you have a mobile game (I believe the 3DS has the capability; though if I find enough time to see this one through I'd more likely be building for Android phones), you could have different copies of the game shipped with different optional side-quests, and a different set of mini games. Developers could add extra quests, extra games and extra items at any time, and people who already have the game could still benefit.


One thing I thought might be interesting is an 'observer mode' - some of the minigames could have wireless 2-player modes, mostly cooperative. But even with 1 player games, you could watch the games of someone else within range. You could have extra achievements for something like that: watch 5 different people beat a certain game, or watch a draw on a 2-player one. You could have some of the benefits of a MMO, but with your in-game contacts being people who are actually close enough for your DS/phone/whatever to exchange messages when you pass in the street; actively encouraging social play.


And ... getting on to silly sub ideas:
The game could contain an embedded ARG. See, there's a parallel universe where all media is censored by a totalitarian "nanny-state", but abstract puzzle-ish games are allowed for their positive effect on improving your minds. The resistance, who wants people to have the right to make their own mistakes, has started communicating using the messaging feature buried inside such a game. So far, the authorities haven't figured out that "chipped" consoles don't censor player-to-player messages.


But the rebels are playing the very game you have in your hands, and it turns out that messages have somehow started to leak across from one world to another.


So basically, you start getting messages from other "players" who are actually NPCs programmed into the game, acting as a rabbit hole into helping the resistance of a parallel world. There could be some interesting puzzles here, like passing messages from one NPC to another across a place where a barrier exists in their world, or finding that when you visit a certain museum/library your phone's camera shows the secret government lab that's there in the other world. There's many ways these kind of games could be implemented (posters with registration-marks on to let the camera easily identify a real-world location), but for something like that you'd either need one area with a lot of players in, or staff around the world to set up different parts of the plot in several cities.

Another idea strikes my brain today, and stuck to a few other fragments hanging around in there. I'd be interested to see what people think of this. Two main questions would be whether its interesting enough for people to play, and original enough to be different from what's already out there.


The plot (if required) would be something along the lines of a great cataclysm erasing significant portions of the world. Only in highly populated areas was people's knowledge/imagination of their surroundings strong enough to keep places real. Everywhere else, nature dissolved into a grey blank canvas. Now it just happens that you're one of the few people with enough imagination to recreate the featureless world. Or maybe it could work without an RPG type plot, and be more like a pure puzzle game.


You start with 5-6 'tiles' in your memory. Maybe they're bits of countryside you remember or something. Each tile would be a 3x3 block of map tiles, with roads going out on 2 or more edges. Next to a city (like the one you start in), you can place any of the tiles from your memory. Once you're walking along a road, you can only place tiles where the roads and terrain along the edge of the tiles match up. To start with, you'd have tiles with just grass or desert terrain, and either 2 or 3 edges having a road coming out along them. This restricts you to a relatively small subset of the possible tiles, so its relatively likely you'll have one to fit in a certain place.


On the 'blank map' or on certain tiles, you'd have a couple of types of resources. These might be imagination wells, or settlements. If they're on tiles, you can put them down and visit them as soon as you have a matching tile to put them next to. If they're on the map, then you have to get to them and put a tile on top of them, and the relevant object appears in the centre of the tile.


Imagination wells are little bits of grey that aren't entirely clear. They might be mis-shapen representations of what was once there, like modelling clay that hasn't quite been rolled flat. They can stimulate your imagination, like seeing faces when you look at clouds. Collecting one lets you take a tile from the available set into your memory ~ draw a card, essentially. They will 'respawn', scattered randomly across the map area you've already explored, after certain events.


Settlements are little villages - maybe without the people, but small enough for you to envision them on your own, or that might have barely survived whatever weird apocalypse has struck this world. The number in your 'deck' will be quite small. I'm not sure if the ones on the map will be in predefined places or scattered randomly, but the number will have to be fixed. Each settlement has a mini-game attached; a falling block puzzle, or snake game or something. I'd say these should be all different (though there's at least a few variations on the theme of block puzzle), hence the fixed number of villages in the game. Maybe these will use the same graphics as the main game, or maybe they'll be more abstract. Some of these may require you to achieve certain milestones (level, points, etc) before you can pass through. All will have a game-specific list of achievements to pass, and let you draw another tile for each one completed. Some will have only 5 levels, or 10; while others might just go faster and faster, and hand over a tile at regular intervals as long as you keep getting higher scores with no arbitrary limit.


For a little extra 'bonus', maybe the settlements will grow more ornate on the map, covering an entire tile rather than just the centre square, as you get better at the game.


As far as the 'RPG plot' version of the concept goes, there are also larger towns, with people in, who further some kind of "restore the world / prevent a second apocalypse" plot. These cities will be much like the place you start in; most will have a few inhabitants to chat with, maybe some items to spend your points on, and (assuming enough development man-hours to provide sufficient games) a game or 2 in much the same way as the smaller villages.


Cities would be placed in a pre-defined layout; as they're linked to a game's story, it wouldn't make much sense to encounter them in a different order.


Items could possibly include 'game powerups' like a bomb (usable in most falling block games), a shrink potion (shortens mr snake, or flattens a tetris-piece) or speed up/slow down items (which could be used in most games, but would only be advantageous in some). You could also have game varying items, such as one which makes the playing field 4 squares wider (for most games with a randomly generated board). For some games, a created variant might turn out to have its own set of tile-yielding achievements.


One addition would be a book (not sure if that's the best item) which lets you learn about a new terrain type, or a new road type (get a boat and you can travel along rivers too): now, each tile edge can have two paths leading off it, one of each type, which makes it harder to find a match, but then that is balanced against the growing number of tiles you have in your memory. When you get a new path/terrain type, you can choose to discard and redraw tiles in your hand, from the new expanded deck. Maybe there's a good chance you'll get back tiles with the road in the same place, but with a river on it too, or similar. Explore far enough, and do well in all the mini-games, and eventually you'll reach enough cities to complete the story; but a game like this should have enough replay value to keep on going with the mini games.




One idea I had as a possible extension to this would be as a mobile game; play within range of someone else (I believe they've got a mechanism for the 3DS to do something like that, though its probably beyond homebrew guys) and they might exchange minigames in the background. You could have a new minigame injected at any point, and the more you socialise with other players, the better the chance you'll have something new to play. Could even add whole new side stories ... add a bit of variety to subsequent play-throughs.
If a big company was doing something like this, you could have access points at game shows or in particular shops handing out new modules when you get close; I'm sure this could lead to guerilla-marketing monetisation. (Imagine a forum post on gamefaqs or somewhere, "I just got a new mod while I was in Shop X" is bound to drive a few people in)


Got a couple more add-on ideas for this one, if anyone's interested, but its 6:10am now and I should really go to bed.

Turn-based Real-Time Strategy? Is that even possible?

(Sorry, not very helpful I know)

I can't say much about actually creating your game, but I'd say the first step has to be coming up with an idea. For me, this is the easy part: I have a lot of ideas, and most of them just get filed away in the back of my mind.

But one idea doesn't make a game. Some people might disagree, but I'd say when you have an idea, just make a note of it and keep it somewhere safe. If it happens to match another idea, stick them together.

For example: "A system where characters learn skills from each other" is an idea, not a game. Then I glanced at it and added the thought: "some (temporary, maybe older) characters might have a lot of starting skills, but are only in the party to teach others". That's still just one idea with a little branch off it, not enough to really work on, so it goes into the file.

Then I have another idea: "Old hero comes out of retirement, but finds that the industry has changed a lot". This was inspired by reading a story about a guy who was in hospital for years, then found that he had to learn a whole new set of skills because his old employer had started using a production line.

Now that one's just a single idea too, but they both work with old people, so they get stuck together.

I think you should keep on until you've got 4 or 5 ideas in a bundle before turning it into a game. If possible, 3 ideas that all connect to each other, making a little loop, will be preferable to 4 in a line.

Before you start with the actual "making", I'd say you should decide on the basics of your world, characters, system etc. So start with your ideas and ask questions. "Why is he retired?", "What's he been doing for all these years?" "Are heroes common? Do people acknowledge their role in society?" "Is there magic?" "What's the tech level?"

If the ideas you have naturally suggest answers, that may be a good omen. If there's more than one possible answer, think about both. If one of them loops back to another idea, or connects to something else in your ideas file, then take it ... a big set of ideas that fit like a jigsaw is a perfect core for your game. As each answer raises more questions, try to answer those too, until you've got a pretty good idea about your world.

Not exactly laying about, but my server has plenty of space free. SCP/SFTP, web, mail. PHP and MySQL should be no trouble. Nobody's asked about cron before. If you want to add stuff to crontab, you'd have to ask me to do it manually. Though I'd be happy to give you your own daily/hourly dirs

I saw a suggestion a while back for something similar, but giving everyone some kind of coupons for the essentials. So you could use your food stamps to pay for cheap groceries or whatever, but you couldn't put them towards luxury items. (I'm imagining that the supermarkets would get payment from the state, or maybe some kind of tax breaks, for accepting the coupons. You'd probably end up having them only redeemable against the cheap&nasty own brand products)

People around the poverty line have a bigger incentive to get a job, because they would still get their coupons, and all the money they earn could be spent on luxuries. Theoretically, people who are more well off could do the same - but above a certain point, people will not bother claiming their 'free' subsistence, because they wouldn't use them anyway (because it would mean buying lower quality stuff).

Its perfectly possible, except that the windows installer (at least up to XP, I'd be surprised if Vista is any different) overwrites your master boot record without prompting.

If you want to build a dual-boot system with windows added second, I'd advise you to create a sensible partition set to start with (first partition on the disk should be NTFS, then an LVM volgroup for your linux stuff). Before installing windows, make sure you have a bootable disk (a GRUB floppy works well for me, though I suspect most liveCDs or linux rescue disks will do the job) so you can restore the MBR afterwards.

I don't know about ubuntu (I'm a redhat addict), but I suspect it'll give you pretty useful tools to do whatever you need.

Oh no, they got 255 signatures! One more and the counter might overflow and destroy the internet! Curse you, George Bush.

I'd be interested in some kind of britmeat, as long as I'm not the oldest or youngest person there again (always seems to happen when meeting internet people).
Manchester's more convenient for me, but then just about every meet I've been to lately has been at a club on Canal Street (Manchester), so a change would probably be a good thing.

My recommendation would be the Vigor 2820Vn ... seems pretty reliable to me, though possibly a bit expensive. I originally chose it mainly because its easy to set up sane QoS rules (like allowing my machines to set higher priority, but not my housemates). Or if you want something cheaper, I suspect the ones without all the fancy features will still be good quality.

CLockwork ants bring back memories First game I ever made was about an ant called 'Tim' defending his tribe against the invading machine horrors. Many references to "The eerie click-click-click-tap-tap-tap of six feet hitting the stone in perfect rhythm" (Yes, its melodramatic. I was young and inexperienced) One of the major allies was a discarded ragdoll posessed by the spirit of the homeowners' daughter, an alien (and therefore scary) worldview for her ant minions.

Anyway ... back on topic
At the moment, I'm working on about 3 projects at once. I tried thinking about each of them in terms of their critical changes from the real world, but found that it seems to me that's not the important bit. I'd say the new/different things make a world interesting, but its the familiar things that let the reader/player empathise with it.

For example, at the moment I'm writing urban legends for an SF world. Yes, kidnapping people as hosts for a sentient tattoo is bizarre and alien. But the paranoid stoner who sits at the end of the bar warning you about these things is a character you can recognise.
Actually ... another thought: If something in your world is a big change from reality, its alien to the player. But whether it seems realistic from a character's point of view is a more interesting question. How do you convey which of your changes are normal and everyday within the world where they occur? If magic is an everyday thing to your characters, but storms are a cause of real fear, do you want the player to buy in to this wordview? How do you do it?

Hmm ... my current projects and their 'critical differences'. How important would you expect these differences to be in defining the world?

Legacy of Dracula
* Vampires don't exist
* Some people think they do
* If you get shot or stabbed, you're probably going to die
(hmm ... difference?)

Toyland
* Astronauts, zombies, ninja pirates, wizards, dragons and nurses all act like regular people
* Buildings are provided by "the maker", and the city is rebuilt or reorganised on a daily basis
* There exist creatures called mixes, who have heads/bodies/legs from different lego sets. They're scary because nobody understands them
(lots of difference. What's the main one?)

Whispersmith
* The world is ruled by rumours and politics
* There's a shadowy cabal known as the 'whispers' manipulating world events
* Anybody will commit suicide if you say enough bad things about them
(hmm ... its a little harder to pin down this one)

Terra
* Far future. Mankind has colonised planets in 330 systems, and earth has been swallowed by a black hole
* 95% of everyone is Roman Catholic, and the Inquisition is a force to be reckoned with
(2 differences: Which is biggest?)

Theives Without Borders
* 2 guys robbed a jewellery store and are on the run
* Most people are jerks, except to people they like
* "normal" people will keep on doing a job they hate rather than risk change
(Hmm ... where's the critical change?)

I ordered some stuff called "Hoom" that's advertised for full-body hair removal ... still waiting for it to arrive though. Too scared to shave, my coordination's terrible and I just know I'd end up cutting myself.

When I saw that this  isn't rm2k3 any more, I really hoped it might use some engine that I can run with wine.
So far, I don't know if this is true or not. The splash screen displays, then it changes the resolution (giving me a visible rectangle that's about 100x180, looking hideously stretched - I hate the overscan on this TV), then it exits.

Will the new exe help? (I don't know, it says "connection refused" when I try to download it tonight)
Should I try tweaking the options in the hope of being able to play this game? Or should I just give up?

And then you eat it! You may omit the lemon if you don't like eating lemons.

What about people who don't like banananas?


Ah well ... here a recipe of my own.

Unorthodox green curry
(A Thai curry recipe, adjusted to fit the ingredients I had at the time, and then changed a little bit more every time I try it) - serves 1-3

Put some oil in a big frying pan (or even a wok, if your girlfriend hasn't scraped it with a fork so much that the non-stick coating flakes off and gets in your food). Crush a couple of cloves of garlic into it, and add some herbs/spices (I use half a dozen birds eye chillies, and half to one teaspoon of lemon grass, chives, coriander, ginger, cayenne pepper, paprika and black peppercorns). If your friend just had a party and there's a leftover lime on the counter (No, I don't know why someone would buy a big sack of fresh limes for a party), squeeze some lime juice in as well.
Put on a high heat until the oil starts to sizzle, then add 2-3 chicken breasts (or pork steaks, or a pack of cheap chopped turkey ... sausages also work well, but bacon/gammon doesn't). Fry for about 5 minutes, then turn and repeat (adding more oil+spices if necessary).

Take the pan off the heat for a moment. Cut the meat into strips or bite-size chunks. (This is what kitchen scissors are for - I would have thought this should be obvious, but I know someone who needed to be told that its unnecessary to get out a chopping board for this task). Add 2 tablespoons (40g / 2oz) of shrimp paste, just enough coconut milk to cover the bottom of the pan, and 1/4 to 1/2 a pound of minced beef. Put back on a medium heat. Now is a good time to turn on the rice cooker. Also measure out 250ml (a large mug full, if you don't do metric) of coconut milk.

Then stir-fry, sprinkling a spoonful of the coconut milk over the top every minute or so. When you've added all the milk, throw in any veggies you like (I usually use a couple of chopped carrots, half an onion, and a handful of cashew nuts), and stir-fry for another couple of minutes.

Serve with rice or nodules
Consume
Enjoy (this step is not optional)

[Note: The first time, I left the shrimp paste out because I don't like it. But then I found that you can't really taste it, and it brings out the flavor of the spices. So don't omit the shrimp]


We should have a food forum Is that thing where you can make a forum for $30 still going on?

Thanks for the recipes Adolph A little present for you in return. Maybe I'll also offer a reward to other people who posted, once I tried your recipes.

OS: Windows 2003CPU: Sempron 2200+RAM: 1GB PC3200ATA HDD: 160GB + 120GB + 4x 200GB (Raid 5 in software)SATA HDD: 4x200GB + 2x250GB (Raid 5 with a real controller)Cd-Drive: DVD+/-RW, speed not marked (£140 back when dual-layer drives first came out... bah)GFX Card: Radeon 7000 AGPSound Card: AC'97 onboard (not that it matters, with no speakers)Monitor: Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 920 (21" CRT)Keyboard: Ebuyer extra value £0.99Mouse: Ebuyer extra value £0.99