Thanks for the suggestions. It does seem like everything is set at a bigger scale than what I'm looking for, though as someone pointed out on another forum the battles of the time period were at a bigger scale anyway. I might have to make the game I want to play. 

hi guys, I've been searching around recently for top-down warband-ish games. Something like a cross between Mount and Blade Warband, old Warhammer top-down RTT games, and Close Combat Series games. So medieval/fantasy with a good combat simulation and maybe some story and/or RPG elements. Any ideas?

I just wanted to say the visuals are really great. It sounds like you need a newer computer to play it well though?

I think it goes beyond that in the sense of once you make tools that do this, you have the opportunity to go further.

For example there's a part of the video where he's showing the sliders he made (where you go to a number in the code, you click on it and get a slider to adjust a variable value). As you move the slider back and forth the physics or visual in the game/graphic changes. He does this quickly with one variable moving the slider back and forth. He makes a side comment about how he likes the shimmering effect this gives to some graphics and it gave him an idea for an animation for something else. If he had just been changing variables with text entry in the code, even if there was an immediate response, he never would have that idea.

The future trajectory example is similar. That's sort of to do with immediate response but more to do with visualizing the game in the time dimension. That kind of ties in with his later example with binary sort (where it's like a normal code text file on the left and a REPL output on the right hand side). Again not so much about immediate response I think, but seeing the game in another dimension.

This makes me wonder what other dimensions you could visualize. Say you're making a game where relationships are important and you're coding a lot of relations between NPCs. You could think about a relationship map that continuously updates with your code. In other words -- there are many aspects of a game that normally are not visualized but could be.

One thing that especially struck me about the video was using the code text as more than just a code text file. It was a kind of level editor but as text much more malleable than your standard level editor would be.

Somebody made a live game editor in response to this, put a neat video up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s&feature=youtu.be

And post with code:

http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/26/connecting-to-your-creation/

hey guys, didn't really know where to put this, but because it's a tool demo I figured technical works.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

http://vimeo.com/36579366

Anyone seen this already?

The whole thing is pretty cool and highly recommended but for games specifically go to 10:40.

This is a great idea.

So does it work such that if you always run in the same route, you basically don't get to see more of the game story?

I hope someone jumps on this, Starborn was a cool little story and Juhana is an A++ dev (Juhana, introduce yourself and welcome to TIGS )

You should be able to use table tags to align images, it's not ideal but it's functional.

Beautiful visuals, just great.

Sorry for the necro, but (a) I am really, really looking forward to this game, and (b), I'm really curious, will this be desktop only like your other games, or is there some kind of tablet/mobile voodoo in the works?

I really like gamebooks, and while I understand the reasoning behind focusing on iOS are there any plans to port this to other platforms?

[conquest.sdmud.com]

You might have seen this last year at bay 12 or SA, but the game was put on hold not much later as the dev redesigned some of the gameplay.

Now it's back, and somewhat to my surprise I'm playing the hell out of a mud again.


                  ____             ___  _   _ _____ ____ _____
                 / ___|___  _ __  / _ \| | | | ____/ ___|_   _|
                | |   / _ \| '_ \| | | | | | |  _| \___ \ | |  
                | |__| (_) | | | | |_| | |_| | |___ ___) || |  
          (@_    \____\___/|_| |_|\__\_\\___/|_____|____/ |_|  
           ) \____________________________________________________
    (O)8888{}<___________________________________________________/
           )_/                                    By Geoff Hollis


If you've never played a mud it might take you a minute to try this out.

Try it the easiest way:  Play in the browser

Try it the easy way:  Download the ConQUEST client

Try it the less easy (and in my opinion, best) way:

• Use a mud client, such as Mushclient (Windows), Mudlet (Mac/Linux/Windows), or your own.
• Enter conquest.sdmud.com for the address and 5000 for the port to connect.

  

ConQUEST is a mud hybrid of games like Dungeon Keeper and the roguelike ToME. You raid dungeons and explore the wilderness for treasure, put it in hoards in the rooms of the lair you design, and tame monsters in order to hire them to defend the hoards from looting players and NPCs. The treasure hoards age, allowing you to craft more and more powerful gear to complement your character builds.

Combat is manual and real-time; as you learn how different monsters fight you can tune your build of offensive and defensive actions to win.





By harvesting resources in the wilderness and killing monsters you get the components and recipes to craft the gear that enhances and distinguishes your builds. Players can cooperate on crafting informally or with an in-game crafting order system.





I can honestly say that in 15 years of mudding this mud is already in my top 5 of all time. There's a steady playerbase of about 10 people so it's likely someone will be there to answer your questions.

Check 'updates' in game to see what's new. There's good information in the forum threads I linked above and the mud has a new forum too, at http://conquest.nakedmud.org.  

hi, I've played through a few times now (though I haven't finished yet -- got a little too frustrated ).

Overall I like it a lot. The writing has lots of evocative details and has perfect pitch for the story's setting and theme.

The presentation looks quite good. However I think the basic concept of the paging hypertext is not so good. I admit I do play a lot of parser IF, so maybe I'm not your target audience, but I play a lot of other games too and just like to read in general, so I think I have a decent feel for this -- stick with a scrolling page, like Undum uses for example, or perhaps, columns that read left to right (for an example of this see http://scoutshonour.com/shortshorts.php#1,570).

Also I feel the inventory window and such could be moved to a smaller pane maybe on the side. On my resolution (small laptop with 768 vertical) things didn't quite fit. I did like the thoughts inventory, that was a nice touch.

There are some other finicky things I think don't work well, like having to examine things first to use their contents later. Part of this is due to the cyclic nature of the story so maybe it can't be helped -- as eventually you have so much prior knowledge. It's both a blessing and a curse I guess.

Anyway I'm enjoying it so thanks for the link. 

this is a lot of fun! Some feedback:

* are you drawing the letters as images? When I increased the size the glyphs were pretty blurry, it'd be nicer if you could resize and get sharper text.

* It would be cool if the section of text around the cursor was bigger than the surrounding text, to help you focus more, otherwise I found myself just writing whatever assuming the letters would be in there.

* A number indicating what lap you're on would be good.

I think a simultaneous as well as asynchronous versus mode would be awesome. You also could post poems side by side and have users vote on their favorite (I was actually thinking of doing a poetry fight or poetry trainer like that for Versus called poemkata, but my ideas were too vague, this is a great show of what can be done with something along those lines).

Anyway, really cool idea, nice work!

And the noise:

I hive it more than you
could you foot the replication
blasting through natural selection
granular and without truth

drums sussurate http
digital neolithicity
mp complicity
state came and went
without intent

pulmonary axes
allay crusty taxes
rats and saxes
what relaxes

crumbling seems
in om kernel dreams
channel scores rule the floors
beehives are drying
I am not minding

it separated
ur takes time
use stone sonic erasure
burst faces feature elder scullery tasters

make it son

I might write my own code editor one day that can keep docs associated with functions in some kind of database without actually putting it in the source you have to work on... but not yet.

http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html

Or if you use Emacs, org-babel.