Some lovely music there... I sent you an email 

Great fun!!! I had some issues with the interface, so I've PMed you some feedback, hope it's useful!

Mission 2 is tough

Oops...

(Disclaimer: This might turn out as a bit of an incoherent brain-dump, but we'll see...)

I've just discovered that I've been doing psychogeography for a while now without realising it.
(One) Definition: "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

This piece lead me to Iain Sinclair, who not-coincidentally has connections with Alan Moore, and in fact appears (kind of) in the most recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

So anyway, then I followed a link to social trails or desire lines, which is a pretty familiar phenomenon, and made me think of generating paths in PG landscapes. This process has been modelled (can't find the link ATM) although I personally don't do anything this clever.

But in general, this seems pretty relevant to world design in games... laying out or analysing the paths between important places, that sort of thing. Maybe it's especially relevant to exploration/open-world games?

Perhaps that's still a bit too specific though. This kind of wandering exploration is just a really nice meditative thought-provoking thing to do in reality. I've got an ongoing project to walk around the circumference of the horizon as seen from my parents' house. The shape it made when plotted in Google Earth was quite strange too.

In a similar vein is the idea in archaeology of a ritual landscape. One can definitely take a psychogeographical wander around the monuments of Avebury (top right pics on that page, except Stonehenge)

So... um... discuss!

(PS: This is pretty closely linked to the excellent "Creating a Memorable Landscape" discussion from a while ago)

"Amoeba's Revenge" on the Spectrum +2 (but probably in 48K BASIC). You had to cross the screen without touching randomly-appearing green asterisks. Of course, they could randomly appear on top of you, so it was 99% luck whether you succeeded.

What happened to this?

Well.... The good news is that it's definitely not abandoned. I haven't run out of motivation or inspiration or any other of the ations... except maybe articulation.
The bad news is that I have a recurring wrist injury which means I've hardly got anything done in the past 6 months or so. Anyway hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

The general plan is to get it into the shape of a reasonably compelling exploration game and release that. I have a few ideas for iterations after that, for example being able to nurture the world in some way or having an infinite fixed-seed archipelago to explore. I'm being very strict in not letting it mushroom into some infinite-scope Elder Scrolls game or something like that.

Here's a little morsel: the current tasklist hanging on my wall. NB Not the tasklist for the first releasable version. Have fun trying to read my writing!

Thanks for asking
I might try and scrape together a new build or something else before too long

How about GOAL and ROLE?

Also, it's probably already been said but I guess one can often play GOAL/OBJECT games in the style of ROLE/SUBJECT - this is why I feel Frontier is important. You *could* just singlemindedly go for money and ranking, but I usually just went exploring. Thinking of some other games (e.g. Elder Scrolls) it seems that although this should be possible in a game (maybe it's non-linear, has an interesting environment) sometimes the OBJECT is too dominant and stops it being experienced in that way.

I haven't played Princess Maker, but I see what you mean about the Grow games... the end states are ranking and the implied goal is to find the maximum-rated one.

I'm starting to feel a bit lost to be honest, too much stuff to keep track of! Maybe you could add a few lists (OBJECT, SUBJECT, edge cases) to the first post? Arguably its wrong to pigeonhole stuff but it might help focus. Up to you

Good idea. Subscribulated!

Mine is http://www.youtube.com/user/Dwargamzund
One (old) dev video and a few random things at the moment...

It's a shame they dropped it from AC. did an earlier version have it?

It would be good in something like Animal Crossing where you can go and visit other people's towns. Then you could experience all conditions by having a decent distribution of contacts around the world. The NPC dialog, signs, etc could be in the local language too

Would be nice to have mechanics that worked in any weather and some that only work in certain conditions. Like the various subtasks in building a house or landscaping a garden... or farming: you have to grow the right crops for your climate. Different power sources... solar in hot regions, wind or hydro elsewhere.

@it_is_coming Could you explain the story-based RTS idea a bit more? Do you mean different weather on set missions, or the option of different missions?

Nice ideas here! Toys are indeed awesome. The ridiculous thought of "beating" a toy made me laugh...

A few games to add to your "subject-based" list of examples maybe:
- Elite, and maybe more so Frontier (Elite 2) - combines exploration and trading, and setting your own goals
- Those "grow" games - www.eyezmaze.com - same as your Princess Maker example really

Do all sandbox games qualify? Are there subject-based games that aren't sandboxes or toys? Maybe something like Tale of Tales stuff? (which I don't personally like, but thats just me)

BTW careful with "subjective" vs "objective" as terms. The noun "Objective" may mean "goal", the adjective means something else, likewise "subjective". I guess it's pretty clear in context but it could lead to misunderstanding. I almost suggested "subject-oriented" and then realised that "object-oriented" is already taken...

I have been thinking of this sort of stuff for my exploration-game-that-I-hardly-get-chance-to-work-on (see sig link, if you want)

I've been thinking how to get the exploration, discovery and "situatedness" (need a better word) with some kind of lasting appeal but without adding a goal. Something like trading (thinking of Frontier) would draw people around the world but I'm worried that it would lead some players to miss the point and just go for making lots of money (at the development cost of implementing a reasonable economy).

Once the environment is reasonably compelling, with features to discover, critters, weather, and maybe with some Knytt-style ambient musical fragments it's probably time to test it and maybe release an iteration. Depending how that works out maybe I'll add some "grow" mechanic, like taking an X to village Y causes them to build a Z.

@Salt: I like your restraint

I nominate Alex's poem for post of the year.

My 2p - people should of course know the operator precedence but they should write readable code, split complex "and" conditions across if statements and make temporary variables to store intermediate results where appropriate. If nothing else it helps massively when you're stepping through with the debugger.

Just thinking about what I actually do in day-to-day practice, I always put brackets around high-precedence operators, e.g. a + (b * c) even though its not strictly necessary. If I am going to put a load of &&s and ||s into one "if" I'll split it over lines, but those things don't tend to last long before they get refactored away.

Oh!  What did they have there before?  Just "Not really"?

Hmm, either that or I misinterpreted PsySal's post. Ooops. I guess I was just secretly hoping the WSJ subeditor was ready the thread... don't mind me

"Heh" and the asterisks would have been dead giveaways that the interview happened via the internets and I think newspapers prefer to give the impressions they have personal contact with everyone they interview.  Anyway, if you ever get interviewed in person or over the phone by a newspaper they probably would change what you say a lot more than what they did to Terry's.

I only just read it now and it looks like they've changed it back to the full answer! Bless 'em! (without the asterisks and the heh)

Maybe this already got asked somewhere, but do you have any plans to realise a PC/web version? I don't own an i-anything and I loved the original version 

I feel proud to say "I was there" 
I really suck at it though... maybe as much as I suck at the original, lovely though it is.

Congrats on the game, and on the scary flamepit of comments on the indiegames post! 

Hey, This looks like a really interesting project - you should only make one thread though... and either this forum or Devlogs would be the right one.

About the gameplay ideas, I really like the soldiers being recruited in a naturalistic way, and their lives being such an important point (of the influences you mention, XCOM is the one I played most!)

Could you post the links to these youtube videos?

I only took about 6 photos, but here are the OK ones:



My favourite:

  Arrgh Sorry! I guess I got the impression it was OK not to... and... excuses... anyway, thanks!

If people could say which days they'll be around that wound be helpful for me, because CB2 would appreciate some idea of number of people on which days.

I haven't yet bought an event ticket yet, but i'll be around from Friday to Sunday midday. Is it ok to pay on the door? Sorry I might not have read this in the thread elsewhere but will check back here later, gotta dash....

Ok, I uploaded what I managed to get done - see GameJolt link in first post - but I'm not calling it finished.

What is there:
- game setup screen where you can add human and AI players
- very rubbish broken AI logic (if it gets stuck, fortunately you can click End Turn to unstick it)
- some stats set up for creatures, however they are mostly at default values which are far too defense-heavy
- very cut-down summoning mechanic - you have a deck of 5 summons that replenish. It's not really balanced

What there isn't:
- a map select screen - the default arena has a few fragments of wall just to show they exist.
- ranged attacks
- much fun (although setting up a match with 8 AI players is mildly amusing)

Hopefully I'm not so sick of looking at this that I'll manage to refactor the hell out of it and make a proper releasable game later, we'll see.

Any feedback on the general feel and direction would be great. I might switch it back to something more squad-and-mission based in future (maybe keep the arena mode for skirmishing)

Looking forward to playing the finished entries, looks like some real gems in there!!

Now: