next »

[Morre]

PaleFox came up with the idea of starting something like the Commonplace Book, but online and collaborative!

Naturally, we set one up straight away. It can be found at the address below:

http://tigbook.jottit.com

Go ahead and add your ideas, folks!

[Alec S.]

This seems like a pretty cool idea.  I contributed a phrase. 

[CK]

myspidersenseistingling

[Frog]

Wait how do I add to this?

[Morre]

Just click the "edit" button below the ideas.

This brings me to another question:

Is this format good enough?

Me, PaleFox and a few others in #tigirc discussed different ways of doing this. A standard wiki or a WordPress blog are two other ways. However, a wiki feels somewhat overkill, and wordpress requires registration.

We then discussed the possibility of making a custom site to handle this. Would there be interest in such a site? If there is, what features would you like to see? Here's some thoughts:
- Optional registration (If you register, you can edit your own posts. Nobody except administrators can edit other people's posts).
- Each idea submitted is time stamped and added to the top.
- Ideas can be browser by popularity, and there's a voting mechanism (just thumbs up/down or youtube?) to help people have their say.
- Simple submission form.

I'm guessing it all comes down to what we want this thing to be. Right now, it's like a multi-user twitter. A wall, if you like. With the other approach, it'd be more of a structured idea repository.

[Frog]

I think TIGWiki would be awesome. Not so much for ideas but as a wiki about indie games, developers, etc.

[michael]

cool idea!

[Corpus]

Cool idea! Or it would be cool, if you'd all stop using it as a medium for conversation

[Bree]

Whoever mentioned the choose your own adventure game- that could actually work, so long as you had some way of storing all of the (possibly infinite) choices you were given.

[mirosurabu]

I find "show us your ideas" websites quite helpful. For example, http://www.mygameideas.com helped me get over some bad ideas and find several interesting ones.

Cheers for this.

(there is no MMO idea yet?)

[Morre]

@Miroslav: Well damn, that mygameidea.com is pretty much exactly what we were going to design. Only a few subtle differences: ours wasn't going to require registration, and I would've designed it differently. Cool stuff though, thanks for linking it.

Also: There *is* a tigs mmo game joke in the idea book, if you look carefully enough...

[Fuzz]

It seems I may have missed the point of this. Is this for game ideas only, or is my nonsensical gibberish okay?

Integral fishes flying through the void stumble upon an unnatural pollywog that is counterassembling the lifeforce of the Hebrew language. Farther on their shells lie in waiting, listening to the sound of birds shitting. The essential attributes of the end are appearing in the new world of thought pioneered by the thought police of Manhattan. Why are the dead men reducing nature's eternal cycle to a warp of dust? The cellular television is likely to know the uncanny question to the answer of blasphemy. When the lights go away and the fires play you and I will be in a ray of sunlight. In sadness we shine; basking in the glow of embarrassment we rain. The penultimate solution to Plato's inequality regarding an allegory of some sort will not be available in your local library until the beginning of rattlesnakes. I walk in the lava of gold, crying on the walls of destiny, disappearing into the dead space created by my ignorance. When all is lost and the parrots are the last survivors of our predestined Italian apocalypse, I will not be there in any form but that of God's staircase. The futility of my existence overwhelms me, makes me die inside, makes my guts fall on the floor and arrange themselves into the shape of a cyclical circle. Sick inside, the cycles turn and turn and never stop turning and Rome falls and is erected and Alexander dies and is born and all is reborn when all is dead. Do we have to put up with all this, or is it all fragmental, figments of the collective imagination, dreams of horrible fluidity? I come and await the last time, but I am not ready to die in my courageous sleep that brings life and death and imagination and the will to live and apathy and mysterious forces that control the everyday lives of all mortal souls. When does the runoff stop and the runon begin and the rivers flow and the sentences end and the prisoners break from their shackles and regain the innocent sin of life's masterpiece?

[medieval]

I think it could count as ideas for games/films/novels/whatev

[diaskeaus]

Great idea, but it should be categorized.  Multiple pages, multiple categories, searchable, linkable (eg. ideas that have been done or finished could be linked).  Categories could be FPS, adventure, fighter, etc.  Furthermore, allow to link to other wiki pages which then have design specs, ideas, possible graphics, etc.  Turn it into an idea notebook that can be referred back to; people can create their own userpages and post links to all of their ideas.  Allow for the rating of ideas.  Allow for comments of ideas.

In other words, something of more value than that game ideas website referenced.  Something that could be used for a developer's notebook.  Of course the key is collaboration and input from the community.  With the prospect that eventually it will get done, someday.

I would gladly contribute to something like that, that actually has staying power.  The way it is now is interesting but overwhelming.

[Fuzz]

I think a big pile of unorganized ideas is far more interesting.

[shig]

Can't we have each idea as it's own page or block?

So we can vote on them or sort them by lenght, rank, author or randomly.

[nihilocrat]

(there is no MMO idea yet?)

MMOs tend to be big and difficult to make well, and usually boring. At their heart, they're not too difficult; if you can make a multiplayer game, and write a few routines to save data to a database fairly often, you can write what's basically an MMO.

However, this persistence creates a lot of design problems that don't exist in a normal multiplayer game. An MMORTS has to worry about the relative power of players being too large; in a normal RTS you start with the same units, and when a battle ends, you 'go back' to having the starting units. An MMORTS has to have some sort of concession to make it practical for new players to join, otherwise they could be easily snuffed out by players who have played the game for only a little while. This all seems really obvious, but you're still having to create a game that plays significantly different from the get-go.

If you made Starcraft Online, without changing any of the mechanics at all, people would be able to field massive armies in the matter of an hour or less, or in the case of an RPG, they could achieve maximum level in a slightly longer amount of time. The most common solution for this is to just make it take much longer to get these rewards, and as a result we see "grinding" and other forms of boredom.

Small bugs or imbalances in resource or money can be exploited such that there is a permanent change to the gameworld that might be difficult to fix without just wiping everything out. A good real-world example is when gold exploits are discovered by players, exploited, and then the money passes through many hands to the point where it's really hard to track and fixing the imbalance involves destroying items or gold of people who were ignorant their gold was "counterfeit" or bought with "counterfeit" gold. In a non-persistent game, fixing the issue is as easy as forcing everyone to patch to a version where the bug/imbalance is not present.

I think a fairly unexplored space is the semi-MMO, like Diablo, where you are basically playing an MMO where the only zones are a public, non-game chat room and a massive 4-player instanced dungeon (i.e., the game).

[mirosurabu]

I asked that because...

...of this: http://www.mygameideas.com/tags

You see what's the the biggest tag? Seems like everyone wants to create MMO today.