selene tan

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I’d like to spotlight Emily Short, who’s best-known in the interactive fiction (IF) community. She was involved in the development of Inform 7, a sophisticated tool/system for creating IF, has written several works herself, and created a handy guide to IF for newbies or people who want to explore. She also has a column, Homer in Silicon, in GameSetWatch where she says some very insightful things about narrative in games.

Another thing I admire about Emily Short is that she’s clearly no stranger to the technical side of game development. There are a lot of people writing about games, but I like the kind of analysis you get from someone who programs.

When I first told my friend about Double Pong, he thought that it would be a game of Pong with two paddles perpendicular to each other, controlled with one input. When I was thinking about a small project to re-familiarize myself with ActionScript, I decided to make his version.

After finding out about the lively Nintendo DS homebrew scene, I was determined to make something of my own. But first, I wanted to make something small to familiarize myself with the relevant libraries.

As a fan of both robots and kittens, I of course thought of Robot Finds Kitten, the “zen simulation” that has been ported to a multitude of platforms. I found an existing DS version of RFK, but its controls were sluggish, spurring me to write my own.

I used devkitPro and the PAlib text and input libraries to make Robot Finds Kitten.

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I’ve been following this thread on a guy’s first time running a D&D campaign. Somewhere along the way, (around page 2) a discussion about character creation (and especially power selection) as a “valid” arena of challenge got brought up.

What’s a “valid arena of challenge”? Well, an arena of challenge is a context where success or failure is socially important to the people involved. Chess can be an arena of challenge. D&D can be an arena of challenge. Within D&D, something like kill-count could be an arena of challenge, if the players choose to make it so.

What makes something a “valid” arena? That’s where the arguments start. Most of them involve the question of “fairness”, which is always tricky.

I think that one major requirement is that players know that it is an arena of challenge. I feel like this is the “most unfair” thing to do. If someone were applying for a job where height was secretly important (i.e., was an arena of challenge), but applicants weren’t told that it was, people would think it was pretty unfair. Melinglor brought up the situation where the GM says “Go make whatever character you want,” so the players do, and come up with characters that are useless for the adventure. When the GM said “Make whatever character you want,” the GM was essentially saying “Character creation is not an arena of challenge.”

The problem, of course, is that in D&D, character creation affects a player’s effectiveness in the rest of the game; it’s implicitly an arena of challenge. For character creation not to be an arena of challenge, the GM has to handle things so that all characters have the potential to be equally effective. One way to do this is to give the players the illusion of freedom and control, but not the reality. Another is to make sure that all characters have opportunities to take on challenges they are particularly suited for, and carefully balance challenges so that nobody is too useless.

Another requirement is that players are given enough information about the arena of challenge to form a strategy not based on pure chance or whimsy. Of course, what constitutes “enough information” varies from person to person. (It’s also possible that in an arena of challenge, pure chance is the optimal strategy. I think those arenas are uninteresting. “Read my Mind” is one of those uninteresting arenas.) I think that enough information should be given that players need to make as few assumptions as possible to formulate a strategy.

In my opinion, the universe of all possible D&D play is too wide for players to form strategies for. If I were told to “make the best character possible”, I would still be making certain assumptions, such as assuming that the game would be heavily combat-based, and that the game would generally be by the book. I might even assume that I was supposed to make the best character for solo dungeon-crawling. All these assmuptions could be wrong, and that would not technically violate the stated challenge. If I made my solo dungeon crawler and it turned out that the character was being rated with respect to its usefulness in a heavily political game with almost no combat and certainly no dungeons, I would cry foul.

I guess what I mean is “Players should know what the arena of challenge is.”

Finally, Callan brings up a good point about how character creation is more of a “deal-breaking” arena of challenge than most others. Basically, if character creation is an arena of challenge, there’s usually no way to opt out of it–it’s required to get to everything else. That sucks!

So my last “fairness rule” is that players should be able to choose not to participate without overly dire consequences. Of course, “overly dire consequences” ends up subjective, too. “Do this or else you don’t get to have fun” is pretty dire. Below that, I’m not sure where I draw the line.

This is, in some ways, more fundamental than the others. Players should be willing to to enter the arena without coercion, because coercion is inherently unfair.

One of the assignments for my Visual Story class was to create a short film that told a story without dialogue. My role in the group was sound designer; I also composed the soundtrack for the film.

Download Em No Meio (130 MB .MP4)

Some notes about the design and development of Astral Schism.

I had two main goals when adjusting the game difficulty:

1. The two modes must have similar difficulty levels
2. Both modes must be winnable by people who don’t play games that often

I adjusted difficulty by changing the spawn rates of enemies, asteroids, and ore/hulls, and by changing the number of starting shields.

While I managed to strike a fairly good balance for the project deadline, I feel that it could still use some work. However, there are some more fundamental design issues that need to be addressed first:

It’s possible to get stuck in the game

The way the game works, level advancement is based on how many ship upgrades you have. When you run out of shields, you restart the level with the same number of shields and the same upgrades. This means that it is possible to get to a level that is too hard for your skill with few lives. Unless you can collect enough ore or hulls to return to base, you cannot gain enough lives to clear the level.

One possibility is to always grant a minimum number of shields to the player on starting a new level. e.g., if we have determined that the third level should be beatable with 6 shields, then the level-change code will also set the player’s shields to 6 if the player has fewer than 6 shields. Any other fixes to this problem will probably require a change to the current level mechanic.

Level advancement uses an unusual mechanic

I got comments from several people that the level mechanic “seems a bit weird.” It has the bonus that at a given level, you always know the ship has a minimum number of upgrades and should therefore be able to handle things. It’s just not what most people expect.

The “boss” for the ambassador mode doesn’t fit in

The “boss asteroid” requires a method to defeat it that never shows up elsewhere in the game. I’d like to change that, although it might “spoil the surprise”. On the other hand, there’s no such surprise for the Exterminator mode.

I want a scoring mode but don’t know how to do it

Scoring for the Exterminator mode is pretty straightforward. Just count shots fired, enemies extinguished, that kind of thing. But what’s the equivalent for the Ambassador mode?

There are some statistics I could keep score on: number of times levels are played, total time spent on a level, amount of ore picked up. For all of these, lower numbers suggest more player skill, which can result in slightly weird scores.

So, over at Brand’s blog, there’s a discussion of Myers-Briggs types and gaming. It’s neat stuff, and I’m a sucker for personality typing, so I decided to play.

In high school, I tested as a pretty clear INTP. Now, though there are times when I feel more like the descriptions of INFPs, in addition to the times when I feel INFP is way too touch-feely for me. So I guess I’m more like INtP, or INxP, or some other thing where that’s fuzzy.

Anyway, gaming. I think I approach gaming as an INTJ. So, characters over setting; broad concepts over details; strategy and logic; clear rules and procedures over open-endedness. What helped me figure out my gaming-type was thinking about my fantasy heartbreaker, Song of Ethera; it’s pretty much an expression of “what I find cool in RPGs”. It’s pretty much character-based with a really loose setting, and based on encouraging lateral thinking for effective use of resources. I’m also trying to incorporate a strong structure that supports both the players and the GM. I’m pretty strongly J when it comes to gaming. I flounder when left to my own devices and end up not doing anything interesting. It’s probably why I tend to be uncomfortable with freeform.

I’ve played various characters in many games; a lot of them seem to default to “hyper-me”, which has merits, but hasn’t led to the most satisfying play experiences. I keep trying to play extraverts and generally freeze up when I’m trying to do “real roleplaying” with them. Then my introverts end up fading into the background instead. Gar. But anyway, the character I’ve had the most fun with is, I think, an ENFJ. Whoo.

So what does this say about me? Well, the IIE slice is probably me going “I wish I were better with people”. Brand described it as escapist, which sounds about right to me. My longest-running character is a D&D bard with 25 Charisma and Epic Leadership, meaning she has over a hundred level 1 followers. So, yeah.

The PJJ slice is kind of interesting. Brand mentioned this, I think, but it’s kind of like… My life is sooo not together, let’s try to be together in the game. So structure is really important for me. And I tend to have more fun with characters who go out and make big decisions.

There’s tTF, which is, um, thingie. I guess I like playing characters who can be touchy-feely, but I still construct their behavior logically. It’s not like I’m a nerd or anything. (Yeah, right!) I also don’t really immerse in characters; my best play has come when I distance myself from my characters, rather than trying to “be my character”, which just makes me freeze up.

NNN… “Details? What details?”

What I like in games: tactical-ish thingies. Combining different resources or abilities to come up with a new, cool thing. (e.g. feat/spell “combos” in D&D) Feeling like I make a difference. Kewl Powerz.

I am bad at writing conclusions.

While I was home for the summer, I got to play with my old group again. The GM has been at it for years and years; I think he cut his teeth on Red Box D&D. He’s been our primary GM for several years, although since we’re in college we only get to play together during breaks. We’ve mostly played AD&D 2nd ed or D&D 3.x together. Our usual campaign is epic-level D&D. We started what was going to be a mini-campaign that’s a prequel to the usual one. The world is based on Shadowrun, which is why both D&D 3.5 and D20 Modern rules are being used. D20 Modern is more heavily represented, but several characters (including all PCs) were created using D&D rules.

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