M64’s Games Blog

I have created a news section on the main page of PEG wiki. I will try to separate my personal blog and PEG news, but for now the blog has more readers and so I do some advertising here. If you are actually more interested in PEG project then my personal ramblings, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the main Wiki page or the Recent Changes page.

Also – I do not know if you have noticed, but Wikipedia has started a donation drive. Remembering how much inspiration Wikipedia’s example gave me and how much time daily I spend on Wikipedia, donating was an obvious thing to do. If you have some loose money and feel the same, please consider donating too. For those impulsive types there is a Wikipedia donation banner on the blog’s sidebar.

Hello my dear readers. I have put up a wiki for the Post-apocalyptic economic game – temporary code name is PEG. The link is here. Editing is open for registered users. I hope you don’t mind me self-hosting it.

Hello my dear readers! I have been neglecting you for a few months and for that I would like to apologize. The reasons were numerous – subsequent attempt to write my thesis, important milestones at the studio and choice and purchase of my first car. But now I am coming back. It will probably take me a few days to get up and running again, but now that I am motorized I do have some more free time in the evenings and I hope that I will be able to put it to some good use beginning next week. In the mean time I will try to restore some contacts in the FOSS gamedev community, catch up on the progress of PARPG and perhaps even setup a site for the post-apocalyptic economic game thing. I hope I will be able to write something more interesting in a few days.

Hello.  Today I have something special for my readers. An actual game idea in the form of a hight concept document for a game. The general idea is to create a city building/economic game set in a post-apocalyptic world of PARPG. I proposed the idea a few weeks ago on the #freegamer and most interested people, like TheAncientGoat and mvBarracuda, seemed to like it. I also like it because it allows us to test the commundo ideas with two games in it right from the start.

For the last 3 weeks or so I was polishing out a high concept document. This is a document that is supposed to present a vision of the game, perhaps describe a few unique ideas about it and not to detail the game design in every possible detail. Many mechanics that are quite certain to be included in the game (like some sort of a combat system) were not described. My main sources of inspiration during writing of the document were: Fallout RPGs (mainly the third part), Fallout Tactics, PARPG story design documents, Settlers II, Anno 1701, Dwarf Fortress and Majesty – The Fantasy Kingdom Sim.
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As an aspiring FOSS game creator I stand before some dilemmas and questions that I think may be common to other creators. One is that I have many game ideas – much more than I think I am able to turn into full game projects. Therefore I have to make some tough choices, which is hard without any other input than my gut feeling. Second, I feel there is a sort of unspoken premise of developing FOSS games – that you will be able to attract some contributors and make your games bigger then what you could ever do by yourself. But it is wiser to create small games, as big project require large initial investment before you will have a working product to show off and without that it is difficult to find contributors. Third, is the question of how to perform preproductions – without them it is rather hard to get the gameplay right, but they lengthen the project and move away the moment when you have something playable to show. I write about those questions today because I think I have found a possible answer and I would like to discuss it.

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Small technical update about the progress of things. While TheAncientGoat and dmj726 are busy writing universe concepts proposals I have been spending some time evaluating different possible technical platforms for hosting the commundo world lore and asset repository. Options currently investigated are: Drupal, Joomla, ocPortal and MediaWiki (+ some supporting technologies). So far Drupal feels like the easiest one to use, ocPortal is nice because it has many useful features (like wiki, chat etc.) included in the base install (but it is a bit complicated), Joomla falls somewhere in between and MediaWiki has not been evaluated yet. If anyone has experience with those systems and would like to share his knowledge, then I could certainly use some advice.

Aside from that, I have added randomized favicons to blog and fought off a small wave of comment spam. Also I have started a thread I called Design Drills on FGD forums – the idea is to exercise our game design skills by collectively discussing some game idea without any plans or obligations to ever implement it. Unfortunately the thread is not getting too much interest, so if there is someone who reads my blog, but does not read FGD or have not noticed the thread, I would appreciate if you give me a hand with getting the discussion rolling.

Hello there. Long time without posting. I have had some bad case of what can be called a designers block and this has lead to a blogger’s block. To put the long story short I have decided that the next logical step in the commundo development would be to design some games that could be used as starters and I got stuck while doing so. Anyway, I think I owe my readers an apology for the lack of updates as well as some insight into what is going on in my head and notebook. I also hope that resulting discussion could help me with some decisions.

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Hey there fellow free gamedevs. Sorry for the delay, but previous week at my studio culminated in a Friday all night crunch followed in my case by some really nasty flu and this did not help me write an article. The atmosphere around commundos has cooled down and it might be for the better as the flu has drained all my weekly enthusiasm reserves and some design decisions are difficult to make without it.

Today I want to talk about another idea for improving open source game development process. It is not exactly tied to commundo, but I think the two ideas can reinforce each other so I would like to employ it to start the first commundo. Sharing a world is a way of cooperation between several game projects. Therefore it cannot function properly without an actual game(s) participating in it and pushing its adoption. Now a shared world  is most useful for commercial style non-casual games that actually have the ability to present worlds to its players.

Commercial style games are big and complex almost by definition and so they will take a lot of time to implement. We don’t have that much time. We also refuse to make simple games instead (casual… meh). The only other option is to make the games small. Or even smaller. Therefore I would like to propose ultraepisodic games. Ultraepisodic games would work a lot like normal commercial episodic games, for example “Sam & Max”, only more episodic – each episode should be prepared and released within a month or even less, adding perhaps some additional preparation time before new seasons. Because teams working on FOSS games are much smaller than their commercial counterparts the episodes would also be much smaller, on the scale of a single level – hence the term ultraepisodic. I also think it would be benefiting to be able to make the new episodes even more frequently than the commercial games do – with a dedicated team, established world lore and asset repository two week time frame may be possible. To put the long story short, if the commercial episodic games are like comic books, then ultraepisodic games should be like webcomics.

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Just a quick update on what is going on. I am having hard time at work, so I probably will not post any longer update until weekend. The shared world idea has been named “commundo” from latin “commūnis mundus”, or shared world. There is an ongoing discussion about possible settings for the first commundos at FGD forums if you have not already joined it, you might consider doing so. Now some may worry that such discussions with dozens of ideas going into different directions can disperse the effort that should be focused on the creation of the first commundo, but I would never call a discussion harmful. We need to consider all the options before making a decision. Another thing – if you have not noticed some time ago I have added a Creative Commons license widget to the blog – all published materials are covered by CC-BY-SA.

And now an important announcement – we are getting a spam flood in the comments. Therefore I am introducing some more strict filtering rules and this may go as far as manually moderating some of them, so don’t be surprised if yours is not published immediately.

A short update on my progress with drawing. I’ve made a drawing of a part of my flat.

Perspective drawing of some doors in my flat

That’s my first “big” picture drawn by sight (and not from a reproduction). I have messed up some proportions so I had to change the chair and cupboard slightly and the plant greatly to make the picture come together. I’ve also got quite upset and have not finished it. Now I think it’s not that bad – the central part looks pretty good and even the improvised parts are not that bad. I also think it would be dishonest not to show you some of my failures. (continue reading…)