Fallout Economics?
by m64 on Jul.12, 2009, under Game design
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.
I want to try out a new way of cooperating in the process of creating a document. For that I have published it through the co-ment service. It is a system for commenting a document very similar to stet – a tool used during the drafting of GPLv3 which I have happened to like a lot. To add a comment click on the “>>” button to show the sidebar, click on add tab and mark a part of the text that you would like to comment on. Registration should not be required. You can also read and comment the article directly on co-ment site.
July 14th, 2009 on 8:01 pm
Hello, I’ve put my best comments on the text, I hope you’ll find at least some of it useful, I hope many more will join the effort.
July 14th, 2009 on 10:37 pm
Yours were the two stylistic/grammar suggestions? I have already incorporated them into the text.
July 15th, 2009 on 12:17 pm
Yes, I made 2 grammar comments, I’ve seen you have corrected them, bu where are my other comments? I had made 5-6 comments on the text which were referring to actual gameplay and story.
I remember that I was suggesting a more complex organizational structure: alliances, tribes, casual groups, individuals.
I see that you have included some of my comments, glad you find it useful.
July 15th, 2009 on 12:57 pm
Why did you choose to use that comment system instead of say Mediawiki, Clipmarks, ShiftSpace?
In my opinion it’s not suitable for 4 reasons:
* attribution/blame is hard to follow
* it doesn’t have a comment archive or a filtering mechanism for old comments
* it doesn’t have versioning or diff
* users can’t correct errors in text by themselves even if the changes are small.
I, for one, would have chosen Wikipedia as a comment engine.
July 16th, 2009 on 1:46 pm
I chose it mainly as an experiment. I remember I really enjoyed “stet” during the GPLv3 drafting process, also there is a similar feature of annotations in MS Office and I have found it very useful for collaborative document writing. I wanted to use stet, but it is a perl script and I do not have a server to host it. Co-ment seemed as the closest similar web tool that I could quickly setup.
It does have a comment filtering mechanism (View->Filter), it does have versioning (View->Versions), if a user is added as a co-author, he can change the text by himself and has access to versions diffs (although these should probably be public).
If I were not experimenting, I would also choose some Wiki for the comments. The problem with wiki is that it does not support adding comment to a specific part of text, so commenting on longer texts may be cumbersome. Shiftspace requires installing a plugin, so I think this a bit too much to require from occasional commenters. Clipmarks I don’t know, but from a quick glance I am not sure it has the required functionality.
Anyway, I am not by any means a strong supporter of co-ment, this is just an experiment, so if it does not work as expected I will not be forcing all future project documents to be published there.
July 17th, 2009 on 5:41 pm
OK, I think the co-ment ate your other comments. It’s a real shame as I would certainly like to read them. I guess co-ment might have still a few technical issues to sort out before they become a truly usable platform.