Computer game idea - Law of One game :)

[carrie]

The Law of One can be made as computer game -

Make a game which simulates a person doing this day to day tasks.
Each task have desired effect or undesired effect.
Each task can raise or lower polarity

a) Person is 12 years old person.
b) Make simulation run over 3 (simulated) years.
c) Person performs actions.,
d) Game tracks karma, law of confusion,

e) At end of 3 years, print out results...
most probably, result will be (less than 51%) and user will have to
repeat game.

make game fun and exciting, like Super Mario Bros x64 but with Law of One in mind.

how about it?

[ayadew]

The world is beyond logic, sadly. And why focus on this 51%-thing, we are here to be ourselves.

[Peregrinus]

We are in an illusion already, so why spend time being in an illusion of an illusion?

I agree with ayadew. We need more time in the real illusion, and less time watching TV, on the pc (I am guilty of that), etc. etc.

[Ali Quadir]

I love video games. I'm even in the process of building one. And I've played with the idea of including Law of One material in it, the problem is the density of the material, I don't see a way to put it in our design plans playfully while remaining true to the nature of it.

As for your idea Carrie, it's certainly a great way to get the idea out to the game playing public. But it needs an "addictive" quality the stuff that makes you come back for more, being a person in an ordinary world won't cut it. But maybe if you spice things up a little and build a video adventure where a player gradually discovers more of the truth which he can then use to increase his abilities in game. Similar to the celestine prophecy. Then I think you got a very good game concept.

However, games are notoriously slow to build. It takes about 5 years to put a commercial grade product on the market.

Incidentally, anyone heard about the 1988 video game where you are a sleezy tabloid reporter sent to investigate a report of a two headed squirrel which leads to the discovery of a crystal of great power which leads to discovering someone in a positive secret society who has two members on mars exploring the head on mars Which is actually a great temple. And the pyramid city around it. Eventually you uncover a plot by negative aliens (led by elvis) who took over the phone company to dumb down the population by transmitting stupidity waves over the telephone lines. And you end this nefarious plot by activating the crystal you found along with 2 other crystals in the great pyramid. Which suddenly makes everyone smart again.

Sounds nuts? It was brilliant, it was my first exposure to these new age conspiracy stories and it hit completely home with the information I was fed before that. Of course it's only a rough estimation with the focus on humor. But it was awesome at the time. Better than starwars!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_McKrack...indbenders

Here's the intro be sure to check out the awesome music.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=za...9848849903

Here's a speed run of the full game if you want to know the whole story. Not sure it's worth it actually, but maybe you feel bored
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=za...9307965109

[Peregrinus]

This is one of the reasons I love this forum. Diversity allowed!

[carrie]

We have C++ development tools here. We can build game in days.

I need artist, story-line and musician. Any ideas?

[Questioner]

But it needs an "addictive" quality the stuff that makes you come back for more

How to make moderation more addictive?

Incidentally, anyone heard about the 1988 video game...

No, but I think that story line could be used for a great movie.

---

We have C++ development tools here. We can build game in days.

I need artist, story-line and musician. Any ideas?

I appreciate the ambition. As someone with a lot of business experience in software development, I think that trying to rush from your concept to a viable business model "in days" may be naive, given how sophisticated today's video game market is.

For example, this 2007 BBC article
Cost headache for game developers
says that Pac-Man cost $100,000 to develop in 1982, while by 2007, the average Playstation title cost $15 million to develop.
Here's another article on the subject:
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs
and you can do an Internet search for "game development costs" to find many more.

In this article on the business risks of developing video games,
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/41...risks_.php
several risks are identified, including business risks, scheduling, technology, and testing.

According to Newsweek,
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140003 Grand Theft Auto IV is the best selling video game of all time, with $500 million in first week sales. The game used a hundred different voice actors, and a crew of over 100 visual and sound artists, programmers, and editors. Its production cost was well over $100 million and the whole process took more than three years. This was reusing a lot of the physics library and other materials from the earlier GTA games. That's bigger than anything I've ever worked on, and I've worked on some of the largest business software projects ever in big companies you've heard of.

Retail price for all of GTA IV's spectacular photorealistic high-def animation, soundtrack, action, storyline, online options etc. is just $30.

What's your business plan to have something more compelling than this, clearly worth $30 in today's marketplace, "in days?"

Do you have experience managing development projects with several departments and million dollar budgets? If not, will you be able to get the funding, project management, marketing plan and so on that are needed for a project of this scale?

If you can't compete with the scale of something like the GTA franchise, then what will be so compelling that enough people would still be willing to pay enough to recoup the production costs? Is there market research backing up the premise? Any examples of other "morality play" games that succeeded brilliantly?

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that to do it would be a really huge project requiring very clearly defined ideas that justify a significant investment. If you've got the team or funds to go for it without needing to sell the premise to an investor, you could start any time. Otherwise, anyone with the money would most likely want to have answers to the kinds of questions I'm raising.

[Ali Quadir]

We have C++ development tools here. We can build game in days.

No you can't unless you're happy with the simplest results possible.

Terribly sorry, but writing code is notoriously hard and slow.. And it's a very common misunderstanding that a game can be built in a short time.. Writing a game in a day was possible in the 80's but no more these days.

For the record, I'm working on a 3d space adventure game. And around Christmas we're going into the 4th year. And to be honest, we've got almost nothing other than the basic plumbing required. I doubt I'll finish it in the few years left to us. But I'm doing it because I love doing it, no other reasons.

For every 100 amateur games started less than one is actually finished. More than half never even have their first line of code added. It's sobering statistics, but you have to realize it if you want to seriously commit to this.

I need artist, story-line and musician. Any ideas?

I'd love to brainstorm with you. I write code. I don't have time to offer you. But ideas and advice, sure.

PS.... A Zak McKraken movie...

[carrie]

> almost nothing other than the basic plumbing required. I doubt I'll finish it in

What game engine are you using/ or what tools are you using?

[Ali Quadir]

I'm constructing it in Java and the eclipse platform, partly to prove that Java slowness is in the past. Mostly because it's ideally suited to tackle large projects. An added benefit is that it'll run on practically every OS. The reason the plumbing took such a long time is that we have MMO aspirations. And since I don't have the illusion that we're going to be able to afford a server park, all interactions are pushed back into interpolation units. So that basically I can send complex behaviors to all clients in one go and have the clients interpolate them without the server thinking about it. In the average game you need a steady flow of instructions to keep a moving object moving. In this one you need to send one command, with some parameters to all witnesses of the movement. And they'll all visualize it in a similar way aiming towards having the object arrive at the same time on all clients. To keep the server load low. Since this is a spacegame we're able to cheat a little in this area.

Most of the time went into figuring out how to keep many clients updated of changes. And how to keep the system modular. I want to be able to hook in systems like trade or stories.

At any rate, I started from scratch 4 times now. Like I said, I'm not sure I'll ever finish it. But we've got client, server, 3d visualisation with simple shaders. The required model loaders. A working heads up gui. And a nifty json inspired object language I use to define game data in.

Here's a two months old screenshot. It's fairly accurate, I have been fiddling with other projects most of the time since.

  Screenshot 090927.jpg (Size: 100.32 KB / Downloads: 12)


Are you a coder Carrie?

[xlsander]

zack mckraken rules big time and i sso much my childhood - though i never have been able to finish it - played it many many times as a kid and always got stuck somewhere on mars lol

[Ali Quadir]

Another fan

I had a friend who also played the game and he had a friend who had the walkthroug, he was always a bit ahead of me so whenever I got stuck I would just ask him in school...

[xlsander]

well wouldnt be the first lucas product with "real info" in it

[carrie]

Ali,
We used a service builder here to define the protocol and transmissions. did you try RakNet or light-weight Ajax RIA/PRC protocol?

For screens, did you try DirectX or OpenGL GUI builders? they make GUI for you and emit code you can use.

You can script the GUI and dialogs now, either with Lua or ECMA JavaScript.
Did you try that?

[Ali Quadir]

well wouldnt be the first lucas product with "real info" in it

Absolutely true Though in this case I figured out they've used an external new age guru that the lead designer happened to know in the brain storming and changed it very very much to make it funny, they felt the original material was too serious. I looked into it later on half hoping that it was inspired by a work of fiction that would entertain me further

It's basically a wink to the new age world of the time that was pretty unknown and inaccessible. No one had internet at the time offcourse.

Hey Carrie,

I do not use raknet, I use only open java software as a base. Raknet is a commercial product it's also C++ based. Ajax won't serve my purpose because it's javascript, while I work in Java. Javascript is limited outside the web browser. And this isn't a web game. I did use it at work. For screens I use the OpenGL library, direct X won't do because I work with Java, direct X would lock me in the MS world. I want the server to run on Linux, and the clients to run practically everywhere. It's a two man team and we're both hooked on linux so that had to be supported to make it interesting to us but we also could not afford beying locked into just linux because it's a small target audience... Mono wasn't strong enough at the time so that left us with only Java... I'd still go with Java if I had to restart from scratch today because I know it by heart and it's fast enough... Due to automatic hotspot optimizations it is at some points paradoxically even faster than C or C++ code would be.

I did use LUA in a previous iteration of the game. But LUA is a script language. If I want to build scripts in Java, I'd write them in Java and offer the user a way of including those class files at runtime. I tried the idea.

What I really needed was an object language much like XML, only XML has the problem of being way too verbose and ugly and terribly slow. I'm not a fan of XML so I went for JSON, and when that did not fill all my needs I simply expanded the definition. I'm not sure if right now it's recognizable as JSON it's certainly not compatible. But it's a very direct method of building in memory graphs of objects. And a rich data structure is essential. I can now send whole code blocks describing behavior or gui to clients. Also the code I use to serialize these blocks of code to network can be used to serialize to disk and in effect "Compile" the code.

Code:

dialog{
   visible=true
   bounds=bounds{x=0;y=512;width=256;height=256}
   content=label{text="Selected = " + selected.name}
}

I could go on for hours about the script language. I've fallen in love with it. It's primary strength is that it allows me to work on the plumbing in Java and write the actual game in the script, "Selected = " + selected.name in the example above will in effect be converted to a expression so even after the dialog runs, if I select another target it will handle all the updates for me. Which is a big time saver considering the amount of dialogs and information is going to go into the final game.

I'm fairly low tech. I use LWJGL (I used to use JOGL), Guice2, OpenAL and I have MySQL support though I'm really leaning towards using the file system as a database. I work with databases in my day to day work and I think they're outdated. I want to go with a disk cacheable Keystore because it has the best scalability imho, but right now all the information is stored in that script language. And it loads in milliseconds so I haven't been motivated to actually build a keystore or find me one.

It's basically aside from a game a testing ground for new techniques I wanted to learn. So the resulting style of working is unfortunately against finishing it very quickly. Fortunately we're having loads of fun. Which is important too

Will you tell me about your project Carrie?

[carrie]

We used DirectX and OpenGL with small abstraction layer here.
That depends on genre 2D / 3D, plot or story line.

- For 2D gaming, either you can go direct to DirectX or OpenGL.

- For 3D game with TCP/IP layer, you probably need a service builder otherwise the thing is too complex.

I could recommend Shiva or Unity development engine for 3D development with their back-end server engine.

We use C++ here with MFC, WxWidgets with ECMA scripting going with either OpenGL or DirectX. For sound, we use DirectX sounds.

[carrie]

Coming back to topic:

What plot / story line should it have?

[Ali Quadir]

Lol, am Pmming you

As for the plot or story. I think the Zak mcKracken emphasis on entertainment is a good way to keep the game accessible. The best way to do that is from the top of my head to caricature the various factions and groups. This allows you to express their qualities in a very clear way while at the same time making them into amusing heroes and anti heroes making the story interesting without becoming insulting but rather recognizable to the insiders.

[Questioner]

This allows you to express their qualities in a very clear way while at the same time making them into amusing heroes and anti heroes making the story interesting without becoming insulting but rather recognizable to the insiders.

Aha, it's an Internet forum in 3D.

[carrie]

where should it start?

should main character be male/female?

what kind of scene 1 should it be?

[Peregrinus]

Thoughts... I wasn't so into this, but I can see this getting interesting. I was an artist at one time, but am not sure I have the capabilities to do things in the computer world. One could look around sites such as deviantart for artists and ask them if they would be interested.

Begin with creation scene (intro), showing light in original form, the prism, frequencies, progressin of planets in our solar system, showing venus, then mars becoming uninhabiitable, then the moving of the souls to earth, and

In between incarnations could be shown via a spirit complex, then show the incorporation with the mind/body.

Fade in to game play with a random male/female incarnation 75,000 years ago. Have one major event per life which requires decisions as pertaining to STO or STS, then continuing the path up to an extent to increase polarity, in between incarnation choices, then on to the next incarnation once those choices have been made. Make the pre-incarnation choices available so that polarity can be gained slowly or rapidly, but also that one can fail by making the choice of wanting too much at one time.

Ensure all corresponds to the LOO, but also that religious as well as sts entities could also see how their truths correspond to it.
Have STS and STO landings, UFOs, atlantis, etc as all part of the progression

Basically, one must "think" as a Logos, if that is even remotely possible...

[Ali Quadir]

This allows you to express their qualities in a very clear way while at the same time making them into amusing heroes and anti heroes making the story interesting without becoming insulting but rather recognizable to the insiders.

Aha, it's an Internet forum in 3D.

lol lol The only thing missing from an Internet forum I'd say

I like the idea of the prism, some kind of simulation of the different rays that you have to balance out could be part of the mechanics... But the amount of human interactions possible is virtually endless. How do you get those in a computer? Or how do you select which ones to put in?

[Peregrinus]

I like the idea of the prism, some kind of simulation of the different rays that you have to balance out could be part of the mechanics... But the amount of human interactions possible is virtually endless. How do you get those in a computer? Or how do you select which ones to put in?

Not so difficult 75,000 years ago.
Choice a) Mmm eat berries good!
Choice b) Mmm eat berries good. Come! Mmmm!

Choices throughout the ages would become more complex, and would take time to collaborate/add.

[carrie]

Hi Ali,

---

thumbnail 1 - is part of introduction screen

representation, all of us are streaks of light trying to find their way.

---

thumbnail 2 - icon for this game.

[Questioner]

I like the idea of the prism, some kind of simulation of the different rays that you have to balance out could be part of the mechanics...

There's that chakras bar graph test, this could be an excellent instant summary of how the player is doing. Of course, to even get to see that at all there would be a lot of fog you have to clear away first!

[carrie]

There's that chakras bar graph test, this could be an excellent instant

Does anyone know the formula how results are calculated? if so, can you contact me via pm.

thanks

[Questioner]

The chakras test I was thinking of is http://www.eclecticenergies.com/chakras/...dotest.php. The form is created by client-side javascript. The final scoring is done by a server-side script. The client side script is visible with view source. It writes out values from -2 through +2 for the radio buttons representing "not at all" to "definitely." The score for each question is part of the form submission.

To calculate the results, the server side script must have some connection of which questions correspond with which chakra. That server side script might for instance know that questions 2, 9, 16, 38 and 43 were for the first chakra. I don't know for sure which questions go where. This is just for an example with made up numbers.

The server side script needs to have some data structure to map the individual questions for each chakra. This could just be an array. With that definition somewhere in the server side script, it could add up the total score and then calculate a percentage score for each chakra. Those normalized scores would then go to the chart generation script to make the bar graph. All of this is routine for any multiple choice test with the subtotal items interleaved or shuffled.

You could make your own list of keywords or concepts related to each chakra. Just go through any discussion of the rays or chakras and note down what is discussed about each one. For example, http://www.rickrichards.com/chakras/Chakras2.html, describes an open root chakra as a life in harmony with security on the earth as a place of shelter, while an unbalanced root chakra could make someone anxious, indulgent or angry regarding physical safety.

With a few days to go through the Ra books and also search Google for articles about chakras, you should be able to get a hundred keywords or concepts about the chakras. If you put each idea on its own index card, then you could use a big corkboard to arrange the cards into scenes for your game.

You could use different color cards to represent the different chakras, and try to make each scene in your game include at least one element from each chakra. This is a technique that screenwriters sometimes use to make sure that their themes and plot elements are represented throughout their story. They have cards representing characters, situations, conflicts, etc. This way the writers can see at a glance that the scenes include everything they wanted to have in the story. If the writers forgot to include a character in some part of the movie, the absence of that color card will show that they need to put that character into those scenes. Or they will need have some other character explain what happened to the person, so the audience knows that person wasn't overlooked in the storytelling.

The question is, how would you visualize each of these concepts with a scene or choice in your game, in a way that is fun, interesting, emotionally compelling, entertaining, thought provoking? To put it in storytelling terms, how would your game offer a voyage of discovery?

I think the real key to success for the project is how the scenarios and interactivity are designed. How can that design offer something fresh and unique for players? If the storyline and game play are excellent, then the graphics and sound might not have to be very elaborate. There's simply no way for a small shop to compete with the kind of lush visual production of something like Halo or GTA, with countless photorealistic scenes and combat physics. But there is a chance to outdo them on the level of thoughtfulness that goes into the story and learning process for the player.

The business book "Blue Ocean Strategy" explains how to evaluate what features are important to make something new for overlooked buyers within an industry. The idea is that there are some factors everyone assumes are important or not important, but an ingenious new idea can overturn all of that with a fresh strategy.

Here are a couple of articles that apply "blue ocean" concepts to the success of Nintendo's Wii console: http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/200...lue-ocean/ and http://www.valueinnovation.net/2008/04/n...ategy.html. These articles point out that Nintendo plays a totally different game in business than Sony and Microsoft. While the xbox and ps3 battle for superiority of realistic graphics processing and physics calculations and movie playback capability, the Wii totally ignores all of those to offer simpler hands-on fun at a lower price.

What could be a "blue ocean strategy" in the game world? Perhaps an iPhone app that people could play any time, even for a few minutes waiting in line? Log on to the server, see what changes others players have made, respond with some choices of your own, log off and the game continues with all the other players? Perhaps an open source game for PC and Mac, and the business profits come from subscribing to a server that integrates the multi-player functionality? Perhaps a Java game on a cell phone that would give you different scenes depending where you are in the world? Maybe the music soundtrack uses an ever-changing range of songs licensed for the game from up and coming "new age" musicians, with new music downloaded automatically every month? What fresh approach could transcend the current limitations of video games, the way that the fun of the Wii transcends its limited graphics hardware?

None of the ideas I just mentioned might be a winning business model, but they do show some examples of alternatives to fancy first-person graphics - which a small shop can't match anyway.

In my own opinion, until there is some clarity about the storyline and gameplay - and the business requirements - it would be premature to try to pick a coding model for implementation.

[carrie]

hi,

we do extensive work with graphics (see attachments* 1, 2). the idea is focus towards content and story telling.

we use world-space editor along with sound mixer, font render, effects render, texture mapper (see attachment 3)

texture (or layout render) assembles all graphics into world-space (see attachment 4)

world-space is desgined in CAD (computer-aided design) environment (see attachment 5)

(*attachment graphics were scaled down, original loss-less is 2megs PNG file)

render includes accurate weather, rain, flame, burning effect.


i guess this game would be complete opposite of Doom or those shoot'em-ups

---

weather can be easily simulated (see attachment 6)

most codes is in C++,
most of interactions can probably be scripted.

[Questioner]

That's some impressive looking scenery, Carrie.

Do these graphics only work on PC, or can they also run on Macs or consoles? Is a high-end graphics card a prerequisite?

the idea is focus towards content and story telling.

I agree, that also seems to me to be most important for your project.

[carrie]

Do these graphics only work on PC, or can they also run on Macs or consoles? Is a high-end graphics card a prerequisite?

PC, Mac. Not on consoles.

Medium-to-average card is required.