Surviving Minecraft

Bizarrely, I want to make a Minecraft mod.

The problem I always had with playing Minecraft is that the goal of the game subtly shifts as you progress. It shifts from the immediate problems of survival (that is, gathering food, creating shelter, and fighting off the local predators) into a sort of sandboxy open world question of what you're going to do with your time. It changes from a game to a set of computerized legos, with which you can do what you please, since there's no real penalty for making mistakes any more. Even if you rampage your way through the darkness and get eaten by a pack of bizarrely carnivorous spiders, your house is still safe and sound where you left it. Your chests full of axes, spades, clothes, bread, mutton, and torches remains pristine and untouched. You simply begin again, with a little more foresight and a little less recklessness, if all goes well.

And it's just not the same.

The only solution implemented by the developer is permadeath, where upon your character's death the world is deleted. Which is ok, I guess, except that the game still gets too easy once you get your foothold on the world. Your walls are up, your homes are safe, and there's nothing left to do with yourself but continue to build elaborate palaces and hope that you don't make the single stupid mistake that results in your death.

No, what I'm looking for is a world that gets continually harder, one that strikes out against you no matter what you're doing. I want the zombies to be aggressive, feral, and deadly. I want them to slowly and noisily tear down your walls while the wailing attracts the other zombies. I want the skeletons to appear in groups and fire flaming arrows that turns your abode into a flaming ruin. I want spiders that can climb anything and poison you such that a single bite means your death.

And when all of that happens, I want you to spawn away from your house. I want for there to be nowhere for you to go back to when all is said and done. I want for you to have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps again, and always be on the alert for yet another attack. I want it to feel like you've accomplished something when you've survived for six nights, not like you're doing struggling and it's time to farm the grains again, or to see how the pigs are doing.

I think an experience like that would be a lot of fun in a sandboxed Minecraft world. After all, what's the point of giving you a world to explore when the world itself isn't even very interesting?

Chased by Ghosts

I wrote the prototype of a game, where you play as a little dot being  chased by a light-generating ghost. That's pretty much it, and it's kind of annoying, because it was fun trying to write a real-time light rendering thing for my game, even if the game is really simple and probably almost childs play for somebody who writes code professionally.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with the game, which is annoying because it's not really a mechanic that lends itself to strong gameplay options. What you have is your light source chasing you down. When it touches you, you die.

Naturally, this lends itself poorly to "race as fast as you can" sorts of games, and strongly towards both memorization challenges and manual dexterity challenges. The memorization is pretty poor gameplay, in general, since any game that can be completely bypassed by a piece of paper without any other gameplay elements that might add randomness or fun (like old dungeon crawling games, for example) is only just barely a game. And trying to add challenges that require quick moves in a game where information is necessarily limited isn't easy, either.

I'll probably just sit on it for a while. I wanted to share, because game prototyping is fun!

Cheesy Toast

Recipes in a roleplaying game blog? It's more likely than you think!

Despite the fact that I am willing to learn to cook anything and the fact that it's just the two of us in this house, my wife insists on eating nearly nothing but cheesy toast. It's her favorite dish of the moment, and there's nothing I can do to convince her to eat anything else for lunch half the time. For dinner, well, it's on: Sometimes it's burritos, or picnic tortillas, or some sort of vodka sauce penne, or whatever it is we're craving, but I guess you just can't beat the cheesy toast.

Here's the recipe:

CHEESY TOAST

Bread
Cheese
(Optional: Pizza sauce)

Pre-heat oven to 350F.
Put pizza sauce on bread.
Coarsely Grate cheese.
Put cheese on bread.
Put cheesy bread in oven until crisp.

And a recipe for simple pizza sauce:

EASY PIZZA PIE SAUCE

2:1 proportion of Tomato Sauce to Tomato Paste
Garlic Powder
Oregano

Mix together sauce and paste over low heat in a metal pot for 5-10 minutes. Add garlic powder and oregano to taste. DONE.

Dark Souls

Picked up Dark Souls yesterday because if there's one thing that me and my wife have in common, it's a deep and abiding love for video games. Or something.

I played the hell out of Demon's Souls, and always liked the very dark and grim fantasy. It's bleak and vibrant at the same time, and doesn't go so far into the grimness that it ends up becoming a parody of itself, like Todd McFarlane or Dimmu Borgir. It's just the right touch of seriousness presented in a totally matter-of-fact way, backed up by the explanation of "it's demons," and "it's magic."

Hopefully it's as good as the last one. After a couple of interesting missteps with the character generator, including a couple of experiements that caused my wife to recoil in disgust, I finally created a decent seeming gent, skilled in the necessary attributes of war who brought with him the Twin Humanities gift, which I chose merely because I liked the name.

Turns out I'm undead and you can't even see the massive, Gerard Depardieu-esque schnoz I gave him. DAMN IT.

Chimeras!

 No real content today- nothing about The Odds Are Against You, being a Dungeon Master, ONI PUNCHER, no theories, no complaining, no nothing.


Just a picture of a chimera, because they're one of the coolest mythological creatures that doesn't get any love. Sure, people fucking love elves and dragons and stuff, or even goblins or orcs, but never chimeras. Even the Minotaur gets love, and it was just the one guy, once, that somehow got turned into a semi-intelligent race of native american analogues! But whatever.





This picture is from the God of War digital artbook. It got a lot of things screwy about mythology, but it got the actual mythology part fairly correct. Things look like they should, feel like they should, and generally act convincing, and that's really all you can ask for in an action game.
   

Dreams of Aftermath

I had another dream about zombies last night, but it was a peaceful dream, oddly enough. It was a dream of the aftermath of zombies, of learning to survive through hiding, running, and generally being cannier than the other zombies. It was a dream of stewardship, and of patience. 

For example, I needed a thing from an electronics store. I needed to get something off of one old device I had, and onto another. You know how dreams can be- what's important at first is the goal, and then before you know it you've been looking for so long the search is all that matters and you almost forget exactly why you're doing what you're doing. 

In this case, I went with my brother to the store, and my father was opposed because it was a waste of gas. They were probably all taken up by now, and besides, it'd draw attention to our hideout in the wrecked building we'd created hiding holes and sneaky spots in. But I wouldn't listen. 

I ran out to our old car, but he was right- zombies. By this time, we'd long since run out of ammunition for weapons, so I didn't bother. I just picked up a rather thick stick and smacked the zombies around. These were Romero zombies, the slow, lumbering kind, so it wasn't so bad. 

I got to the store and it was mostly looted, but it was ok, because there were houses near here. Even though the sun was setting, they looked mostly undisturbed, which meant maybe the looters had left most of the things around. My brother decided to stay with the car. I decided to forge onwards.

I'll abbreviate the rest: I found where the Canadian army was offering extradition to safe Canada in exchange for enlistment in their foreign legion. I was tempted, but decided against it. What would my family do without me? And besides, I hadn't told anybody that I was going. But I did find a woman there, who started talking to me. She was charming, and she seemed to like me just fine, so we explored the dilapidated houses together. She lived near there but I couldn't stay, so we parted ways and I went back to the house to try and improve it. Materials were hard to come by. It was stressful- my father wanted us to stay safe, but I wanted to live in a better place, so we argued a little. I don't know who won.

Remind me not to live in the total collapse of society.

ONI PUNCHER Adventure!

One of the first things I want to do for ONI PUNCHER is similar to what I did for Aim For The Head; namely, an introductory adventure to show people what I was thinking about when I made the rules.

One of the reasons, I think, that oD&D took off so strongly was that it was possible, through the adventures and modules and ramblings of the creators, to see exactly what the first DMs were getting at. You get a very good sense of what Gygax was like when you read what he produced. You get a very good sense of what Arneson was like when you read through his material, as well. It's not quite as good as having them sit down and play a game for you, but it's pretty close.

And so that's something that I plan on doing. I have a lot of ideas for a one-page module for Oni Puncher, as well as some nifty extra rules for it. I think you'll like it. It features a very dangerous Oni named Hideaki, a luminescent demon that's causing some serious problems among the westland farmers. Will you be able to defeat him, or will you yourself be defeated?

(That reminds me, I never included rules on how to lose in Oni Puncher, or how your Punchers might be defeated. I might have to add something in!)