Well, it would seem that IE7 doesn't really support Blogger (or anything else), so we'll have to see how this comes out.

My Raspberry Pi is now up and working, and SSHable. Unfortunately it would seem that the work internet connection gobbles SSH type packets because it's a dick. So, I'm examining my alternatives. So far they consist of:

1) SSH in through my phone, and try and work on there. This is problematic, because it'll be kind of slow and awkward, and will also eat up my data allowance.

2) Set up AJAXTerm on my Pi. Apparently it's a webhosted terminal application, so I could connect to it like a website. It is, understandably, rather slow.

3) Get Boo out of storage and try and work on that when I have WiFi available. Again, not an ideal solution...

I think I'm going to pick up a sexy windows tablet when they arrive, either a Surface or one of the delicious ASUS ones. Until then, I guess I'll have to find some other way to keep busy at work...

Also, Jamie, do we want to set up SVN at some point? I also need to come over and bother you about code-related stuff.

Synergistic modularity: the first progress meeting

So today's meeting went well. Really, really well. I'm in an excellent mood due to how well it went, because it went really, really well. Really.

We got an enormous amount of ground covered in terms of hashing out conceptual problems, and I think we're all a lot more clear on what it is we're trying to make and how that might come about. We started off taking a look at what each person had done over the last month, with clearly the most visible development coming from the coding team - Tai has made a good start on learning Java, and Jamie has got the basic mapping and texture loading done. So we can see how a battlefield would look (it's looking very Tactics-y) already, which I was not expecting to get in the first month. 

The meat of the meeting, though, was Relm and Tai leading us through their ideas for mechanics and game design, which quickly led us to a long and intricate debate over a central tension in the creation of this game - to what degree do we sacrifice narrative fidelity to include interesting game mechanics? On the one hand, we have people who want to make a good plot with deep and interesting characters. On the other, we want the game to allow players to play around with the characters' skills and abilities, and to keep it very open. We don't want each character to have their job/class/role fixed from the start, unchangeable; but we also don't want characters that are blank slates in the pursuit of customisability. 

After a lot of discussion on this point, it seems that we came to the following conclusion - we can separate to large degree a character's personality from their combat role and abilities. A given character may be able to be a fighter, a healer, an archer or a mage depending on which skills you give her, but whichever she is at a given time she will also have a core personality that is unchanged, and which colours the specific manifestation of her chosen role. A morally-ambiguous guttersnipe of a character could be a melee fighter by being an assassin, or a mage by being a warlock who has made a pact with a demon for power - a different character could fill the same roles, with the same general skills, but might end up being a knight for the former or a druid for the latter. 

This modularity of character customisation (a system of Relm's devising involving action-granting items being equipped to a character, which can be swapped out when wanted) may be a nucleus from which Mike can begin brainstorming. It seems he's had a bit of paralysis over ideas because when you can make a plot about ANYTHING in ANY setting, it becomes very difficult to come up with anything which isn't generic. Starting from today, he (and others) may start getting some cool ideas. How does this world differ due to the fact that anyone can change their combat focus at any time? It's a world where 25 years dedicating yourself to swordsmanship doesn't necessarily make you better at it than someone who's just decided to pick up a sword after studying magic tomes for the last few years. How do people switch so easily? One suggestion was a concept of an immortal soul that grows in power and, with the right items, can channel that power in different ways. Change the objects, and the manifestation of the power changes. Another was mechs, with abilities determined by the systems load-out chosen for each mech suit. I'm looking forward to seeing where these questions will take us.

We also discussed the scope of the project, due to different people having very different views of how long the finished product will be. Much of this is down to us really not knowing how much work it will be to, say, add 6 hours of content to a 6 hour game compared to making that 6 hour game in the first place. We may find that it takes surprisingly little to add content once we've got the main systems up, or we may find that the art/dialogue assets required would just simply be too much. After a lot of back and forth on this, we came to the conclusion that starting out making a short game would be best - if it looks likely that we could easily expand it to a longer game then we could, but best not to bite off more than we can chew right from the off. It also means that we can do a 'proof of concept' game first, perhaps with slightly more limited character/skill selection, art assets, and a rather short plot. After that, we can either greatly expand upon it in a second version, or have that as the first part and make a sequel. Or we could take what we've learned and make something completely different, armed with better knowledge of how things work and what we can/cannot do. So it looks like Thundercut will end up being a shortish game, which is fine for everyone. Oh, and it'll be working on a square grid, because screw hexes. They're great for some parts of the game design, but they're just too damned fiddly.

This isn't everything that we covered, and I'm sure I'm leaving out large chunks of important developments. Hopefully we'll have a few other blog-post reports from other people focusing on what they found most interesting. I'm going to leave it at that, for now, with a big grin on my face. Night.

I can post too!

So, Duncan has very kindly added me to the list, so I can make my own posts as well as commenting on his.

I'm looking forward to Thundercut, and I hope it goes well. I particularly want to get back on the coding ladder - it's been a long time since I made anything substantive, so I want to try and get making and doing and accomplishing again. I'm also excited about the possibility of making something someone else might actually want to consume at some point!

At some point I shall endeavour to post something about my struggle to learn Java, which mainly focusses on my struggle to actually get a compiler running, or more accurately to avoid getting dispirited and giving up when things don't work immediately. This ungodly heat is not helping with that, incidentally...

It starts

I need to put up some kind of a test post to see how things are all formatted and such, but just posting "Test" or a load of "lorem ipsum" seems like a bit of a cop out, so I'll make this the first official post for the project I suppose.

I'm writing this in the days running up to the first monthly meeting of the project. The story so far is that I (inspired by Louis) have gathered together a group of friends to make a video game. We had a meet up around a month ago in which we discussed what everyone wanted to do on the project, what we want to get out of the experience, and what kind of game we actually want to make. All very high-level, rather vague stuff inspired more by idealism than any experience of what to expect (mostly, though Mel probably has a decent idea of the stresses of group projects in general). More details about this will find their way to relevant sections of the blog as time permits, I'm sure.

A few weeks ago, shortly after the initial meeting, I sent out a suggested 'To Do' list for people to look over in preparation for this month's meeting. It included things like for Jamie, Tai and Louis (our prospective coding team) to learn Java and start working on the most basic parts of an engine of some sort, and indeed for me to set up this blog. Given that it's an entirely voluntary project none of the items on this list were obligatory, but it seems like at least some of the tasks have been completed to some degree. Which is good, because I'm imagining a lot of the things we talk about at the next meeting are to do with what we've done since the last, and what we're going to do to build on that.

I'm really looking forward to the meeting, come to think of it. It's managed to sneak up on me, but now that it's in sight I'm excited to see how people's thoughts have changed on the project and what they have come up with in terms of new ideas. I've had a few short chats with Relm about specific game design ideas he's had, all of which have been very interesting. If Mike has had some time to think about plot/story ideas, I'm sure he'll be wanting to share them with the group and they will be, if his past ideas are any judge, off-the-wall yet thought-provoking. And I'd love to be able to see some of Melissa's portfolio - right now I am thinking that it will look just like all the other similar games which I've seen, but there's no reason that this has to be the case. Given that I live with Jamie, I've been able to see a few progress shots of the engine - it's early days but still a lot further on that I'd have thought we'd be.

So yes, I'm rather rambling on but long story short, this weekend is looking like it'll be pretty great. And then we'll take our next step forward.