Curse you, Flash!

Why solve simple problems, when you can be stumped by hard ones? I appear to have out-clevered myself for the moment. I'm not finding any good way to test for collsions against the arbitrary line movie_clip I'm drawing as a trail.

I'll paste the code after the jump, if anyone wants to take a peek. Perhaps a good night's sleep will bring council.

My apologies. The drive swap took longer than it should have, but now I have more storage, less bad sectors, and less chkdsk'ing on boot, and well over 99% of my files recovered. To celebrate, I give you an hour-and-forty minute work in progress. This would be Flash game #2, a simple trail-blocking (soon-to-be) game.

It is set up so I can easily add a second player when the basic game code is up and running. The basic notion is Tron, but holding down the direction keys increase/decrease your acceleration and avatar scale.

When large, you move fast, but have a larger collision. When small, you can fit through tight spaces, but move slowly.

Currently Player one is mostly running without collision, sound or death. Hoping to polish of more of the loose ends tomorrow.

If I can finish the whole thing in under 5 hours, I'll be pretty happy.

You may have to click in the window to activate the key input. Sorry for the crudity of the model, but keep in mind the idea is not to produce polished gems, but to use Flash as a method for rapid prototyping of game mechanics.

Launch eRadiRace!

-game not quite over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.

The Design-A-Day update will be a little late this evening...the NewEgg Fairy made a visit, and I'm taking my machine off-line for (I hope) a few minutes. If the design fails to appear, send tech support.

In the meantime, here is a conundrum to tease your brain:

If an advanced genetic therapy could give you youthful, healthy immortality, but destroyed all of your memories in the process, would you take it?

Discuss.

Have you read the April edition of Wired, the issue with Will Wright emblazoned on the cover? Not much meat in the in the New Worlds of Gaming section for those that are paying attention (and one editorial I quite disagree with, more later), but the Cory Doctrow interview with Danny Hillis did jar loose some ideas.

Called "The Massively Multiplayer Magic Kingdom," it's a look at the theme park as a precursor to the MMOs we all know and love. Sorry. No link.

Let's take it as read that Theme Parks are one of the ancestors of the MMO. They are both magical environments with fanciful characters wandering about and long lines to get to the good stuff (at least in the days before the instanced dungeon).

So let's turn it around. Can we talk today about taking an MMO and turning into a successful theme park? I'm partial to the idea. I was rooting around the file cabinet the other day and chanced upon a shareholder's letter from The Dream Park Corporation dated 1995. Based on the Larry Niven novel Dream Park, they were trying to bring to life a very ambitious park-as-multiplayer game, a few years before the technologies to make it work were really available. I gave them a few bucks to push the idea forward.

More recently, I've participated in Otherworld, a fantasy-themed adventure weekend. This was a great experience, but doesn't scale to theme-park size (check them out, you'll have a wonderful time).

Could you create a theme park based, for instance, on World of Warcraft. EverQuest? Should you?

This weekend's Flash project ran long, so I will be posting a short entry tonight as I continue to work on it.

The project is a ground-up re-write of the Design-a-Tron using what I have learned on Radial-Solo-Ball project.

---

Goals for the new version:

Redesign of the underlying database to support categories and subcategories

/Category

item

item

item

...

//Subcategory

item

item

item

...

///SubSubCategory

item

Launched term searches include parent category tag

/Books

//Novel

She

Would launch a Google search for Novel She, which will be much more likely to pull up a relevant entry for H. Rider Haggard novel "She" than just searching for "She."

A preferences page for including/excluding categories from the engine (will need to set a local cookie)

Less kludgey overall implementation

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There was originally a game database and a pop culture database. These will be merged in the new revision.

The basic construction will be:

Specific Domain meets Constellation of Domains as Human Endeavor

Previously, it was hardwired so that the specific domain was always games. The new database structure will allow any domain from the pop culture list to be used as the specific domain. This way, you can use the Design-a-Tron to help generate ideas for Broadway Musicals or the next Great Novel as easily as video games.

See you tonight!

Today's sexy topic: database access. Woot!

Okay. It gets better, I promise!

By way of groundwork, I'm going to sketch out a massively- multiplayer persistent world game:

Freelancers of Orion: World of Starcraft

• It's a RTSMMO
• Each player owns a home planet that cannot be captured or destroyed
• Players build fleets of specialized craft to fight for contested planets, asteroids and space stations
• There is a commerce and trading element
• The game is played in 3D space. There is an enforced truce in the Galactic Plane (2D-slice), to allow a safe corridor for commerce.
• The player's planet (and ability to mobilize fleets) grows more powerful, levels up, as do the player's "civilization skills," shipbuilding, mining, trading, combat, etc.
• Planetary fleets can be organized into interplanetary confederations (clans/guilds).
• Heads of federations can play a meta-game of strategy on an abstracted map. Similar in purpose to the Battlefield 2 Commander interface, for the command of multiple fleets

[I'm getting on a plane first thing in the morning, so this one get published a day early. Joy!] 

One of the things I like about developing games for handheld platforms is the scope. I cut my teeth writing small games for the Radio Shack CoCo, the Commodore Vic 20 and Amiga 500. In some ways, designing games for the handhelds reminds me of those days.

The scope of the machine is small, you can kind of fit the whole thing in your head. The graphics have very defined limits; you make the best looking game you can within those limits, and you focus on the gameplay.

Which does not bring me to tonight's topic, by any stretch of the imagination.

The Next Gen. The scope of these machines is...more. The PS3, in addition to being able to heal the sick and travel through time (you wondered how they were going to hit their launch date, didn't you?) is also purported to push a staggering number of polys per frame. The XBox 360 is no slouch in this regard either.

This was a fact frequently bemoaned at this year's GDC. You see, most of the time, a human being has to sit down and make all those game objects, filled to bursting with delicious polygons. And that cost money. And sometimes you hear people asking, how much better a game am I going to get for my [$xx Million if you are a Publisher][$60-70 if you are a Consumer].

I mean yes. It is vitally important to the suspension of disbelief that that bush near the front door of the GenBioXConsortium building that you are infiltrating contain more polys than could be rendered in the entire scene in the previous gen. Nobody is arguing that. But at some point (or so the argument goes) we reach a point of diminishing returns. Adding another 20 artist for three years for better looking scenery...at some point the math doesn't work if the consumer is getting the same old game in a shinier package.

So with tonight's massive preamble out of the way, here's a very simple game design idea for Next Gen that actually makes use of every single one of those polys in a game friendly manner.