[Crazy Idea] Kickstarter project to get out of print books into the public domain

So... I recently have been noticing this "kickstarter" thing where people come up with an idea and then say how much money they would need to make the idea happen and then... if enough people "pledge" money the thing happens... otherwise everyone get's their money back.

So I then think... hey... I have crazy ideas all the time... and some of them could really just be a couple thousand dollars away from actually happening... crazy idea for a game? figure out how much it would cost to pay someone to develop it and BAM! game exists... or whatever.  But one of my crazy ideas floated to the surface... that idea I had that one time about printing books for cheap... yeah... that would be perfect... and then, thanks to all the coffee I've been drinking today, I came up with the following:

Kickstarter project idea:

Obtain the Publishing rights for the "Infocom Books" and release them into the public domain... the books are "Planetfall", "Wishbringer", "Enchanter", "Stationfall", "The Zork Chronicals", and "The Lost City of Zork" published by "Avon Books" on behalf of or under licence from "Infocom" who got bought out by "Activision" who are now also Blizzard... so who knows who "acctually" had the rights to them... so that would be the first step.  Figuring out who owns the books and then figuring out how much it would cost to get the rights to them... given that they have been out of print for 20 years their response it likely to be... oh... we own that?

Then I was thinking... actually "public domain" might be less awesome then I think because after the rights are obtained there's no way for me to get rich fund additional projects and then anybody with deep pockets could print them... so this is where it get's "crazy".

Kicking in:
$30 would get you e-book copies of the 6 books
$60 would get you e and "crappy" printed anthology edition of the books (kickstarter target would be be enough to get 1000 copies of each book printed in soft cover on bible paper or whatever... about 25,000 dollars)
$120 would get you e and "crappy anthology" and "hard cover, look pretty on the shelf" versions of the books...
$200 would get you all of the above an 1/1000th share in the "company" that holds publication rights of each book for 10 years... including a share in any profits made from the sale of the books

if the project is successful the books would be printed and sold online and at sci-fi/video game conventions/available for people to order in bunches by retailers etc... it would be a croudsourced advertising campaign/word of mouth stuff... and the ebooks would be made available on all of the platforms like amazon and kindle and kobo etc.

After 10 years the licence to print the books would either A: revert back to the publisher or B: be bought out into the "public domain" by the "company" that we established... if enough money had been made by this point in time to do so.

Now, I haven't actually set up said kickstarter campaign because right now I'm not even at the point where I've figured out who actually owns the right to said books in the first place... I'm at the "figuring out if people think this on one of those 'so crazy it just might work' ideas or one of those 'just plain crazy' ideas"... also input/feedback would be appreciated.

Hooray for Logic!

So, as mentioned in a prior post I was mucking about with HTML5 canvas and hex grids... I believe I have worked out the kinks in my logic and have therefore managed to build a script that draws the grid as I have it in my mind.

In the process of reworking my faulty logic I cleared out all the the "mouse" logic I had before, it shouldn't be too hard to put most of it back in and work out the intersection logic for the offset cells... I hope.

I think the next think I'm going to work on is "moving around" the map.  Right now I always display the map with 0,0 in the upper left corner and I don't even have a way to statically set an "offset". So I'll need to make the draw code work with a variable to determine where to start drawing and then work out way to move around (maybe with mouse dragging or similar).  Then when I start trying to fit my "figure out which cell the user is clicking on" code I'll be able to take this offset into account.

Still nobody wanting to help me out with my project and no real reason to believe it will ever move beyond the "me figuring out how to do stuff" phase... but hey, stranger things have happened.

edit: I've done some more work and have much of the stuff I was talking about needing to do done now...

[Game Idea] Sweet spot somewhere between Disgaea, MnM: Heroes Kingdoms.and Farmville

... and maybe some other games thrown in the mix for good measure.

(Links to Disgaea, Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms, and FarmVille on WikiPedia.)

I have, over the course of my life, played a diverse variety of games that caught my attention and then proceeded to wring it dry.  Ikariam, Civony/Evony/Ceasary, *Ville, Atlantica Online, Kingdom of Loathing and and countless other web games have stolen hours of my life that I cannot get back.

Most recently I tried out "Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms" and while I may give it a bit more of a shot... it's not what I'm really looking for.

First, despite myself, I like those "online" games where you have a constant stream of stuff  that you "can" do, and a short list of things that you "have to" do in order to progress in the game.  I only want to "have" to spend a few minutes every few hours but I want to be able to "grind" when I feel like it.

In addition, these games tend to take most of the "strategy" out of the strategy game.  You really just build the next thing and then build the next thing.  When I worked out a optimal profit schedule for FarmVille such that I was planting crops that would be harvested in the morning before work, immediately after work, and then short crops every few minutes until bed time... but all that really didn't make a difference in the long run. In FrontierVille, Mafia Wars and Treasure Isle they coupled these mechanics with a slowly regenerating energy bar that could be spent right away but you would only "lose" it if you didn't play for over eight hours or so. Basically it was like they had built a machine that's only purpose was to ensure your kept looking at it on a regular basis... their ad-impressions stats must be astronomical... but still, just knowing when and how often to log-on isn't strategy.

Another problem in the "empire management" genre is that the battles are very hands off... I attach an impersonal horde of troops to a hero and send them off to complete a mission.  One of the things I really liked about "backyard monsters" was that I felt like I had some strategic control over my troops... at least where and when they landed.

So, All this leads to THE IDEA:

Tactical Empire Management Strategy Role Playing Game

You get control of one quadrant of a grid and can expand your empire by claiming new quadrants... this might actually be more like a Massively Multiplayer Real-Time Civilization game in my mind.  Groups of monsters would constantly be encroaching on your territory and impeding your production of resources.  They could never drop production down below something like 20% and their defence could be improved... but their would always be something to fight.  Combat would be handled similar to a "Tactics" game (like Disgaea) in these combats with very fine control over which units to send into the fray and how they fight.  Units that were included in these combats would need to "cool down" between matches in order to recover hit-points and earn experience points.  They could be called back into action again immediately if they took less damage but this would negate much of the previous combats experience points.  Similar mechanics would be used to capture new territory or fend of sieges.  Player vs Player combat would also exist in an "arena" environment while attacking another players buildings would have their units simply defend using the systems AI.

Other then that, its all just flavour and gravy... would need to be hooks into all the most popular social media streams, pay for perks to increase income stream, ads to generate primary revenue... all that kind of stuff you'd expect from a web game.

Though I'm kinda partial to monster raising and card collecting... so we'd have to work that into the troop management system somehow.

Spring Unit Animation: Why in-sim animation should be optional even though its awesome

For background you need to know what spring is:

Back in "the day" there was a game called "Total Annihilation[+]" which could rightly be described as a "Revolutionary Real-Time Strategy Game" for a lot of reasons... but the two that are important to the discussion here are that [1] the game was set-up and the developers provided tools to make it exceptionally modifiable and [2] units were 3D models and the scripts that affected their behaviour also actually controlled their behaviour.

This second point is what I mean by "in-sim animation".  Essentially, in order for the the unit to aim it's weapon or deploy it's nanolath mechanism or load or deploy a unit... the script actually, like programming a robot, sent commands to adjust the position and rotation of pieces and then sent fire commands to weapons etc.  This was great because it meant that these animation script could take into account every possible angle or situation by having the script control the position of each bit or bob of their unit... allowing a programmer with some understanding of spacial geometry to create fluid and realistic animations.

Anyways, fast forward a bit and "Total Annihilation" is starting to show it's years... still an awesome game but with modern computers better able to handle complex graphics and simulation a group of programmers and TA modders start a project which will eventually become what is now knows as the "Spring RTS Engine[+]".

Spring has been growing away from it's TA roots but it still maintains that great "in-sim animation" feature as the only way to animate units.  The problem is that I believe it's holding back some potential features.

Because gameplay is affected by these unit animation scripts they need to be run for every unit, regardless of it the unit is being drawn or even in the players line of sight, on every computer, including the server.  This also significantly increases the number of variables that can be rounded wrong and result in desynchronization.  Another issue is that simulating all this stuff is CPU intensive which results in an unnecessarily high "frame rate bottleneck" when CPU load is being generated for these animations even when they are not rendered.

So, what's my solution to this problem?

Unit scripts will have the "option" of triggering "non-sim animations"... these animation scripts will have no effect on gameplay.  For example, a unit would have 2 "synced" vectors for it's emit points and the script would move these vectors to the correct point in space and then send this change to the "unsynched" animation script to deal with, this "unsynced" code could be as simply as existing animation script just running in parallel with the "synced" code, or it could be as complicated as an inverse kinematic solver to allow the unit to point in the new direction or interpret 3D studio or Ogre3D style animation scripting.

The cool thing (in my mind) is that this could probably be done already with the existing engine... units would just be emit points and their Lua scripts would send a message to an unsynced gadget that handles the unit's animation.

Sooo... crazy smart idea or jut plain crazy?

[Crazy Idea] Higher Difficulty Summary Modes in Games

So I recently beat the second (and sadly, at least for the time being, final) PAA:OtRPoD episode on "Normal" difficulty which unlocked "insane" mode. The difficulty is that, for me, playing through a game a second time is BOOORING.  I've already searched every inch of the game to find fiddly bits, I've already read all the in game dialog, I've already made all the "right choices that make the game move forward instead of killing me"... so it's not much fun to play through on a harder difficulty.

Sometimes developers at least throw me a bone by including additional things to do the second time through and the occasional piece of non-linear game play... but for the most part... BOOORING.

So my idea is to have the game option made available after beating it the first time that I call "summary mode".  When I walk through a room that, on a prior play-through I searched every nook and cranny of it will display a little window saying "upon searching the room you find 2 health potions and a magic sword"... when I'm at a "plot point dialog" it will just say "you discuss the events with Dr. Badguy and then he attacks you".  None of the in game tutorials for mini-games or chocobo raising will show up.  Just the combat and equipment management stuff we really care about.

Another idea would be for a "movie" mode where all of the "plot" get's presented without the annoying combat and equipment management crap.

meh. probably just me who thinks this way.

[Crazy Idea] Extended URL Shortening

Had some crazy ideas about URL shorteners today.

Imagine that you have a short url like "goo.gl" for example, traditionally this would be used to provide people with short urls like "goo.gl/AAAA" where "AAAA" is a random string... this would take the user to a website that the server at goo.gl associates with "AAAA".

Idea 1:

goo.gl/AAA belongs to me and the next character is the article I want to link to, so:
goo.gl/AAA0 is my first link and goo.gl/AAA1 is my second link. this could also be done with an extra / so goo.gl/AAA/0.

Idea 2:

sinbadev is my twitter account so, sinbadev.goo.gl could be a link to my twitter page, my first shortened link would be sinbadev.goo.gl/0 and then my next shortened link is sinbadev.goo.gl/1 and so on.

Idea 3:

sinbadev.goo.gl/* or goo.gl/AAA/* links to sinbadev-benjie.blogspot.com/2011/04/*.html
This way I only need to make one shortened url and can just include my latest article.

These ideas could all be combined and we could make use of other valid url components too.

Does anyone know of any existing url shortening systems that support one or more of these concepts?

"Desktop Civillizations (???)" Progress!!!

So, there has been scripting happening. I now draw the field based on the contents of an array and you can click on spots and this changes the state of that array element such that the tile is drawn differently... Oh, and the grid is actually made of hexagons now and when you mouse over a grid it shows that grid with a green circle around it.

Next steps could be any number of things... I'm not sure I'm ready to start thinking about game-logic yet so I'm thinking about maybe making it so the grid is "filled in".

Up till now I've been cropping my screenshots... what the board actually looks like is:

I would like those empty spaces in the corners to be filled in... such that after (9,0) you would see (0,0) again and the triangular empty space in the bottom left to be filled in with the hexes in the sticky out part of the triangle in the bottom right.