[CRAZY IDEA] Asynchronous Game Development

There is a very good chance that this blog post exists because I am reverting to old college habits in pursuit of NaNoWriMo... namely I am somehow avoiding something I "need" to do by doing that same thing to no purpose.

I don't know anything about developing a video game but...

So, I have never completed any programming project that took more then 6 months to develop. The occasions where I did complete projects weren't games anyway. So, while I may not be knowledgeable about making video games I know quite a bit about failing to complete video game projects.

I'm sure someone else has thought of this but...

There are many times when I have an idea and it later turns out that someone is already doing it or has proved it to be crazy and abandoned it. That said, I like writing down my ideas because it helps me "hone" them.

So I've heard there's this problem...

There are a number of examples I have seen of games getting to a certain point and being scrapped or taking so long to develop that by the time they are released they look dated or perform less well then recent games.  This comes because the engine and the assets and the game itself are essentially built, and tested, at the same time.

Now, this style of concurrent development makes a lot of sense because you can have everyone in the company working on the same project and deliver it and move on. You can also ensure that the graphics and engine and interface and play mesh seamlessly because there will be constant back and forth between the sections of the team.

All that said, here's what I think someone should do...

First, this would only really work well with a large development team working on a long project; preferably multiple concurrent projects.

Stage One would be game design, concept art, maybe get the development team in to do some mechanics demos to get an idea how the whole thing should work... block out the whole project from scratch, figure out what's essential to the release, what's modular and the timeline/roadmap for the project.  Everyone from every team working together for maybe 10% of the total development of the game.

Stage Two the story guys and game play guys and the art guys break down what assets are needed and then the art guys make those assets... but target them to work on an engine that they expect to be up to date at the end of the project.

When the art guys have figured out when their part of the project is going to be done the designers start working on an existing engine using existing assets and build a working example of the game play mechanics and further block out the needs from the final engine so that they finish around the same time as the art guys.

Stage Three the art guys and the designer guys go off and work on something different while the engine guys build the engine that will support the existing assets and game play. They may need to bug the art and design guys to make sure they are getting things right but for the most part, if it was designed and planned well it shouldn't be a problem.

Stage Four, everyone gets back together and makes sure the game works as it is, looks good, plays well, doesn't break etc... and essentially the rest of the project is bug fixes until release.

So...

Does that make sense? Am I solving a problem that doesn't exist or making an existing problem worse? I don't know but it seems to me that it would be a lot more rewarding at every stage of the process for those involved and it would result in significantly less waste on the "more expensive" aspects of the project.

[STUFF] Facebook Inadvertently Fixes the App-Wall-Spam Issue

So, if you are like me and play Facebook games and also have a friend or two who do not, you have likely realized that people get annoyed when you game-spam them.

Earlier this month (I think) Facebook copied a useful Google+ feature which actually provides a great way to resolve this problem without being denied (or denying those friends who do play) great virtual swag.

Step One: Compile a list of people who actually play the game (or at least people you want to spam notifications to)

Step Two: Create a List of those Friends

A:

B:

C:

D: Add all the friends from Step One to the list

Step 3: Now, this only applied to wall shares so some shares you'll still have to work for but for those it DOES work for, its simple to only share with the "right" people by choosing the list when you share something.

A:

B:

As a bonus, you can view the list of players of a specific game and you are more likely to catch their wall posts too.

[Crazy Idea] Adopt a Novel

Let's agree, for argument's sake, that it is technically possible I am talking about books in the public domain or people who live in countries that don't have copyright laws that would restrict this activity, OK?

There are many novels in the world, and there are many people in the world.

As a rough estimate there are 147,093,357 "items" (mostly not novels, but its a number) and there are over 309,000,000 native English speakers in the world. I can read a novel in under a week so if we wanted to have every item in the library of congress read... and we had some kind of magical level of both participation and efficiency... it could be done in under a week. Nifty huh?

What there aren't many of are good quality, readily available, electronic copies of most novels published before about 1971... and really before the eBook market really started taking off in about 2010.

So that brings me to the [Crazy Idea]: Set up a way for people to adopt a novel, they would get (or create) a scanned copy of the book and they would spend some spare time over the course of however long it took to clean it up, format it into a properly transmutable format (like epub) and provide it back to the world.

Obviously they would start with an OCR system to get the basics but would have to go word by word to ensure the accuracy of the conversion and mark up the formatting. Ideally these books would be committed to a versioned repository and verified by general consensus, with minor patches being applied when someone noticed a wrong word or comma that should actually be an apostrophe and such.

Of course, no really good idea is truly unique so it turns out http://www.pgdp.net/c/ already exists.

[Opinion] Value of a Video Game

As with all discretionary spending, the true value of a Video Game is different for each person... which is why companies offer “self selection” price points.

The difficulty is that the companies making the video games are not able to truly control the price of these games due to variable distribution channels and monkey wrenches like the used games market.  The ideal solution appears to be to digital distribution.  Unfortunately game companies do not seem to realize that these channels represent a fundamentally different product then those available at retail, and as such, users are not adopting them.

That said, the prevalence of “game apps” on a variety of mobile devices has opened the floodgates in the general public to the idea of digital distribution... so now it’s up to the game companies to resolve the remaining value disparities or continue to waste potential revenue on obsolete market forces.

The “Real Value” of a video game

When a “real” game is released it costs about $70. Renting this game for a week costs about $10 so the assumption then is that this game will be used for 7 weeks, or sold/traded in after a certain number of weeks for the remaining value (calculated as -10% per week).

The first and most obvious difficulty comes from the fact that most people will “wait and buy it used” which represents a loss to the developer in the following way.

Player 1 Buys a Game at $70, Player 1 Sells the game for 40 after approximately 4 weeks, Player 2 Buys the game Used for $50.

In this scenario the material cost of 2 copies of the game is very low (disk and manual and packaging, let’s say about $10 at the highest). So the game company makes 60 dollars.

If the “used game store” was eliminated then the company would instead make, 60 from the first Player at $70 and then, 4 weeks later they could lower the price to $50 and sell a second copy making another $40 for a total profit of 100$... but that’s unrealistic.

The truth is that in the first scenario Player 1 is actually only paying $30 for the game and Player 2 is very likely to sell the game back 4 more weeks later for $20 and then he, too, will only have payed $30 for the game... and the “game store” will sell the game one more time to a third player for $30 recovering another $10 of their initial sale.

So, paying $70 for a digital version of a game is definitely a bad idea for Player 1 because he is actually paying $40 more for his copy of the game then if he bought a copy he could later sell to a used game store.

Solution: Screw retailers... their bad for business.

So, the solution in my mind if for game companies to charge $40 for the game digitally if its being sold in store for  $70, this would represent the “real price”... and then, after about 10 weeks drop the digital price down to $30, then again down to $20 after another 10 weeks to target the “people who are willing to wait and then buy used” market.

The advantage here is that the whole system is a win/win. Players spend less and Game Companies earn a lot more off of each Player because now a sale represents one player rather then 3 or more. True, the player who buys the game at $40 is sort-of paying $10 more for his copy of the game, but he's also benefiting from not having to make two separate trips to the game store and the fact that many game stores only give "store credit" for the used games they buy.

[Crazy Idea] Kickstart my "Arcade"

There are a number of reasons why this is a [Bad Idea] but it’s still an interesting concept.

So my sister was in town and I was talking about how the idea I keep revising that would be the business I would open if I won the lottery (which would be difficult given that I don’t play the lottery) or became wealthy in some other way... was never going to happen.  We discussed a number of businesses following a similar model that actually exist and seem to be doing okay... so it's not so crazy an idea after-all... then she mentioned the possibility of Kickstarting the whole thing... and I was thinking:

Could I make a Kickstarter project to establish my dream business?

First, I would need to go over the “business plan” and revise it to meet the current version of my vision.  Second, I’d need to figure out what contributors would get out of contributing.

The biggest question is “Would I hire me to run my business?” and “Could it be described as mine if I contribute practically nothing to the start-up costs?”... essentially I would just be the idea guy... and the world is full of us.

But, all reasonable considerations aside let’s get back to dreaming:

My “Idea” is nearly impossible to describe using a single word, which is why I think it’s worth doing. So here is a list of things I would like to have.

•     Library of games and books for people to use
•     Couches, chairs, tables (gaming tables and cafe tables), private gaming rooms.
•     Arcade machines, pinball machines, computers and consoles (including vintage consoles like NES/genesis/colecovision)
•     Collectible Card games, board games, books and comics for sale
•     Food and beverages available for purchase
•     a stage where we could have shows and open mics and karaoke
•     pay showers, laundry machines and sleeping pods

I would also like to have regular events, every day and night if possible:

•     Tabletop war-game, card game, board game, video game tournaments
•     Expert led training sessions for geeky topics (how to DM DnD4e, how to build a beat down deck in MtG, writers worshops)
•     Club nights and lockins, book clubs, real-life meetings for guilds
•     all age concerts and mini-raves
•     programming competitions

...and that’s just the current jumble of ideas on my mind... in my mind all of this forms a cohesive “come, stay, spend money, bring friends” atmosphere from a chaotic series of disparate elements

Next would be to think of how to “Kickstart” the idea:

We would need to raise enough money to secure and outfit the premises and maintain operation for a certain amount of time, let’s say six months to establish a beach-head in the community and culture, my guess is around $100,000

There would be a certain number of “slots” for shareholders... but I wouldn’t want to exceed more then %40 of my funding by this means, so the first 400 people to spend $140 would get a 1/1000th share and a six month preferred membership.

The first 600 people to donate $70 would get a six month preferred membership.

And then we would need to make up the target with anyone else spending $50 getting a six month normal membership.

But then I was thinking... could I really cater effectively to 1500 members over 6 months with 100,000 of start-up capital... assuming that I will not be giving any merchandise away for free and that I need to be able to sell services to non-members?

So we need to start looking at math instead of making arbitrary guesses... but let’s start with some more guessing:

Each month has somewhere around 180 profitable hours... if I can sell 8 people (who may be members) something in each of those 180 hours that would net me 5 dollars of profit I would make 7200 dollars, and I would theoretically be serving 180x8=1440 of my members some “free to members” service in those same (and possibly in off-peak) hours. So sure, it could work... and that is assuming my facility can readily cater to 16 people simultaneously in each of those hours... which seems reasonable.

So randomly rounded math works out... we give people the option to kick in $15 to get a set of keen buttons and we’re golden... time to start my business plan and market research again.

[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...