Finally Kongai

Was feeling tired last night, but as i was packing away the plethora of web windows I had open I got sidetracked again. Eventually ended up back on the Kongregate website, and ran into an old game; Kongai. I had originally been interested in the game after reading Gamasutra's analysis of Kongai, but at the initial launch you had to play LOTS of Kongregate games to even get a starting deck. It now looks like you get 3 cards to start off, so at least you can jump in and see what it's actually like.

I really like it.

I've been using the R/P/S example for so long about game balance by metagame, now sirlin has formalised the metagame into a definable set of yomi states. Yomi; knowing the mind of the opponent. Excellent word. Kongai is full of Yomi.

GameLog 51 & 52

1 year of GameLogs stutters by as uni assignments take their toll on my gaming. Another combined report with little to show in 2 weeks.

UnAngband (15h) - VRBones XXII, 24 Rohan Paladin - My furthest push yet into the depths of UnAngband. The pally played better the second time around as I concentrated on archery to get me out of known non-melee battles. Eventually died to a pack of wights down the bottom of barrow downs.

Football Manager 08 (7h) - Gateshead Season 4, 3rd - Past the 1/2 way point in the league and we're a solid 3rd. We had a brief stint in 2nd, but Grimsby is way out in front. The team is playing well now and we're leading the goal scoring, even though we're losing some every now and then.

Nodiatis (4h) - Free online MMO. Plays like t.r.e.a.c.l.e.

TrackMania Nations Forever (3h) - StLukes CCG plus a little racing to keep in the points.

Fallen sword (2h) - Free online MMO that I tested with Ben

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (2h) - BundyBow, 12 hunter - Enough to get into Darkshore and start the grind. Even playing the hunter with carbonite isn't enjoyable enough to keep going.

Track King (1h) - Horse racing management online MMO. Bit too simple when FM08 is still sitting around waiting to be played.

It's WAR!

After reading that Warhammer is going to have an Aussie server, had a check to see if I had missed my beta invite. Nope. But a couple of hours later it did arrive, so I can only guess that all aussie betatesters were delayed until the news release.

Couldn't wait to get home and test the login. I knew the file would be big and I'd be unlikely to play tonight anyway, but I wanted to get it started right away. Then I saw it was a torrent. Eww. I like torrents as a theory, but being a torrent means it will take ~6 times longer to download. Then i saw the size.
9.4Gb.
OMFGWTFBBQ!!@!
I'll be lucky to be playing by the end of the week ... :(

Hidden information minigame

Had a dig through the GoodGame forums and found some suggestions for ways of attacking your rivals in the upcoming Office Wars game. One suggestion prompted me to build it into a hidden information game akin to the Prisoner's dilemma.

*You and a rival are both invited by your boss to visit his health club and play a few rounds of golf or tennis. Obviously the idea here is to lose convingly enough to boost the boss's ego, while showing up your rival. This could be a mini-game, (in which the object of the game is to challenge your boss and beat your rival but not play well enough to beat your boss), but a simpler idea would be to slip your rival some kind of perfromance enhancing substance, or special sports equipment, so they inadvertantly beat the boss really badly in the game, humiliating them boss and making him angry at your rival.

This could be an interesting blind information game if both you and your rival have to choose beforehand how well you will play (as well as what sabotage to do either to increase or decrease your opponent's ability). To do this you can have the boss challenge each of one individually without the other watching, then he watches both of you play each other. you can't play better in the second match as the boss will then know you went easy on him and ruin his trust in you. The object then is to lose as badly as possible to the boss for maximum boss ego boost, but still beat your rival when going head-to-head so you're seen as second best, not a complete loser.

Presented as a logic puzzle it would be:
Choose a number between 1 and 50 as your start skill and a number between -10 and 10 as a modifier for your opponent. Reveal both numbers simultaneously. The winner is the closest to 25 without going over. Score = amount under 25 you chose minus 10 if you were the lowest number, or minus 25 if you go over 25.

River basins by triangle slope

Doodled around a bit with the river basin algorithm to see if there was a way of embedding both mountain chains and river basins as never-touching trees. Somehow it warped into rivers passing through the side of a triangle while the vertex defined the mountain.

From the doodles it looked like there would always be only one exit from each triangle (almost 100% in real life too) so I hacked up some diagrams in Office to then check out if we can use the slope of the triangle to represent implicitly the exit points. Seems like it works, but certain initial heights will preclude different configurations from forming. Not sure whether it's terminal or not yet ...

Bargara Streetview

Andrew mentioned that Streetview now covers Brisbane, but lo and behold, it's also covering Bargara!

Other places:
Olsen's place
The Basin
Bargara Pub
St Lukes
St Johns Church & School
Bruce Hwy crossing Kolan River
CQUniversity
Matt's turnoff
Greig's Place
Andrew's Place

VR - The way TO the Future

Ever since I made up my handle way back in Uni for a new phenomenon called IRC, I had been taglining my emails with 2 short sentences:
VR - The way OF the Future
VR - The way TO the Future

The capitalisation was important as it outlined my pet philosophy at the time. Virtual reality is definitely going to be the way of the future, unfortunately is still taking longer than I thought. The second part is a little more in depth and I had cornered many a traveller into a conversation about virtual reality as an education medium that is able to change the world as we know it.

At Uni we have been looking at a collaborative assignment on E.Learning futures with a view to submitting the final paper to the Australian government as ideas for Rudd's Digital Education Revolution. It triggered memories of my old philosophy and with a bit of dust blowing I managed to write down my thoughts for merging with the rest of the document. So here's the latest on
VR - The way TO the Future

Lighting fires in UnAngband

Last night I had been rummaging around my pack in UnAngband looking for something to combat the trolls. On closer inspection of the flasks of oil I realised that they would possibly do fire damage if smeared on arrows and my sword. (Don't know why it took me so long to think of it, I'd been dipping my arrows in all sorts of things before). So off I trundle to the forest with oil glistening from every pointy bit.

While searching for trolls a goblin sprang up out of the bushes, to which I immediately ran through with my longsword.
"you have no more arrows (1d6 +0 +0) ".
?? Huh?.
There were a number of other messages, but this one caught my attention. I fobbed it off as something the goblin did and looked for useful things on the ground after the goblin's demise. Nothing but mushrooms. I step over to one and I lose another arrow. WTF??. That's when I 'l'ooked around to find that it wasn't mushrooms I was collecting, but fire. My oil coated longsword not only dispatched the goblin, but lit up a patch of the ground. "hey, that's cool".

I headed off to continue looking for the trolls when I noticed that the fire was following me. Back-tracking to see what was going on revealed that the fire wasn't moving, it was spreading. I'm in a forest. There's grass and trees. There's a fire that's spreading..... Uh Oh ...

I could easily outpace the fire front, but I was concerned at the size it was getting. One whole side of the map was alight. "Hmm", I thought, "I wonder if I can lure the troll into it. Would that still count as a kill?". Off I went through the forest with a swathe of destruction behind me. The message bar was delighted to inform me of unknown creatures meeting their demise in the conflagration. There were still some buildings through the forest and I poked into one to pick up some more potions, but took too long and the fire had me surrounded. If it's a true fire it would burn out eventually, so I rested a while until the message bar stopped with it's death notes. I stepped outside into a charred landscape. It was all gone. Save for a little pile of gold over there ... and a hat over there. Luckily the fire hadn't wiped out all the goodies left behind from its victims.

I spent a while picking up the "profits" of my devastation, but couldn't find a troll statue to signify my main goal had been achieved. It was cool though ....

GameLog 49 & 50

Football Manager 08 (13h) - Gateshead Season 4, 3rd - Half way through the season and we're sitting solidly in 3rd. The team is playing well and the 4 new purchases are delivering both on the field and entertaining the crowd. 2 new strikers have frontlined the attack and even Clarke is fighting for a spot. With good quality up front I've dabbled with a 4-3-3 and it seems to work well against the standard 4-4-2. Both left and right attackers have good penetration, better than the attacking wingers, although the sprints down the sidelines have declined.

We picked up an ageing AM last season not realising he would only be transferred at the start of this season. He's been playing above himself and keeps managing to get on the scoreboard. His fitness keeps him from playing every game, which lead to the formation of the 4-3-3 instead of either 4-3-1-2 or 4-1-3-2. Exited the FA cup in a poor away performance, but we're still in for the trophies. Concentrating on the FA trophy this season so we'll have one of each when we go up to Div2.


World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (7h) - BundyBow, 12 Hunter - Started new characters again with Ben & Levi on Trial accounts. I'd moved over a Drenai hunter into the Night Elf starting area to kick along a bit. Don't know whether Ben will continue on with it or not but at least he's had a solid go now and know what it's about.


UnAngband (7h) - VRBones XVI, 14 Rohan Ranger - After a long chat with Andrew Doull about the inner workings of UnAngband, I've pumped through a couple more characters to test the level generation. There's lots of things i haven't seen before in rougelikes. There's lots of stuff on the floor, but mostly junk (skins, wood piles, etc). Features like cupboards that line the walls and hallways can be searched through to find better items. This adds a lot to the game. With the room descriptions and themed rooms like cloakrooms I found myself playing slower and exploring rather than madly running to the next battle. It doesn't feel too different at the moment, but I'll really miss it if I go back to another rouguelike. To me that's a good quality. I used to advocate strong user interfaces for the same reason. You won't get any extra sales for having an intuitive interface, but once they try it they'll never go back.


Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space (3h) - Inspired by Caffo's GameLog post i had a look at Wierd Worlds. Played pretty well, but seemed lacking compared to what I'm used to with FM08 and UnAngband. The length of game is refreshing, although I really need longer games that grab ahold of you and don't let go until sunrise.


Guitar hero III (4h) - Slowly going through Easy mode 5 starring all the songs. ~4 more to go. One song I had never played before I almost flawlessed it on the first go! Missed the final note! it was a crappy song though, so I was contemplating stuffing it anyway so it wouldn't be the first one I'd flawlessed. Tried Cliffs a couple more times, but I'm missing silly notes. I've been noticing that i play better at the start of a session. Once you cover a couple of different songs you seem to lose your way, even though you can put the guitar down, go have tea, come back and nail it. Very interesting dynamic going on there.


TrackMania Nations Forever (3h) - St Luke's has started back into TMNF for winter sport. Only 2 showed up for the first day so we spent the time looking at some of Matt's track design as well as racing online.


Battle of Tiles (1h) - Scott got past the final dragon to complete it, so I'm probably done now. I don't think I've ever put down a game and knew I wouldn't play it again apart from demos, so I don't believe this game is truly finished, but I'll mark it as such to clean up the list a little. In part that was one of the reasons for starting up the GameLogs last year: To see what games I play and where I got up to.

GH: World Tours for your own songs

I've been debating with Andrew for a while about the differences between Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Tonight we weighed up whether RB2 or GH: World Tour would be the way to go. The problem from my perspective is that Sony is limiting my options with olden days lock-in. Do I fork out for a cross compatible 2nd guitar so that we can co-op in GHIII now and be complete when (if) RB hits our shores? Do I wait out for the new "I've got drums too" GH:WT? The whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth ...

It's a bit weird I'm even labouring over Guitar Hero anyway. If it weren't for Andrew's generous birthday gift I still would have been oblivious to the potential of this game. After a few sessions I began to hum the played songs all the next day, I couldn't get them out of my head. Not just the song, but the beat, the rhythm, the solos. It was ingrained into me. Andrew had noticed the same thing, as had other people I had talked to who had played the game. This is not just listening to music anymore, it's deconstruction, analysis, living the music !

There's a term I'd like to adopt. Live the Music. GH has a knack of getting you into the song more than mere appreciation. If you also happen to like the song it gels so well that it's a glorious experience. I never would have guessed I would enjoy this game so much because I thought it was targeted at the wannabe rockstars ala MovieWorld. But it's more than that. It encourages you to break down the songs, to understand an off tempo solo section by analysing why you keep missing certain notes, keeping the beat and feeling the energy change in the song, humming purely the downbeats. I had never heard of Cliffs of Dover before playing it, but I distinctly remember 1/2 way through thinking that I really like this song. The more I played it the more I loved it. It made me google up who the artist was, why was it in the hardest bracket? and OMGWTF!!@!
I've never done that for any song in the last 10 years.

So where's the next step? If this is such a great experience (not quite front row concert but better than listening to it) why aren't new songs being pumped out all over the place for free so you'd try them out? I'd certainly play through some freely downloadables (like the Dropkick Murphy's ones) just for the fun of it, but if there were more I'm sure there'd be another Cliffs of Dover experience in there. A new "Live" album or REM. Man, "New adventures in sound" was hard to get into but incredibly rewarding. How much better would it have been going through that experience in GH? So why aren't there millions of songs out there? If I were a record label and had played the game it would be obvious that it's the replacement for radio. I'm guessing they just don't play.

Rock Band on the other hand looks like it's moved on. It's still not songs, songs everywhere, but it's certainly getting there. It feels like they are one step ahead at this point and that they can see what the final goal is, just not able to break through the music industry chaff. Neversoft, on the other hand, still seem to be stuck under the maintenance of the franchise rather than sallying forth to rewrite the rules. The initial GH:World Tour pack just looked like a catchup move. That's when I saw the trailer:



O.M.G.
Make your own song anyone?
Why bother waiting for the music industry to "see the light" when you can have a million people churning out songs faster than sporn. That's it. Game over.

The only thing will be whether the game can cope with sorting and organising all the content into useful ways like spore doesn't. A system akin to LastFM would be a nice start.