Games of the year

That was ... wierd. I just finished voting in the AusGamers game of the year and, although I've played well over 50 different games this year, I found myself skipping almost all the categories. Shooters? Nup, only TF2 needs to be on my rotation to get my fill. Racing? Lots of that, but GT5 is leaving a sour taste in my mouth, and TM Nations is the only one I've been constantly going back to. Handhelds? No iPhone games in the list, and too many to really pull one out (maybe NinJump, but that's really because it's currently in the frontal cortex).

One thing I did notice was that of the AAA games I did own that made the list I felt a little underwhelmed by, which makes giving the nod to a game I didn't even buy seem overly optimistic about how they play too.

I felt the same way when surveying the roguelike game of the year voting over at ASCII Dreams. I played a handful, but really didn't have a standout apart from returning to the well of Dwarf Fortress again and again.

Maybe it's the whole indie scene that gets game of the year?

In a couple more days I'll do a time based summary of the year by tallying up the GameLogs. I'm of the opinion that the game that can keep my attention the longest is as likely a candidate as any for GotY. I'm guessing League of Legends will be one of the frontrunners, and I'm happy with that.

AR Drone

MUST... BUY... !!!
.. Sandy says no :(

GameLog 175 & 176

Dawn of War II - Chaos rising (27h) - Picked up an 8 pack for all & sundry. Played through the first mission of the expansion beofre realising I'd rather go back and build up my chars through the original scenario. Just about complete now with most above the level 18 starting level for new chars in Chaos Rising. Winning most abattles , although somewhhat slowly, but losing defense missions badly. Finally got terminatr armour and that made the difference. Played a couple of Last Stand and comp-stomp multiplayer games too.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (18h) - Got very annoyed that the expansion had to download an additional 4Gb the day before it released (meaning ~10Gb for the month and additional limits paid for), then found out that it didn't come with any game time, then missed the launch because the login client wasn't responding. All in all a very poor launch and took the edge off my enthusiasm to get back into the game. Later on I found myself getting tired well before midnight. Not an obvious sign, but I usually have to wrench myself away from games to get to sleep by 2ish, so to me it means that the gameplay just isn't there anymore. It's definitely worth it for the co-op play with Sandy, but I give it a month, maybe 2.

Dwarf Fortress (8h) - New fortress on the laptop to take into work: Fleshymines

Patrician 4 (7h) - Steam sale. Plays pretty slowly and found myself falling asleep, or wondering what else is on sale.


Gran Turismo 5 (3h) -Finally got the wheel, but it's not that big of a difference. Couldn't get anywhere near my time on the Top Gear Elise challenge, but at least I wasn't sliding all over the place. Loading times are a killer though. They are long enough to look for other things to do, like flip over to TV, or play DF on the laptop.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - More matching mayhem.

Various Facebook games (5h) - After the lament about facebook games and the development of Notorious, I spent a while looking through lots of different facebook games for something with gameplay. Anything. Backyard monsters looked pretty interesting and very similar in concept to notorious, apart from being stuck in a number of FB tropes. Kongregate is still looking like the place for innovative games, but the just aren't making the transition to FB, or the search / broadcast is so weak that I'm not finding them.

A thing for Hematite

Ebalromek, "The Revered Length", a hematite coffer
This is a Hematite coffer. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with hematite. This object menaces with spikes of hematite. On the item is an image of "The Revered Length" the hematite coffer in hematite.

Wow, this dwarf had a thing for hematite ... and recursion.

Playing through Dwarf Fortress again as a lunchfiller at work and after losing 2 dwarves to madness, I finally have an artifact to grace the halls. We have a population of over 50 at the moment and are just getting into our second year at "Fleshymines".

There's been a little altercation with goblin thieves with VERY sharp knives (resulting in a number of reduced appendage dwarves), but apart from that it's been going pretty well. Managed to get an underground farm working fairly quickly as well as most initial services. There's only been one caravan so far though, so there's masses of mechanisms and toys clogging up the place. Opened out a large cavern directly under the trade depot so that most stuff is within easy hauling distance when one finally arrives.

Our position is slightly elevated abover the river too, so I managed to dig out an underground channel at river level to a spot under the new dining hall. Hit an aquifer layer on that level (and possibly higher) too, so the new hall has both aquifer and channeled in fresh water.

A couple of ghosts are making a nuisance of themselves so I might have to make a new area for burial. I wonder if they like recursion too?

Notorious

Concept
A game where you build dungeons, raid the locals, and fend off heroes to become the most notorious in the land.

Facebook implementation:
The problem with most new games is that they either follow the social obligation path of Farmville or the energy-as-limitation with artificial missions akin to Mafia wars. I want to design a game where the interaction between players is a little more meaningful, and the interaction with the game is not as artificially limiting.

Even though the digging out of dungeons and conducting of raids takes time, the planning is freely available at any time, as well as the interaction with other dungeons through heroes and the rumour system. Matters still need to be addressed as things may not go to plan on the raids, diggers may strike unknown obstacles (monster pits / gold veins), or new areas need to be designated once dug out. There should be enough activity for new players and invested players to be able to play as long as they like, but players seeking only small doses of fun can still plan out a fair way into the future, and also have many things to do when returning from a period of time away.

Most monster contracts and built areas are designed to be replenished over time, so the dungeon will settle about a certain level of notoriety if left alone for an extended period. Heroes will attempt the dungeon at somewhat regular intervals (~1/2 hr?), and non-returning heroes will raise the notoriety of the dungeon, which in turn inspires higher level heroes to attempt the dungeon. Once a high enough hero comes through to wipe out all the monsters and take most of the gold / equipment away, the notoriety drops so that minor heroes will attempt it next time.

Things to do
Build a Dungeon
Conduct Raids
Hire Mercenaries
Buy / Sell Equipment
Ransom Prisoners
Bribe Heroes
Listen to Rumours / Spread Rumours
Replay events
View Highscores

Build Dungeon
- Pick starting location (allow restart / multiple dungeons?)
- Designate areas to be mined out
- Designate a room (Storage / bedroom / training room / patrol room / eating / vault)
- Start with dirt around entrance, but get into different types of stone further in, with gold / gem seams / caves / ravines / streams. Stone needs mining equipment and a lot more time to get through. Gold seams could take a long time to go through, so they provide a steady source of income

Conduct Raids
- Capture prisoners. Designate prison areas. If area contains digging designations, prisoners will also dig. Each prisoner has a name / occupation and a bounty that is used for notoriety
- Target equipment / gold
- Spreading chaos. Raises Notoriety. Increases happiness for chaos creatures.
- present 3 targets with easy / medium / hard options. Give percentage chance for success, appproximate time to get there and approximate rewards.

Hire Mercenaries
- Set up contract with goblin camp to provide up to 5 goblins at 1 per hr for a wage of 5 gold per hr each.
- Contract with a Troll for modest lodgings and 40% of all loot found
- Mercs will take wage from whatever drops, or through trips to the vault. No payment angers mercs, granting greater autonomy to take their payment through other means.
- If mercenaries level up while in base, you can attempt to offer them individual contracts
- Provide a choice of 3-5 contracts at the "villians'r'us" trader. Go between for nefarious rulers of the world
- Make names and random stats for mercs. Light hearted like Majesty.

Buy / Sell Equipment
- Purchase goods through middle man
- Sell manufactured items and old items from heroes to black market

Ransom Prisoners
- Negotiate through ransom broker
- Ransom for prisoners continues to rise from their base level (set by profession/level), giving bigger rewards, more notoriety, but also more incentive for heroes.

Bribe Heroes
- Pay minimal cost to cast spell of seeing on hero so that you can observe what someone's dungeon setup is like.
- Can organise a more tougher hero than the dungeon warrants if you pay the difference. This should allow even level 1-2 players to see what a level 20 dungeon is like from both the hero and dungeon creators perspective. Negotiate deal to split profits for upfront cost.
- Cast spell of control to give player the choices the hero would have automatically made. (Move to grid coord / fight / search / free prisoner)

Listen to Rumours / Spread Rumours
- Find out what townsfolk have to say about your dungeon. Multiple perspectives available to hear different variants, plus a general consensus of notoriety.
- Choose rumours by dungeon (player) / monster / town / hero / prisoner / rumour type
- Heroes use the rumour system to pick their next targets.
- Information leaks through public interaction of your dungeon with the town, as well as returning heroes.
- Spread rumours allows the player to either agree or disagree with certain rumours (through a conversation with townsfolk, with chance of them believing) or make their own rumours up. Allows the user to control the notoriety of their dungeon (and other people's dungeons) and tailor the types and level of heroes that attempt to take on their dungeon.


Replay events
- review events hapening in your dungeon since you were away
- sort by time / level of importance / characters involved / room involved

View Highscores
- sort by highest level of hero killed (main criteria) / current notoriety /notoriety change / rumoured wealth / rumoured size

GameLog 173 & 174

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon (40h) - More Philip campaign stretching all the way down to Athenia, and more east toward the second port city needed for boats. Seemed to get bogged down in constantly monitoring 5 battles at once, but eventually it didn't seem to be too much of a callenge with phalanx and cavalry ruling everything else.

Gran Turismo 5 (10h) - Ordered a new force feedback wheel for this one when I pre-ordered a week ago, but the wheel still isn't here :/. Plays Ok on controller, but there seems to be no real direction as to what cars you should (or shouldn't) be using for the next challenge. What it really needs is a way to filter all cars in the dealership and 2nd-hand lot according to a challenge. Even worse, future challenges don't even show you what the requirements are until you're the right level :(. The game also is unbearably slow between races, even after clearing 8Gb on the HDD to "speed up loads". I didn't notice that much speed up. Lucky the Cricket was on at the same time and I could catch up with the score while it all loaded up in the background.


Bejewelled Blitz (3h) - More matching mayhem. New catseye gem is a bit weird. Way more powerful than the moonstone gem that seems to have dissappeared, and as it's shareable you can also more or less trigger it when you want rather than hoping a lucky moonstone lands when you have the cash to use it. I'm predicting scores approaching 1 million with cateye, although I've only got up to ~550K using it with other multipliers.

Team Fortress 2 (2h) - Twiddling time waiting for GT5 and Cataclysm to hit. Going through some of the older stuff as it might be a long time until they see the light of day.

MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers (1h) - Another twiddler. Not sure why I put this one down, but after a few games I remembered the arbitrary nature of the interface. Almost always feels sluggish until you WANT to cast an interrupt, then there's no time at all. Lucky I didn't lose a game because of it, but it was frustratingly close.

Civilization 5 (1h) - Loaded up some uploaded scenarios and I finally found how to trigger the 'scenario' button, but they still seem end immediately with no opponents.

Ravenwood Fair (1h) - I'd heard that Romero was developing a facebook game, but was incredibly dissappointed to find it's another Farmville clone. In frustration I also dug through some more games and for the explosion that Zynga had back a couple of years ago, there's bugger all available. There seems to be either farmville clones, mafia wars clones, or travian-like web games shoehorned into the facebook juggernaut. Really dissappointed. I'm hoping Sid Meier can do better.

The lament had me put some time into designing a new game that allows a different type of social player interaction. Like all my games it's probably never going to get past the design stage, so I'll publish it up here once I've fleshed out the idea.

60Gb internode plan

After lamenting the previous internode offerings while mired deep inside Telstra's price squeeze, Internode have finally released their new plans for people still on the Telstra monopolized DSLAMs. Well, they're awesome. Going from $70 per month down to $60 per month and going up from 20Gb, to ~50Gb (60Gb, but measuring down and up traffic would equate to ~50Gb down for me).

In Simon Hackett's rant about the Telstra price squeeze, there's one thing that is painfully obvious:

This situation also underscores that a key and critical requirement for the future National Broadband Network, in whatever form it takes, which is that there is an ironclad legal requirement that the NBN Company must only be a wholesale provider – that it must not directly offer retail services to consumers.

Moodle 2.0 presentaion

Found a link to Martin's recent talk to a polish MoodleMoot on the new featuress of Moodle 2.0.

One of the main features that has me excited are the community hubs. Not only will it be easier to see good moodle courses, but I believe it quite possibly could be the silver bullet to bring about my vision of the future of education. The key will be to establish a framework of authorative tags to represent the skills that the course will teach, and the skills required for entry to the course. Once these are in place, there will be both an open market available using community sites (from the community hub model) and the easy contribution to the market by publishing sites. Even the ability of creating your own hub will mean that there doesn't need to be an authorative global tagging system. Each authority (Eg: Queensland Studies Authority, or the approaching national curriculum) can establish their own hub of approved courses, and set their own tagging practice up to allow the courses to merge seamlessly.

We're living / teaching in exciting times!

[Edit] More links
Community hub discussion
Learning Object Metadata
Australian Classifiication for Education standard (used in Moodle)

USB memory sticks are good for transfer, bad for storage

Here in the IT department we would get on average a student a week with problems accessing their stored files on a memory stick. They are almost always attempting to retrieve a critical file for an assignment or presentation due today. Even though we have many options to recover damaged files, over half are simply not recoverable due to physical damage to the memory stick. Put simply, they die. Often.

The great thing about memory sticks is that they are very portable, and have a relatively good transfer rate. This makes them excellent choices to transfer files from one computer to another (Eg: from school to home), but their unreliability means that they are poor choices to store data for an extended period of time.

To offset this unreliability, it is recommended that you copy files to and from your memory stick, but never run or edit anything on it. Here’s an example:

Fred has started work on an assignment at school. He finishes up for the lesson and saves the file to his ‘My documents’ drive located on the server. He wants to continue working at home, so he manually copies the file to his memory stick. That night Fred wishes to continue work and inserts his memory stick. Instead of working directly on the file, he copies it to the desktop or an allocated space on the hard disk. From there he can work quickly and effectively on the file. Once finished he can then copy back the updated file onto the memory stick, possibly renaming it to another version. At school the next day, Fred continues his assignment by copying the previous night’s file onto his ‘My Documents’ drive and working on it from there.

In this example, the assignment will exist in multiple locations and have multiple versions. If at any point the memory stick dies, or even the home computer or school computers become inaccessible, the file will be recoverable with a maximum of a few hours of work lost. For times when you REALLY need that file, even copying it to multiple memory sticks is a wise choice. They don’t need to be super expensive, anything in the ~$10-$20 range should be sufficient for a simple transfer.

GameLog 171 & 172

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon (40h) - New steam pickup while waiting for GT5 and Cataclysm to hit. Very polished for a 5-man indie title, and has a good historical feel along with open ended play. Replaced it with Hegemony gold alpha as it handled a slower pace of recruits. Means less troop for me, but mainly allows taking out enemies in pitched battles then having time to siege the city before they regenerate. Still trying to come to terms with utilizing the population effectively between offense and defense, but at least it makes for an interesting game.

Currently playing through the Philip campaign and have pushed back the Illyrians out of Diabolis and the Athenians almost back to the Thermopylae pass. Hopefully I can sweep up north and force the Illyrians into submission, then swing onto the peonians before moving east. Not sure whether I push further down the greek peninsula. Don't have ships yet and Athens is already raiding my shorline back near the capital

Civilization 5 (25h) - Finished off the emperor Mongol scenario in under 60 turns. Downloaded scenarios don't seem to be working? A little more on the Terra Australis map.

Dungeons and Dragons Online (6h) - Already picked up Cataclysm, but this was an interesting diversion to get back into the MMO space.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - Free multiplier weekend ended with a new record: 626,100