Topia Online

You ought to. He's just said you were talking out of your arse.

You know, somehow... somehow, I don't think that's gonna happen.

You're banned now but you're probably still reading, so I want to say thanks for switching to italics for emphasis. Besides being the correct thing to do, it looks much nicer. And Gnu was using his own italics for emphasis, not to mock yours. He was mocking the content of your post.

I'm sorry to hear that you're so jaded when it comes to the gaming industry. Then again, considering the quality (or canned quality) of most professionally funded MMOs, I can't really blame you. All I can really say is that while I understand not agreeing with a feature list, or certain aspects of gameplay, outright claiming that this project is "vaporware" is ridiculous. Our funding is simply to speed up the development of the game by hiring additional coders and getting a steady art asset pipeline in place. We can and will finish it ourselves if we don't meet our fundraising goals. We can and will deliver this game to the MMO community. It won't be for everyone, but we anticipate a niche community (and hopefully will attract those not interested in a sandbox MMO per se, but rather who are interested in the scripting aspect of the game).

At any rate, I'm not really sure what this thread turned into - Zen asked me to clarify a few things about the project, and I've done so. If anyone would like to ask more questions about Topia or its development, feel free to drop by in IRC - channel #TopiaOnline on quakenet.org.

I'm also available on Skype, and we have some community organized conversations going from time to time. You're all more than welcome to stop by and participate, either with criticism or inquiry. :)

You're not my virtual dad!

*runs to bedroom, slams door, continues doodling design document for Paultopia Online: Virtual rEVOLution in notebook while pouting on bed*

I guess being civil was too much of a stretch

AND HE DIDN'T EVEN QUOTE MY ITALICS RIGHT ASDLKJFDSF

Honestly, I was willing to give the project a second look and hope that at least something comes of it, but his answers seem similar to everyone else's when people ask about the seemingly toxic combination of features and get little more back than "It'll work, we promise!" I'm sure the game may well be a heck of a lot of fun on their low-load canned server full of good-intentioned beta testers, but I can't see it as any more than a ten-headed beast once it's in bigger hands.

edit: I realize that post quoting probably doesn't inverse the italics, but my undying grammar rage runs free.

Thank god he didn't call us Christmas Shoes, he might've really felt some pain from that.

That's a really good observation. I've personally only really enjoyed total open world PvP while playing beta states. Once you let the Goons in (no offense, Goons), it's all over. They'll (not just the Goons, but all goons), will kill your game as the ultimate PvP.

But the Wolf/Sheep discussion has been had, hasn't it?

My own observation? Human competitive interactions need referees. Not just to enforce some arbitrary "rules," but to keep people from hacking the game to the point of destruction. It's just that MMOs have far too many players to referees to be effective in stopping the madness once it sets in, and they *always* take too long to act on problem areas.

Solutions? There actually might be some good ones out there, unimplemented. Perhaps something like League of Legends player moderated system. I don't play LoL so somebody else might want to give a better run-down of the system, but a friend of mine who does play and actively take part in the player courts (or whatever they're called) swears by it.

But there has to be some quick way for reports of game-breaking activities to be quickly judged and acted upon for any large scale PvP to be anything more than a niche of a niche.

However, I say again, as long as you know you're aiming at a niche, and you make that niche happy, even just a few thousand regular customers can make you some bucks.

Eve online has had goon presence for YEARS and managed them successfully. Don't forget Eve is a MMO with hardcore non-consensual pvp anywhere -- ie what people in this thread don't believe is workable design in the modern MMO market.

So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the pvp design, at least up to the "deleting servers" bit.

I knew we were missing something.

wwwwwwweeeeeeeeelllllllllll not quite. Yes, you can be suicide ganked. It's a very rare occurrence. High-sec is where the vast majority of the player base stays in near-perfect safety.

If the concept of high-sec didn't exist, neither would EVE.

The Bitcoin community, then?

I want to see it too, on the market and all!

I have playable prototypes (no shit, you can hop in and play. Well, you can't, but I can) of two games at a state where it's actually playable in the sense that you're playing a game that feels like a game, not an exercise in shoving your dick into a meatgrinder, which is there the third one is. I'm continuing to work on both, of course, but there's literally pages and pages of little things I need to do, need to research, need to figure out how to implement, etc before I get around to the big stuff, which is primarily dropping a couple thousand dollars on paying an artist (I even know who I want, and she's said she's game to do it for two grand) to do the art for a Kickstarter. That'll cover a fully rigged model (for the main character), a couple of posters, some stills of the various foes, concept art for promotional materials, and the backdrops / basic work on the other characters.

The Kickstarter wouldn't have to pull a profit, and as long as it covered all of the monetary costs of making the game I'd be perfectly content with it. Not that I'd turn down a hundred thousand dollars in sales, mind you; I just don't think it'll happen, nor am I reliant upon it, because I have a day job working as a sysadmin in a San Francisco startup. So I'll probably do silly things like open source my code, for example.

That's for the one project. The other is a lot simpler, but the basic gameplay (while still fun to me) needs a lot of work before it appeals to anyone who doesn't enjoy playing Minesweeper on Expert without flagging mines, or other masochistic exercises in constraint solving. It also needs a reliable, programmatic way to generate playable, uniquely-solvable level maps. Both of those problems are both non-trivial and essentially creative, so they're not the kind of thing I can force a solution to; I just have to keep working on it here and there and hope that I can figure it out. But the priority is on the first game.

(There's also a third game, but it's totally unsuitable for a first effort. It requires server infrastructure and a lot more work than either of the other two. I'd like to start small, y'know?)

Tell us more about your games/life in this thread Aaron.

For that, you'll have to hit up the Random Thoughts thread. This is the thread where Kruniac asked to see my project! That over there is the thread where I overshare about my life in general.

Man, someone from the old corpnews crowd shows up again and before I realize it he's banned :(. Miss ya, Troy.

But about that game, well, best of luck to the developers or lack thereof, they're going to need it.

Well clearly an indie dev knows something those highly paid emotionless robots and bean counters in the industry don't, I mean look at all that kickstarter money!

I don't think Kruniac deserves any snark.

I forget where/when, but someone on Qt3 was being very abrasive and gung-ho about a game in development and took criticisms very personally until the developer stepped into the thread and tried to sway the discussion back to a tone of constructive feedback. It's not uncommon now for an indie developer to have relationships with fans who feel like they're part of the process of development, who want to spread the word about a game they're enthusiastic about, and who then go a little overboard in selling a product they don't actually have any stake in.

A developer jumping into a BF thread is a good thing, even if it was at the request of the original overly-defensive party.

Where's Raph Koster, Mark Jacobs and Richard Garriott when you need them? ;-)

Will I regularly be forced to guess which of several equally-likely configurations is the correct one at the end? Because if not, I can probably live without being able to mark off incorrect moves.

The difficulty in generating playable "boards", if you will, is in ensuring that there is always at least one non-guessing path to finding the unique solution for that board. :)

Well, looking at the example of Minesweeper, the problem never occurs (at least, not in my memory) on Beginner or Intermediate, which leads me to believe that the likelihood of a guessing situation occurring is directly related to the density of the mines (which, unfortunately, is also the main measure of difficulty). I could probably prove this mathematically if I weren't so lazy. The easy kludge here is to just give the player some kind of probe which will allow him one free guess, perhaps at a time penalty, but this is both not guaranteed to resolve the situation and is, well, kind of lame.

The problem does occur on Intermediate with a reasonable level of incidence. It doesn't occur on Beginner because density is practically nonexistent.

The main measure of difficulty should properly be the average and maximum number of steps of inference it takes to solve the board without guessing. Picture this:

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 2
- 1

This has zero degrees of inference. Simply by observing the 3, we can fill in information. Compare with this:

- 1
- 1
- 1
- 2
- 1

This has one degree of inference. We take the constraint from the lowermost tile (that only one of the two adjacent tiles is a mine) and apply it to the one above it (that precisely 2 of the three adjacent tiles are mines). This allows us to conclude that the tile to the top left of the 2 must be a mine.

This works as a model of difficulty for pattern and constraint solving problems such as Minesweeper. However, building boards with a unique solution that are guaranteeably solvable without guessing in <= N steps of inference is hard. Well, hard to do in any reasonable period of time; I can't throw a year's worth of cluster computing at the project.

For human players, though, not all inferences are created equal. People typically learn the type you show in your second example fairly quickly, but it often takes them longer to learn to do it without the boundary, and quite a few people never figure out that you can clear the three spaces marked 'x' in the following shape:
- - 1
x - 1
x 1 1
x - 1
- - 1

Is that so? That sort of thing seems super obvious to me. Probably another reason why people who have playtested it don't find it enjoyable or interesting, except for the logicians and computer engineers. :)

So did the game Zen was pitching get into super-successful beta on schedule? Is he even now laughing at the ignorant villagers who didn't believe?

So...cancelled KS, but I guess they are just taking pledges from their own website now? (According to the KS) Which is of course, a great way to get around giving KS any of the money, or not getting any of the money if you don't make your goal.

Also, and this is a bit douchey, so I hesitate to bring it up, since they Developers don't seem like evil douches, but by moving away from KS and doing it themselves, they never have to worry about giving the money back for failing to deliver a product.

AaronSofaer: Just make a damned "Your for fun projects" or "Game Dev" thread already, your stuff doesn't deserve to be buried under some obtuse Topia online thread.

I'm late to the party but I am totally fascinated by the use of the phrase "over 16 different creatures already planned!"

I appreciate the sentiment, but I only posted about them to make a point; to wit, that I have things I'm working on, but they're small scale, because taking a small dev team and doing something large scale is stupid.

I'll probably post about them somewhere more relevant when they're actually at a place worth talking about.

Well, keep in mind that the game has no NPCs, so that's more like 16 different playable races.

Okay, I actually read this thread and the KS. From the KS:

Goon Target Goal #1 located.

That's pretty niche. Plus (from the KS) it looks like Topia Online is going to be heavily dependent on player created content like that scripting to keep things ticking along. Which is just asking for Goon Target Goal #2 to be something like, "Implement script bombs for maximum lols".

Dongcopters that kill servers, goal #3

So basically, Second Life redux?

(i was going to add "minus the furries" but then between the 16 already planned creatures and player-scripted content someone will find the way)

Furries always do!