my brain hurts!

[Marksman45]

I've been learning to program in Java... my brain hurts.

It hurts less than it did when I was learning C++, but more than when I was learning BASIC. Java makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than those other two, though.

Yesterday, I was coding and I broke the IDE (Integrated Developing Environment; a program that you use to develop programs). It starting throwing exception errors and finally crashed... I had to re-install it. Although I'm sure (on the rational plane) that my coding had nothing to do with it (it was probably due to corrupted files somewhere), it still felt kind of like breaking a mirror with my reflection.

I'm currently struggling to create a program that emulates a table-top "adventure simulation" game that I've been designing for 6 years. It has 6 years worth of complexity, so I'm starting small, just making a program that tracks the (multitudinous) statistics and makes the (complex) calculations for combat resolution (in the simplest of all possible combat situations: two people punching eachother until one is killed or otherwise rendered unable to fight). The various other character behaviors, tactical map displays, and more abstract features are going to have to wait until my brain hurts less.

But anyway, coding is eating up most of my free time, and probably will continue to do so until I run into a snag and run out of ideas... so I'll probably be scarce around here. Not lobstering, just scarce :)

[stilltrucking]

Good luck Mars. with your adventure game. It sounds like a Duesey.

http://www.secondchancegarage.com/public/227.cfm

Adventure games are cool as heck. Is there any combat in yours?

Here I go off on a tangent again.


Do you think violent video games could be an escape valve for mankind's killer instincts? the conventional wisdom is that they cause more violence.


I wonder if anyone has a combat game where you sneak up behind people and slug them? I was never much for face to face combat. You can get hurt that way. I like this new push button warfare. Kill from miles away. No muss no fuss. No blood stains on your clothes.

http://www.livingstonemusic.net/iraqraid.htm

I hear thunder, my roof is shaking. A storm is coming. It is better than the Southern Pacific. Oh my gosh, the southern pacific is coming on too. Heaven is a train on a rainy spirng night with thunder and flashes of lighning

[Marksman45]

Yeah, there's combat in my game, but the players are actually encouraged to avoid it when possible, because it's as dangerous as real combat. You go in against some guy with a sword, and you can end up losing an arm (or even a head).


Some of my favorite video games are rather violent... For instance, the "Twisted Metal" series, in which you drive a car equipped with a variety of weaponry and try to blow up all the other cars, which are also armed. Or "War of the Monsters," in which you control a giant B-movie type monster and fight with other giant monsters for dominance, smashing cities in the process. Or the "SoulCalibur" series, which consists of one-on-one duels between people wielding all sorts of melee weapons (although there is no blood&gore, so the game isn't considered as violent as, say, the "Mortal Kombat" series). Or "Red Dead Revolver," where you shoot outlaws in a spaghetti Western type setting (with a Sam Peckinpah level of blood).

The idea that violent games produce more violence is completely ridiculous. That's what they used to say about comics, and before that, pulp fiction. There may be some people who cannot help but be impressioned by such things, but those people are not sane.
You know, in Germany violent video games are drastically censored. They are not allowed to show any violence against human beings, so all humans that get killed have to be replaced with zombies, aliens, or robots, and any blood must be changed from red to something like green or yellow. In other art forms, censorship is not allowed, but games don't get the status of "art" in Germany (with which I disagree strongly; video games are most certainly an art form. It's an art form that hasn't produced its "Citizen Kane" yet -- it's still producing "Nosferatu"s and "Metropolis"es -- but it's still an artform).

Could video games be an escape valve for mankinds killer instincts? I don't know. I *do* know that people like to smash things, and I think that providing a non-destructive way for people to smash things is a good idea.
But even the most violent video games are actually exercises in tactics, strategy, critical thinking, and hand-to-eye coordination, which are things that I support the development of.

And yes, they do have a combat game where you sneak up behind people and slug them. There's a game for the PlayStation2 console called "Manhunt" that could be described that way. Its violence (although actually mostly *implied*) is quite disturbing. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_%28video_game%29 )



And that is a really cool car. I'm gonna have to put that into my game, once I get around to implementing automobiles. Oh, by the way, this game that I'm working on is about The Rustbelt. The premise of it is that you take on the role of an adventurer in the Rustbelt and try to have a successful (and non-fatal) career.

[stilltrucking]

I got to make my head hurt too. Either that or let my brain fossilize. I am thinking about going back to school as an English major with a minor in philosophy. What the hell is parallel sentence structure? I put the picture of the car up because I wondered if you would know what I meant by a Duesey. That was high praise back in my youth.

I hope I get to see your game someday. I used to like playing Prince of Persia. That was about as violent as I could stand.

I like the idea that combat is optional.

[Arcadia]

good luck! java, nice name. I can only plug the computer, press enter, ctrl plus alt plus supr and F2 most of the time... I´m not a video-player-generation, but my Utah cousin send me this one and I do score 4 in the first try!!!

http://www.imgag.com/product/full/ap/30 ... aphic1.swf

(after twenty years of reading and listening politic-humor I already know why I can´t laugh at these things anymore...)

[Marksman45]

Wow, is that car the origin of that phrase? When people say "that's a doozy," do they actually mean "Duesey" without realizing it?

The description of "adventure simulation" for my game I came up with fairly recently. I used to describe it as a role-playing game, but I realized that was innaccurate; it involves character investment & development (that is, you create a character whose skill and ability grows over the process of the game), but it is not, unlike RPGs, centered around a story. In fact, it's centered around the lack of a story. The objective is to go on adventures and discover and collect as much loot as you can without dying (which is also the same objective as the Atari classic <i>Pitfall!</i>, which is one of my favorite games). The exploration and survival (including combat, if it comes to that) are fleshed out with intricate statistical models, and that's where the "simulation" part comes from. It's a game that simulates adventures.

More recently, I discovered that the phrase "adventure simulation" had been used before to describe a video game, or rather an entire series of video games, the <i>Oregon Trail</i> series, which were, indeed, simulations of adventure (<i>Oregon Trail Deluxe</i> in particular is also one of my favorite games)

The first version of my game that will be completely contained within the program will feature ASCII graphics much like a roguelike game. Which means that graphics will be abstracted to various text characters, which requires imagination (much like reading a book vs. watching a movie). This also means that the only violence will be in written descriptions, and as such, just how "violent" it is can be debated. (I'm pretty good at writing graphic descriptions of violence, though, as evidenced in many/most of my Rustbelt stories)
This also means that combat will be more like a much more complex version of chess -- in fact, it will be turn based, and as such be strictly a tactical & strategic exercise, requiring no finger-twitching to survive... just the ability to keep track of a pretty large system of statistics + a simple tactical map, management of resources, and making tactical choices based on those elements.

(For future versions of the game, I plan to include simple semi-animated cutscenes of comic book-style drawings for particularly spectacular moments of gameplay, including combat maneuvers that could be described, as our Sober Duck would say, as <i>mythotical</i>)