Virtual Femme

Football season has started, so this seemed like a good topic for a blog.  Okay, I really don’t have the perfect advice to make your wife love football because I honestly don’t know anything about you or your wife.  Maybe she knew someone who died in a football game, so she’ll always hate it.  I won’t be able to help you there.  In fact, I’m just going to tell you how I came to love football, much to my husband’s joy.

My husband is a huge college football fan, and we actually used to live in his favorite team’s hometown.  I think that if we hadn’t moved away, I’d probably never come to love his team.  It was just way too in-your-face anywhere we went, and honestly, I didn’t understand the game.  If I’d stayed where I was, I probably never would have wanted to learn the game.   Part of the problem with football, at least for me, was that there was simply so much dead-time, and none of the positions seemed to make sense.  It really looked like the ball got snapped, and everyone ran around until someone got knocked down.  To me, it was just a chaotic mess of men, a ball, and some grass.  How did it all change?

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I’m flexing my story-telling muscles again and giving the world of Primordiax a test run via a Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition campaign.   So, while I should be blogging about world building and storytelling, I’m going to blog about an amazing gaming table - possibly the ultimate gaming table - that was sent to me by one of the other players in my group.  Prepare yourself for the hefty price tag of nearly $10,000 for this table.

My first reaction to the table was probably pretty normal: W-T-F.  WTF!!!  Who would pay $10,000 used for throwing some dice and moving a few figures around?  Someone crazy, that’s who!   Then I took a look at the actual table - dubbed the Sultan- which is brought to us by Geek Chic, and my next reaction was, “Wow! I want one of those.”  Of course, the price tag will prevent me from having one except for in my dreams, but I bet that Geek Chic will sell a few of these.

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“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else; hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”

– Lucille Ball

People often ask me how I get my inspiration for my writings.  Sometimes things come to me as I’m driving around, taking a shower, or cooking.  More often than not, I am inspired by other artists: authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, film makers, and architects.  The key for receiving inspiration is to constantly receptive to input with the game or area I’m designing in mind.

Books serve as one of my favorite sources of inspiration.  My job is to paint vivid pictures in people’s head and give them enough to create something of their own via role-playing.  An author’s job is to draw people into their world and characters in order to ignite our imaginations.   We’ve got very similar tasks.  When I read a book, I always have the nuggets of future areas or instances in mind, and sooner or later, I’ll run into something – a turn of phrase, a vivid scene – that sparks my imagination for an instance.

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I am a gigantic fan of seamless, realistic worlds. In the old days of multi-user dungeons (MUDs), players would always start in a central city, and devs simply tacked on cool areas onto it. There really was very little rhyme or reason when it came to world and area design. “That’s cool!” became the standard of which new areas got implemented and “This seems like a good spot!” was the mantra for where the area got added.

Things are a bit different now in worlds where roleplaying is required. While most players can admirably suspend disbelief and take the world as its given, roleplaying becomes far more easy when the world is as believable as possible as well as basically correct when it comes to details. The average roleplayer playing a text game does a fair amount of reading, and they possess a good deal of information on various topics. When a detail runs contrary to what they know to be true, players are jarred out of their state of suspended disbelief, and they have a “WHAT?” moment. So, designing areas and instances in a roleplaying game requires at least rudimentary research in whatever type of area I’m building unless it is purely fantastical.

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Quantifying any day-to-day activity into game mechanics is an extremely difficult endeavor. Simple actions that we take for granted can create a coding nightmare. For example, most of us probably take making change for granted. We use increasingly smaller denominations of coin to make exact change. This is something most of us learn in grade school. How do you write code to make change, though, assuming that you have differentiated currency? Think about that for a bit. You would first start by simplifying the currency. Most games go with a coin system that is a factor of 10 in some way. Either 100 of a type of coin creates the next type or 1000 of one coin creates the next type. Then, to make change, it’s simply a matter of division and subtraction.

Now take something much more complicated than making change like cooking. In one simple stir fry, I may use up to 10 ingredients and 3-4 utensils without thinking twice about it. I cut, cube, stir, toss, season and taste before I’m done with one dish, and I may cook 3-4 dishes a meal. Of course, give my husband the same ingredients, tools, and time, and he’d probably produce a charred lump of something inedible. In a roleplaying game, the goal is to make the process believable but not cumbersome, fun and yet challenging. How do you streamline something as difficult as cooking?

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One of the things I love most about world building is researching the areas that I’m about to create.  Currently, I’m working on one of our thirty-eight biomes, specifically savannas, and I’m having a wonderful time reading about various grasslands, how they form, and what kind of life they usually support.  A lot of it came back to me from my college days as a biology major, but I haven’t been in a biology classroom for ten years.  I remember now why I loved biology and ecology so much.  Savannas, also known as tropical grasslands, are probably featured whenever there’s a movie or a documentary about elephants or lions, so I’m already thinking about what kind of magical, mythical, or downright scary beasts I can put in the zone.  In addition, I’m planning out what kind of areas could go in the zone.  Maybe we could have a hollowed out tree much like the one Rafiki inhabited in The Lion King.

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Many, many people call themselves gamers including tons of women. Housewives and college girls put in serious time on MMOs, “coffee break games”, and games like the Sims. (An estimated 55% of Sims players are female.) Mini-games such as those sold by PopCap and BigFish are a gigantic hit for women. We’re definitely out there in force, but in the overall industry, women make up only 12% of the population according to a study done in 2004.

Seriously, though, one’s sex shouldn’t matter that much when it comes to gaming anonymously online with thousands of other players, yet it often does. Men pretend to be women because they say that they get more help that way. Serious women gamers pretend to be men in order to get into serious groups. Then, there are the EPCs of the world, and they just reduce women gamers as a whole to nothing more than online sex bunnies.

EPC - Evil Pussy Cat - is what I’ve dubbed a specific type of women gamer. (Sometimes you run into men pretending to be women who also deserve the title of EPC.) Every guild and every game has this type of player, and I feel for any guild who has more than one. EPC is a tribute to someone I watched in morbid fascination as I was playing City of Heroes/City of Villains. I never had a direct run-in with her, but I’d watch her have drama after drama on the guild alliance channel. She’d gathered a group of “white knights” who simply hung on her every word, and she enjoyed that attention greatly. In fact, if she was online and other people weren’t talking to her or about her, it wouldn’t be long before she had some sort of fit. One time, there was an animated games mechanics discussion going on guild chat. Several people were involved, and EPC threw in a few random sentences about her day or her life here or there. No one really picked up on it, and it wasn’t before long before EPC got “offended” by a statement a random guildie had made and spazzed all over everyone. A few of her “white knights” also jumped on the guy, and of course, chaos ensued. This happened on the forums a few times as well. Honestly, I’d love to be more specific about the issue, but I can’t for the life of me remember the issue over which she was totally losing it.

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When designing a virtual world in which roleplaying is a focus, I run into all sorts of interesting questions and conundrums. In a low tech world much like the one in our own history, I believe that children looked for entertainment much like they do now, and many children probably loved animals much like the children of today. In today’s world, we have tons and tons of stuffed animals, many of them extremely life-like, all of them made with faux fur or synthetic fibers. What if that wasn’t readily available? So, while I was Michaels shopping for sales to support my other hobbies, I ran into the answer and a new addiction - amigurumi. Amigurumi is the Japanese art of creating animals by knitting or crocheting the parts, stuffing them, and sewing them together. I’d actually had exposure to this already from my relatives in Thailand, but I hadn’t realized they actually had a name.

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Every now and then I feel like I’m at war with code. Most of the time, I write due to the fact that we actually have more coders than we do writers, and good writers are extremely hard to find. Every now and then I code because sometimes I’ve just got to get down and dirty with the nitty gritty parts of the game. (Also, I don’t want to wait for a coder to get around to adding my stuff into the game.)

Coding really comes in multiple parts:

• Figure out what the end result is going to be.
• Map out how to get there within one’s coding ability.
• Write the code.
• Upload it.
• Begin debugging.

Hopefully, the code will load, and I’m able to skip the very last part. That’s always a wonderful dream for a writer turned coder by necessity.

My victory was over a clan ability spell called inferno that serves as an area of effect spell (AoE) against all foes located in a room. It should have been easy. I based it off of a spell that already works and exists in the game but had been taken out because the base damage was a mess. The trouble began when I had to adjust the timer (how often you can cast a spell) and the casting time (how long it takes to cast the spell) based on the caster’s clan rankings. I had forgotten to define a few variables which broke the spell before it even got the first simple spam (message sent to the player). That’s a pretty newbie mistake to make, honestly, but coding is much like math. If you don’t use it often enough, you forget all the steps.

The spell operates in two parts. The initial casting checks for all the variables such as whether or not the character has enough spell points to cast the spell, whether or not the character’s clan tribute has been paid, whether or not the thing the character is trying to attack is in the room, whether or not the room allows combat, and a multitude of other things. Once the player makes it through all the checks, the casting begins, and the player receives a confirmation message. Then the second step of the spell begins, and this part was a bit more complicated for me.

I needed to pass a bit of information from the first part of the spell to the next part of the spell which occurs 4-6 seconds later. I never find that part easy as all the variables that are passed through have to match. And of course, I end up having problems. See if you can spot the problem:

if( (count/rank) >= 4) call_out("inferno_effect", 4, tp, room, damage);

else call_out("inferno_effect", 6, tp, room, damage);

void inferno_effect(object tp, object victim, int damage) {

It’s a very simple mistake, but it took me a bit to find it. Again, it was a newbie mistake. I finally got it all worked out, and I felt like I’d soloed a raid boss. Of course, it was just one spell in the whole scheme of things.

I’m learning to get into this blogging thing. Sometimes writing, in general, organizes my mind or relaxes me, so I can go back to projects feeling refreshed. When coding and designing games, there are simply so many things to do that organizing the game itself is a gigantic job. I find myself with so much to do that I simply freeze up.

We recently introduced a project management system to our second game, Primordiax . We had our meeting last night, and it was extremely well received by the rest of the devs. While, initially, the system itself seems like a lot of additional work, I expect productivity to increase dramatically. People really do like specific tasks that they can check off and feel they’ve finished. Having a deadline seems to be very good for those who are creative. We tend to bounce around from project to project and fitter about writing things that interest us immediately. Then we get bored and flutter to our next project. That’s not the most productive way to go. I had gotten to the point where I was spending so much time assigning projects to everyone else (It was a constant flow of “I need something to do!”) that I wasn’t able to have any time to get my own projects, which are considerable in number, done. I personally don’t like managing, but in a small company, I don’t really get a choice of doing exactly what I like to do. Luckily, one of the people we keep on staff and a good friend of mine was able to step up and take over the project management system.

The system itself is pretty simple at its core. It consists of a task, a way to claim it, and an assignment with a due date. The difficulty comes in creating the tasks and having someone to check the tasks in and out for those interested in doing the work. The system inherently creates a competition between developers as well, which is an unintended side-effect but should be beneficial to the overall progress of the game.

Last but not least, putting up the task management system allowed me to note that we need more builders/writers. If you’ve got interest, contact me!