Being an account of one man’s virign experience with EVE Online. My first exposure to MMO’s was FFXI on its European release. I walked (like some kind of savage) from Glenwood down to PC World to pick it up after having a quick go of the copy my brother Patrick bought. I have to say it was pretty great at the time, an almost entirely novel multiplayer experience. But it was hardly flawless, the punishing xp loss on death and the hunt for random drops (fuck you second job quest) marred the exprience for me. Still it was either play that or attend class, so I did a semesters worth of assignments in a week or two (the first semester of the add-on BA in Humanities was a fucking joke, easy mode shit, sort of regret abandoning my stonking results to jump to a MSc) and settled in to explore Vana’diel. Continue reading…
A sign of things to come
Slipped up, meant to post this last night to retain my “at least one post per week” rule but ended up going to bed earlier (well later but earlier) than planned and totally forgot. What I need to do is queue up a “buffer” post at the beginning of each week to be posted automatically on Sunday if I forget. Oh well. Going to back date this bad boy, wrote it yesterday just forgot to post it, so it counts, right? Right?….Dont look at me like that Continue reading…
Writing that monkey off my back
Well I’m done. For the second time and not really. I re-wrote the mess of an ending I wrote yesterday in my rush to finish. So I’ve finished Nanowrimo in that I wrote over 50,000 words of a novel. I’m not finished in that that what I wrote is neither complete in itself (I skipped some harder scenes just to write easier ones and finish) nor is the overall narrative complete. This is much more of an Act 1 than a Book 1. It’s also not finished in that I have done exactly zero editing. I haven’t spell checked it, I havent split it into chapters. It’s just one giant long stream of text. Next week I intend to finish off the scenes I left out and do the very minimum level of editing it requires before it can be considered a first draft. As it is it’s basically a first-first-draft. Continue reading…
The tyranny of letters
This is going to be a very short entry. More because I don’t want to break my “One entry a week streak” than anything else. While I don’t think I could have avoided it starting Nanowrimo with ten days to go was certainly something I’m not in a hurry to try again. Five thousand words a day is onerous to say the least and I think the super accelerated pace is solidly impacting the quality of the writing. I’d prefer the text to be a lot more concise and “punchier”. Due to the fact that not a lot really happens for the first part of the novel the meandering, expansive, word heavy style that prioritising word count over all is forcing me to adopt is really hurting it I think. What was meant to be clever and mildly sardonic feels like it’s overly verbose and vaguely mean spirited.
I still like the basic idea but if this is going to be anything other than just something written for the event its going to need some serious editing/re-writing and I’m going to need to increase the technical quality of my writing. One area where I think I’m really shaky is dialogue, every time I write some it just feels odd and stilted. There’s nothing natural about it and everyone ends up sounding the same. Another problem area is female characters. I don’t think I have a good understanding of how women think so I fear all my female characters simply come across as male characters in drag.
One good thing about Nanowrimo is the element of competition or shared effort it creates. If I wasn’t spurred on by Dave and Adam posting their updated wordcounts I think, because I started so late, that I probably would have just said “Fuck it”, sat back and played all the fucking games that came out and I bought this month. As it is I’ve managed to stick to my five thousand a day target (well on average at this point as I took Friday off and just did 9K+ on Saturday instead). If I keep it up I’ll be done by Thursday. Well that’s not quite right. I’ll have the 50K words done by Thursday but it looks like the novel itself won’t be finished. Whether that means I’ll just finish “Book 1” on Friday or push on and write more afterwards I don’t yet now. But I really want to, and am looking forward to, hitting that 50K.
If a virtual tree falls in the forest and no one sees it is your development time wasted?
I just had the stupidest argument ever about Dishonored and by extension a certain approach to game design. Stupid because clearly neither party involved had any intention of being convinced one way or the other and because I genuinely believe towards the end simply failed to understand what was being talked about. Dishonored really isnt the point here though, it does serve as a useful jumping off point though so in brief heres the controversey. Continue reading…
Pride, Falls and a joke about trains
The joke was a lie. Sucker. I have a tendency, and by tendency I mean bad habit, of avoiding giving people a clear answer by saying “I’ll think about it”. I don’t want to do that anymore. So when I told someone earlier tonight that I’d think about I meant it. And here’s where I show my work. So, pride, much like football, is a funny old game. I think pride is often pointless, certainly the petty things people ascribe to pride (not going to lie, I think growing up in Dundalk may have skewed my view on this – pride in nothing at all was/is far too often the nominaml cause of meaningless conflict). But pointless or not I think pride is a sin in which I often unconsciously wallow, entirely unfounded and unsupported pride at that. Generally it doesnt really bother me, my unearned egomania is well entrenched and an old friend. It can become a problem though.
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Flavour of the week activism or If you’ve awoken dont go back to sleep
People have every right to be upset about a woman dying because legislation hadnt been put into law because it wasnt politically expedient. It’s obscene. The concept (and internet obsession) with comparing misery dicks is equally obscene. That being said a lot of people’s outrage over this whole debacle seems overdone or forced at best. There are lot’s of other preventable deaths taking place in Ireland that no-one talks about, that get no Dail protests, that people just basically dont give a shit about. The cynic in my suggests that its because they dont make for quite as good a news story. I’m not trying to condem or shame anyone, it’s all too easy to simply miss these things. But if you have found yourself stirred to action by this current case than I’d urge you to try and keep abreast of similar issues, dont shame yourself by indulging in “flavour of the week” activism.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about here’s an example. A week ago a 22 year old woman froze to death on the streets of Tralee. I saw exactly 0 tweets or Facebook posts about. The lifespan of someone living rough on the streets is less than half of someone living in normal accomadation. The Simon community’s annual review shows that on averge 30-40 homeless people who they work with die each year, this figure isnt an accurate figure of the total number of deaths due to homelessness but its already pretty fucking shocking. Of course problems like homelessness have neither an easy enemey to blame nor a readily identifiable “silver bullet”. They’re complex problems which require people to think about them and contribute their time or money. Which is clearly not as attractive as a simple hashtag and some enjoyable moral outrage.
I hope this isnt preachy (but fear it is) and I dont want people to take this as an accusatory “Hey you cant care about that without caring about this!”, I meant it be illuminatory instead ;) (More “Hey you care about that, maybe you werent aware of and would be interested in caring about this?”
A moment in time Or a depressing attempt at self assessment
I think existence is pointless. I think mortality and an understanding of scale renders human endeavour meaningless. I think humanity is a bunch of delusional animals obsessed with distracting themselves from the fact that we’re living lives that dont matter in a universe that doesnt care. I’m a lazy, nihilistic coward. On a good day. Unsurprisingly this is not a cocktail which helps generate a lot of motivation. I have started a million different things, but eight hours later when I wake up they never happen. I have not and cannot catch up to tomorrow’s Michael. Who isn’t obsessed and terrified by his own morality and the grim meaningless of it all. Even the false immortality offered by atrocity is tempting at times only I’m a) lazy and b) why should I inflict my misery on others? Anyway even that would pass in time, “Nothing beside remains”. Then on other days I don’t think and I’m not those things. Continue reading…
The letter of the law
This is purely to make sure my one post per week vow is stuck to. Currently researching my cock off for my PhD (which I think I’ve largely come to terms with). Which isnt leaving a lot of time for other stuff, I’ve also been low level sick for the last week or so. Not enough to really take me out of it, but enough so that I’m always tired and fuzzy headed. Not fun. My nanowrimo attempt remains more or less stillborn since my last post. I’ve more or less decided on which basic story I’ll go with, but I’ve no words written, no real plot planned out and no time to really work on it. I think I’m going to sacrifice at least Sunday to it.
Even worse I’ve had next to no time to work on Ave Imperator, which is something I really want to get stuck into. Well thats not entirely true, I’ve refined some of the basic design and nailed down (at least in my head) the core functionality I want to include. Of course, as it always the way with such things, every time I try and think more about it I end up coming up with ideas for other games instead. One I would love to work on (but I dont think its achievable by oneself) is this:
Random game idea – Faust – You play a lord of hell locked in a battle for regency now that Lucifer has gone missing. Your legions are ready but you need to recruit strong souls to lead them. Gameplay consists of selecting various locations and locales on earth (played through in 3rd person/isometric view e.g. you could head to a town and run around a few screens worth of it, or a prison/school/battlefield/etc.) and going there to recruit humans by offering them faustian bargains. AI controlled rival Lords tempt the humans with counter offers. You can recruit both “named” and generic units (the named units tie into the games narrative). Back in Hell you wage a campaign (using a campaign map similar to Age of Legends/40K: Dark Crusade) to conquer the other lords. The battles are played out like a trad SRPG, your human recruits/souls are your main troops (perhaps you can upgrade, specialise them by combining them with various demons) – basically the soul management/upgrade system works like a reverse version of the demon breeding in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Human souls work on a circular “emotion” aspect, similar to elemental strengths/weaknesses. Different emotions give rise to different powersets/abilities, you can try and “breed” the emotions you want offering further faustian deals. All Faustian deals (including the initial recruitment ones) cost a certain amount of demonic powere/potential – which you can increase by conquering other demon lords and enslaving them/annexing their territory. Tone/apperance somwhere between Solium Infernum and Digital Devil Saga/Demon Summoner, basically dark and primarily western in basic visual design but drawn in an “anime” style (ideally sprite based as well). Add in a solid narrative, a good (and extensive) post-game/skirmish mode, customisable traits for your demon lord, etc. and this would be more or less my perfect game. If I win the lotto (or make it big some other way, I am totally making this game).
Failure to ignite
Well, as Dave and Adam are blogging about their Nanowrimo experience I figured I should throw up something as well. Luckily mine also offers a nice negative counterpoint to theirs. Continue reading…