Sunday, February 8, 2009

February has come..


Hello Everyone,

It has been a fast and furious month. As most of you know if you have been following this blog, I have jumped into Modding. Specifically a mod entitled "Prophesy of Pendor" for Mount&Blade. Today we are over 14,500 downloads and growing steadily. This is pretty good, way over 5% market penetration within 6 weeks.

Currently I am coordinating a volunteer team of artists, writers, and enthusiasts from six continents and collectively we are producing the next version of this interesting piece of entertainment. The interesting aspect of this exercise is that it has given me a platform to give real examples of the theories I have been discussing for years. The initial piece was to give an example of the entertainment convergence by intentionally blending a game with literature and performance art as well as to sample some rudimentary concepts using chaos theory

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The result has been met with a high degree of player acceptance and a thirst for more. The next version we go deeper into the entertainment convergence, so deeply blurring the lines that separate traditional entertainment offerings that our consumers, just in a few pages of literature, feel unsettled and are moved in ways that they did not expect. It is something that they think about when they are not playing, wondering about the nature of the universe and reality and how an act so simple as playing a game, may affect real lives..somewhere else. From a technical standpoint, we will be delving into new areas and evolving some of the basic concepts of game play.

Using chaos theory in an intelligent way it is likely that even the enemies that the player will face during a game will be different in the sense that some games various events will occur, and in others they may not. It will be an example of what we talked about earlier regarding designing for the possibility of something rather than the explicit sense of something happening. I have a feeling that it will be very well received. In addition we are advancing the see-buy-build concept of strategic gaming into one that is dealing more with personalities and skills and loyalty. In most, (all?) games there is a list of components that we can purchase, we know pretty much what those components are and plan accordingly. This new model adds another dimension as we will not control explicitly what options are available to use to build, but rather our steward and his biases and skills will determine what is available at a location to build. This is one of those areas where unless you have seen it, or conceptualized it, it is difficult to explain the model as it is "not like" something else. So we cannot say "It is like Oblivion except this and that".. which gives a frame of reference and an idea which can be conceptualized. Nuff for now.. I will post the next version of the story for everyone to read.

Talk to you all later,

Jim

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