Do no evil

I have especially fond memories of the fall of the Berlin wall, because I was studying German in high school at the time. The collapse of the Soviet Union that followed was a profound and fundamental change to the lives of many hundreds of millions of people - and a beacon of hope to many millions more who still live in the undemocratic and totalitarian regimes around the world. I have been fortunate to make friends with a number of people from countries that were on the other side of the wall - an impossibility for most of the West in the generation prior to mine.

What has been disheartening since then is the loss of the ability and faith of democratic states, especially the leaders of those states, in the fundamental and profound truth in the strength of democracy and preservation of human rights. This has been felt most keenly in the abrogation of these universal rights for a minority - even as a terrorist or mass murderer, you should still be entitled to a fair trial, and just treatment - a necessity many have forgotten.

The failure of state actors to uphold these necessary rights has meant in many instances, non governmental organisations have stepped in the breach. When we say NGO, we typically think of a volunteer or charitable organisation, but there is nothing prohibiting a for profit business making the same decisions and potentially the same contributions.

I would like to thank the US based executives of Google for their brave decision to take the moral high ground for the rights of the few - a decision, though unlikely, may help lead to another wall falling.

Is that the extent of your largess? You'd better have more for me, and soon...

I was going to do a pre-release of Unangband 0.6.4 tonight, but I've spent the last few hours writing monster response sentences like the one above in order to ensure bribing monsters doesn't get too repetitive.

Feel free to download from SVN and poke at the obvious mistakes I've missed until I do release... some time this weekend.

(I also need a volunteer to run a good Valgrind on dungeon generation. There's a buffer overrun somewhere which I can't pick up on Windows / Mac OSX. Thanks in advance.).

Hi Kotaku

Feel free to have a look around and if you do go home, say hi to one of my top five games journalists for me...

The Torchlight Thread

I took the opportunity over the Christmas break to play Torchlight - and my thoughts on playing it still haven't crystallized into an actual opinion about the game.

That's a little surprising given Torchlight is what might be considered a commercial version of the genre I design in. I suspect I'm still unsure of what I think, because the game really isn't a roguelike. I'm basing this on a much more intuitive feel than the Berlin Interpretation, and as a result, I reserve the right to change that view at a later date.

So instead, I'd like to solicit your opinions. Have you been playing Torchlight, and if so, what do you think? Feel free to comment below and try and influence my unborn non-opinion.

(Please note I'm playing on Very Hard - as I suspect difficulty level will form part of this discussion).

Games I've Not Played in 2009

Looking back on my year of gaming in 2009 makes me realise I'm stuck in 2008. With the exception of Torchlight*, I have bought no major commercial releases this year, and Torchlight is not a full priced game. With the ability to buy games as cheaply as the sales that Steam and other digital distribution services have on now, as well as the discounting curve that most major release games follow, I have no incentive to pay full price for a game. I am prepared to shell out not very much money for iPhone games, of which I've bought a few. Unfortunately, the only one I play on a regular basis is Civilisation Revolution.

Of the games of 2009 which interested me:

• Borderlands: Procedural weapon goodness. I'm there. Ridiculous Australian pricing. I'm not.
• Left4Dead2: Censorship Australia has censored my wallet. Yes, I can hack around it, but I'd rather not buy, on the basis that Valve has more chance of pressuring the Australian government to change that set of ridiculous laws then I do (I'm a foreign national, so I can't vote in Australian elections). Besides which, I'm more angry about other ridiculous laws that are getting passed here...
  
• Section 8: My multiplayer experiences this year have been cramped by a poor ADSL connection. And is it better than the continually evolving Team Fortress 2?
• ARMA 2: Waiting for the patch that fixes everything...
• Men of War / Order of War: Just didn't get into the demo enough to justify buying at this stage.
  
• AI War and Solium Infernum: Played the demos. I can see how these games could be good in a world where I had a lot more time than I do now. What I want is a strategy game that plays like Civilisation Revolution on the iPhone. On the iPhone. Uniwar doesn't feel like it has the depth I need. And I'm sick of tower defense.
  
• Dragon Age: I have Baldur's Gate disc sitting in the package, unopened. I've played the first 30 minutes of Oblivion and the first two hours of Morrowind. Why buy another RPG I won't play because of time constraints and the paralysis of 'which mods do I load?'
• Captain Forever / Successor, Spelunky, other critically lauded indie games: I'll play these as soon as they start developing them in a genre I enjoy. Just not platforming / scrolling shooter... to be honest, this is the one area I regret not spending more time on.
  
• Some console games which have got rave reviews: I still don't have a Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii. And I'd only want to play Metal Gear Solid anyway. To the point where I might go look for a PSP second hand.
• Some great sounding Nintendo DS games: Since I bought the iPhone, I haven't picked the DS up once. Actually, since Brain Training...

So a disappointing year all round. But it's been entirely my fault...

So what have I been playing?

• Civilisation Revolution: I had to stop playing this, and start functioning as a human being. So I did what I always do to stop making a game enjoyable for me. I redesigned it.
• Canabalt: Great two minute filler. Should really download the improved version. Review is here.
  
• Puzzle Quest: Challenges of the Warlords: Parts 1 & 2 for the iPhone: Review is here.
• Rolando 2: Bought this on the Edge's recommendation as iPhone Game of the Year (or at least #1 in their top 50 lineup). I can appreciate the vibe, but it just doesn't click for me.
  
• Far Cry 2: Haven't reviewed this beyond some snide comments, but the game is surprisingly pick up and playable if I have a spare hour or so. People complain about the check points, but I enjoy the flow of planning a path through or around check points and having it go horribly wrong. Feels repetitive if you play it too long in one sitting.
• Team Fortress 2: BFF.
• Plants vs. Zombies: So apparently this is a 2009 commercial release. Consumed it in one sitting. Never went back. Will get my wife to play this over Christmas some time.
  
• Defense Grid: The Awakening: Consumed it in two sittings - one with no sound due to a Windows bug, one with sound to see if the sound track and dialog was worth it. It really wasn't. Never went back.
• Red Orchestra: If you ever want to feel like a hero, play this game. I cannot recommend this FPS highly enough.
• Day of Defeat: If you ever find that all the players on your Red Orchestra server are bots, play this instead for a slightly slower, more cerebral version of TF2.
• Torchlight: Played the heck out of the demo. Bought it, while feeling ambivelent about the poor monster path finding, resulting kiting gameplay and the slot machine loot fest. Haven't touched it since.
• Stalker: Clear Sky: Ended up trapped in a warehouse that was just a buggy as the Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl release. Never made it out with enough motivation to keep playing. Would go back, but suffering from mod paralysis.
• Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space: Really fun pick up and play games. Would be perfect for the iPhone other than screen size constraints. I'd recommend the Weird Worlds demo ahead of downloading the free version of SAiIS if you want to try before you buy.
• Vampire: the Masquerade: Absolutely enjoyed this while feeling guilty about playing this now I'm married. Stopped at the painful sewers section, which I understand is for the best.
• Dystopia: Still playable. Still fun. Still only play Mediums with Assault Rifles and Mediplants.
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butchers Bay: Really enjoy the production values and story. Couldn't figure out the stealth sections so shot everyone. Ended up in the second Super Max facility, where I apparently turned into Link from Zelda and have to do fetch quests for everyone. Will revisit this with an FAQ.
  
• Spore and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: Went back with the new computer, for an honest reappraisel and to give these games a second chance. They failed.
• Research and Development: This is my GotY. And it's a free single player map pack for Half-Life 2.

* And the Void, which I just picked up this morning off Steam.

Patience

My apologies for the lack of updates recently; I hope the wait will be worthwhile.

Developing roguelikes is unique in that you can reasonably be assured that if you wait long enough, someone else will come up with the solution. I added cellular automaton driven cave generation to Unangband earlier this year from an article on Rogue Basin, but never fixed one major issue with this algorithm, which is connecting the disconnected regions that this method generates. Fortunately, Ray aka Bear has come up with an elegant solution in this Post-processing to ensure map connectivity post on rgrd.

You may also want to check out another roguelike development blog (added to the roguelike links on the right) If Error Throw New Brick, where Chris Hamons is working on his roguelike Mage Crawl.

I've also played a few Unangband sorcerers recently, and realised that the class doesn't have a strong starting game. Unlike other Unangband mages, Sorcerers start with only a single attack spell, which means any creatures which resist this attack will kill the player quickly. In this example, the Sorcerer has a psychic attack spell (Mind Thrust) to which mindless creatures are immune. In the first few levels, this consists of insects (which have 'weird' minds) and plants (mushroom patches, molds etc.)

I played around with adding a second attack spell, and making the sorcerer trap spells accessible earlier, but neither felt the right approach - they ended up playing like other mages.

Instead, I've gone with adding a first level Charm Plants spell. This hopefully won't be over powering - almost all plants are stationary, and where they move, they do so by breeding, which allied monsters won't do. And it means the player has a more flexible and indirect attack method with which they may be able to snare insects and other mindless enemies. Which is the intention I had with this class all along.

Give me money

I believe I've discussed this before, but Gabe Newell is also now recommending that you give me money in order to fund me developing more games...

(By me, I of course mean all those amateur and indie developers whose games you enjoy. But also me.)

Running hot

The answer to my Cold Start question I posed earlier:

I have seen this problem previously caused by the CPU starting on a low stepping and failing to step up due to temperature of the CPU. This was fixed by the vendor (not Dell) releasing a BIOS which started the CPU initially on a high stepping and then stepping it down following POST.

Care to suggest any alternatives?

Getting warmer

Those of you intrigued by the Cold Start story I told have made some interesting guesses, but I'll let you ponder this additional piece of information.

The problem started occurring after a BIOS upgrade.

Does that help or hinder you? I'll let you know if you're getting warmer...

Cold start

I bought myself my first desktop ever: a Dell Studio XPS, and had it delivered earlier in the week. It's reasonably well specced (Core I7, 6 GB RAM, Radeon 4850), but I'm just in the process of logging my first support call for it:

The computer fails to start when cold. Switching the power on results in the fans spinning up, the power button maintaining a yellow LED lite as opposed to white, and POST not launching. After waiting 30 seconds or so, and shutting the computer down by holding down the power key for 5 seconds, it is possible to power it up again and have it boot normally.

The amusing part from my point of view is I've seen this problem on another model of machine, in 1999. Care to hazard a guess as to the cause in that instance? (It's not year 2000 related)

Answer will be in a follow up post...

Doull's Law

The time you save using procedural generation will be lost running the algorithm as a screen saver.

500th Post

This is the 500th blog post on Ascii Dreams - an achievement I've been waiting to reach for a little while now. I hope you'll excuse a little self-indulgence at this milestone.

I started Ascii Dreams following the advice of a number of people on rec.games.roguelike.development that I should post my 'design diary' notes in a blog, instead of spamming the newsgroup with posts. My first article generated what I feel was a positive, albeit long thread, spamming the news group with posts discussing classes versus skills, with my position opposed to both. I would also like to think it indirectly inspired Ironband, an Angband variant by Antoine - the first person to reply in the thread:

There are no classes in Ironband - all characters can fight, shoot, sneak and cast spells. You can specialise by raising the appropriate stats (e.g. Intelligence and Wisdom for casters). The other stats are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Agility, Stealth, Perception and Luck.

It seems inevitable at some point as a blogger, you begin to worry more about traffic stastics than the quality of your writing. I achieved some early infamy through blogging, with articles being linked to by notable games journalists, up and coming games journalists and getting Slashdotted. But the Ascii Dreams traffic has remained consistent at around 150-400 visitors per day as opposed to experiencing the exponential growth which would support a web based advertising model - much to the disappointment of my wife. Unsurprisingly, the top read article is The Death of the Level Designer - a title I only partly regret choosing. More surprising, or perhaps not depending on your understanding of the human condition, is the popularity of the article on how to play different region DVDs on your Macbook:

Page	Pageviews	Unique Pageviews	Avg. Time on Page	Bounce Rate	% Exit
1.	/	57,894	47,101	00:03:43	74.40%	68.10%
2.	/2007/11/why-do-games-still-have-levels.html	27,803	25,866	00:04:44	85.67%	80.53%
3.	/2008/01/death-of-level-designer-procedural.html	9,916	8,090	00:04:00	62.68%	54.21%
4.	/2008/10/review-world-of-goo.html	8,950	8,366	00:03:39	89.93%	88.73%
5.	/2007/11/unangband-dungeon-generation-part-one.html	5,870	4,697	00:03:00	42.85%	34.12%
6.	/2008/09/backup-spore-save-games.html	4,987	4,621	00:02:48	86.17%	84.16%
7.	/2008/09/spore-save-games.html	3,763	3,494	00:01:33	80.00%	78.58%
8.	/2008/05/unangband-magic-system-part-one.html	3,481	3,041	00:02:50	51.39%	40.94%
9.	/2008/01/how-to-make-dvd-drive-on-intel-macbook.html	3,348	2,577	00:03:34	80.91%	73.45%
10.	/2007/11/20-underused-game-mechanics.html	3,325	3,086	00:04:37	75.16%	49.98%

Anyone who starts a web blog on an obscure game genre from the 80s and expects to become a celebrity has delusions of grandeur. Which is why I'd like to thank Simon Carless for giving me a writing platform for thinking outside of my comfort zone over at GameSetWatch. Simon is one of those people that you cannot overstate his generosity - he has provided unfailing support, kind advice and allowed me to express my delusions on a public platform shared by far more respectable games writers than myself.

The experience of interacting with the wider games journalism community has been similar to my experience with any cultural subgroup - as long as you're polite and have something interesting to say without offending anyone while keeping them entertained, you can very quickly meet the core influencers; which I've done so just long enough to realise that the motivation behind and issues underlying any clique remain basically the same: outsider vs insider, public vs private, person worth knowing vs object of interest. To reiterate: you're not missing out on anything if you're blogging in quiet, writing for yourself, with a small group of appreciative readers.

It still appears early days, but I have high hopes for the Procedural Content Generation wiki. I think my first mistake in expectations in creating the wiki was that programmers who were lazy enough not to generate game content by hand, would some how roll up their shirt sleeves and throw aside the same principles to write a wiki full of web content. Nonetheless there is a small but dedicated community of contributors who are building up a useful link repository to other procedural resources, and acting as a central collection of all things procedural. It's no aigamedev.net, but the procedural generation field feels in its infancy - and may yet remain just a curiosity instead of powerful set of tools that are widely used by the game industry.

What has been the most gratifying, and I hope an indication of the usefulness of this blog, has been the feedback from the wider roguelike community - both directly, and indirectly. I always appreciate whenever someone on rec.games.roguelike.development references an article here, or another roguelike blogger, of which there are a few now, links to this blog to agree with or refute a point I have made. I won't pretend that I'm a great programmer or game designer, but I've spent a long time developing Unangband - over 10 years - and I will continue to share the lessons I've learned and problems I'm having while working on the game.

Will Unangband ever be finished? I believe so, and I have a firm idea in my head of what the game will play like - at least for version 1.0. I'm at the point of development now where I'm more comfortable discarding bad game play ideas, instead of putting in everything I could possibly implement, and more work is spent 'modernising' and tidying up the code base than implementing new features. There are still plenty of hurdles to clear, and ongoing motivation will always remain an issue for an amateur developer such as myself but the end is in site: sometime in the next 5 years, of course.

As for blogging, I still have a number of large themes to explore in the same extended multi-article form that I've been using. While the total volume of content has fallen, and frequency of posting slowed a little, that has as much the increased incidence of real life instead of any change in the idealised game blogging savant personality I try to maintain here. I'm not someone project my personal hopes, fears and stories in blogging form: it's not your business what I'm doing in the real world, and I won't be someone who tries to foist their personal or political views on you - except on the very rare occasion where they intersect with the gaming sphere. I realise who I am as a person will inevitably leak onto the page - just remember that I'm not the person you think I am, so try to avoid idealising or denigrating me based on what small part of me you see here.

I've really enjoyed writing the last 500 posts. Please use this opportunity to request anything you want to me to discuss in more detail: I've had a request for more writing about my table top gaming experience which I'm sure to bore you with at some point. Comments, criticism and baseless praise are welcome - and we'll be back to a regular, more faceless, less fanciful service shortly.

Should you email me?

Occasionally people want to email me questions about games and game design, writing and so on. If you do, my email address is [email protected] with the appropriate substitutions. Please try to avoid the gmail spam filter as I receive enough spam to make it not worthwhile checking the spam traps.

However, unless you're pathologically shy, my recommendation is to post your question in one of the comments here. That way everyone reading this blog can benefit from your intelligent questions and my rambling, off-topic answers.

In that vein, I periodically wonder if I should have web forums for Ascii Dreams - because the comment section is so limiting in many senses. I usually decide against this, because Unangband players are well served by the forums at angband.oook.cz and roguelike developers by the rec.games.roguelike.development news group. My attempts at setting up forums for procedural game developers are a less than resounding success.

Any recommendations about online web forum software is welcome.

More Borg Call Graphs

I'm experiencing this phenomena called being busy that I don't normally allow to affect my blogging or development work but appears to be doing so more as I age. I believe this is related to a phenomena called sleep that seems to be an requirement I wasn't previously aware of.

In lieu of anything intelligent to say with this update, I present more borg call graphs. Thanks again to darke for generating these. From his notes:

These ones are 500k turns, with a level change every 1000 turns to try and simulate someone actually playing it. Took about 20 hours to run through the tests with all the instrumentation turned on.

The first is the entire graph. The second one focuses on the playing "dungeon" side of the tree. The last one focuses on the dungeon generation "cave_gen" side of the tree.

Speaking at linux.conf.au on 'The Linux Gooey'

If you're in Hobart on January 20th, 2009, you'll be able to drop by and hear me speak at the 2009 linux.conf.au Gaming Miniconf. I'll be talking about the Linux Gooey - why Linux needs a Game Maker and the evolving language of games.

You can see the full days schedule here; you will need to get tickets to attend the miniconf.

NaNoWriMo

Ah - once again, I've failed to even come close to the NaNoWriMo required total. I've still found it a useful exercise, as always, and I've written far more fiction than I would have written otherwise. My problem is I still found plenty of time to blog, program and celebrate my birthday, and various other functions.

Or at least, I shouldn't think of that as a problem. I mean, that's living, write. I'll argue that we just need a southern hemisphere timed writing event, perhaps in May.

For those of you who've been following this blog, I strongly encourage you to do one of the following two things:

1. Jeff Lait has published his 2005 NaNoWriMo. You may remember him as another roguelike developer and obviously a talented author as well. So please: buy his book.
2. Alternately, you can help donate to the NaNoWriMo to keep this event running. They've failed to cover costs again. Details on donations are here.

Take care. I'll be trying again next year.

NaNoWriMo 2008

I've registered for NaNoWriMo 2008, and will be attempting an entry again this year. Last years attempt failed miserably, because I forgot about the competition until the 25th of November. I'm a bit more optimistic about this year, but I'm not promising completion, as I'll be on the road for about 6 days of the month, which may impact my ability to write.

In the meantime, as a warm up, I've written another science fiction short story 'Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory', that has been kicking around in my head a little while. It took about two hours to write, as soon as I realised the nationality the protagonist needed to be. It's on my writing blog, which I'll be updating regularly this month. Have a read.

Two post-mortems of interest

A post-mortem of why Spore didn't feature more science.

And a game related event I attended recently.

My apologies for the lack of blogging - a regular service should resume shortly.

Spore Save Games

Hi Mr Wright,

I'm a frustrated game designer. What particularly frustrates me is the single save slot in Spore. I can understand why you do it - you want to create a persistent universe where changes carry on from one game to the next. But I want to have the freedom to experiment from a fixed base line; to see what choices I make at each stage of evolution to carry on to the next.

More importantly, if your game keeps losing save files: as it has just done for me; and appears to have done for other people playing the game on the net - I want the reassurance that you will have auto-saved when I finished the Civilisation level after grinding my way through city after city of unenjoyable game play for the previous two hours.

That is all.

Regards,

Andrew D.

PS: While you're here, you might want to read some design suggestions I have for Spore... and how to backup your Spore games.

Results for 'Which articles have you found the most interesting/useful?'; new poll

Thanks to the 31 of you who voted - I always find the feedback to these polls interesting. I think this is telling me to stick to my core speciality (roguelikes) and not branch out too much into other areas... feel free to discuss.

A Technology Bird's Nest	5 (16%)
Being Diplomatic	3 (9%)
Designing a Magic System	27 (87%)
Games are Not Art	5 (16%)
Prince Charming	3 (9%)
Prototype Theory	5 (16%)
Spore: The New Cambrian	4 (12%)
The Democratisation of Game Design	6 (19%)
The Search for Citizen Kane	3 (9%)
Unangband Edit Files	14 (45%)
What is Wrong with Fun?	8 (25%)

Next up: it's more Spore week voting.