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Comments (0) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Aug 23 2007, 09:20 PM
Role Play Games

So interestingly enough in my human relations class we were going over resolving problems in the work place and it said the most common form of resolution is role playing senarios. The most popular is team building and moral, but the most common is asking people to put themselves in someone elses shoes. That got me wondering, why in a professional setting is role playing for work place resolution ok but role playing as a recreation tends to be frowned upon by the main steam?

Lets look at role playing. What is it? Basically it's putting yourself in someone elses shoes, trying to see things from a new perspective, philosopy, etc. So those shoes happen to be on elf who's dealing with damage to his home forest, or a dwarven warrior protecting the integrity of his clan name. Is that really so diffrent from real life senarios? What's the hot topic with politicians and the media right now? Global warming a.k.a. environmental issues. Sound like an elf we know? Kids get into fights in school yards all over the country because someone called his/her mom a name. I know I did. Sound like a previously mentioned dwarf?

Why is it "wrong" to be an RPer then? Well.... it's not. Like any other recreational hobby it has very possative benefits and oppertunities such as expanding social, tollerance, communication, and problem solving skills. The problem is that people perceive role playing as an escape from real life problems. From my personal experience over many years of table top and online gaming it seems the perception is acctually the rarity. Most gamers have more than one character, ie. they enjoy seeing and solving a problem or an issue from more than one perspective. How is that a bad thing? Isn't that something we're encuraged to do?

Yes there are gamers who "escape" into their characters, who do some really unhealthy things for their addiction. And yes I call it an addiction, but keep in mind, not everyone who drinks is an alchoholic, not everyone who works out does so complusively. We know that in moderation alchol consuption has benefits, this has been medically proven. We know that exercise is good for us, but over doing it is detrimental to our health. The diffrence is with other addictions people know that the object of the addiction is not the cause of the problem, it's the person with the addictive personality disorder who has a problem and needs help to moderate or abstain from the object that stimulates their addiction.

This same distinction doesn't seem to be made for games, especial for role playing games. People want to classify gamers as out of shape, fat, anti-social, yada yada yada, and say that gaming or role playing is the cause or that it encurages unhealthy habits. It's not, people had unhealthy habits before MMO's were realessed and they'll continue to have unhealthy habits. Walk into any office building, resturant, or park in the country and you'll find people who don't game with the same 'problems' that is currently being blamed on the gaming instustry. The games are not the problem. It's the abuse of these games by a small percentage of gamers who have a problem. Passing the buck is not going to help them. I feel that's a destinction that needs to be made, not just because it'll help gaming addicts get the help they need, but because in theory it will help keeps game from being dumbed down or ruined for responsible gamers. You know, those of us who have jobs and mow our lawns and manage to have social lives off line as well as online.


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Comments (1) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Jul 1 2007, 11:21 PM
Alot of games have ruins scattered through out the landscape. Some games go to great lenghts to explain why these ruins are there, who made them, ect. Some games just treat their ruins as landscaping and have them there for no better reason than because they look good.

I've lost track of the number of times I've run up on some ruins in a game and gone "What's this?" and hoped that there would be some clue, something, some hint of the builders, of the civilization that built it. But either I have to go read some big long lore thing out of game, or there's just nothing. There is nothing there for me to puzzle out or discover on my own. There's no carving to make tracings of to take back to a researcher, there's no old manuscripts, broken pottery, arrow heads... nada. I either have the information or I don't and I have no obertunity to learn this for myself in game.

Why? Not everything needs to be spelled out. How long were tombs and pryamids in Egypt lost before someone stumbled over them? Archologists have been studying those for years, and while we now have a good idea of who the ancient egyptians were we still only have theories on how they did some of the things they did. And that's what makes them so interesting, the not knowing, but knowing there are clues there, that it can be figured out.

I would like to have some quests that are less quest and more mystery. Things in the game that the
"official" lore never touches on, but that players can discover, figure out and write their own game lore for. Something where the reward isn't neccisarily game experience but acctually the feeling of contributing to the game world.
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Comments (0) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Jun 23 2007, 12:03 AM
Step one: get an idea

Step two: play with idea, possibly get other to play with the idea too, see what develops

Step three: look at all the concepted ideas and mesh together the best elements of each

Step four: begin building and fleshing out the main concept
* it's not a bad idea to have a back up concept incase the first concept doesn't work

Step five: Edit, polish, clean, and improve concept

Step six: Steal rubber stamp off Vamyen's desk for approval

Step seven: pronounce concept done and hand over to programers and artists to turn into an in game master peice.


There you go, since we seem to have alot of folks who are confused as to what concepting means. If you look at director's cuts of movies, or the behinds the scenes development stuff for characters, you'll see they didn't start out with the character concept that made it into the movie. Concepts go through alot of developement and evolution before the final production modle/character is released. This isn't going to be any diffrent.
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Comments (0) · Permalink · Quagmire · Not rated (0 votes)
Jun 2 2007, 12:52 AM
[01:48] <Vamyen> we need a good font
[01:48] <Pandra> amen
[01:48] <Vamyen> a hand written scrolling font
[01:48] <Vamyen> something for some of the game letters
[01:48] <Vamyen> make it look the period
[01:49] <Vamyen> we need at least 5 good options

Marr Vellis - something about a city outline

Humans - something about them

Magic - nothing pops or sparkles in the current magic discussion threads

Quests - oi

Mazes - yay

can't remember whatelse I'm supposed to be doing....

Wash more socks

Get the girls from Grandma's

James needs shampoo
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Comments (1) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Apr 8 2007, 11:40 PM
Money, what demoninations are we going to use, how, and what impact will banks have on this? It money going to have weight, will it be counted seperatly, while you be able to put part of into a bank to keep from loosing all your worldlywealth to pick pockets?

Seasonal events- do we have in game holidays just because there's holidays going on in RL or do we stick with game relevant holidays? Personally I like seasonal events... but there are some events I miss every year in WoW 'cause well it happens on the holiday and only then and I'm out doing stuff that day. It'd kind of be nice to have game relivant seasonal holidays that occur around the same time as RL holidays but not on the exact same day.

Banks- what exactly is going to be the banks function, if it's a storage device then how large is it. I fecking hate little banks that hold less crap than my back pack. Perminant storage strutures that can hold less than I can carry on my person are highly rediculous in my mind. Will banks be linked? Personally, I find it irritating when banks aren't linked.

Houseing and apartments. I know alot of players will want houseing, but I've been thinking there are some players that would like the benifits and security of a house, but aren't interested in designing one... and they'd rather perfer to live in the cities instead of out on the fringes where player housing is traditionally located. So maybe if we made in game apartments that offered the features of a house with restrictions on say storage and furnashings then we could take some of the pressure off players to grind up and do the gruling ingame labor of building a residence. This would also give players housing options in areas where we don't want to turn loose of design controll.

Spell books and recipe books. Are these going to be acctual physical items ingame, or will they be built in as part of the character sheet? I kind of like the convience of having the spellbook as part of my character instead of part of my inventory. I also like recipie books, though with what we're going to try and do with the crafting system it might be more convient to not have recipe books soul bound so they can be shared and copied easier.
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Comments (2) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Feb 28 2007, 05:56 PM
Loom work approach:

I’m not sure about the approach previous story team leads were taking, and they didn’t leave notes for me to figure all that out. So I’m going to outline my methods for the rest of the team and for any possible future story team lead so they’ll have an idea of what I was doing and how I was going about accomplishing it.

We will be writing stories among other things, but not stories intended to plot out the course a player should follow. Instead these will be stories that explain the game lore, how the game mechanics are handled lore wise, provide examples of what can be accomplished, and that set up a frame work that the players can build on. Our job is not to guide the player or give them hard set goals. We’re not story tellers. Instead we’re game masters; we craft the world that game takes place in, thus establishing the loom. Story team will provided quests, teasers, and other tidbits of lore to establish the weft. The weave, the goals, will be decided on and woven by the players.

Something I read along time ago in a game master’s handbook said all game masters cheat. Good game masters cheat in favor of the player not the story goal. Most MMO’s seem to forget that and instead just grind through players the way the average player will grind through a quest to achieve end game. Let’s try to keep that in mind while creating the loom. We want to make a challenging game, but we want to cheat in favor of the players so it stays a game and doesn’t become a chore.
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Comments (0) · Permalink · Overlordly notes · Not rated (0 votes)
Feb 27 2007, 06:12 PM
I'm dyslexic, I also have a family, a job, and much as I try to kill it, a social life. So I'm fairly busy, resulting in my hours being fairly random and odd. We also have team members from all over the world, diffrent time zones and all that jazz. I'm also the tinniest bit absent mind >.> sorta like Mount Everest is just the tinniest bit high. So I make notes, alot of notes, too keep track of what I'm working on.

But this is good for story team acctually. I have no idea how many team leads there were before me, but whatever path, goal, plans or desigines they had didn't get written down where the regualr devs could see. That's kinda bad since then if something comes out and the team lead disappears the rest the team doesn't really know how to continue.

Story teams' job, in a nut shell is communication. We're supposed to design the story that attracts the player, the world the player sees and interacts with, we set the frame work for the stories the players will create. To do this we must be able to communicate amoung ourselves, to the artists, the animators, the programers, the sound guys and everyone else who contributes to project wish.

To be a successful communications leader, then my team needs to know what to do and how to carry on, even in my absence. If the leader fails in his or her duties, then the team is destine to fail, which means PW will fail. I know getting a MMORPG to production is a long shot, but I do not want story team to cause the failure of PW.
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Comments (0) · Permalink · Quagmire · Not rated (0 votes)
Feb 27 2007, 05:53 PM
It's my dad's birthday...yippy. Turn off phone.

Posted Story team meeting agenda.

Need to track down race list again and dig out the orginal race studies questionaire.

Notes race case studies.
- set monthly dead lines
- find good time for monthly race discussion meetings
- remember to mention maximum submission of 3 case studies per race per author
- make up a word to use other than Deadlines 'cause I hate that word
- look into organizing race case postings more efficently
- remember to mention that studies not picked for a spacific race case study can still be used for NPC races
- make catigory and exceptions for unique race case studies, refrence Ghediepunk's defined race and Flint's interest in seeing a penguin race designed.

Research beastiary stuff, and get with JP to learn more about rigging, animation and skinning. Acctually, find out what all artists we have to work on rigging, animations and skinning and try to set up a meeting with them and story team to get dialogue established.
Handy dandy links:
http://petopia.brashendeavors.net/html/showall_all.shtml
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/bestiary/articles.html
http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/view_bestiary.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_bestiary


Find out what the deal with Wiki is and define the peramiters and responsibilites of story team lead.

Clean up World concepts forums, see if Jerky wants the name changed back to story team.

Read through Vamyen's handbook and make a handbook for story team.

Edit the Racial studies sticky to bring it up to date.

Work on writting up Loom approach description.
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