Sociocracy Game
This is going to be a short, idea-jot post. I have been reading up a storm about sociocracy. The wikipedia article does not really do it justice. It is a very interesting system of governance based on cybernetic principles that claims to achieve decisions that are in the interests of much more people than a [...]
The essence of metastrategy
A recent post on Less Wrong, Levels of Action, reminded me of a game I created whose dynamics I wanted to explore. I still have not explored the dynamics to a great level of depth, but I thought it would be interesting to the nerdy community that reads my blog. The idea came after playing [...]
If you’re going to have upgrades in your game, don’t be so dumb about it
Every week, I find myself spending some time checking out the newest interesting-looking flash games on Kongregate. Most of them end up not being so interesting, but every once in a while I come across a well-done innovative game (Level Up! and Little Stars for Little Wars are two that seem to be memorable at [...]
New Year’s Resolutions: Produce, Believe
I bring you two personal experimental hypotheses for 2010. I am a Haskell module author. Constituting my released modules are those ideas which resisted the least when I opened the text editor. But two of them, data-memocombinators and graphics-drawingcombinators have gained some popularity, and I am feeling rewarded having written them. Most of my ideas [...]
Gravmari Released!
After fifteen weeks, Hubris Arts has completed its first game, Gravmari, directed by Max Rebuschatis. The game is a journey through the depths of space in a strange and alien ship called the Playertoid. It was inspired by Katamari Damacy, Kubrick’s 2001, the efforts of NASA, and, most importantly, dreams of floating through the cosmos. [...]
Collision Detection with Enneatrees
Many of my games boil down to, at some level, a large collection of circles (or spheres) interacting with each other. I use circles for collision detection, and otherwise whenever I can for organization, because the results look more natural than using boxes. If you organize using boxes, your simulation will tend to “align” to [...]
New game: “SpaceBattle”
Over the last week, I took a break from Dana and wrote a Geometry Wars-style action game. The main idea the game explores is virtuosity. Essentially there is so much to control that our puny human brains cannot comprehend it all for a long time; the game is engineered to have a very long learning [...]
Braid!
I just had my mind blown by the trial of Braid, by Jonathan Blow, which just came out on XBox Live Arcade. This is the most interesting puzzle game I have played in many years. It’s a platformer about playing with time, and in incorporates this very effectively to allow clever solutions to puzzles which [...]
Making Twilight Imperium a bit less random
Twilight Imperium is a marvelous board game introduced to gamedev by Hagan Koopman (“King Koopman?”) some time ago. It is ridiculously complicated, has a 60 page dense rule book, and takes 15 hours to play if everybody already knows how to play. I used my roommates’ TI parties as an excuse to go on hikes [...]
Git Revolution
I’ve been learning about git, and have generally been excited about the distributed model. I mean, I used svk, but a robust distributed model is quite exciting. Tonight I had a completely crazy idea: to make a game around git. I brainstormed and I brainstormed, many brains rained. And then it hit me: this is [...]
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