Uploaded some Wall posters.

I found some wall posters in this folder. They were mostly of space age themes. In spite of what some people may be thinking, Wograld was not intended to be pure fantasy. I kind of liked how in Ultima 7, there was a spaceship in the farmers field. I always thought it would be fun to add a little bit of science fiction to an otherwise fantasy story. Not to go overboard with it, but to just add enough to give it a similar feel to the Ultima Series. To that end, the Paranoia areas will be heavily alien themed. I have not gone into all the alien and spaced themed ideas because I don't want to spoil it yet for people who may want to play the game. As you well know, aliens are a common source of paranoia in a lot of stories. So I will add the Ufo's and aliens from outer space. I could use the wall posters there.

Nanowrimo

The whole of November was taken up by me writing a novel. www.nanowrimo.org The C++ group I was involved with got to chapter 7. After that, we kind of stopped. Something about chapter 7 in that book just got very hard all of a sudden, even though we seemed to be making progress prior to that. Well actually, each chapter just got harder and harder.

One nice thing about novel writing is you do not have to worry about having a project to large to do by yourself at all. I find that I can write a whole novels myself without any help from anyone else. I won the nano write, but I still have not finished the story, being as I got over the 50k needed to win, but my plot is not really more than halfway done. The story is about a web developer who has no social life, so she joins a cult.

I could talk more about my plotting problems here, but I think I will leave that for somewhere else, as I know not all game developers like books in the horror genre. My husband loves to read horror novels, but he would not like to see the horror stuff happen irl. So then I asked him. If you don't like it for real, then why do you read so much of it? He likes a lot of Stephan king, except for the dark tower series. I hope I did not fill up my book with too many descriptions of her dreams and nightmares. When I do the editing, my critics might insist I take that part out.

Wograld History, not as easy as it seems.

One of the reasons I think I initially put off the website is because I wanted some kind of world lore that made sense for the game, I had this idea of four races and nine stupidities, but then I had really no back story. For instance, I wondered, why were the stupidities important to the populace? How did the four races come to exist in the world. Try as I might, I could not answer those questions. About a year or so ago, I seemed to have written up something about a tyrant who united all the races and that the nine stupidities were a bunch of vague principles that originally tied to common sayings in the realm, but solidified into a set of principles that were used to defeat the tyrant. As far as the races went, I knew that orcs and elves could become the other race, same with humans and undead, and that undead and elves were originally considered immortal while orcs and humans were mortal, whatever the heck that meant.

One thing I have realized that as I have gotten a more in depth view of history than what i had in school. I have come to realize, that people today do not really understand the past, or even how people of that time may have thought or seen the world. I often speculated especially about ancient magic and what it must have been like. Was religion and magic always so closely interwoven? Were the gods really demons? Were the demons really gods? Why did the mysteries disappear? People can only speculated based on the writings and art that they find, but so much would not have survived the ravages of time, particularly in hot and humid climates such as Africa and the Americas. Also, a lot was destroyed by war, with a new king or tyrant removing the face and symbols of his predecessors in order to make it so that he was the only history that ever existed, and that the past did not. People like to think that certain things are or were timeless, but was that truly so? I feel it is not enough to say that is always the way it has been, one can only go further back and farther away.

One thing about the setting of Wograld, after the tyrant king, people are on an upswing. It is not falling into a dark age where people forget how to do even basic tasks, but rather, suddenly can craft new weapons and armor that they could not before. There is an enhancement in the learning of combat techniques and magic.

But the new skills and powers are not without their detractors, in fact, after the tyrant, it is almost an uphill battle to learn new things, since the races of Wograld seem to be afraid of it. This is where the demons come into play. Demons are an idea that I had after thinking about what to do about the skill system. What if, in order to raise your skill caps, you had to summon demons and ask them to train you in various skills? Wouldn't that be neat. Typically people think of demons in games as either monsters to fight, or little familiar creatures for warlocks and summoners to use in combat. But I like the idea of a whole new take on that idea. (well, actually a very old idea)

Housing and Realism

I recently found out that Wograld current housing tool requires you to buy building materials, unlike the housing tool in Ultima Online that just required you to have the gold in your bank box to create the ready made additions. While Wogralds current version of the housing tool could be considered more realistic and true to life, Ultima Online's housing tool could be said to be designed to maximize fun in the game. How much fun it is to have to remember how many boards or ingots you need to finish off your dwelling? Sure it is more realistic, but the reality is people don't play these games for realism. If it was realistic, we would have a housing mortgage crisis. Players would no longer be able to afford their in game houses anymore, and would have to move back into thier bank boxes.

Even Ultima Onlines housing tool had limits however. Some of them were well deserved, such as limited the creation of houses to certain tiles already existing in the game. This makes sense, otherwise the new houses would take too much time to load on screen, making for a laggy experience. The other, unessarly limitation is that Ultima Online's houses had to be physically possiable. Since crossfire as a whole does not really support this notion (what with buildings that have maps inside maps inside maps) It does not seem that Wograld nessarly has to follow in the footsteps of the idea that the world has to obey the same physical laws of the universe. For instance, why not have housing that is an inverted pyramidal shape? Maybe that is too wierd for most people however, but the idea that it is wierd and alien would probably draw people into the game because they would see stuff they have never seen before. Too many games, once you have seen a little bit of the world, you feel you have seen it all. You feel like it is just like every other game you ever played. The world is the same, it fits the same genre of sword and sorcerey, or some poorly written sci-fi.

Even Ultima, a pretty classic medieval style world had some science fiction elements. Once players get imersed in a world however, the worldlore becomes less important and the gameplay more important. It doesn't matter if the orcs are supposed to be at war with the humans, if game mechanics make it easier for them to work together, then they will do so. These kinds of things are set more by how the hard coded programming rules of the game are writen rather than what some talentless hack of a writer threw up on the website in her spare time.

Given that Wograld is not trying to be an emulated clone of your real life (if your so called real life was so wonderful you probably would not waste hours upon hours of your time on Wograld anyway,) it makes little sense to emulate the parts of reality that you dislike. The functionality of a game mechanic to achieve a certain goal, a certain feel for the game, trumps up the nagging voice of trying to be realistic in the sense of emulating real life.

Filling in Game lore part1

I took a break from the WOGRALD project for a number of reasons, that are more embaresing to admit than not being able to program in C. (something I did learn)

First of all, I wanted a way to fill out the game lore for the project. I had something all written up, but it just did not seem compelling enough. I wanted to really draw people into the game, make them feel immersed in the world before I even began to work on the project. I came up with the idea several years ago of the nine stupidites, basically things people do that are considered to be stupid, not as in retarded stupid, but as in lacking in the common sense department, as in the dress sense of your average programmer. Programmers tend to wear clothing until it gets big gaping holes, then they even continue to wear them, oblivious to the fact that the pants are now indecent and the shirt looks like a rag. Even if it is pointed out to them, the self confident coder geek will tell you how wonderful that torn up shirt and pants are, and how they will never part with them. Its not really about the outfit though, I don't really know why people do that. I'm not trying to say this to get after programmers and make them suddenly dress like sleezy wall-street suits, but I did think that if I dressed up like a programmer, then I would learn to code. I don't know if this really works though. I don't think you have to wear the holy shirts to get top quality code done.

Then I spent some time studying the occult. I came to realize that all the major games that I really liked that did well, the authors had spent an awful lot of time pouring through grimores and religious mythology. They studied all the demon names, angel names, spirit names, ancient magic sigils, etc. They knew how to use a pentagram and what way it should be pointing to get the results one wants in a ritual. Draw the demon sigil out in blood, make a pact, etc etc.

At first that all sounds irrelavant, because why would you need to know all this real lore to make your imaginary world, but mythology is what builds a world, it is what makes it compelling. And that is why religious fundimentalists will never create the best video games.