All of the songs of The Yes Album are a part of the Astral Invasion story;-)

I am still looking for a programmer who wants to make Space Hockey with a plan to continue making games within this same universe for... the rest of our lives, actually. A programmer mentioned that they thought Space Hockey could be made in less than one year, Space Hockey is a pretty special game for something that can be made in less than a year. Lost Art Studios really is decades ahead of the competition when it comes to making space ship games, and some of the later games such as Territories, Mission, Clash of the Titans, and Struggle of the Ancients are truly revolutionary designs unlike any games that have ever existed before. Clash of the Titans, for example, would be the first strategy game of space fleets that actually works as a strategy game rather than single “death ball” fleets of every ship on each side chasing each other around the map in what amounts to a completely broken game. It's hard to believe that nobody is interested in any of this, it really is... I really am living in the Twilight Zone.

Since I've been revealing a lots of aspects of the Astral Invasion story towards the end here, I thought I'd cap it off with a little more variety. In all of the games of the PDU the story is told by the music as much as the text, and the story is always originally derived from the song lyrics. There is a format too it, as well, where the primary story arc is always one band and is always based on an entire album from that band using songs from other albums from that band that also fit the story. Major side story arcs are thematically separated from the primary story arc (and each other), by being other bands. So story arcs always also have a unique sound and atmosphere based on the band that is telling that story arc. Obviously, in Astral Invasion, Yes is the sound and inspiration of the primary story arc of the sun exploding. The Yes Album is the core of it, and several songs from Fragile and 90125 are also used for the primary story arc.

Here's one song from each of the major side story arcs of the Astral Invasion story, and the three bands that are telling them.

This one is related to the story of a space marine general named Gloria Grace, who you would have seen in Armageddon Chess if you read that. If you were really paying attention, you might have also noticed the line “God gave us grace to save this place”;-) General Grace is the last of the pantheon ascendants of the first time through the broken time loop, she is Artemis. Yes, there are a lot of female heroes in the PDU, because there are a lot more Greek goddesses than there are gods and they all need to do some great thing and ascend at some point during the story.

Another big thing going on in Astral Invasion, besides Artemis ascending and the sun exploding, is that Andrea “Death Stalker” Takahashi's big moment happens during this game. Andrea hasn't made it into this blog much because the focus was on Cindy, but she was inspired by a line from Babylon 5 and Andrea (she's actually been called “Suzi” since she was a child, only the authorities and the media use her legal name Andrea) is Cindy McAllen's “equal but opposite”. This is partly about Andrea having just made a fundamental change in her philosophy.

And, this one... I will just cryptically post without further comment;-)

On 19/01/2018 at 10:23 AM, Kavik Kang said:

Lost Art Studios really is decades ahead of the competition when it comes to making space ship games, and some of the later games such as Territories, Mission, Clash of the Titans, and Struggle of the Ancients are truly revolutionary designs unlike any games that have ever existed before. Clash of the Titans, for example, would be the first strategy game of space fleets that actually works as a strategy game rather than single “death ball” fleets of every ship on each side chasing each other around the map in what amounts to a completely broken game. It's hard to believe that nobody is interested in any of this, it really is... I really am living in the Twilight Zone.

hehehe, I feel your burden.  Around here everyone is hoping to make a game that breaks ground in novel and fun ways.  I think though one has to bring forth some evidence of their idea in order for it to be taken more seriously by the community.  Like my game, I get a lot of people looking, but not a lot of expressed interest yet, which is to be expected because I haven't provided the community with anything to try.  Like wise, you may find it hard attracting long-term dedication to your ideas seeing as right now they are just that, ideas.

They are not just ideas.  I am a game designer, not a programmer.  Most of these games exist, and Rube exists.  The modern game industry's often quoted phrase "ideas are a dime a dozen" is far more accurately stated as "bad ideas are a dime a dozen".  These games are not ideas, they exist.  I know exactly how every one of them functions, at least half of them have near-complete "full notes" stage design documents, and I can play every one of them in my mind.  I already know how they work, I am not guessing.  That's what my generation of game designers do... "we already know how it works" we don't "blindly blunder forward through trial and error praying that things work out well in the end" as is the institutionalized process of the modern game industry.

There are over 600 pages about the PDU on this blog, including two first draft design documents, how much more do you expect me to reveal?  Especially considering that, as far as I know, there is not a single person who has actually even bothered to read any of it...

EDIT: I forgot about Space Hockey, there are actually 3 first draft design documents on this blog.  And I really don't see how it is possible that not a single person has ever said a single word too me about the story or the games.  Not even a Rush fan?  How is that possible?  That is why for the last 6 months or so I've been saying that I have to be "living in the Twilight Zone".  It doesn't seem possible that not even a single Rush fan has had anything to say about it, but it is somehow true.

If I can't find anyone who is interested in making Space Hockey, than I am out of ideas again and I will at least know that I tried every possible way of doing what I was born to do over the last 40 years.  There is nothing else I could have tried to do that I can think of.  So I also wanted to point out here that my games are not based on "my ideas".  They are the "next generation" of the games made by companies like Avalon Hill, Amarillo Design Bureau, SPI... a whole different gaming world than the one you know.  A gaming world that spent a lot longer time than you have yet to reach arriving at our way of doing things.  Those companies were originally continuing the tradition of the "ruler & string" games that had been played by real world military men for centuries.  There is a lot more about all of this on my Gamasutra blog...

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarcMichalik/787769/

The Pirate Dawn Universe is the next generation of all that.  Not those types of games made as computer games, those types of games translated into computer games.  And Steve Cole's Impulse Chart is a far more sophisticated thing than modern gamers believe exists in "board games".  In fact, it's far more sophisticated than even world class SFB experts believe it too be.  These are not "my ideas", this is a form of simulation design that is ultimately centuries old.

7 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

They are not just ideas.  I am a game designer, not a programmer.  Most of these games exist, and Rube exists.  The modern game industry's often quoted phrase "ideas are a dime a dozen" is far more accurately stated as "bad ideas are a dime a dozen".  These games are not ideas, they exist.  I know exactly how every one of them functions, at least half of them have near-complete "full notes" stage design documents, and I can play every one of them in my mind.  I already know how they work, I am not guessing.  That's what my generation of game designers do... "we already know how it works" we don't "blindly blunder forward through trial and error praying that things work out well in the end" as is the institutionalized process of the modern game industry.

Congrats, if you've got the game sketched out in your mind then you're way further ahead than most of us, but you probably already know that.  o.k, you say that you're about to give up on getting your game out there.  I'd focus on the bolded portion of what I quoted, that is unfortunately your short coming.  If you don't get around to learning that skill, your games will probably never see the light of day because what you're hoping for, I suspect, is someone to come along and read through your documentation and learn how your games work and then agree to help you out.  But... you're forgetting one important thing, most of us here are here to program our own games.  Learn to program and this community will help you out immensely, till then you're likely talking in the wind.

I hope one of your games is realised one day

Cheers

Programming isn't my thing, I would never be a good one.  I am a game designer, I spent my life learning that.  Becoming a great game designer and programmer would be the same thing as becoming a great doctor and engineer.  The people in the computer game industry have always said they hire game designers, but they don't really mean it.  They hire level designers.  The games are designed by committee, in the vast majority of cases there is no game designer... although they use the title for level designers.  By our definition, they don't have game designers.  But they think they do, because they have a completely different definition of what that term means.  It took me a long time to realize that this had been the main issue throughout most of my life.

I'm not a programmer and I'm never going to be, and I am never going to make games because the modern game industry doesn't use game designers.  They think they do, but that's just because they think a level designer is a game designer.

The thing is... I really am four decades ahead of you when it comes to space ship games.  Not because I'm special, but because I am a part of an entire community that is four decades ahead of you in this area.  Your space ship games really are very close to Candyland compared to the PDU, it really can't be overstated.  That makes this all particularly frustrating too me.

I'll add something just in case there is anyone out there that has actually read the story on this blog and liked it enough to really take it in.  If you exist, you are probably pretty blown away by the lyrics of Magic Power.  There are five different valid interpretations of it, for one thing.  Another is that early on I didn't want to reveal Marvin's last name so I just replaced it with the very uninspired "Cayce".  As a thank you to you if you are out there, and this would reveal one of the possible interpretations of Magic Power, Marvin's last name is actually "Vaith";-)

5 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I'm not a programmer and I'm never going to be

Why exactly do you think so?

You say you designed your games in detail in your mind, and they exist, you know they work, etc. That's exactly what a programmer is doing. (But it's easier for us: If our algorithm fails, we can figure out the reason discovering an aspect of the problem we did not think about. So programming is both helpful to understand a problem and to proof its solution, and its an iterative process - no need to think about every tiny detail beforehand - mostly.)

You define detailed rules for your games and imagine exactly how they play - again that's what a programmer is doing. We think about what data we need, what we want to calculate from that and how results affect logical decisions. we let the program flow happen in our mind before we code it.

Programming itself is not hard. Working on difficult problem is hard, but that has nothing to do with programming. From what you say you have already solved all problems for your games. (I know nothing about the games you mention, but i'm sure none of them tackle difficult problems like physics simulation, high performance rendering or AI - how should they? Luckily the game engines available nowadays have all this built in already. You don't need to be a top programmer anymore.)

What is hard is getting started.

Learning programming gets quickly hindered by starter questions like: What Programs do i need, how do i get input and output, how to draw something, how to load from HD, etc. This is frustrating, and by using a game engine this only gets worse (but it saves you years of work in return - all those years you wasted in not learning programming ).

Maybe you should give it another try - you don't want a young and inexperienced programmer, you don't get get the experienced guy... what other options do you have than do it yourself? Download Unity, look for a Pong (or in your case Asteroids) tutorial project, get it to work and then play around just for fun...

It's not my thing, I would never become truly good at it.  You need to be great at it to be of any help in your business.  I've worked with "AAA" programmers before.  I would never become good enough at it to be more of a hindrance too them than a help.  Someone good be in an endless state of cleaning up my mess.  I wouldn't try to become an artist, either, because I have no talent for it.  I believe there are only two ways for a game designer to find a way into the computer game industry.  You either need to be a programmer or artist, and you can become a part of the committee.  Not really a game designer, but at the same time you will be "designing games".

To be a true game designer, designing the games and creating the background/story, you need to be both a businessman and a designer.  This was as true in the hobbyist game industry as it is in yours, it was just a lot cheaper and easier to do with board games.  Often a one-man operation running out of a spare bedroom.  There is a little more too it than that if you want to make computer games, and either way you have to be two things if you want to be a game designer who is "creating their own art".  And that is my problem, I only do one thing.  I am as terrible of a business man as I am a programmer or artist.  Space Hockey is actually the fourth time that I have tried to start my own company to make games.  The only time I ever came close was when my father, unlike me being a businessman is his thing, devoted a tiny bit of his time to help and almost did it.  But I won't ever pull that off on my own, as you can probably see from my two post attempt that is all I can think to do along those lines.

I really am very good at what I do, but there really is only one thing that I do well.

What the heck, another Astral Invasion Cindy song...

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

It's not my thing, I would never become truly good at it.  You need to be great at it to be of any help in your business.

In the business i used to work last time, nobody of us was great at what he was doing, really

And again, time has changed. Today artists with some basic scripting skills create games, some of them very good. We are heading towards creating professional games just by clicking. If you really want to create computer games, you can. You could start with something simpler, like Game Maker.

I work for 4 months on a problem that i'm still unable to solve. I'm not good at this stuff. There are few people who finally developed seemingly good solutions for the problem after a decade of research - maybe. Academic experts, so i do not understand what they say in their scientific papers. I really don't like to work on the problem, it's kinda boring, most code i already wrote is useless. But i must succeed - otherwise i'm totally stuck. And nobody will join me to help even if i claim my vision is worth it. I have to show it really works first i guess.

So, i really think you should to do the same. Even if it's just for fun and still won't work after a year. Writing design documents is not enough. What you do is like going to a record company without a demo tape and not willing to sing, compose or play an instrument.

That's really just another way of saying "they don't hire game designers in this business" which they've been insisting isn't true for 35 years.  They get downright offended by it.  But like I said in an earlier post, I've understood for a long time now that it is because they have a completely different definition of the term.

I might, as a hobby after I give up on this, mess with something like GameMaker just to do something for myself.  That would be a very long road to making my games, and I don't have a long road anymore.  I will be 50 later this year, and I was born with a genetic condition that makes me already older than I should expect to live.  But my family has a history of living to an old age for someone with this problem.  So I probably only have 10 or 15 years left.  Making simple board-game like things in a generic editor is not going to get me to making PDU games in any kind of amount of time that I have left.  Really, I should have been making computer games in the early 1990s, the computer game industry has never liked board game designers right from the beginning.  I know, I was there.  So I was really just born into the wrong career at exactly the wrong time in history.

And I do have skills to help other than just writing it.  I did all 30 levels of Sinistar: Unleashed across four levels of difficulties through the raw data files in under 3 months.  As soon as I have something to work with... "a game is never finished, someone wearing a suit eventually rips it from your hands and puts it on a shelf".  I would never be happy with it, or consider it to be "finished", there would always be more than I could possibly do before it shipped.  And finishing the story of any one game is a monumental task when there are 11 other games intricately woven through it as well.

I'm not going to get to the PDU in any amount of time that I have playing with a generic editor.  If those kinds of things existed 20 years ago I'm sure I would have done a lot of things with them, but in 2018 its a little late for me for that.

Since I've given away so much of the spine of the Astral Invasion story that I wasn't originally meaning too, I'll add this as well.  Especially considering the Triumph songs I posted, and how perfect the final lines of this one are.  I'll also mention that this is all closely related to the Time of the Titans chess set in Armageddon Chess, and only someone who has gotten into the story spread across this whole blog, and really taken it in, will be likely to be able to make much sense of all of this other than just what is apparent on the surface.  Although after reading just Space Hockey, and what I have given away about Astral Invasion in Space Hockey and since posting Space Hockey, the trailer and theme songs of Fallen Angel Rising found in the Armageddon Chess blog post will have a lot more meaning too you.

Kavik Kong, are you actually a retired serviceman? I checked out your blog briefly.   I suddenly started thinking that maybe you're someone who's got many more years on us all.  Did you participate in lots of war-games or something?  Totally shooting in the dark here, was just thinking is all.

I was never in the military myself, but have known a great many people who were over the years.  Today I know a lot of majors, colonels, and even a couple generals.  That's where me and my games come from, the PDU is the "next generation" of the games played by real world military men for centuries.  From the Ruler & String games, through Avalon Hill and ADB, to my final "3rd generation" translation of it all into computer games.  The PDU is, in many ways, one of the few remaining legacies of the original gamers... real world military men.

Just in case there is actually someone out there who has read all of the story on this blog and is really getting into all these revelations about how it all ends, here's a bonus for you.  Not only will the lyrics have a lot of meaning too you if you know the story, but I've always considered this to be one of the greatest songs ever written.

And, why not, the song/movie where you would actually see the sun explode!

I am still looking for a programmer who is interested in very easily dominating the sci-fi space ship genre of the computer game industry. As any merely competent person would know, there is no competition for a former member of the Star Fleet Battles Staff among the 1^st graders playing in the sand box (making Candyland-based games) of this business. This will be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Contrary to the many wildly inaccurate rantings at the end of my last thread that I was not allowed to respond too (cowards...), I was what your industry would term an “assistant designer” during the actual design phase of the final edition of SFB. My name appears in all of the core rules/products of the game such as Basic Set, Advanced Missions, and the Tactics Manual. Because of this, my name is among the most respected and well-known in the 40 year long history of the Star Fleet Universe. In that small world I am a celebrity among minor celebrities. I was also one of only four staff members ever actually hired by the company as a paid employee, and founded the tournament that became the most legendary “Den of Aces” in the entire SFB tournament system (which was second only to the World Chess Federation as table-top game tournaments go). Welcome back to reality.

I am merely speaking about them in the same exact manner that they have spoken too me for about 35 years now. For some reason it is perfectly acceptable for them to speak too me this way, but it is some type of affront against humanity for me to say the same exact things right back too them. The only real difference is that we are the actual educated, competent, and experienced ones and they are foot-stomping red-faced children who's fragile little egos cannot tolerate the presence of real game and simulation designers who predate them by centuries and shatter their delusional fantasy world of “Candyland Genius”.

If anyone is interested in being completely dominant in the space ship game genre I am still looking for a programmer to get this started. In about 35 years of trying they've never come anywhere within the remote vicinity of doing space ships well. It would be impossible to not succeed in this if we can get the games made, there is no competition for the SFB Staff when it comes to making space ship games. We aren't just in a different league, we are on a different planet... and any competent person would know that already.

E-Mail: kavik_kang@hotmail.com

I love the amount of dedication you are giving to your field of work but if I may help in some way,  it sounds like you realistically need to hire a programmer to produce your game. It would be difficult to ask an experienced programmer to work for your company and on your designs for a year for free.  Even if there is 'possibly' some payment after it is finished and profitable, this is still not much of an incentive. I personally would just want to work on my own projects as a hobby and I'm sure many other programmers here would feel the same. You could have a programmer partner in some project but be prepared for them to have input into the game being created . Otherwise you may be better doing it all yourself. You don't need to be AAA programmer to produce a profitable game, BUT you WILL need to be good at the business side if you want your company to be a success. I wish you best of luck. 

Yes, I actually realize all of that.  It is very unlikely that I will ever get to make any of my games.  "Game designer" is not a valid job description in the modern game industry.

Sorry to here.  If you already realized what I was saying, can I presume you have not hired a programmer because your company can not afford one?  If so, apart from creating it yourself, I totally agree with you that you are really going to struggle to get YOUR EXACT game created for YOUR company for free. 

Kavik Kang: I don't have any money to pay other people, I am barely getting by myself since I stupidly devoted my life to become the best in the world at a job that doesn't exist.  If you read my post in the "One Vision" thread you'll see that I was a part of the group of people that invented the form of collaborative game design that the computer game industry uses today.  The first few games of the PDU are meant to be made that way.  Only Territories and Mission are "fragile" and need to be made mostly my way or they won't work at all, but the first three games of the PDU are intentionally very simply and open to "interference" from others.

Addressing that issue has always been a part of the plan of the PDU. 

15 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

Contrary to the many wildly inaccurate rantings at the end of my last thread that I was not allowed to respond too

Let's be a bit more honest about what happened in that topic. You were not only allowed to, but actually did respond after all of the posts questioning your credentials, and made no effort to address it.

The post was later closed by a moderator not involved in the discussion as it was getting circular, unproductive, and impolite; apologies for my part in that.  It is wildly inaccurate -- and like many of your claims in that topic, trivially disproved -- to suggest that you were not given a chance to respond.

For the record, my claim about your credentials is based on the available credits online for the products in the SFB line. If the actual credits differ from that, I will happily retract that portion of my remarks and give you my apology - and would suggest that you have the oversight corrected, as other people checking your credentials (such as people considering hiring or working with you) will be using the same method as me of checking online.

You've been given lots of advice on improving your approach to getting games made, including in that topic, and I would suggest taking some of it - but if you would prefer to continue that same rhetoric that hasn't succeeded for over a decade go right ahead.

You don't have to be this world changing designer to recruit successfully -- the difficult-to-believe claims actually harm your image -- the fact that you've worked on a couple of shipped products would actually be impressive if you just stated it plainly without the pomp and grandeur.

Good luck. 

None of my "claims" in that topic were "trivially disproved".  Everything I said is true.  I have been at this for 35 years, I've already tried all of the things people suggest.  In fact, in many cases, I was probably the first person to try those things.  I have already established that none of those things work.  I've tried it all already.  This is all that is left.  Nothing else works.  And you are still acting like your industry hires game designers when we both know that they don't.  

I am being honest about what happened in that thread, you got in a bunch of easily disproven attacks in on me and then closed the thread (like cowards) before I could respond.  You need to be more honest about what happened in that thread, pretty much everything you people said at the end that I was not able to respond too is disproven by things that are already on my blog.  I tried it EXACTLY the way you are describing in this post for about 25 years, that never got me anywhere.  I didn't become "Pirate Lord" until after that.  I am way, way past that.  I did it the way you say I should for 25 years and was completely ignored for 25 years.

As for my "credentials", here is another way of putting it... if you only know the names of 10 SFB Staff members, mine is among the only 10 names that you know.

If anyone wants to completely dominate the space ship game genre of the computer game industry, I am still looking for a programmer.  We can't fail, there is no competition out there and they've never managed to do space ships well in 35 years of trying.  It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.  The SFB Staff are the founding fathers of modern game design.  If there is not a single person out there that is interested in this, then I've finally proven beyond all doubt that the modern game industry is incompetent.

It really is that simple.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

If there is not a single person out there that is interested in this, then I've finally proven beyond all doubt that the modern game industry is incompetent.

Let's just go with that then, if it'll make you feel better, and call this argument finished.

7 hours ago, desiado said:

stupidly devoted my life to become the best in the world at a job that doesn't exist

Sorry to here again, but if you believe this, I’m not sure what you expect people in these forums to say. I’m not really qualified to answer this type of response. I could say focus on getting funding for your game, crowdfunding even patreon or do prototyping etc.  If you are not good at doing business proposals, ask help for that instead.  Somehow I have a feeling you will say you realize this already and probably tried it.  Sorry it’s not worked out for you.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

If there is not a single person out there that is interested in this, then I've finally proven beyond all doubt that the modern game industry is incompetent.

You aren't getting any responses because you've successfully built up a reputation of having an attitude that nobody wants to deal with.  Everyone is intentionally avoiding you.

I actually don't have the attitude that you think I do.  We created the system of collaborative game design that you use, and we do it a lot better than you do.  If I were making games I would quickly become known as the designer in your industry who is the MOST open to other people's ideas, and uses them more than anyone else does.  Just like SVC's reputation in the hobbyist game industry, because that is how we do it.

I tried it your way for 25 years, that got me absolutely nowhere.  Originally I wasn't alone, there were about a dozen of us who SHOULD have been among the earliest designers in your industry.  I am just the only one left who is stupid enough to still be slamming my head against your brick wall.  Right from the beginning, you were absolutely convinced that we were idiots and you were game design geniuses.  Even though it was a brand new thing to you, and a centuries old thing too us.  That extreme level of arrogance prevented you from using game designers right from the beginning, and that has never changed.  It has only become more ingrained over the years... and you are still literally centuries behind us.  You think in terms of what we called "family games" such as Candyland and Risk.  By the standards of where game and simulation design actually is, knowledge that is on the verge of being completely lost, you don't even count as game designers.  You think in terms of Candyland and Risk, anyone who has so much as played a game can do that.  We really are about 200-300 years ahead of you in how we do things.  That is why Rube is indistinguishable from magic too you, that is how little you understand about simulation design.  You can't even imagine what Rube might be or how it might function because there is a 100 year gap in your knowledge between Candyland and Rube.

I can understand the programmers and artists wanting to keep the real game designers out of your business, but I can't understand the people who fund it all wanting to keep us out of your business.  They would make a lot of money on people like me.  In my case, with space ship games and strategy war games.  Absolutely, totally, and completely dominating the space ship game genre in your business is such a simple thing for a member of the SFB Staff that mere words cannot even describe it.  Saying there is no competition out there for us in this specific genre is an understatement beyond the ability of mere words to describe.  You really are very, very bad at this whole simulation design thing.  You are starting over from scratch, 300 years behind the actual professionals.

If not a single person in your industry is interested in that, then you are incompetent.  It really is that simple.  QED.

I am still interested in your design ideas - but i'm not part of the game industry, like many others here as well.

But even if i would rule a big AAA studio, would i take the risk to make a game for a niche market? No, i wouldn't dare, even if i see potential.

Who has sold more games? Candyland / Risk or SFB? (Here in Europe Risk is the only game i know just the by name.)

However, niche is not a bad market, but a market too small for the so called industry, i think. (And sadly a market hard to reach even with a good product.)

Probably you disagree and you're convinced any of your games would become an instant hit? Then, why did you not work with that young programmer who wanted too? You do agree, and you have doupts yourself... well, ok - that's right, but also one more reason not to blame others for anything. If 'we' are too incompetent to reach that small market, than maybe this is intended for most of 'us', and that's no reason to treat 'us' like idiots.

I really understand you got angry about recent responses, but you can't resist to provoke that again and again. This and your pessimism is not really inviting to work with you, maybe?

There were no spaceship games for a decade, there were no point and click adventures for a decade, ... This is a matter of fashion, or of no more options to innovate, but it does not proof a whole industry to be fools.

At this point you really have to give a bit more evidence of your genius, more than talking about fish in barrels, referring to thousands of pages (while still keeping secrets as you say), and more than extending Asteroids with multiplayer / sports to convince anybody. HOW do you want to rule the space ship genre? Just with infinite details, gameplay mechanics that can make holodeck happen and and tell god how things work? Be serious for once, please.

4 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I actually don't have the attitude that you think I do. 

You don't get to choose other people's opinions of you.

Nypyren: I'm not.  I was just pointing out that how we actually do things, and your impression of how we do things, are two completely different things.  Our system is, by far, the most inclusive way of designing games that there ever was.  If you want to believe the exact opposite, that is fine, but you are wrong and any SFB player can tell you that you are wrong.

JoeJ: Space ship heavy sci fi games are, traditionally, not a niche market.  They come second only to RPGs.  They are only thought of as being a niche market because the computer game industry has never made a good one.  It's the lack of knowledge behind them, and lack of quality in the gameplay that has made them appear to be "niche games".  And you can't compare sales numbers of hobbyist era board games to computer games.  SFB was the dominant game in the world, second only to D&D, for about 20 years.  It has also been the most influential game ever made, second only to D&D.  Almost every game that you've ever played with space ships in it was a badly conceived vision of SFB.  Either directly or indirectly.  These games rarely get made because A) they don't know how to make them and B) they are a disaster when they try to make one because they don't understand how it works or what the audience wants.

People want space ship games, there just isn't anyone capable of making them who is allowed to work in the modern game industry.  They are second in popularity only too RPGs, if they are done right.  People want Star Trek and Star Wars, there just isn't anyone who is allowed to make games that is capable of giving them too them.

There is a lot more to Space Hockey then you can see, this is a great example, because you don't understand how space combat works.  It is very complex, more so than you can possibly imagine.  Ask any SFB player and they will tell you the same thing.  Space Hockey is intentionally very simple, it was meant to be made as a stand alone indie game.  So of course there isn't much too it.  But it would be an amazing and very fun game that people who got into it would play for years.  It works very, very well.  You just see ships and weapons, but it is all a single thing that works in unison with each other.  You have to understand how the combat works, and plays out, to see what is actually there and very few people in this world (even among SFB players) are capable of visualizing that.

What more do you want from me?  A 700 page preview of a 14 game universe with a timeline covering the formation of the earth through the explosion of the sun.  Three (3!!!) examples of design documents, one written to be a playable game that can be sent too someone as an e-mail, one a full computer game, and the third an amazingly good and addictive indie game that is simple to make (especially compared to what it is in the end).  My background... I've been designing games and simulations since before your industry even existed, created one of the first computer game mods ever that still stands as the basis of player ratings in all sports games, literally rescued the project at the one computer game company I worked that never would have shipped a game at all had I not been there, and was an assistant designer of the largest and most complex game ever made that dominated the gaming world alongside of D&D for 20 years.  This isn't enough but a degree from the Devry School of Game Design is?

Oh... and I also completed the work of centuries of simulation design history to arrive at the Holy Grail of simulation design.  A general simulation of time combined from reality that is indistinguishable from what we perceive as "God".  What more am I supposed to achieve as a simulation designer to even be considered worthy of consideration by you people?  Which one of you can claim to even approach my background in simulation design, or achievements in it considering SFB and Rube?

You are forgetting that my problem is that there is no level of experience, knowledge, and achievement that will get you a job as a game designer because game designer is not a valid job description in the modern game industry.  Their arrogance and incompetence has, literally and truly, stolen my life from me.

Joe, I am not aware of any "young programmers" who wanted to work with me.  Nobody has said a word too me about Space Hockey except for one E-mail from a sound guy I have saved.  As I have made clear, though, I don't want to involve any younger people until Space Hockey is a "real" thing to involve them in.  I don't want to distract people who are at the age that they need to establish a career for themselves misleading them into thinking I am making games.  Until I am working with a programmer capable of making Space Hockey, there is nothing real for them to become involved with.

And there is no question in my mind that people would love Space Hockey, I don't know what "doubt" you are talking about.  In fact, I consider Space Hockey to be something of a "secret weapon"... something I've always known could be done VERY easily and yet be irresistibly addictive too those who are looking for this kind of thing.  Space Hockey really is a very special thing from a "bang for the buck" perspective.

33 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Their arrogance and incompetence has, literally and truly, stolen my life from me.

lolwut

Your arrogance and incompetence has literally stolen my life from me.

2 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

created one of the first computer game mods ever

Why are you still claiming this???  It was just a couple of days ago that I showed you it's not even remotely true.  There were literally hundreds of mods before yours, released over more than a decade earlier. 

As I told you in the other topic, the fact that you keep making obviously untrue claims even after they have been corrected really hurts your credibility.  Successfully publishing a mod is an achievement in its own right, there is no need to try to make it more special than that.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Our system is, by far, the most inclusive way of designing games that there ever was.

Your inclusiveness is not even remotely overcoming the negative impact that your own posts have on the attitude that others perceive you to have.

It doesn't matter what you or I believe about your design methodologies.  You're a huge egotistical prick with zero debate skills, and nobody wants to work with you.  QED.

I was hoping that your casual participation in the forum after your first big period or throwing forum tantrums would have led you to a deeper understanding of how to get along with people.  It appeared at first that you were making an honest attempt to fix your attitude problem, and I saw a glimmer or hope for you. But now we're back to square one and you're throwing tantrums again.

You're repeating yourself constantly in exactly the same ways you were doing before.  You're ignoring honest feedback and instead of discussing the points that other people raise, you go on unrelated tirades about board games that only a very small number of people ever played as if they are the end-all of game design.  Ideas mean jack shit if you can't implement them.

You have problems holding rational discussions, believing things which are untrue, repeating lies as if you can somehow make them true through the sheer act of repetition, respond to other people with non sequiturs and interpret what other people say in obviously incorrect ways.  You should get yourself checked for schizophrenia.  I'm not kidding.  You have serious problems, man.  Everything about you screams "stay away from this person!"

Your ego is the biggest obstacle standing in your way.

JB Adams, IKNFL was one of the first mods ever made for a commercial game.  That is and always has been true.  It is also the basis of the player ratings in all sports games too this day.  I lazily said it was the first mod in a thread a few days ago, I had always assumed it probably was because "where else would modding come from" but the first organized online game community for a commercial game.  If you look at my IKNFL post on my Gamasutra blog you will see that I said "one of the first" on the blog.  I usually say it that way, because I was never certain about that.  IKNFL was one of the first mods ever made for a commercial game, and has influenced all sports games that followed it.  This is just an example of how I never get any credit for what I do.

Nypyren, it's not "my ego".  I don;t believe things that are untrue, I am not repeating any lies or telling any to begin with, I don't "have trouble holding rational discussions".  None of that is true.  What are you even talking about?  I spent 25 years trying this the normal way, as Mr. Nice guy as you might put it here.  That got me absolutely nowhere because the people in the computer game industry don't know anything about the history of game and simulation design.  That was "not relevant to what they do".  So, I could have continued trying this the normal way until I died and nothing would have ever happened.  They don't know enough to realize who I am.  My only hope was to first teach them about that history they know nothing about, which allow them to be able to place me within it... and then realize who it is that they are looking at.  I also have to try and overcome the fact that "game designers" don't even exist in your industry, even though I know that most of you probably still think that they do.  They don't.  You don't hire game designers, you don't use game designers.

It's not ego, it's not me being a jerk.  It's me only having 10-15 years left to live and not having anything left to lose by trying this the only way I never tried it before... because I KNOW how it is perceived.  I am not a 20 year old who thinks he would make great games just because he likes games a lot.  I am 50, I've been designing games since I was 7.  I helped create the largest and most complex game ever made.  I have been making games and simulations since before your industry even existed.  I have arrived at the ultimate evolution of 300 years of serious simulation design that is the fundamental basis of The Matrix and a holodeck.  There is EVERY REASON IN THE WORLD for any competent person to say "Hey, that guy should really know what he is doing with this game design stuff" and yet look at how I am treated by the relative amateurs of your industry.

I am not saying anything that you people have not been saying to me for 35 years.  Someone it is some "great wrong" for me to, finally after decades, speak back too you EXACTLY as you speak too me.  EXACTLY.  That is all that is happening here, I am finally speaking too you exactly as you have always spoken too me.  Who is more justified in that?  The 40 year veteran or you new guys?

7 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

JB Adams, IKNFL was one of the first mods ever made for a commercial game.

It's JUST. NOT. TRUE.

Literally hundreds before it.  Literally over a decade before it was published.  Let it go.  There were even games where the developer provided proper tools to the modding community (e.g. UnrealEd, 1996) before your mod was released.

I also already debunked your assumption that it was the first organized online game community for a commercial game; that happened over a decade earlier as well, so I really don't understand why you're repeating these claims - this is why Nyrpren is accusing you of repeating lies - I have told you that these claims are untrue (with citations to back up the claim) but you are still repeating them... how is that not repeating lies, when you continue to claim something that you have been repeatedly shown isn't true?

Successfully publishing a mod is an achievement in its own right, you don't need to keep trying to make it more special than that.  You are only hurting your own credibility so that people are less likely to believe the other things you are claiming.

Anyone can make a mod for a game that doesn't go anywhere.  IKNFL was included on the disk with the game.  I am talking about "real" mods, that were actually published.  I already told you that "modding" began with the "unofficial expansions" of the board game industry.  I am well aware that "mods" have existed since the 1950's.  You just don't want me to have any credit for anything, do you?  According too you I am some nobody who is only listed in one product for SFB and IKNFL also, of course, counts for nothing.

And, wow I can't believe your nitpicking on this one... yes, when Caveman Ugh first drew Tic-Tac-Toe on a wall I am sure Bam immediately added three more boxes.  I generally cut off the history of gaming at the beginning of Avalon Hill because that is the "modern" game business.  So, yes, there were "mods" before Avalon Hill if you want to be annoying about it.  I know that already.

IKNFL is the basis of all player ratings in all sports games too this day.  It was one of the first PUBLISHED mods ever made.  Anyone can make a mod and throw it online.

35 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

IKNFL was included on the disk with the game. 

Ok, that's a distinction you have not bothered to make in your claims before. IKNFL definitely wasn't the first to have that honour, but it may well have been one of the first. Congratulations on that - of course I'll give you credit when you actually say something true, but if that's your claim you need to be specific, because most people don't disregard all of the other mods as you apparently do. 

Mods that don't have that honour often do a lot better than "going nowhere" though, and are generally still considered "real mods"; many mod authors have later re-released as stand-alone commercial products and/or been hired in the industry on the basis of their work.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

It's not ego <elided>.

I am 50, I've been designing games since I was 7.  I helped create the largest and most complex game ever made.  I have been making games and simulations since before your industry even existed.

THAT is what we call ego.  Even if your statement is a fact, it can still be ego.  Do you understand?  You don't understand.

I'm 37.  I've been programming since I was 5.  I have shipped dozens of games for multiple platforms.  But it has it has absolutely no bearing on anything we're talking about.  The same is true for your experience, because the real problem is your personality.  I'm not enough of a fool to believe that my experience in programming matters enough to be brought up as a talking point every third post like you do.

You're extremely narcissistic.  You lack the ability to think about what is important to you isn't important to other people.  You don't ever consider the possibility that you might be wrong.  To you, everyone else should think you're important.  To you, everyone else is wrong.  Everyone else is at fault for your disappointments.  It's never your fault.

But to you, your behavior is perfectly normal.  You have literally no idea why your attitude puts people off.  It's amazing how completely you lack empathy.

I'm leaving the conversation now. I was drawn in to this conversation to correct what I believe is an inaccurate characterisation of how your previous topic was moderated, and then to correct some repeated untruths. I didn't intend to be nit-picky or mean-spirited, but despite efforts to stick to verifiable facts I have become both, and I apologise for that.

So as to not be accused of not allowing you the chance to respond, if you would like me to read and answer anything please tag me, but otherwise I will leave this discussion be.

Although I feel that your current approach will be unsuccessful, l have already given my opinion and suggestions, and you may of course act as you wish - I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your efforts.

Again, my apologies Marc, and good luck.

 - Jason.

JB, I am not being difficult but I had pointed that out in the thread that got closed.  Obviously, as you pointed out, the "first mod" probably happned with the "first game".  Mankala is traditionally known as the "first game" but almost certainly wasn't.  I was just the first that is remembered by history, and even that may have changed since that is 20+ year old knowledge too me that may be outdated by now.  I agree, mods are mods.  IKNFL really was a very significant thing in a few different ways that I never got the credit for.  I should also mention that Sierra also offered to hire both my and my brother as the designers of FPS:FB99 because of IKNFL, but that came as the same time as GameFX so I had to choose between them.  There was a brief flash of a moment where I was actually a hot commodity in your world.

Nypyren, that's not "ego" those are facts.  All of those things are true and there is nothing egotistical about any of what you quoted.  Those things are all true.  I am also "an obsessed savant simulation designer".  That's not ego, either, just another fact.  It's not necessarily a good thing, either, I mean that in all of the ways you would take it for... both the good and the bad.  It's not ego, it's not narcissistic... that really is my history with game and simulation design.  I have been designing games, "AI" even, since I was just 7 years old.  I did help to create the largest and most complex game ever made, undeniably, most people aren't even capable of playing SFB let alone helping to design it.  I have also been designing games since before your industry even existed.  But I do understand, my resume has always been taken as offensive by people in you industry.  They don't like hearing about game design that was far more advanced than what they do long before they existed.  It really sends them into a frenzy of insults and attempting to destroy the credibility of the person who is trying to tell them about it.  They don't like hearing that they are not the greatest simulation design experts of all time.  That was us, the hardcore side of the hobbyist game industry.  You know, those games that are considered to be too complex for anyone but us "grognards" to even consider playing.  What modern gamers call "overly complex" because they take one glance at it and aren't willing to even attempt to play it.  So you don't accuse me of being narcissistic, I'll use Advanced Squad Leader as the example since I had nothing to do with it.

If my problem is what a terrible, horrible egomaniac I am... how do you explain the first 25 years of me not being that way and yet still being completely ignored other than a single summer where I was actually a hot commodity too you people?  And, during that one summer, how do you explain that?  Had you all taken leave of your senses?

The issue has not been me.  Really, truly, if they were looking for the best game designers they could find all I would have ever needed to say was "I am a former member of the SFB Staff and I want to make space ship games."  If they knew what they were talking about, and were actually looking for game designers, that is all I ever should have needed to say.

Is there anyone out there who is interested in one of the more well-known SFB Staff members in the history of the SFU making space games for them?  There should be...

5 minutes ago, jbadams said:

I'm leaving the conversation now. I was drawn in to this conversation to correct what I believe is an inaccurate characterisation of how your previous topic was moderated, and then to correct some repeated untruths. I didn't intend to be nit-picky or mean-spirited, but despite efforts to stick to verifiable facts I have become both, and I apologise for that.

So as to not be accused of not allowing you the chance to respond, if you would like me to read and answer anything please tag me, but otherwise I will leave this discussion be.

Although I feel that your current approach will be unsuccessful, l have already given my opinion and suggestions, and you may of course act as you wish - I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your efforts.

Again, my apologies Marc, and good luck.

 - Jason.

JB, I also believe that this will be unsuccessful.  I have already tried absolutely everything else.  Twice.  This is all that is left for me to try.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

I am not saying anything that you people have not been saying to me for 35 years.  Someone it is some "great wrong" for me to, finally after decades, speak back too you EXACTLY as you speak too me.  EXACTLY.  That is all that is happening here, I am finally speaking too you exactly as you have always spoken too me.  Who is more justified in that?  The 40 year veteran or you new guys?

You're already having problems, so you INTENTIONALLY try to be an asshole to see if that helps?  Did you ACTUALLY think that would help?  You amaze me with your social incompetence.  You're winning at being a troll though, so you can mark that achievement off of your list.

You'll notice I only started responding when you started calling people incompetent.  I took offense to that.  Look, a real consequence to your actions.  Congratulations.  Now I'm going to be hounding you until the moderators tell me to get off your case, or you learn how to play nicely with others.  The gloves are off.  It's on like Donkey Kong.

Your industry has ignored the real simulation designers of the world since its inception and continues to do so too this day.  That is incompetence.  Not a single person is interested in a former member of the SFB Staff making space ship games.  That is incompetence.  Not a single person in your industry has any interest in the ultimate evolution of simulation design that is the basis of The Matrix and a holodeck.  That is incompetence.

I am sorry if the blatantly obvious truth offends you so much, but it is still the blatantly obvious truth.  Any competent person can see that. Do you have any?

If the industry has ignored them, it's because the players have ignored them. SFB has a 300 page rule book, and that's not counting charts and tables. You honestly think that kind of thing has mass market appeal? You think the industry should toss out their action shooters, their FPSes, their clicker ARPGs (all of which do have mass market appeal) in favor of extremely dense and fiddly simulations?  Get real, dude. Those kinds of games are the very definition of niche, so of course the mainstream industry isn't going to value them as highly as you do.

You seem to think that "our industry" as you put it has for some reason decided to, in lockstep, single out rules-heavy simulation developers for exclusion. For what reason? To what end? Just to be assholes or something? Naw, bro. It's because you don't sell 30 million copies of a game by throwing a 300-page rule book at some fifteen year old kid. 

If you spent your life working on that kind of stuff, and you now find that it hasn't granted you any marketable skills, then how is that anybody's fault but your own? You bet on the wrong horse. Sometimes it happens. Maybe in your next life you'll create Doom instead, and get the Romero-like rockstar life you've always dreamed of.

I have never planned on re-making SFB.  Mission is the best translation of SFB I have ever come up with, and it is a first person star ship simulator/adventure game.  SFB, F&E, and ASL are would all make amazing computer games.  Translated to computer conceptually, not literally.  I make games based on the form of game design that the hobbyist games were based on, which is three generations more advanced than Candyland and Risk... the most simple way, that you and almost everyone else in the world makes games.  They are a whole world apart from what you know of as "games", and the modern gaming world would be absolutely fascinated by it.  It's simply a far more advanced form of game design, that can be used to make almost any type of game, that is literally 3 generations ahead of what you do and how you make games in your "this is basically our first try at this" kind of way.

The players did not ignore them, the only reason the SFU wasn't a major player in the early game industry is that Paramount would not allow SFU games to be made.  So, instead, you got the complete disaster that was Master of Orion as a third class rip-off of the SFU.  As for marketability... you occasionally make the mistake of attempting to make space ship games.  Why do you do that?  Every time you do, that was a pointless waste of time and money when you could have just said "bring in an SFB expert who actually knows how to do this".  But you don't.  You attempt to do it on your own, and fail every time.  Why were you even attempting it, again, if as you say it is such a bad idea?

I did not spend my life working on computer games that are as massive and complex as ASL and SFB, I spent my life translating that form of game design into mass market type computer games.  That's what the PDU games are.  They are games that fundamentally work like those games but do not have the "overly complex" aspect that drives casual gamers away from those types of games.  The fact that they are computer games goes a long way to doing that all by itself, most of the complexity of ASL and SFB just "magically disappear" as computer games because the computer is handling so much of the game for the player.

And there was never any conspiracy to keep us real game designers out of the business, just a certainty right from the beginning that you didn't need us.  Which was pretty arrogant considering that, in the beginning, we were  already 10-15 year veterans of a far more sophisticated form of game design than they were even aware existed and they were programmers who had probably never even played a game more complex than Risk.  The whole "rock star as game designer" thing was the only conscience effort to keep us out, and I always believed was motivated by you not wanting there to be people like, in Hollywood, you either have one of those big name people or you don't get to make a big budget game.

I am not Steve Cole or Ken Burnside, I make games for the mass market audience and I always have.  I "translate" the most massive and complex games ever made down into something that casual gamers will be able to understand and appreciate.  I don't do my best to ensure than only people with an IQ above 150 (I'm looking at you SVC and Burnside;-) are even capable of understanding.  Its more a matter of introducing the rest of the gaming world to our "treadmill of time" than it is me trying to outdo Steve Cole and Ken Burnside in complexity.  I do the exact opposite of what they do, I make that complexity simple and something that casual gamers will finally get to experience.

You are misunderstanding what I am talking about.  It is the core functionality of how our games work, that is the focus of the PDU games.  It's not 800 pages of rules (you are vastly underestimating the true size of SFB) and 50 expansions that I am talking about, it is the "treadmill of time" that these types of games run on... and a whole new "3rd generation" of it called Rube that is designed specifically for computer games.  They are simply games that work in a whole new way than the modern gaming audience has ever experienced before, not me trying to outdo SVC and Ken Burnside in a battle of complexity.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Your industry has ignored the real simulation designers of the world since its inception and continues to do so too this day.  That is incompetence.  Not a single person is interested in a former member of the SFB Staff making space ship games.  That is incompetence.  Not a single person in your industry has any interest in the ultimate evolution of simulation design that is the basis of The Matrix and a holodeck.  That is incompetence.

I am sorry if the blatantly obvious truth offends you so much, but it is still the blatantly obvious truth.  Any competent person can see that. Do you have any?

OH, you're talking about competence at making over-complicated rulesets that only obsessive-compulsive people that want to waste their entire lives obsessing about have the patience for!  I understand now!  I apologize.  I AM incompetent when it comes to that.  I thought you were talking about GENERAL competence, or perhaps competence at developing computer games.

If you think that's the only thing that measures competence... or at least word your posts as if you make it sound that way... well then.  Your bar has been set, but nobody's going to be lining up to be measured by it.

If you're saying we're incompetent because we haven't created (or in your mind, apparently are too dumb to create) your dream system, you should probably research exactly how much effort it takes to turn your blue-sky dreams into real programs.  Then think about the reason(s) why you are yourself too "incompetent" to make it yourself.

If you want to prove that we're the ones who are the true incompetents when it comes to computer games and that is it NOT you who are the incompetent one, you are totally free to try to implement your nonsense that everyone else sees as too complex to bother implementing.

If you can't understand my games then you must have taken the short bus to school.

And, certainly, if the modern game industry has no interest in SFB Staff making space ship games, or the Holy Grail of simulation design that is the basis of The Matrix and a holodeck, then they are certainly incompetent.  Anyone who understands even just a little bit about games and simulation design would agree with that.

Our SFU knowledge is as much about the tactics of the situation and how a fight between ships in space plays out as it is the details how how to make such games work and the nature of the content that the audience likes.  If you don't understand how the fight actually functions, then you can't make even the most simple arcade game with space ships work well.  You don't understand how the fight actually works.  We do.

21 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

If you can't understand my games then you must have taken the short bus to school.

And, certainly, if the modern game industry has no interest in SFB Staff making space ship games, or the Holy Grail of simulation design that is the basis of The Matrix and a holodeck, then they are certainly incompetent.  Anyone who understands even just a little bit about games and simulation design would agree with that.

Our SFU knowledge is as much about the tactics of the situation and how a fight between ships in space plays out as it is the details how how to make such games work and the nature of the content that the audience likes.  If you don't understand how the fight actually functions, then you can't make even the most simple arcade game with space ships work well.  You don't understand how the fight actually works.  We do.

I don't care about your games.  I haven't researched any of them.  I've never heard of them before you started ranting about them.  Lack of knowledge is called "ignorance" where I come from, not "incompetence."  Maybe get a dictionary next time you post so you can use it as a reference.

And you know what?  I'm not GOING to research them.  I don't give a shit about your dust-gathering games.  This is not about your history.  It's about your lack of social skills that you would need in order to cooperate with other people in order to fulfill your goals.  I'm going to verbally beat the reality into you if it takes a month.

I don't have to be nice to you, because you're the only one trying to accomplish something here, and I can give up on you any time I feel like.  But look at you!  You can't even keep your temper under control and are resorting to blatant insults.  I am intentionally provoking you to see just how low you can get.  Please be aware that you're the only one in this thread that CAN lose face and think about how to respond appropriately.

36 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

The whole "rock star as game designer" thing

*cough*

37 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

conscience effort to keep us out

*cough*

I have those skills, you just can't tolerate anyone from outside your own little group claiming any knowledge at all about "your" area of expertise.  It's not 'expertise", it's "young padawon learner".  But you are certain you are an "expert", and your fragile little ego can't tolerate being in the presence of someone who shatters that delusion.  It's not like this is the first time I have encountered someone like you.  I bet you think you are some kind of expert when it comes to Star Trek, Star Wars, and space ships.  It's not just me, in that case, all SFB Staff have this affect on people who base their self worth on their "expertise" when it comes to military space craft.  Your kind can't tolerate being in our presence because it shatters your delusions of competence.  This is actually a common thing that we often encounter.  I'm sorry that we actually know what we are talking about, I know how much that annoys people like you.

You were the one who threw down a gauntlet and said you were going to get me.  Assuming that the moderators don't shut me down for winning a flame war with too much pizzazz, we can keep going until your blood veins start bursting if you really want too.  You aren't ever going to phase me...

7 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

I bet you think you are some kind of expert when it comes to Star Trek, Star Wars, and space ships.

Hahaha, WHAT?  Where did you EVEN come up with that?  Why would anything I have said so far lead you to think I claim ANY knowledge about those things?  I've watched the shows and some of the movies and that's it.  That's all I care about.  I don't have ANY desire to get down into the details like you have.

This is why I said you should get checked for schizophrenia.  You're forming an incorrect mental picture of your environment somehow.  Get yourself checked before it starts impacting... oh wait.

Moderators: Sorry in advance, but Kavik needs this intervention.  You're free to stop me any time.

JB, I did not coin the phrase "rock star as game designer", people in your industry did.  Maybe that was before your time, but I did not make that one up.  You did.

Nypyren, I was just assuming that might be the case since that is the usually thing that causes an obsession with attacking like you seem to have.  Maybe you are just a stark raving lunatic, that would also explain it.

9 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Nypyren, I was just assuming that might be the case since that is the usually thing that causes an obsession with attacking like you seem to have.  Maybe you are just a stark raving lunatic, that would also explain it.

No, I'm a high-functioning psychopath, actually.  And because of this I am very good at identifying other people with mental or personality issues.

Anyway, why would being obsessive in general lead someone to obsess about Star Trek?  You know that people can be obsessed about completely different things, right?  My obsession is finding logical flaws (both in computer programs and in online discussions, in your case) and then telling people they're wrong.

Oh, and I'm also obsessive about editing my posts.  You should probably refresh the page a few times in case I've added any more to my replies.

22 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

JB, I did not coin the phrase "rock star as game designer", people in your industry did.  Maybe that was before your time, but I did not make that one up.  You did.

JB's not talking about the origin of the term.  He's talking about your prior claim that rockstars are perhaps shunned.  At least, I read the post he linked to, not the post of yours that he was replying to.  I felt it was unnecessary, and given your posts, probably a waste of time to spend that much effort trying to even locate that claim in your posts.  (Like, try reading one of your own posts sometime!  Do you even have patience to READ the whole thing?  I don't.)  I trust JB to NOT misinterpret people's words, unlike SOME people in this thread.

If you can't properly follow up on other people's replies to your own criticisms, don't make so many of them in the first place!

Look at my posts.  I focus specifically on the matter at hand and don't get distracted by delusions of PDU or SFB or whatever.  You might also try Ritalin, now that I think of it.  I'm trying to help you here, man.  This is your trial by fire.

You are saying too me "This is your trial by fire" and at the same time insisting that *I* am the narcissist?  That's a good one!  Hahaha!  You really need help, have you considered electro-shock therapy?

Here's something for anyone out there who would like something more interesting to read than Nypie's chest beating ranting and raving...

Much like my family history, I never talk about this because people don't believe it. I was recently goaded into hinting at my family history, so I might as well tell this “unbelievable story” here as well. I used to go to a lot of game conventions and, in the early days of your industry, there was a very brief 2 or 3 year period when computer game companies showed up with booths at the major board game conventions. I made a point of tracking down any game designers who were at conventions and introducing myself and talking too them. At the time I was SFB Staff and worked at Task Force Games and occasionally they were as excited too meet me as I was to meet them. I have at least met most of the legendary game designers who ever were up until the early 1990s.

One time at the ORIGINS conventions somebody told me that MicroProse had a booth and Sid Meier was there, and this was just a few months after the release of the original Civilization. I was planning on just introducing myself, shaking his hand, and walking away but he took an interest in me. We wound up talking for about an hour. It was a tradition to trade games, he gave me one copy of everything MicroProse had brought with them and I gave him a lot of SFB and F&E stuff. He asked me what the highest score I had got in Civilization was and when my answer was higher than he thought possible he wanted to know how I had done it. I had conquered the world in 440BC, this resulted in a change to the game in the very first patch to Civ 1 that he and I had worked out would correct the “problem”. Barracks went from 0 maintenance to 1 maintenance and that tiny little change would prevent anyone else from doing what I had done.

Then he wanted to know if I was willing to tell him about any of my ideas for computer games, and I immediately thought of what was then my idea for a UFO crash retrieval game. We talked for about 45 minutes about this UFO crash retrieval game. It would be like Breach, with special teams operating out of an Area 51 like facility. In our 45 minute conversation we arrived at what you know as X-Com. It is entitrely possible that X-Com was a direct result of this discussion, it is also entirely possible that he was so interested in discussing it because he knew it was already being made and was surprised to hear me describing essentially the same thing almost 3 years before it would exist. I will never know. But, either way, Sid Meier and I established the original concept of X-Com in that discussion almost three years before X-Com was released.

You can see why I never tell this story, nobody is likely to believe it. But it is absolutely true.

35 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

You are saying too me

as excited too meet me

How can a fellow OCD individual not go back and correct those typos?!

Quote

You can see why I never tell this story, nobody is likely to believe it. But it is absolutely true.

Information is true or false based on how consistent it is with other information.  Information which has not been validated has no truth value (this doesn't mean it's false, it means you can't say either way).  For example, in fictional stories, self-consistency can mean something is "true" inside the story even though it is false outside of the story.  Since there is not enough information to compare your story against, the truth of it cannot be determined.  Even if it's true to you, it's unproven to me.

It's also completely irrelevant.  I work with one of the designers of Mortal Kombat.  But who cares?

It's an interesting story about the probable origin of one of the most legendary and iconic games in the history of your industry.  Since nobody ever associates Sid Meier with X-Com, I am sure it is interesting too at least a few people, even leaving me out of it.  Of course... X-Com was probably one of my games;-)

P.S. I'm disappointed in you.  You talked like you were going to "destroy me" with your "trial by fire" and you are already resorting to criticizing typos in casual forum writing?  You really aren't very good at this.  Might I suggest that you read Vladimir Lenin's playbook before trying to use his tactics against someone who actually understands those tactics?  

On 2/5/2018 at 10:09 PM, Kavik Kang said:

Of course... X-Com was probably one of my games;-)

Don't be absurd.  If you didn't help develop it, it's not one of your games.  I see immature designers like you claim that other people use their ideas all the time.  The truth is that ideas are common, and there are probably dozens more people who thought up UFO-themed tactics games but didn't have the ability to do anything with their idea.

Computer game development is rarely about the amazing idea, and entirely about whether you can actually create the final product.  To put it bluntly, board games can be more advanced because your computers are humans, which are MUCH more advanced than computer hardware at the moment.  For a computer game, we programmers have to implement it in tedious detail because it doesn't have any knowledge of its own to understand rules you might see in a design document.  That takes a tremendous amount of time.  A human can read the rules, auto-correct any weird inconsistencies (or make up new rules as they see fit).

Being limited by concepts is rare.  Being limited by budget (money and time) is the reality in computer game development.  Usually there are enough good ideas that we have to remove a lot of really great ideas before a game ships, simply in order to survive as a company.

This is the second reason why you haven't been able to enter the computer game industry with your large concepts.  They're too big to be feasibly created.  I'm pretty sure the people who replied earlier in some of your past threads have tried to point this out to you, but then you dismiss them and eventually call us all incompetent.  That was the last straw.  You are now officially "that stubborn guy with the grandiose ideas, inability to stay on topic, takes credit for other people's hard work, and holds a dismissive elitist attitude."  

Quote

P.S. I'm disappointed in you.  You talked like you were going to "destroy me" with your "trial by fire" and you are already resorting to criticizing typos in casual forum writing?

You may be under a mistaken impression that I'm not going to resort to pettiness or underhandedness.  I totally will.  Literally any mistake I see, I will capitalize on.  You should also totally expect me to make mistakes as well, because I do.  Feel free to point them out if you ever spot them before I fix them.

As I said, I will never know if X-Com came from OUR discussion, Sid and I, not just me, or if he was so interested because he was already aware of it and was surprised to hear me describing almost exactly the same thing.  X-Com was released a little under three years after our conversation, so the timing is just right too.  You are right though, that doesn't make it our game.  It would make Sid and I the people who provided "Original Concept" of the game that they wound up making.  Sid would have done it a little differently, I would have done it a little differently, and they did it a little differently.  The game you know as X-Com was certainly their game either way, they actually made it.  Sid and I just provided the original idea and framework for it... or Sid was just surprised that I was describing something that he knew was just beginning to go into production at the time.

You can resort to anything you want.  Most sane and rational people would tend to avoid attempting to use the tactics of Vladimir Lenin against someone with my family background, but feel free to make yourself look like and obsessed lunatic for as long as you like.  This isn't going to go well for you, I'm not going to respond the way that you are expecting.  I'll even give away the game plan... you will keep ranting and raving and attempting to "destroy me with your trial by fire" while I keep thinking up interesting, yet irrelevant, stories to tell as you stomp your feet in your red faced, out-of-control hysteria.  Go ahead, punk, make my day!

“The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs.” - George F Kennan

Again, maybe you should actually read Vladimir Lenin's playbook before attempting to use his tactics against someone from a family with two generations of experience in defeating those tactics.  This isn't going to go well for you...

P.S. If Space Hockey is "too big for you to feasibly create" maybe you should be in another line of work.  It's a tiny little indie game...

16 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

This isn't going to go well for you, I'm not going to respond the way that you are expecting.  I'll even give away the game plan... you will keep ranting and raving and attempting to "destroy me with your trial by fire" while I keep thinking up interesting, yet irrelevant, stories to tell as you stomp your feet in your red faced, out-of-control hysteria.  Go ahead, punk, make my day!

No, what actually is going to happen is you're going to continue derailing your own thread, and I'm going to occasionally check for updates and heckle you from my peanut gallery.  I will do this until I simply don't care any more, or forget about it.  Obviously I'll take breaks for sleep and work and hobbies.  You can continue copy/pasting your stories you already have prepared if you really want to.  And if the thread falls off the front page I'll probably forget about it.

Lenin, huh?  I'm pretty out of the loop as far as historical figures go.  As they say, "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."  Oh well.  I guess I'll be Lenin then.

Wow, your obsession really is showing now.  How is it that your irrational obsession is going to make me look bad, again?

I don't have any "pre-written stories", I am not the kind of stark raving lunatic that you clearly are.  I will just think them up and write them as I go.  And there is no thread for you to "derail".  I was never planning on having any kind of discussion in the comments of this blog post, I could care less where this discussion goes.  But, please, by all means, continue to "destroy me with your trial by fire".  I'm sure you are amusing at least a few of the sane people out there.

I'll save the story about the really cool high school I went to for your next obsessed rant.  I'll think about those days overnight so that I can make it as interesting of a story as I can.  The more I tell interesting stories, and the more you rant and rave... the worse you look.  I'm really not the right person to be playing Vladimir Lenin's demented little game with, but I imagine that you will eventually figure that out.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

How is it that your irrational obsession is going to make me look bad, again?

That's not my job.  That's your job.  You're doing it very well.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

The more I tell interesting stories, and the more you rant and rave... the worse you look.

The negative effect I receive from being an ass in public to a single person is less than what you get from being an ass to everyone.  I have calculated this risk to be acceptable.

8 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

What more do you want from me?  A 700 page preview of a 14 game universe with a timeline covering the formation of the earth through the explosion of the sun.  Three (3!!!) examples of design documents, one written to be a playable game that can be sent too someone as an e-mail, one a full computer game, and the third an amazingly good and addictive indie game that is simple to make (especially compared to what it is in the end).  My background... I've been designing games and simulations since before your industry even existed, created one of the first computer game mods ever that still stands as the basis of player ratings in all sports games, literally rescued the project at the one computer game company I worked that never would have shipped a game at all had I not been there, and was an assistant designer of the largest and most complex game ever made that dominated the gaming world alongside of D&D for 20 years.  This isn't enough but a degree from the Devry School of Game Design is?

Oh... and I also completed the work of centuries of simulation design history to arrive at the Holy Grail of simulation design.  A general simulation of time combined from reality that is indistinguishable from what we perceive as "God".  What more am I supposed to achieve as a simulation designer to even be considered worthy of consideration by you people?  Which one of you can claim to even approach my background in simulation design, or achievements in it considering SFB and Rube?

I (and probably we) actually want LESS then 700 pages! 

You should be able to describe any goodness you plan to add to the inferior computer game in 10 sentences.

If you can't, because your games work only due to complexity, then you fail to convince anybody. We try to make things simple for a good reason: To make games accessible - easy to learn, but hard to master. You know all this.

Repeating your background, talking about stories, making claims existing games are all wrong are that doesn't help. WHY are they wrong, and HOW (shortly said) do you plan to make them better? Why do we need to read 700 pages to figure this out ourselves, eventually. Does the player need to read those 700 pages as well to be able to play? This probably won't work... this thought you imply to me (and probably us).

"A general simulation of time combined from reality that is indistinguishable from what we perceive as "God". "

You say this to people that know the math to go there, while you do not. We work for decades to simulate a alternate reality, and we make progress in both hardware and software. And you know nothing of this. you can't even know what you miss just by playing computer games. We talk about computer science here - how do you think you can teach us something about that?

Nypyren, that makes no sense.  You are the one who has declared your intent to "destroy me in a trial by fire" (while calling me a narcissist, oh the irony) and what you openly say will be your future obsession with me.  I am not obsessed with anything here, you are.  Just as you said you are.  I'm perfectly happy for you to keep making a fool of yourself like this for as long as you want too.  You'd have a better chance of beating my at Star Fleet Battles than you have of "destroying me in a trial by fire" through Vladimir Lenin's demented little game.  I hope you keep going, and I hope their really is a heaven... because I'm pretty sure that this will be the most entertaining thing that my grandfather has seen since he died.

JoeJ, I tried less than 700 pages for... about 25 years.  That didn't work.  I thought a full preview combined with Rube was going to work, but apparently nothing works.  There truly is no level of experience, knowledge, or achievement that will cause a computer game company to even consider hiring a game designer.  I should have known that all along, if "I am a former member of the SFB Staff and I want to make space ship games" doesn't work then I don't think there is anything that will.  Those 700 pages are about half within the three design documents, the other half is a preview of the entire 14-game universe focused more on the story than the games.  It's not one game, it is 14 games.

I don't need complex math to arrive at Rube.  I can't teach you about computer science, you are the experts in that.  Just as you can't teach us about simulation design, we are the experts in that (but it enrages you when we say this while we accept your expertise with computer).  And artificial universe is not arrived at through computer science, it is arrived at through simulation design.  Our field, not yours.  It took about 300 years for us to arrive at Rube.  If we were blackboard math wizards, we almost certainly would have arrived at it a lot sooner than that.  But, being just the simulation designers that we are, it took... well... about 300 years.  It was mostly military people who arrived at this, not scientists or mathematicians (although we do have plenty of those on the SFB Staff too, along with all those military guys).  Maybe you never read this part, but the SFB Staff has a lot of people like scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, and a whole lot of real world military people like a Colonel from US Space Command and the current Director of Threat Integration of the US Army.  The SFB Staff is not a bunch of trekkie kids who play with space ships, it is a very serious group of people.  I am one of the only pure game designers among them.

I can't teach you computer science, but I can teach you how to create an artificial universe.  A primitve one, for now, because the computers are still a long way from handling "Ultimate Infinity Rube".  Rube is a physical construct that is the key too this, not a thing that will ever exist in reality.  Rube can be many things, depending on how you use the concepts within it.  Too truly be "The Matrix" or a holodeck would require computing power that we are probably about a century away from having.  At the same time, Struggle of the Ancients, Part 1 is a very primitive version of The Matrix that can exist now as game.

Rube is very real, and shockingly simple for what it is.  I could explain Rube to other SFB experts in just a few pages, too anyone else in a few hundred pages.  They have a frame of reference from which to understand it, and we have a language among ourselves to aid even more in explaining it too them.  I explained Rube to Steve Cole in about 3 paragraphs, and my guess is that he mostly gets it just from those three paragraphs.  Believe me, or ask anyone who knows SVC, if he thought it was nonsense he would have let me know that immediately and in no uncertain terms.

I really do know what I am talking about, and this really does come from a group of people that is every bit as intelligent and impressive as yours is.  It also comes from a very, very long history of the most realistic table top simulations and the most intricate artificial representation of time ever conceived (SFB's Impulse Chart).  It's not just me, Rube owes it's heritage to hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of three centuries beginning with military simulation "ruler & string" games.

But, really, all I should have ever needed to say to have a job as a game designer in your industry was "I am a former member of the SFB Staff and I want to make space ship games."

So you say you can explain rube to other experts of simulation design, but not to guys that actually create realtime simulations of ships in space or on sea, any kind of other vehicles and even humans and animals. What do you expect we would not understand? We deal with equations while you still deal with tables. We deal with pretty accurate simulations by the laws of physics in realtime, while you use extreme abstractions to 'design' the illusion of a simulation driven by rules and dice. Maybe i am exactly your nightmare of a ignorant programmer, but i don't see - even if i'm a boardgame noob - why i would not be able to understand, if you would try to explain.

But you do not. You fail to describe any of your games in a short overview. Remember i've read your Space Hockey doc and assumed a 1st/3rd person view all the time until the very end where the minor fact comes up it is a 2D game with Asteroids like controls. This changes everything and i'd need to read it all again. Did you fix that? Probably not, because guys like you never listen, and they never answer questions.

You fail to transport your vision to other people in a compact and efficient way. All you deliver is a vague impression of your fantasies around spaceships, some unrelated rock songs and your history of trial and failure. This and some esoteric statements that let me doubt your ability of rational thinking. That's the problem - not some nameless industry.

5 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I don't need complex math to arrive at Rube.  I can't teach you about computer science, you are the experts in that.  Just as you can't teach us about simulation design, we are the experts in that (but it enrages you when we say this while we accept your expertise with computer).  And artificial universe is not arrived at through computer science, it is arrived at through simulation design.  Our field, not yours. 

Define simulation 'design'.

My understanding of simulation is the trial to understand and predict known laws of nature. There are no open variables that we can design at will. We can only do it right or wrong. This has nothing to do with games.

Further i guess you accept our expertise in computer science only because you are not willing or able to program yourself, so you have no other option. But that does not imply its the same the other way around. I made computer games, that includes some game design. To make me accept your expertise about this would not take much, but what you deliver is just enough to make vague assumptions.

You just talk in riddles all the time, and you enjoy it, but that won't take you anywhere.

6 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

But, really, all I should have ever needed to say to have a job as a game designer in your industry was "I am a former member of the SFB Staff and I want to make space ship games."

18 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

 

(Please excuse the corrupted quote above; forum software bug)

OK, Kavik.  Let's make your game.  I'll show you step by step how game design works in our industry.

First, we need a high level concept of your game.  In one sentence, describe to me your game's high level aspects by using the following examples as template:

Civilization 1:  2D, top-down, turn-based strategy with resource acquisition and management, and combat between multiple factions.

X-Com: Isometric, turn-based tactics combined with a strategic global metagame.

Yes yes yes! That f***ing can't be that hard.

Nypyren, I know how what you think is game design works in your industry.  I've worked in it before, and have forgotten more about the process of game design than you will learn in your lifetime.  We really are your founding fathers, WE INVENTED YOUR PROCESS!!!  Wow!!!  

But go with the simple one... Space Hockey is a 2D top-down space combat game for both PC and/or console.  It is hockey played with space ships, using the BPV system to limit ship count so that it is possible for a player to be "bashed" out of the game before the end of each half.  It recreates the combat environment of SFB within an arcade game.  What next Great Master of Game Design...  You do realize that I've been doing this since before you were born and we invented your process, right?  And you are talking down too me... There's that indescribable arrogance again.

JoeJ, It can be explained too you, it would just take a lot more to explain it to anyone who does not have a “world class” level of knowledge of SFB. Rube's “cardio-vascular” system is the ultimate evolution of the “treadmill of time” of the hobbyist game industry, SVC's Impulse Chart with its embedded Sequence of Play. “Moments of time containing reality”. There is about a 100-year knowledge gap between how everyone else on the planet thinks of games and simulations and how we think of them. You are providing a perfect example of what I mean by “you think in terms of Candyland”, or “family games” like Life or Risk. You are literally three generations behind the SFB Staff in the way that you see games and simulations. While there are “turns” in SFB it is not the same as in other games, it can take hours to resolve a single “turn” in SFB because there is potentially so much to a “turn” due to the impulse chart.

In SFB the Impulse Chart divides each turn into 32 impulses, each of which represents about 2 seconds of real-time. Each impulse has a Sequence of Play embedded within it. That Sequence of Play is about 15 pages of double-column 10-point font. So a “turn” in SFB is 32 “moments of time containing reality” with 15-pages of double-column 10-point font defining everything that can happen over the course of each and every impulse. “Moments of time containing reality”. Are you beginning to see the vast difference between this and what you know as “game turns”? This is not Candyland, this is the most intricate artificial simulation of time ever created, and it is far removed from just about everybody else's understanding of how games and simulations function. This is not the only issue, but teaching this first (in a lot more detail than this vague description) is necessary with anyone who is not familiar with SFB. You aren't presently in the same place as we are when it comes to game and simulation design and I would first need to bring you up to speed on that before I could even begin to describe Rube. It generally takes about 3 years before a person begins to truly understand SFB, so this it is no small task to bring most people to the point where they are even ready to start hearing about Rube. We really are about 50-100 years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to simulation design. That isn't an exaggeration.

Exactly the opposite of your vision of me “hating programmers”, the exact opposite is true. I envision the people I worked with at GameFX. When I think of what would happen if I described Rube too them in detail, and I have said this before, I see them running away from me with Rube as soon as they understand it. Their extreme level of intelligence combined with their knowledge of higher math would mean that two-weeks or so after they understood Rube, they'd have a far deeper understanding of Rube than I do. A great example is that I have great difficulty in thinking about Rube at any “resolution” greater that 1 impulse = 1 second. You will immediately run away from me down to your game loop and think of Rube as 1 impulse = 17ms of your game loop. I have great difficulty thinking in terms of 17ms impulses, you don't. If I fully explain Rube there is no doubt in my mind at all that it won't change a thing. Nobody will hire me to design games, and will then get to sit back and watch your entire industry will run off and make Rube based games for the rest of my life. I still won't get to make games, but I'll have to watch all of you making “my games”, and most likely you wouldn't even give me the credit for it (although I almost don't care about that). I am not going to end my life watching the entire computer game industry making what would be my games while I STILL don't get to make my own.

Finally, there is nothing wrong with the Space Hockey document. I am sure everyone who reads it understands it, even you as you showed in this post. I moved the notes to the end of the document to get them out of the way, and that was where gamepad control was mentioned. As developers this should not phase you, you should be used to this kind of thing in working documents. I don't know what to say too that because it is not unsual at all in the way that we make games and maintain design documents. When our methods and your are not the same, I stick with ours. We've been at it a few centuries longer than you have, so I just always assume our way is better.

I can write “proposals” for any game you want. If you really want a brief overview of any of the games just tell me which one and I can write a proposal for it, that is the “brief overview” that you are looking for. This blog was meant to focus on the story of the entire universe, not the individual games. Finally, the music is far from “irrelevant”, the story is written around and based on the lyrics of the songs that literally write the story. The Struggle of the Star Queens chess set in Armageddon Chess was created specifically to show how this is done, and what the result is, and is just a 15-page short story. Anyone can see in that just how relevant the songs are too the story. Almost every word of every song is clearly relevant, because the story is written around them, and anyone can see this for themselves in the 15-page short story of the Star Queens chess set.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Space Hockey is a 2D top-down space combat game for both PC and/or console.  It is hockey played with space ships, using the BPV system to limit ship count so that it is possible for a player to be "bashed" out of the game before the end of each half.  It recreates the combat environment of SFB within an arcade game.

That's great progress. It tells me more about the game than the design doc. I'm not kidding. Listen to Nypyren if he continues his advise, really!

Remaining problems: I don't know what this is: BPV, SFB.

I've never heared of SFB (or Candyland), i never saw a D&D game. You should not assume people know about those games - explain related mechanics instead. A footnote referring to their origin would be enough.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Exactly the opposite of your vision of me “hating programmers”, the exact opposite is true.

I did not think this way. I confront you with prejudices as you do with 'us'. 

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

I am not going to end my life watching the entire computer game industry making what would be my games while I STILL don't get to make my own.

Consider to change your mind. Being an inspiration is more worth than success, even if credits come posthumously (not sure if translator got me - i mean after death)

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

We really are about 50-100 years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to simulation design. That isn't an exaggeration.

We have a serious problem here. Because the same is true the other way around. I'm very sure about this now.

You, as a board game designer have to 'simulate' the simulation and spend a lot of effort on how to make this plausible.

We, as game programmers just do the simulation. We probably have no need for the knowledge you are so proud of, if i get you right. 

That does not mean your thoughts about game design are worthless (you still can use those mechanics for game design). But it means you lack fundamental knowledge of how computers (and computer games) work. I offer to write a code snippet of how an Asteroids ship works, and to explain it. Let me know if you are interested. 

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Finally, there is nothing wrong with the Space Hockey document. I am sure everyone who reads it understands it, even you as you showed in this post. I moved the notes to the end of the document to get them out of the way, and that was where gamepad control was mentioned. As developers this should not phase you, you should be used to this kind of thing in working documents. I don't know what to say too that because it is not unsual at all in the way that we make games and maintain design documents. When our methods and your are not the same, I stick with ours. We've been at it a few centuries longer than you have, so I just always assume our way is better.

There is something wrong. For computer games both visual presentation (2D / 3D, text based, first person, top down...) and controls* are the first hings to mention (Nypyrens examples are not realtime action games, so controls are not that important and not mentioned in one sentence descriptions.) For action games those things are more important than game design in my opinion. I told you multiple times and you did not listen.

I can't think of anything more wrong than mentioning those things at the and in a footnote. You focus too much on your own role. You need to go outside of your head and see things with the eyes of a nobody knowing  nothing, but not yourself, then it makes sense i hope.

And believe me - this 'nobody' will agree with me that YES is unrelated to your games, even if you manage to get Roger Dean as the cover artist. This is fantasy - totally unrealistic - you can't be serious with this.

*) thinking of it, controls are probably obvious for most genres if we know about the view.

1 hour ago, Kavik Kang said:

Space Hockey is a 2D top-down space combat game for both PC and/or console.  It is hockey played with space ships, using the BPV system to limit ship count so that it is possible for a player to be "bashed" out of the game before the end of each half.

I'm going to ignore the rest of your fuming since this is the only important thing in your post.  Thank you for humoring me.

Next, since you mentioned it's hockey, my assumption is that it is a real-time game.  However, I could also see hockey being implemented using turn-based rules.  I've been trying to read your design document, and have only made it to the ship component list so far, so perhaps you mention this somewhere.

My next question is:  Is this a real-time game, or a turn-based game?  This is perhaps the most important ambiguity to get resolved first.

38 minutes ago, Nypyren said:

I've been trying to read your design document, and have only made it to the ship component list so far

Don't wanna interrupt, but that's the same spot i stopped reading too and skipped to the end, where i found the important stuff just bu luck.

2 hours ago, JoeJ said:

Don't wanna interrupt, but that's the same spot i stopped reading too and skipped to the end, where i found the important stuff just bu luck.

No problem.

@Kavik Kang What I'm finding is that the design document has plenty of detail, but it needs to be reorganized.

There are small yet important details that you mention occasionally, such as the fact that gun projectiles don't inherit the firing ship's velocity.  There is your vision for how you want the game to be tuned for maximum enjoyment.  There is flavor text to go in an enjoyable game manual.  That's great, but mashing them all together makes it hard to use the document as a reference.

To get a better reaction from game developers, you should split your game design document into separate documents:

• Technical design document (usually split into specific chunks per major game feature, and referred to as "specs"):  A reference for developers to use when they're actually working.  This would be something that both you and the programmers update any time a specific implementation detail decision is made.  You would talk with the programmers any time this changes. They would ask you questions, and the answers would be added to this document.
• Vision document:  Move all of your "I think a good player should be playing the game in a particular way" and "My goal is to tune the game so that the game is played in this way" here.  Similar to the design/programming relationship in the TDD, this document is here for a team of multiple game designers to share and keep up to date. 
• Localization and flavor text document:  Move all of your "Game Manual Description" sections here.  This will eventually be shared with localization outsourcing teams who will translate the in-game text descriptions and manual into all of the languages you want to support.  Most of the time, this will be converted into some format other than a text document so that it's easier to integrate with the localization team's tools and the game's localization code.

In your TDD, you need to keep as many similar concepts located near each other.  You occasionally mention things early on like "system charge time" but then only list what the rearm/charge times are much later.  For any common terminology, you need a glossary section so that you don't need to ever repeat yourself.

The initial gun "firing lanes" section is somewhat convoluted since you don't explain at this point that different ships have a different gun configuration.  Initially I thought you were saying that all ships have the same five lanes.  You could make this clear in this section, or just don't mention it until you get to the individual ships.  You may need to draw a diagram to explain what you mean by "side-by-side" or "multi-fire".

Still reading.  More to come later.

You make the same "too" typo (that I mentioned before in a less civilized manner) in a few hundred places in your document.  Despite this being a nitpick, you need to come off as professionally as you possibly can, and this mistake is simply hindering you for no good reason.

JoeJ, If those three sentences tell you more about Space Hockey than the design doc then you have some very serious issues. That is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my life. I don't even know how to respond too it other than to say I think you are just trying to make it seem like I am an idiot or something. It can't be a sincere statement.

In the board game industry we had a saying “You won't be there when the player opens the box”. It meant that everything had to be explained in the rules in the way the player could understand, you won't be there to answer questions. I don't adhere too this in my design documents for computer games. I will be there with the team that is making the game, I can answer their questions. Bringing a design document to a “you won't be there” state doubles (if not more) the work required to complete it. You are supposed to be professional game developers, you should get it without it being brought to a final draft state. That would be a huge waste of time, especially considering that as soon as the rest of the team sees it, it is going to change a lot. Taking it to final draft state would be a silly thing to do, and a complete waste of time. I thought you were professionals, you don't know this already?

You do know what “SFB” is, you are again not being sincere. BPV is explained extensively in the design document, it means “Basic Point Value”.

I haven't gotten to Nypyren's “advice” yet, but I can't see it being anything that I didn't already know before he was even born. I am one of your founding fathers, we invented the process that he is laughably pretending to explain too me. Wow!!!

The same is not true the other way around. We are 50-100 years ahead of you in game and simulation design. You make 1^st generation Candyland-like games, we aren't even on the same planet with each other when it comes to simulation design. Your coding brings our simulations/games too life. And Rube would give you a whole new, and vastly more powerful, framework for you to work within. You simply don't know what you are talking about here, you don't seem to even understand what game design is. You appear to believe that programming is game design. And I have been using computers since the earliest days of DOS, I do have a basic understanding of how computers work. I am not someone who has never used anything older than Win95. Computers are not “voodoo magic” too me. You understand far less about game and simulation design than I do about computers, which is obvious from this last post of yours.

It should mention gamepad control at the beginning. In fact, it DID mention gamepad control at the beginning. I moved those notes to the end to post on the website. Had I not done that you would be criticizing the notes at the beginning of the document and telling me that I should have moved them to the end of the document... where they are. It is a working document, you are supposed to be a professional game developer and yet you seem to be demanding a final draft game manual as a pre-production design document. As mentioned earlier, that would be a colossal waste of time. It's hard to believe that you are making a serious issue of this, do you not understand the concept of a working document? SFB's annexes would clearly drive you mad.

Nypryren, there was no “fuming”. You are the obssessed deranged lunatic who is going to “destroy me in a trail by fire”, remember? Not me. What happened too that, by the way, give up already? I am still waiting for you to “destroy me”.

As for the hockey design doc, I could seperate it into seperate documents if that is what the people I was working with wanted. That would only take 2 or 3 days. I do it our way, I am prepared to adapt to the way of whatever group of people wound up working with. They will, almost certainly, want something different than what you are describing. So I would adapt to the people I am working with once I knew what they wanted. It would only take a few days or so to convert my design document, done our way, to whatever it is that they wanted. Because of this, the specifics of how you think it should be are never likely to be relevant.

It is real time... top down space combat game, references to Subspace, Star Control, and Nintendo Ice Hockey all make that painfully obvious. I guess I could say “real-time” somewhere, but that really is a silly issue to bring up.

The projectiles DO inherent the velocity of the ship, Stinger even relies on that fact in it's design. I have no idea where you are getting the opposite idea from.

It's not “I think a good player should be playing a particular way here”, what that actually is are comments based on the “Laws” of how this type of space combat works. In some cases your intepretation of that may be the case, in most that is how it works and there is nothing anyone can do to change that fact. Such as the “law” that “Speed is life” and if a slower ship tries to play away from the goal it will be left behind and irrelevant. That isn't how I think good players should play, it is an immutable law of space combat.

I'm glad you are reading it, but you aren't offering any useful advice here. You are just finding things that you, personally, think you can nitpick at. The system/weapon charge times are listed with the systems and weapons... imagine that.

As for “too”... are you even serious? What does that possibly matter too anything? I notice you are avoiding actually talking about the game at all... the only thing that actually matters to the players.

Ok, I just got to the ship section.  In this section you explain the Magnetic Accelerator gun.  You say:

"Projectiles move much slower than Tachyon Cannon shots, the MAG is very outdated and is an almost useless weapon.  Almost.  This weapon can be lethal using rocket boosters to line up a tight stream of projectiles, moving very fast in a compressed stream due to the extreme boosted ship momentum.  This is the 'needle injection' attack ship of this game."

Ok, so maybe I misinterpreted this when you mentioned it the first time.  If the projectiles don't inherit the ship's velocity, then if the ship is going too fast, it will run into its own shots (since you played Star Control, the ship I'm thinking of here is the Mycon Podship after you gravity whip.  If you accidentally fire while facing forwards, you run into it.)  I can't imagine that's what you want to happen in your case.

This is why it's important to clearly explain exactly how you want the projectiles to work.  From your two different descriptions, I no longer know whether you want projectile velocity to inherit the ship's velocity or not.

Also, have you played the Star Control: Origins beta yet?  They have a ship which functions similar to your Stinger.

47 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

As for “too”... are you even serious? What does that possibly matter too anything? I notice you are avoiding actually talking about the game at all... the only thing that actually matters to the players.

It's important because you can't make this game alone.  That means you need find assistance.  There is competition between projects trying to find enough people to implement the countless game ideas that everyone has.  Whether you know it or not, you are competing against these other projects for people's time.

Multiple choices (your project vs. someone else's) mean they get to choose who they want to help.  If they see two equivalent concepts, one with a very impressive and professional initial presentation, and then they see your design document with grammatical mistakes, those grammatical mistakes will decrease your chances of being the one that is chosen.

For a similar reason, your extremely long design documents need to be properly re-focused so that someone reading them doesn't get bored of your flavor text if they're only interested in the game mechanics.

This is similar to making typos like that on a resume, or making a resume that's 15 sheets of paper.  There's a big stack of resumes that someone has to pick through, so the simplest things get picked out as the easiest ways to discard that resume.

33 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

I am one of your founding fathers, we invented the process that he is laughably pretending to explain too me. Wow!!!

If you invented this process, then why don't you use it properly?  Your design document has all of the core concepts it needs, but is too inefficient to use for a team project in its current state.

49 minutes ago, Kavik Kang said:

Nypryren, there was no “fuming”. You are the obssessed deranged lunatic who is going to “destroy me in a trail by fire”, remember? Not me. What happened too that, by the way, give up already? I am still waiting for you to “destroy me”.

I want you to do two things:

1. Look up the definition of what "trial by fire" and, more accurately "trial by ordeal" actually mean.  Not what you think they mean, but what they actually mean.  Think carefully about how I intended that meaning to apply to this thread, since there is obviously no way I'm actually going to throw you into a fire and see if you come out of it alive.  This is a metaphor, this time.  If you understand those.  My hypothesis so far is that your lack of empathy will prevent you from understanding what's actually happening in this thread.
2. Find my post where I said I would "destroy you" (even paraphrased), read it again, and quote it for me.  I promise I haven't gone back and edited it.

Actually, one more thing:

I want you to think about how my behavior has changed since yesterday, but how yours has not.

Okay, I have read your ENTIRE design document.  You have what could potentially be a fun game.  There's nothing fundamentally wrong or impossible about your idea.  Any experienced game developer could create this pretty easily.  However:

• 86 pages is far too much to explain this game.
• You still have major personality problems standing in your way of finding people that might help you.  If you manage to form a team, the #1 issue is going to be your teammates quitting because they don't want to deal with you.

Also, I know you've played Subspace and Star Control 2 (because you mentioned them), but have you played Altitude?  It's remarkably similar to Space Hockey.  Here's a Steam link:  http://store.steampowered.com/app/41300/Altitude/

We did invent this process, and I am using it. It supports far more complex designs than anyone in your business has ever attempted. I really have probably been doing this since before you were even born.

Altitude is not a top down space shooter. Top down space combat games are... top down. This is a very significant thing, thing that I can't possibly describe here. Anyone who participates in another game forum that I am active in, Scouting Ninja for example, can attest too the fact that it would take me at least 3 paragraphs to even begin to convey that. The short version is that top down space combat is a unique genre like FPS games. It is a very specific thing like Star Fleet Battles or Subspace and has many unique aspects too it. Altitude is also not hockey from what I can see. There are many very popular “scenarios” within this genre, the most popular being variations of Capture the Flag and Base Defense.

86 pages is not too much, considering that it is also the early draft of the game manual and most of it is the also the beginning of the manual. Without that it would probably only be 30 pages or so. Quite the time saver, huh?

If you were the guy I was doing this for, I would be doing everything you just said and it would be ready in 2 or 3 days. It is a simple matter to rearrange it however someone wants, and add whatever they want too it. But every group of people does this differently. I am sure much of what you suggest is what they would want, but some is not. And other things they will want that you haven't mentioned. I'm not ignoring you or taking any kind of jab at you, it would just be a waste of time to do any of what you suggest because of this.

I little bit about design documents...

Your design documents are 100% correct in their structure and content. You've developed them over about 35 years within your process to work with you and your process for making games. I don't do it that way, but have always known that I would be conforming to the format of any computer game company that I worked at. I would have a few ideas from our history to suggest along the way from our way of doing things, but would just be adapting to whatever format that group of people use. If you are anything like we were, you all do it a little differently among yourselves. Breaking up a game design document the way that we do it into any format is a very simple matter. So is adding any new elements that weren't a part of the original document.

When I say “we”, in this case, I actually mean Steve Cole. Every group of people does this differently, and I am from his group of people. If you want to be really confused, read the Pirate Dawn design document. It is very, very different from how you do it. SFB is a much better example, SVC does this a lot better than I do in every conceivable way, but my more simple version of it in Pirate Dawn shows what I am talking about here. Our way is to use an alpha-numeric reference system. Doing this means that many things seem “out of order”, but it is a superior working document. Weapons might be section F, but the individual rules (F1.0, F2.0, etc) are in the order that they were introduced to the document. Not in the order that makes the most sense if you are reading it as a novel. This makes it infinitely expandable (FF, FFF, etc), and references to other relevant sections are in the document as you read it. You generally have to “bounce around” the document to read everything about certain subjects, but everything has a place and everything is in its place. It is a working document, not a novel.

You can't write a design document or game manual “in order”. It can't be done. Something always comes before something else that it is related too. Either phasers or asteroids will come first in the book. If it's phasers, then when you explain how phasers interact with asteroids you will be talking about asteroids before the reader has read about asteroids. It is unavoidable. It is going to be “out of order” no matter what you do. What we do is categorize everything, but within those categories things are generally in the order they were introduced to the game, not the order that makes the most sense if you read it as a book.

Also, I do not have any kind of attitude problem. People like me. I have tried everything else already, at least twice. I had given up about a decade ago and never thought I would try to make games again. You view of things change when you start to get to only having 10-15 years left to live. I have nothing to lose by just speaking my mind without caring what anyone thinks of what I have to say. The alternative is to just wait to die, I really don't have anything else to live for. I was born to do this, I made a more serious study of it than quite possibly anyone else alive, and I have spent 25 years writing a story around a dozen games. Space ship games, from a former member of the SFB Staff. That really, really is all I ever should have had to say, because so many of the things I say that you don't like are true.

2 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

JoeJ, If those three sentences tell you more about Space Hockey than the design doc then you have some very serious issues. That is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my life. I don't even know how to respond too it other than to say I think you are just trying to make it seem like I am an idiot or something. It can't be a sincere statement.

I'm exaggerating a bit, ok, but it is true that the doc is confusing to anyboby other than you. I'm not used to work with design documents, bu i'm a programmer with the experience you aim for. Your doc would be of little help when implementing your game to me - i'd need to ask much to much questions.

There is NO need to react with defense to this kind of feedback. But there is a need to improve the doc. Start coarse, refine with details. Remember the people reading this the first time know NOTHING about your vision.

3 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

You are supposed to be professional game developers, you should get it without it being brought to a final draft state. That would be a huge waste of time

No - YOU should be able to convey your vision to avoid wasting time. WE try to help you to get there. Take it or leave it - no need for defense.

3 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

You do know what “SFB” is, you are again not being sincere. BPV is explained extensively in the design document, it means “Basic Point Value”.

I don't know SFB - i won't repeat this anymore. Maybe it was never popular in Europe? Again - you talk to me, not yourself. Assume nothing.

If you explain what BPV is later in the doc you can't use abbreviation in the opening sentence.

3 hours ago, Kavik Kang said:

I haven't gotten to Nypyren's “advice” yet, but I can't see it being anything that I didn't already know before he was even born. I am one of your founding fathers, we invented the process that he is laughably pretending to explain too me. Wow!!!

And you say WE ignore you??? YOU ignore US, Kavik. You even ignore or honest trial to help. Can't you see how stuck you are in your own prejudices about others people incompetence? This led you into a deep hole of frustration and isolation. All caused by the wrong assumption other people would be able to read your mind and share your vision just by magic. We are not your military friend who played games with you in your garage. We did not play 3 years of SFB just to get it. It's just a game Kavic, not more. That's really not a glory achievement that deserves that infinite amount of respect you expect from us just because we work on games too. People explain their background to introduce their self and that's it. No need to mention it again and again. Your past is not what you are worth. Present behavior and deeds is what matters.

I stop reading further after i see '50-100 years ahead' for the 100th time. I'm tired of that. I give up. You'll never get it.  

Thank you for FINALLY writing a complete post in a sensible fashion.  Now we can finally have a real discussion.

Since this forum software is actively working against my attempts to properly quote and respond to individual sections using its built-in quoting functionality, I'm going to quote you differently in this post as I reply.

"Altitude is not a top down space shooter."

Yes, that's true. The theme and layout are different.  Many of the maneuvering and combat characteristics you explain in your design document are present to a certain extent in Altitude.  It has a soccer mode in the game which has rules which are extremely similar to your rules in Space Hockey.  I had a great time playing it, so I thought I would recommend it.

Game developers (not just on the design team) often draw inspiration from other games and analyze them to determine which aspects work and which don't.  In your design document, you have a vision about what should work in your game and what shouldn't.  However, the actual implementation of the game as software may reveal that it's extremely hard to tune the game so that it behaves exactly as your vision does.

I've seen this happen a lot in computer game development; someone believes that their idea will be great, until we actually implement it and it's not as fun as we'd hoped.  I've been on several successful game teams, but I've also been on a lot of teams that had the project cancelled because the implementation could not be made to match the vision, or we matched the vision exactly but it wasn't fun.

It's costly to try out ideas to find that they don't work.  It's cheaper to try out someone else's implementation of a similar idea, to get a feel of how someone else's attempt of a similar idea worked (or didn't).

"If you were the guy I was doing this for, I would be doing everything you just said and it would be ready in 2 or 3 days."

"If you are anything like we were, you all do it a little differently among yourselves."

Taking these two quotes as a whole.  The first sentence means you are properly flexible after you get a team.  That's good.  Your second sentence is absolutely correct; every team I've worked on has a slightly different way of doing things.  Depending on who works with you, you must adapt.  But first you have to get a team!  This is why everyone has been criticizing your design document(s) so far:

• You have to successfully pitch your concept in order to form a team.
• Only after successfully gathering a team will you know how the team wants the design laid out for them.
• So essentially what you need are TWO design documents:  one to pitch the concept, and one to do the real work.
• In order for you to get people interested in your design, you need to lower the barrier of entry of your design document.
• The people I'm familiar with prefer to start with simple explanations and overviews first, and if they like it, THEN they will be interested in more thorough details and in-fiction background flavor.
• Therefore, we have been trying to suggest to you in different ways to simplify your design document when you use it for the proposal phase.

"You can't write a design document or game manual 'in order'."

Perhaps not.  There can be too many interacting concepts to define them independently.  However, observe:

• Definition section.
  • Space ships are vehicles capable of travelling in space.
  • Phasers are a type of energy weapon.
  • Asteroids are space-borne chunks of rock smaller than planets that can reach sizes in the tens to thousands of kilometers in diameter.
• Game mechanics section.
  • Phasers equipped on a space ship can be used to destroy asteroids.

It's perhaps ridiculously simple, but there are no ordering issues in it.  There are a lot of different techniques you can use as a writer to make sure your readers always know exactly what you're talking about.  Simplification is the easiest way to reduce ordering issues.  If your audience is like me (analytical), we would LOVE to see the proposal version of your design document written like this.

"so many of the things I say that you don't like are true."

Written things hold multiple meanings simultaneously.  There are the literal meanings.  There are metaphorical meanings.  There is the tone of voice being used. 

The things you say that we most have issue with are the tone of voice you use.  We, as different people, read your words and interpret the tone of voice you frequently use as aggressive and combative.

Even if you're not intentionally trying to be aggressive or combative, the way you write tends to match the style of people who are intentionally trying to be mean to others.  If you're not intentionally trying to be aggressive of combative, you should intentionally avoid it because it only leads to negative outcomes.  To do that, you must first learn how to recognize it.  This is why I've been criticizing you for lack of empathy.  Empathy is essentially the ability to consider the possible ways things could be interpreted/felt by other people.

A person is not typically trying to intentionally cause negative reactions in others, so when one does it accidentally, they think back about what they might have done which caused this unexpected outcome.  They then use that knowledge to avoid causing it again.  Over time, with a lot of experience, you build up a lot of knowledge about how other people might react to things, and make your best attempts to use your knowledge of other people's behavior to your advantage rather than detriment.  Many times in online discussions, when someone appears to be stubborn, they're skipping this process entirely.

Look at the negative reactions you're getting from other people.  They are even quoting the exact sentences that are causing their reaction.  Teach yourself how to avoid saying things in that way in the future and you should be vastly more successful at talking "with" people instead of "to" them.

In your most recent post, you did a MUCH better job at adapting and using a more professional tone of voice.

Your document could be further improved by adding pictures/diagrams.

• How big is your rink in relation to the computer screen?
• What are the sizes of the ships in relation to it?
• Your range units could be demonstrated visually; I didn't get a good feel for what those ranges mean from the text-only descriptions.
• You could draw what the different gun firing patterns should look like.
• You could make a rough draft of what you want the UI to look like.

There are limitations to how effective a text-only design document can be compared to one with diagrams.  If you had an interface mock-up, anyone would be able to look at it and understand it in seconds, rather than the minutes it takes to read text and create a mental image from scratch.

Having some kind of very basic proof-of-concept program you can show to people would also help attract a team.

It doesn't need any complexities that would slow development on the full project.  In this case, the multiplayer support is the most complex part that I can see.  It doesn't even need good art until you want to attract funding.

What I would do next if I were you, after making a more readable pitch document, is start on such a proof-of-concept.  Here's exactly what I would do if I were in your shoes:

• Download and install Unity 2017.3.0p4 from here:  https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases?version=2017.3
• Watch some tutorials about how to use Unity.
  • Look at how GameObjects, Colliders and RigidBodies work.  You can rapidly set some of these up as very basic spaceship and rink wall placeholders.  You'll just have box-shaped objects at this point but that's fine.
  • Look at totorials about Unity's new UI system that was introduced in version 5.
    • You should be able to use this to very easily set up a rough layout of the rink interface.
  • Look at the Input-related scripting tutorials.
    • You should be able to make your ships controllable pretty easily.
  • Do further experimentation in Unity and in code until you are far enough along that you can show your proof-of-concept to other people.  Record videos of your work so far, and post them in your blog instead of random music videos.

Nypyren, I am aware of much of what you have said.  Like I said, until I am actually working with other people and adapting to what they want there is no reason to do what can be done so quickly from the base documents that I use.  I don't bother with diagrams because I am always working on different games and the timeline between them as kind of a lifelong hobby.  I've learned over the years that finalizing anything is a waste of time unless it is about to be made, because it will just change enough to make those types of things obsolete very quickly.  For example, 9 years later now, my current Pirate Dawn only vaguely resembles the version of it that is posted on this blog.  The games are all intimately connected to each other, working on one always "bounces" me to two or three others along the way.  So, like I said before, if you were the one telling me how you wanted it done I'd be doing it that way.  It doesn't take long from where I already am and more involves breaking apart what already exists than it does needing to create anything new, and every group of people does it a little differently.

JoeJ, If you don't know what “SFB” means then you have not been reading anything that I have written and are just posting without reading what I am saying. It is mentioned CONSTANTLY, you can't not know what that abbreviation means if you have been reading my posts. I also addressed pretty much everything you say in this post in the one before your post, that you apparently didn't read or didn't register when you did.

Our form of game design most certainly is 50-100 years ahead of you. The third generation of simulation design while you are still working within the first generation. This is provably true, which you should have got at least some idea of from my explanation of the impulse chart and its 32 “impulses” of 8x11 15-page, double-column, 10-point font embedded Sequence of Play. You are the one who is “not getting it”.

And there is that indescribable arrogance again. The little 35-year-old kids, red faced and stomping their feet, practically screaming at the 300-year old men demanding that we sit down, shut up, and learn from them. What is so difficult about this situation for you to understand? WE KNOW MORE THAN YOU!!!

The Space Hockey document is just fine. I think you are being confused by the fact that it is also the game manual for the player. It would be a very simple matter to extract only the “hard game design” aspects of it to provide you with the “20 pages of vague notes” that you are accustomed too seeing. I've seen your design documents. In fact, at one point I was asked to review half-a-dozen or so design documents and offer my opinion on them. One of them was whatever version of Descent was being pitched at that time (1999), another was a sequel to Homeworld. Somebody at THQ was clearly impressed by the game design documents coming out of GameFX. So, I've seen your game design documents before. It would take less than a day to extract the 20 pages of vague notes that you want to see from this. It “conveys my vision” far better than the “just the numbers” version that you are asking for. People who read it have a general understanding of how the game actually plays due to all that “extra, unnecessary stuff” that you think is in it. You couldn't be any more wrong.

I hope you really are “done with me”. You seem to have a severe reading comprehension problem, since you can't understand such a simple game manual as Space Hockey and insist that you have no idea what “SFB” means. You also don't seem to understand what game and simulation design even is. You appear to think that it is programming and writing code. That is implementation of simulation design, not simulation design.

SFB is not “just a game”. It is science. It is the most sophisticated artificial representation of time ever conceived by man. The end result of the entire history of the human development of simulation design. It is the foundation that leads to the “Holy Grail” of simulation design, the core of what you know as “The Matrix” and a holodeck. Welcome back to reality...

I have to keep repeating these truths because they are, very clearly, not sinking in. I know how to make both The Matrix and a holodeck, the “Holy Grail” of simulation design, that has clearly not sunk in yet. It is “indistinguishable from magic” too you specifically because you are three generations behind us in how you perceive games and simulations. Because we most definitely ARE 50-100 years, three generations, ahead of you.

Everybody... Since this blog was intended to focus on the story of the PDU, and the relevance of the music lyrics has come up, I thought I'd post this here. The Star Queens chess set was created to be a self-contained short story that shows how I derive the story directly from the song lyrics. It's only 15 pages. Reading all of Armageddon Chess from the beginning of the timeline, having that background knowledge, will make all of the chess sets examples of this. But the Star Queens chess set stands on its own and is only 15 pages long, so there are really two good examples of this on this blog. One 15 pages, and the other about 200 pages. And, of course, you are seeing how this works just with lyrics on screen and it does work this way, even without the images that would be associating it even more too the story that the player is experiencing. The images would make it work at least twice as good as what you are experiencing in Armageddon Chess.

The PDU is my Star Wars or Star Trek, but far more all encompassing than any of those types of stories that have ever existed before. The other “universes” cover a period of a few hundred years at most. The PDU covers a period of 4.5 billion years or, if you only want to count the period within which the games actually exist it covers a period of about 8,000 years. The entire history of the human species within this universe. There are a lot of story arcs that run through the entire history of humanity, some of which begin in the earliest eras of the timeline. Armageddon Chess and Territories, the beginning of the story, which are on this blog to download and read (together they are about 300 pages). A story arc that doesn't begin until Manifest Destiny, and is therefore not on this blog at all, is the robot story arc.

The robot story arc is, so far, the primary comedy story arc of the entire timeline. Humans eventually wind up building just about the most advanced fleet of starships in the remembered history of the galaxy, but they are comically bad at building robots. Even during the era when their “Advanced Ghost Fleet” is the most powerful force in the galaxy, the humans still can't build robots. Any robot they build will always, inevitably, either run away, explode, or attempt to conquer and enslave humanity. Meanwhile, species far less advanced then them have little trouble building robots.

The PDU is loaded with tribute references to all kinds of things from popular culture. One of these is that, in tribute to Will Smith, about the only thing the humans hate as much as robots is when you “shoot that green stuff at them”. Putting these two things together... In every single ground battle of the PDU the enemy is using at least some robots. It's as if everyone except the humans has no problem building robots, even after the humans have become among the most advanced people in the galaxy. And, to make matters even worse, the robots always have at least one very noticeable weapon that is “green stuff”... the two things that humans hate the most combined. Damn robots who shoot that green stuff at you! The EDF Space Marines are often a source of comedy because of this, they are ALWAYS having to fight “damn robots” who “shoot that green stuff at you”.

Without the context of the story surrounding these song lyrics they have no meaning too you. I realize this. You can see how it works in context in Armageddon Chess. But, with the above having been explained, and the fact that this song is pretty comical just standing on it's own... here's another song/movie from Astral Invasion (there are only a few AI songs left that haven't been posted in these comments already). This is the final end of a specific robot story arc about just one robot that had begun in The Trade Wars, 4 whole games and about 2,000 years before Astral Invasion.

I can't resist mentioning that, had this been in context and you knew the story that this was the big end moment of, the “domo arigato chorus” in the middle of the song that runs from 03:05-04:20, and the images you would be seeing there in relation to the story... would be absolutely hilarious!!!

This story arc had been slowly building over the course of 4 games to reach this point. It had begun in The Trade Wars with the story of the humans first and only attempt (“We've got laws against those kinds of things these days”) to build a “Data-like” robot named “Kilroy”. The Trade Wars is the 5^th game of the PDU, so by that time it had been well-established that the PDU is inspired by the music of the era of “progressive rock” as much as it is inspired by the sci-fi universes that came before it such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. So the audience that is familiar with that music had been expecting, due to the name “Kilroy”, Mr. Roboto to be the end movie of the Kilroy story in The Trade Wars, but then it wasn't. Rush's “The Body Electric” had been the end of that story, when Kilroy malfunctioned and ran away. So now, 4 games and about 2,000 years later, you finally get the Mr. Roboto movie that you had been expecting to see all game long on your first play through way back in The Trade Wars. The short version of how this story gets from The Body Electric to Mr. Roboto over the course of 4 games... along the way a damaged Kilroy had encountered a damaged alien robot and they had combined themselves into the robot that is the star of the Astral Invasion robot side-story arc. This was obviously inspired by V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (and not obviously from what is mentioned here, Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still).

Domo arigato for listening;-)

"I don't bother with diagrams because I am always working on different games and the timeline between them as kind of a lifelong hobby."

I understand how it can be hard to work on things you don't need for yourself, because it feels like a waste of time, but that changes when you want to work in a team.  We as outsiders are trying to help you add things that we know will improve your chances at making this more than just something you do all by yourself.

You've been complaining that nobody wants to help you.  There is some additional effort that you're required to put into your personal hobby if you intend other people to spend the effort with you.

Why would anyone spend effort for you, if you don't spend effort for them?

You may believe that the design documents you've presented are proof of your effort, but it is simply not the right type of effort.

"Everybody... Since this blog was intended to focus on the story of the PDU"

"I am looking for a programmer who is interested in making an indie game called Space Hockey."

"I am still looking for a programmer"

"If I can't find anyone who is interested in making Space Hockey, than I am out of ideas again and I will at least know that I tried every possible way of doing what I was born to do over the last 40 years."

"I am still looking for a programmer who is interested in very easily dominating the sci-fi space ship genre of the computer game industry. "

"If there is not a single person out there that is interested in this, then I've finally proven beyond all doubt that the modern game industry is incompetent."

(Bold emphasis was added by me.)

Spend some fucking effort and try the other possible ways then, you ingrate.

I have quite thoroughly spoon-fed you some additional options which I see no evidence of you ever attempting because you mistakenly believe you've already tried them.  Where are those attempts of yours?  Show me.

Your Space Hockey design document is a joke and an utter waste of everyone's time, including yours, because you had to spend the time writing all of that when you don't even know if anyone else will ever be interested in it.  Someone could have thrown the phrases "Star Control" and "Hockey" into a random word generator, filled in some mad-libs, and reached the same design you did with your 300 years of obsolete and immutable experience.

You spend your time posting music videos that you hope people will listen to (seriously, has anyone listened to any of those?), wasting even more time, and then have the nerve to complain that you're an old man who has only 10-15 years to live and want to fulfill your only dream before you die.  You are consistent only in your inconsistency.

Successful people learn to adapt to a changing environment, and the most successful actively try to predict how the environment will change ahead of time so that they can take advantage before other people do.  You, on the other hand, expect your knowledge from literally decades ago to still be relevant today and ignore everyone who tries to tell you that we've moved on.

The moment you read something you don't like, you immediately stop reading and post a highly reactionary response, often incorrectly making assumptions about what was said.  Is it any surprise that other people will do the same when they read your posts?

I normally don't like making analogies because people like you don't understand them.  You're like this fly that's in my kitchen right now.  I try to open the door to let it outside but it is unable to comprehend that my house is not somewhere it can live, or that I'm trying to help it.  I could swat it because I don't want it in here, but there's no food for it to get into, so I could just wait for it to starve to death.  You are that fly.

You mistakenly believe and incessantly state that since you were there when board game design was a thing, that your decades of experience are somehow better than us younger people who simply stand on the shoulders of those that came before.  Every generation inherits the knowledge of those that came before them and then adds to it.  We wouldn't make any progress if every new generation had to start over from scratch!

Newer generations will always be better than the previous ones, simply because the previous generations die out before they can get the new generation's adaptations.  But you are still alive and you don't want our adaptations.  You stick your head in the sand and pretend that your old way is already perfect.  You sit around whining and effectively say "I'll do that when I need to, but I don't need to now."  This is an amazingly self-defeating attitude you have.

I was really hoping to let this stand here.  In those last few posts I think that I have finally managed to say it as well as I ever will.  Especially if it is going to turn nasty again, I think ending this blog on the comedy of the last post is a good note for this to end on.  I would just add, Nypyren, that if you ignore that previous history as your industry has, and begin reinventing the wheel, then you are starting over and not building on that previous knowledge.  It becomes lost knowledge, which is a very very common thing throughout history for a wide variety of reasons.

I would also point out that the Impulse Chart with its embedded Sequence of Play is all you should need to look at to see that what I do is, based on the previous work of the entire history of simulation design but specifically SVC who arrived at the most sophisticated artificial representation of time ever conceived by man, far beyond how you and almost everyone else in the world perceives games and simulations.  Family games were the first generation.  Avalon Hill's phased turns were the second.  Steve Cole's impulse chart was the third generation.  Rube is the fourth.

I am not going to reply in this thread anymore because I don't not want a flame war to detract from what I was hoping would be the ending of this blog with a glimpse of the comedy robot story arc.