Beavertown

Let's start out with this:

The original stargate, with its spinning metal wheel and its jets of steam and its vault doors and weird little metal staircase, is way better than the new Miami Vice pastel-colored solid-state "electronic" stargate from Atlantis.

And I know its tough to figure out what to do with the thing, 'cause its like, a ring and everything, and the only sensible thing to do with it would be to lay it down on the ground and then jump and dump shit into it, and that wouldn't look good on TV, but it doesn't look good half-buried in the floor, either.

Man, if I had a stargate, I'd use it to get rid of trash, y'know, there'd be an "alpha site," and a "dump site" for old TVs and diapers and bags of crap and shit, the Trash Planet that you never hear about on Stargate heh.

There's got to be an alien race that uses the stargates for that, "incoming wormhole sir!," and then a couple bags of trash come tumbling out of the thing ahaha.

And you know there's tons of planets with kids that have easy access to working stargates, man, I mean, if we had access to a stargate when we were kids, we woulda been doing "prank calls" and playing ding-dong-ditch and throwing of bags of burning dog shit and our buddy's favorite hat through there at randomly-dialed super-serious alien races, I don't think they can even figure out who dialed 'em 'cause of the way wormoles work, its perfect AHAHA.

And even though I'm a sorta scottish guy, the scottish medical dude on Atlantis needs a new hairstyle.

Its almost hilariously cheesy the way each dude on Atlantis has the same hair, twisted in a different direction, so people with bad eyes can tell 'em apart or something, y'know?

Its kinda like the way they all started out with different colored lapels on their jumpsuits, like the Power Rangers or something, the boss chick had red, the science guy had blue heh.

I guess that was supposed to be something like Star Trek, where the "science guys" have blue uniforms, and the "military" guys have red, or something, but that's not how it ended up, 'cause the only people that wore the outfits were the main characters, so it ended up looking all stupid, 'cause your brain is like, "dude, does the government pay for these costumes, or is this supposed to be something that the characters choose to wear and color coordinate amongst themselves? Dude, the boss chick is a civilian. Why are they dressed like power rangers?"

And the scottish medical guy, being a less important character, got the bottom of the barrel "Friends" hairstyle, y'know, its the "oh man, we're out of hairstyles, oh wait, I got an idea!" hairstyle, 'cause all the more important dudes on the show picked the good ones and nobody else can have the same hair as them 'cause that would detract from their awesomeness or something.

Seriously, the medical guy's hair is like, combed from the back of his neck forward or something ahaha.

I wouldn't want a guy with crazy hair like that performing surgery on me, man, the dude would sew your legs on backwards and shit AHAHA.

And you know how his character sorta got killed off over and over again, the guys at the show probably think folks don't like the guy 'cause of his acting or something.

IT'S THE WEIRD HAIR MAN.

Not that I want him back in the place of the chick from Firefly, now that they finally decided to give her a little personality.

Dude, I liked her way better as the dirty-faced mechanic chick, you can't really beat a cute and loose spaceship mechanic chick who can swear in chinese for a character, its impossible.

And you know the way that all the actors always go around pretending they don't know anything about their character, like Gillian Anderson on all the Late Shows this last week, as if she had more important and serious things to think about, like her musical career.

Dude, you know she studied her character way more than any of us ever will, you know she bugged the writers about stupid detail changes and everything, that's like, her job man ahaha.

And there's something multidimensionally funny about her, a beautiful woman, famous for playing a smart character, pretending to be a dumb hot chick in real life, and... failing?

Because she's either a dumb person in real life who is too dumb to act like a dumb chick well or maybe she's into that whole thing where "if you can pretend to be one then you probably ain't one" heh.

Like, here's a beautiful woman that doesn't want people to think she's smart, for some reason, which is strange enough in the first place, and I'm not sure if she's failing or succeeding at it either ahaha.

"Oh, just think of me as a hot chick, that's good enough."

"Uhm, is this a trick?"

And why do scifi writers add all sorts of Leave It To Beaver crap to their scripts, like making pregnancy enhance the super powers of pregnant women, even though they're supposed to be super liberal scifi writers and stuff?

Pregnancy always enhances a woman's latent supernatural powers heh.

Barefoot and pregnant women are the best, that's a womans super power right there, that's all they're good for, non-pregnant women aren't as good ahaha.

"Hmm, I think the black dude needs to be an alien. Let's see how he looks with a lump of clay attached to his head."

"Maybe we should give him a visor."

"Dude, that's been done before."

"How about a unicorn horn?"

"Let's not get crazy now. Let's just spraypaint him silver or something."

"Dude I think somebody died from that in the old days."

See, its something like this, some dude from the future, making fun of this stuff, that's probably what makes all the scifi people self-conscious about the shit they do.

When I love scifi, I would never say anything bad about scifi.

What I actually think is cheesy is hollywood and actors and "real life" and shit.

And it really is the human element that I'm interested in heh.

Kinda weird that I'm the exact opposite of all these hollywood folks who seem to think that they're interested in the human element but that scifi is the cheesy thing ahaha.

Anyways all this junk is another part of the game me and Ex-b were talking about, having a Scifi show (and a bunch of other media stuff, like newspapers and magazines for AI) inside the game, sorta like Wormhole X-Treme for Stargate, y'know, 'cause this is supposed to be an eleven dimensional game and everything.

And that made me realize that its actually the behind-the-scenes dimension that's where all the comedy is, when you make fun of a scifi show, you aren't really making fun of the scifi part, you're making fun of the show part.

And that whole thing evolved from me and Ex-b talking about how weird it was, the way we're 100% serious and 100% not serious at the same time, in parallel or in quick succession (unless its a long mechanical description) in series.

I think we're both super serious and super not serious at the same time, all the time, I think comedy and scifi and everything else in the world is the same way, the guy standing guard on the castle wall has to stay frosty, but at the same time he's the dude that really needs to come up with a joke to release some of the tension, its sorta like that.

Not that I meant to suddenly get all serious on ya heh.

Okay, let's go back to the funny hair thingie ahaha.

Change It a Little So We Don't Get Sued

Actually everything I'm working on is part of this thing where you are s'posed to be restoring the mind and sanity (and some of the memory) of your AI guy at the beginning of the game, repairing one subsystem after another and stuff (the last thing I posted was for a cheesy flashback thingie, y'know, like yer jiggling his wires and his synapses start firing).

And 'cause I'm working out all these different subsystems to his consciousness and stuff, that made me think to make the guy upgradeable, y'know, like a regular computer with hardware and software, you might loot components or make or buy crap that you can stick in its "server rack" slots and whatever.

So now I gotta really figure out what this dude is made out of before I can finish the thing heh.

Anyways, that wasn't really what I meant to talk about.

Naw, see, the thing I really wanted to talk about comes from the way I gotta avoid using red and green and 'cause of that red and green color blindness thingie that Ex-b has, which is totally annoying to me heh.

I mean, when you got to do stuff like traffic lights and computer systems and health and mana bars and good-n-bad-memory chips and yadda-dadda-dah its kinda nice to do the ole "green is good and red is bad" dealie.

So I was building this "repair HAL" thing and I hit another one of those green and red patches, and it made the minigame I was doing into a test for color blindness.

Which I could turn around and work into the plot of the story by having HAL jump up and declare you defective or something once he figures out that you can't tell red from green heh.

"Defective humans aren't allowed to operate on my delicate subsystems!"

Which reminded me of this other thing that occurred to me about the way you could make a minigame into a technical aptitude test that would prevent all the english majors from playing heh.

Dude, there's a lot of shit on PBS where liberal arts people talk about philosophy, you english major guys can't imagine how crazy that stuff sounds to a dude that talks to computers in math and logic, I spend most of those shows going "I can't believe that something thinks that that is a question" ahaha.

Anyways all that stuff made me think about games with Intelligence Tests in 'em, shit man, that's a comedy goldmine, y'know, nobody ever does stuff like that, 'cause they're all like, oh man, we want stupid people to play, 'cause we want their money.

But if you really don't care about that (or if you don't buy into that logic, that's sorta like the logic that games shouldn't be scary, because people don't like to be scared ahaha), then you can do whatever the hell you want, y'know?

Aw I'm just kidding, its a good thing for spoiler sites or my loremaster woulda never finished that goddam level 15 class quest with the bookshelves, holy shit man was my loremaster ever a dummass AHAHA.

Plus, while I don't mind my game being something that'd teach ya something while it entertains you, I don't want it to be so bad that my brother's kids can't play the thing.

Actually, they're smarter than I am, the littler one was giving me physics advice as soon as he could talk, but I think I'm gonna stick with my first story ahaha.

Alright, so I might as well blabber about what I'm doing, I gotta work it out s'more anyways.

See, all these AI-spaceship guys are related to each other, and they got a hierarchy where they end up sorta being like a pantheon of greek gods, where some of 'em are crazy and they try to kill and cannibalize each other and fight over power and there's civil wars and all that.

And as you go along fixing yourself ('cause the AI guy is a character that belongs to you, its something that you play, uh, sometimes, when you ain't playing your clone-characters), its basically the AI character creation system, and its supposed to determine where you fit into the hiearchy and which side you are on and all that kinda crap.

I actually kinda hate that moral crap in games, so don't worry, it ain't gonna be all sucky and simple and lock you into anything and limit you and shit, its just supposed to be a way for me (as the programmer) to figure out some shit about how you wanna play and how you want to portray yourself, I don't even have that hierarchy shit all figured out, exactly, so its not like I'm obfuscating a system where you are choosing sides in a war that you can't change your mind about later (when you actually have some experience and knowledge about the multiverse in the game) or anything horrible and stupid like that heh.

Yah, these AI guys have their own cultures, they'll eventually have their own heroes and villains and news networks and celebrity AI gossip and favorite shows on their eleven-dimensional TV channels and stuff, that's all part of it.

Although the game isn't just about some civil war thingie between 'em all, they might fight with each other and get murderous and stuff sometimes, but mostly they deal with other advanced civilizations, I don't wanna get all introverted and stuff.

Its just that the story starts out with your ship being wrecked on a multidimensional beach somewhere 'cause you got jumped by some bad guy AIs, and in order to escape you translated yourself across the database of the multiverse in a way that caused you to forfeit your grip on a few of the dimensions that you were using for data storage (and the guys who were attacking you didn't want to erase themselves to chase you, so they gave up).

So you're sorta getting your shit together after a nasty drive failure and a wicked beating, basically, y'know, pulling yourself up by your own bootstrap programming and starting over, and you don't even really remember exactly how you got so messed up (not that its a fascinating mystery that you need to solve or anything, the bad guys were gonna use you for parts, the bigger guys tend to cannibalize any of the smaller AI-ships that they can catch whenever there is any kind of fight that they feel like they need to "gather their strength" for).

Although there's a chance that it didn't happen exactly like that.

'Cause mebbe you weren't a runt, mebbe you were a famous ship or something before you erased yourself.

Yah, easy peasy *rolls his one good eye*

I'm not even getting into the crap I got to think about with the mapping of the conscious mind into fun little subsystems that you can fix and shit heh.

Actually this is pretty easy stuff, its more artwork and organization than anything, its not like I gotta make up an entire universe in detail or anything, I'm just making little arthouse tetris thingies and screwing around, all the cool stuff comes for free.

The hardest part is actually the whole deal where I can't use red and green for different things 'cause of that whole colorblindness crap ahaha.

Big Wheels

I had to get rid of the hood ornament 'cause it was too cheesy even for me heh.

This is just the first of a bunch of ships I gotta do 'cause I'm doing one of those George Lucas thingies with a whole fleet of ships moving along at different speeds so it looks like its all in 3d and stuff.

I wanna end up with that effect you get when you look down into clear water and see all the different levels of fish swimming around but we'll see how good that turns out, I ain't no stickler fer perfection ahaha.

This is one of the bigger ships in the center of the fleet of those eleven-dimensional AI spaceship thingies.

And I totally cheated on the background, and the picture of the sun, 'cause the sun is supposed to be a sorta-transparent animated "thrumming" engine thingie and I ain't bothered to do that yet, but at least I got the mask set up for it now.

The original idea I had was a ship that was so big that it could have continents and oceans, just sitting on the hull, held down by gravity, in that circular thingie at the center, but when I do a ship like that I'll need skip the windows and shit, 'cause it won't look right.

And I guess some ships have black holes in their center, when they get really old and horde a lot of mass, and then there's smaller ones with all the different kinds of stars, and even smaller ones that have gas giants, and even smaller ones that just have a bunch of water or hydrogen or something, and then there's supposed to be all sorts of really tiny ones that look like regular fighting ships without the whole gigantic planet-eating borg dealie, but the general idea was a space civilization that strip-mines everything it comes into contact with centered around a bunch of huge-ass "cargo" ships-slash-cities-slash-planets (slash-solar-systems, I guess) in the center.

I kinda like the idea of ships that are so huge they get gravity powered fusion for free and maybe even iron as a waste product heh.

And the whole black hole gravity dealie is about as good as you can do for making the whole warping timespace crap believable, y'know, I'm all about sweeping all my loose ends into a black hole 'cause of the way that they can turn tons and tons of bad ideas into a "singularity" ahaha.

And since I'm totally into the handwavium and unobtanium thingie already y'know its like wtf I might as well go all the way and get me some kickass ground effects and subwoofers in space going untz untz untz and everything awhellyah its the Starship Alabama, baby, its the Mississippi Queen AHAHA.

Mmm Hmm Nah

Alright, so Ex-b is down in Florida right now, somewhere around Orlando, looking for any old crummy job and an apartment that we can turn into a Big Lebowski version of a mad scientist laboratory and underwater supervillian fortress, some kinda antarctic research base where we can stay up all night eating macaroni and cheese and working on this game thingie of ours together.

And I'm working on all sorts of weird and awesome and hilarious scifi game crap that me and him came up with.

Actually I'm doing some pretty boring stuff right now, trying to settle on a scale for the art and redoing the interface for all the interior-of-the-Tower-slash-spaceship stuff at the beginning of the game that you probably shouldn't even know about 'cause it's already sorta "ruining some of the movie" for ya, but I'm half-tempted to tell you guys exactly what kinda stuff we came up with so you can help us evolve it some more heh.

And then again, I don't wanna be like some jackass talking about how delicious the chocolate cake was at the party you weren't invited to, so I should probably just shut up already ahaha.

The scale thing is really annoying 'cause I want the characters on the screen to be big enough that I can do funny shit with their facial expressions and a bunch of animated gag junk like that (in the backgrounds, too) but small enough that they're still "vague" and generic enough for your imagination to fill in most of their details to suit your tastes.

So that a dude who wants to play the game serious ('cause there's a lot of serious stuff in there, I dunno how to do cool space stuff that ain't kinda freaky, let alone all the other stuff I wanna do) won't be too put out.

Y'know, I can't make all the dudes all cartoony with big heads and shit like Pip Boy or something 'cause while that's fine for some junk, the whole "muppet babies" garbage would totally suck for Ancient Rome and Cthulhu-type crap heh.

Plus I'm kinda hoping I don't gotta do multiple scales so that they'll be able to play around with long range combat and stuff.

On the other hand, I'm already doing some of that for vehicle combat, and I probably don't need to do a lot for all the super small "character" images on the world map, 'cause they're so damn blurry and symbolic and tiny that they could be anything.

Its In Your Face

Clone Shoes

The Tower

Here's sorta what I'm working on right now.

I say "sorta" 'cause I keep changing my mind about certain key elements as I figure out ways to reorganize stuff to create more interesting scenarios and situations later on.

Anyways the basic idea is that there's all these eleven dimensional spaceships from way the hell in the future, beyond the extinction of the human race, and the ape race that replaced 'em, and the robots that replaced the apes, and the holograms that replaced the robots, and the memetic collective that replaced the holograms, and whatever else there was, intelligent plants and ghost empires and ape-vs-robot-vs-cowboy-vs-zombie apocalypses and stuff heh.

And the spaceships can travel through time and space and parallel universes, 'cause they're these huge-ass machines that only partly exists in normal time and space, if they bother to exist in normal time-space at all.

And they were created to terraform alien planets and parallel universe versions of the Earth and recreate all sorts of different civilizations, like a Human (and whatever) Backup Array, Jurassic Park Style.

So its full of automated factories and cloning facilities and all sorts of cool stuff on the inside, and it mostly looks like a terraforming tower or an elevator or a vault door in the ground on the outside, when it ain't flying around like the city from stargate atlantis (although it can disguise itself as a Lodge or a Log Cabin or a Stone Tower or a Castle or an Office Building with a nice lawn or just stealth itself with holographic technology at the snap of its fingers to fit any time period it may be interested in recreating).

And the characters you create are clones (although not necessarily human clones) created and let loose on the planet (12 monkey style) by the AI that runs this great big machine, 'cause (of course) its all broken down and shit and it needs your help to repair itself and recover its full capabilities.

And it doesn't trust you, 'cause its made some other clones that ended up turning bad on it (there's my built-in arch-nemesis shit ahaha), so you gotta do missions and stuff to earn its trust and be allowed access to certain areas aboard the ship, and each new area comes with new crap to fix before you can access the full capabilities of that area.

So everything in the game, including being able to create new characters and build your own vehicles and use the cyborg and genetic augmentation areas of the medical lab and firing up the terraforming tower to turn the ruins of a city into a jungle so you can do the sim city thingie and being able to fire up the engines and fly the entire ship around, has a way of being unlocked and repaired and upgraded junk.

Actually, at the moment, I'm sorta toying with the idea of making the Player, as a User, be the artificial intelligence aboard the ship, so you can name your ship when you first start playing the game and use that as your handle for adding content to the game and crap, and then your characters would be the clones of your AI, who acts sorta like a little god or something, and all your characters are your AI's "hands and eyes on the ground."

"Waking up as a clone" or whatever with no memory to initiate some suspension of disbelief has been done to death already, waking up as an AI that just finally managed to get some crucial part of itself operational after a terrible multidimensional crash landing or collision or something that happened six hundred thousand years ago and creating your clones yourself instead using some kinda lame-ass character creation screen is a little more kickass as far as story-telling goes.

And its not like the AI is gonna know what the hell its doing until it gets more fixed up anyways, all the damn AIs that always run the eleven dimensional spaceships in all these damn eleven dimensional spaceship story thingies never know anything useful until the very end of the story anyways ahaha.

The only thing that sucks about it is that it messes up my "earn the AIs trust" access-to-new-areas setup for the clones.

'Cause like, you can probably trust your own characters, y'know?

I suppose there's some angle to work that with "earn access" thing as an AI, instead of having it be by character, where the characters, autonomous as they may or may not be, depending on the player (who doesn't really have to mess with this spaceship crap at all, I plan on making it so that a new character could just leave and go play the game with his buddies and fight monsters and gamble and trade and do whatever he wants to do out of other cities instead of building his own, y'know, all I gotta do is make the "tutorial" starter-thingie something where you repair the transport system that lets you do exactly that and we are good-to-go).

Anyways that's what I'm working on right now, more specifically the map of the tower and at least some of the areas that you can unlock, like the cloning area (which will get mushed into character creation), some tutorial thingie, and the stuff that requires you to scan and explore the grid of the apocalyptic ruins of a city on the surface before repairing and firing up the terraforming system.

I already started making it as an isometric cartoon thingie that you can dungeon crawl around in and work all the little machines, which is what I wanna do for the "scan and clear toxic materials and lifeforms and salvage parts and crap before terraforming can begin" too.

And I guess its good to do the "User is the AI" thingie, 'cause then you don't gotta do the tower shit all over again with different characters, y'know, 'cause while some stuff, like the terraforming-and-exploring-the-ruins and building new cities junk, is kinda fun 'cause its easy to randomize and make interesting, all that "earning trust and credentials" tutorial rat maze crap over and over again ain't no fun.

Hmm, I s'pose I better plan to make some of that a toggle though, in case that starter crap is kinda fun.

None of this junk, no matter how I end up doing it, precludes using your first tower to create new towers so you can create more than one city (even in different parallel universes) or anything, it just turns it all into a part of the game, being able to create new towers is just another thing to unlock.

And the tower as the central feature thingie gives me a way to let folks admin their own worlds (to make 'em fun for their buddies) in a gamey and unsucky way.

Plus its cool for folks who just like to build junk and show it off to other players.

And I can instance everything so you can check out everybody else's crap without bothering 'em, or by invitation, and these spaceship-tower-slash-city-running AIs can team up together in at least a couple different interesting ways and even wrestle each other in a couple different and interesting ways (terraforming fights! ahaha), so that's cool.

And the whole thing with having you, as a user, be the AI of the ship figuring out everything on your own actually makes it kinda nice and interesting for me as a narrator, 'cause then I can just sorta deliver information to you directly as you investigate crap insteada doing that moldy-old "talk to the player through some goddam pestering puppet" thingie heh.

I know I do that a lot here on my blog but I don't like being stuck feeling like I gotta do that shit all the time y'know that junk is only good for a couple laughs and then it starts getting old really quick ahaha.