This website is my home base for exploring game design and development techniques. I'm focusing on game elements that foster the creativity of players: procedural content generation, user-created game spaces, emergent behavior, etc.
Most of my exploration will take the form of small prototypes. These will be tech demos of specific concepts or techniques. After building 2 or 3 similar prototypes, I will then attempt to build a small game using ideas I learned from the prototypes. When that game is complete I will move on to another batch of prototypes, followed by another small game. When 2 or 3 small games are finished I will build a larger, more complex game that incorporates things I've learned to that point.
This is the nature of my exploration. I will direct the search by choosing the prototypes to build. Each of these choices will obviously be influenced by how the prototypes turn out. The goals of the search are fun play, interesting game situations, and fostering player creativity within the game.
This section will be updated to reflect specific goals as time goes on.
Short-term
Small, playable prototypes of specific game elements and ideas.
Medium-term
Small games that incorporate elements from prototypes.
Long-term
Larger, complex games that include multiple elements from smaller games
and prototypes.
Ultimate goal
I have a vision of a large-scale, simulated, procedurally generated world.
A friend and I once started making a small version of that vision we called
Journeyman. This game is the ultimate goal of this site. Every prototype
and game I build will be done with this vision in mind.
But that doesn't mean every prototype and every game will lead directly towards this goal. The purpose of exploring is not only to find something specific you're looking for, but also to see what else you find along the way.
I've always had a desire to create things: frequently music, rarely stories. Most often, the desire has been to make worlds. I remember being amazed at the world Tolkien created with Middle Earth. Thinking back, I now recognize that many of my interests have been influenced by this desire to create worlds. Geology, geography, linguistics, chemistry... these sciences frequenty catch my interest.
Most commonly, my desire has been to make games. After all, the making of a game always involves making a world—even if that world is nothing more than a box, a couple paddles, and a ball. Since my brain is much more technical than creative, I chose the route of a programmer. I think games has always been my goal because I still have that creative drive and making games provides an outlet for that even while I'm mostly excersizing the technical side of my brain.
For a long time I've wanted to write a program that could generate a world. For almost as long, I rejected the idea as entirely out of my reach. That idea was destroyed when I first saw Dwarf Fortress. Here was a game that did so many of the things I wanted to do in my world generator, and it was written by one man. And DF wasn't just a world generator, it was also a very fun simulation game! So the first person to get credit for inspiring me is Tarn Adams.
Another main reason Tarn is an inspiration to me is that he built a community around his game that supports his full-time effort, even though the game is given away for free. It shows that people will pay for what they like, even when they don't have to. It flies in the face of all the big corporations that think they have to lock down access to their products to prevent piracy by treating everyone, including their customers, like pirates.
As great as Dwarf Fortress is, it had one major flaw: the infintely cryptic interface and overall graphical presentation. It was fine for a small niche audience, but not for me. I still go back and play DF now and then to see al the new stuff Tarn has put in, but the interface always inevitably drives me away.
My second inspiration is Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft. Minecraft is another game that creates a world procedurally and lets you do whatever you want in it. But it does so in a completely different way than DF. It uses a first-person view that everyone can relate to. It uses blocks for all of its graphics, which I guess is kind of similar to DF using ASCII characters. But the interface in Minecraft is as slick as it gets.
DF shows that one guy can build a community of devoted fans willing to pay his bills for him. Minecraft shows that one guy can build a game that is accessible to the world and make millions in the process. So why not me? I'll be happy to end up in either of those situations.