Playing Stories – Fall 2012 – 6424
Play through the character creation step of the Elysian Fields RPG, the first RPG to include interactive player character AI: instead of directly controlling your character, you must cooperate with them. The currently selected character is Aella the Warrior. Finish character creation and get ready to play!
Known bug: There’s a problem with picking the Mage class. Will fix. You can still pick it, though, it doesn’t cause anything really weird to happen.
A storm has caused a power outage, and the lighthouse has gone dark. Click on different things in the surrounding area to move, break, or fix them in order to light the beam and keep nearby ships safe.
Screenshot mockup: Obviously it’s missing, well, everything except the basic backdrop and lighthouse at this point, but here’s the base (click for full size):
and here’s an animation test, probably going to slow it down a fair amount though (blink/motion warning I guess?)
Game here: http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/
It would appear that you are the fastest on the planet and you are having a very bad day.
Presentation space: Would be neat to build some sort of cabinet around the computer using very drab, sort of broken-down wall materials, or maybe crates. Controls could be keyboard or some sort of button. (Alternately, it totally isn’t a terrible idea to hook it up to a dancemat/controller you can jump on. Totally.)
Idea 1:
You play through the character creation screen of your typical RPG, picking features and equipment for your character. However, you also have to convince her to actually fight for you.
Idea 2:
You’ve been hired to babysit the “difficult” child on the block. They don’t listen, they’re hyperactive, they freak out over random things, they don’t shut up. Your goal is to make it to getting paid without any tantrums. Who knows, maybe it’s just a matter of understanding what upsets the kid?
This is a bit of a sketchy version but it’s the same overall style.
Face reading: Huh, this has some stuff in common with the research I did this summer. Would also be interested in seeing someone do research on the possibility that simplified/animated faces are easier to read than real ones for some people (obvious hypothesis is that simplified faces are more exaggerated, but pretty sure there is more to it than that.) Reading up on stuff about reading faces is always weird because I’m lousy at actually reading faces.
Eliza effect: I vaguely recall messing around with the Eliza program a while back. Impression of the character was that either it was just not a very well-humanized program, or else she was most like someone who was deliberately being annoying via acting like a robot. Never got the feeling of actually talking to someone like the article describes, but did eventually get annoyed in the way you’d get annoyed at someone. Was an interesting contrast.
Hills Like White Elephants: Familiar, think I might have read it before. About as cheerful as anything Hemingway ever wrote. Appreciate the sort of minimalism in the dialogue, but the specific way he does it feels tired and depressed all the time.
The historians of your day have sent you back to investigate the explosion of the first ever hyperdrive-equipped starship. You’re sent to the space center shortly before its launch. Will you find out what happened, or try to change the past?
Borges reading:
I find it very interesting that this story basically laid out the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics well before it was brought up in the scientific field. It seems to be a very influential story, too; I can think of quite a few works that include alternate timelines in which different decisions have been made as a story element (at least one of which used a literal labyrinth, actually.)
CYOA:
The main thing that jumped out at me here was the description of CYOAs as a finite state machine, because really that’s what they are. Which makes me think about what else to do when writing one on a platform that can handle more information than just state; with a computer, you can track other elements like the whole path the player/reader has taken and whether certain events have been met, which allows you to throw another layer of variance into the story. Gives me some ideas for the project. I’m not sure Twine can track variables besides state though… will have to look in to that.
Revision: You are a time traveler, sent back to investigate what caused a major historical disaster. Do you simply investigate, or do you wind up trying to change it? Is it worth changing what might affect your own history? For that matter, will it even work?
Reflex: Rather than controlling the main character’s actions throughout the day, you control their reactions to stress: fight, flight, freeze, or endure. Of course, nobody can endure everything, and this character’s particularly anxious… good luck.
Hi!
I’m Katie Nestor, a senior CS major/art minor. Looking to head into the games industry after CMU.
Animation skills: Blender, Maya, little bit of Sketchup
Game engine skills: Unity, various tile editors
Programming skills: Java, C, C++, C# (soon), ActionScript with the Flixel game programming library