In the past posts I have laid out all the things that led to that one point where I was suddenly struck by a bolt of inspiration. Once I considered the theme of the realistic zombie-survival game with characters who have depth, the ideas just kept flowing so fast that I had a hard time jotting everything down, there are connections everywhere. But how would you avoid getting entangled?

Complex Connections

I filled index card after index card that day. At first I just had some general ideas like “Avoid combat at all costs,” “Just try to survive” and “Why should there be so many guns lying around in the open anyway?”. Writing them all down in a long list was liberating in a sense: Since I had them on paper I wouldn’t have to worry about forgetting any them so I could empty the RAM of my mind and occupy it with other things.

I thought about the attributes a player character would have to have, just like with my RPG-attempt a few weeks before. But this time it was easy be more specific.

A player would have a name, that I was sure of right from the beginning, s/he would have certain perks and drawbacks which would determine how you would approach the game but still be able to follow your common sense in your decisions. Following Chris Crawford’s advice I wanted everything to influence a lot of other things. Take a player character’s perception, for example: It would depend on how high ground you are standing (or crouching?), whether there are obstacles in your way (e.g. trees). Then, how fast you are moving (if you don’t move you will have a better perception). Is it raining? Have you had enough sleep? Are you using a tool (like binoculars)? How spatially intelligent are you and what’s your current State of Mind? You see, a lot of dependencies. I wrote all these considerations down on an index-card titled “Perception”. But it doesn’t stop there.

What defines a player’s “State of Mind”? Again, a number of things. Whether you had enough sleep, whether you had a fight or traumatizing experience recently, whether you are hungry or thirsty, what time of day it is (people tend to fear the darkness), whether you found something that lets you hold out for a bit longer (= hope) and how secure you feel. And as you might have guess, all these things have dependencies themselves of course.

For a week now I’ve been always keeping that that stack of index-cards in my pocket next to a pen and a number of blank cards. Whenever I learn something new or realize a connection of some sort I write it on the appropriate card. I don’t attempt to express these dependencies in formulas at that stage, I just collect them. I try not to be super-precise and nit-picky, I only want to consider every attribute that is important for a game of survival, even if it seems irrelevant at first. I can always exclude stuff if I feel it will not work later on.

Currently I don’t have an exact idea of the gameplay, I only know that I want emergent gameplay, that not two runs of this game should be alike. Currently, the goal of the game is to survive a number of days and make your way to an extraction point. That’s it. The background of your character should define your strategy, the environment your tactics on how to achieve the goal.

This is the current state of development and I wonder how long I will keep pursuing it or whether I get distracted, lack the necessary endurance or just forget about it. In any case thank you for reading and feel free to get in contact if you feel like sharing something.

And at this point here I want to put out a huge thanks to Conny who was there for me right from the start, she asked the right questions and her suggestions led me from one insight to the next. Thank you so much! What would I be without you?

► That’s it for this series so far. Thank you for reading!

Trying to come up with an original game is hard, as I was starting to figure out. And having nothing to say is okay, but when you want to be passionate about something that doesn’t go beyond a skin-deep cliché you should put an end to it. And that’s what I really tried. But those things have a tendency to bite you in the ass when you turn away…

My Zombie Revelation

Game designer and one of my very best friends, Jot from ilikescifi games paid me a visit on a sunny Friday noon. I had totally forgotten that he would drop by and so I woke up the second he knocked on my door. But some coffee got me up and running and soon we talked about all the stuff nerds like us like to talk about. And then he started to ask why I wasn’t playing DayZ already. I replied that I felt it was too buggy, too cumbersome to install and overall I don’t feel like buying two games when all I want to do is play a stupid mod. But that was half the truth. On the day of the Munchkin experience that triggered it all I listened to stories about DayZ, personal experiences by Wolfi Schütz. With wide eyes he passionately cautioned us about the zombie-infested glades and woods of Chernarus, how he barely survived some truly suffocating situations in that game, how a couple of survivors got an old helicopter working and how other survivors are a greater threat to you than all those mindless husks. DayZ was not a game in Wolfi’s tales, it was an intense struggle to survive just a little longer, because in the end everybody dies.

After Jot was gone and the survivor’s stories I noticed excited I felt about that game, despite knowing about the game’s shortcomings.

Long story short, I downloaded and installed ARMA: Combined Operations and DayZ and a few days later I was together with Jot and Xaver (another former fellow student) traversing the fields of that troubled country of Chernarus. DayZ really was different than most other games. Before venturing together in a small band of friends, I tried the game a couple of times by myself but had no fun at all. I didn’t know where to go, what to do or how the controls worked. But with two friends familiar with the world and its mechanics was great. The first time I really understood what a social game really meant: You rely on each other and work together towards a goal.

The novelty soon began to fade away and under it’s facade of realism I noticed more and more flaws of the game that (at least to me) were killing the overall atmosphere and mood like zombies were killing me before. The game proposed realism but offered, of course, game mechanics. If you were in a world that terrible, you would only have two things to rely on: Dumb luck and your wits or common sense.

Common sense works for DayZ although very limiting in some situations. It clearly feels that I have to follow the approach the designers want me to take instead of coming up with my own ways to solve problems. And since every player character is absolutely the same (even in terms of appearance) it further didn’t feel right. What’s their motivation to keep on fighting and not blowing their brains out with the first gun they find for there is no escape, no hope.

After exciting three hours the three of us parted and I was sitting back in my chair, reflecting on the experience. It had felt pretty realistic at first but the same time some elements were so game-like. I really liked the atmosphere in the game, the paranoia, the feeling of being at mercy of the environment and luck. But the characters were non-dimensional, hollow and arbitrary. What’s their story? How will it unfold?

This question seems to be a constant in post-apocalyptic games with zombies. Take Left4Dead, for example. I really love the superficial diversity in the characters, the small lines of dialogue they exchange in quiet parts, but I always asked myself what their story was, how they ended up together, what they did before the world went South and whether their past would catch up with them. In short, I was aching for a narrative that would have consequences. In the game it makes a lot of sense playing four characters with exactly the same attributes in terms of gameplay. But their world was lacking options and opportunities as well: Just make your way from one safe-room to the next and shoot anything in between. So is this really the way to survive a zombie-apocalypse? Hardly.

And there I had my spark of inspiration – bang – out of the blue: I was angry with those game for they didn’t stay true to the world they depict, their characters are just featureless placeholders and players don’t have many choices to get creative in problem solving on their part.

I felt the rush of blood and inspiration in my body, a focus and a determination: I wanted to make a game with rules roughly like DayZ but with an emphasis on realism, believability, options and consequences. Would you really risk your life for a gun without ammo? Can you really patch up broken bones with a shot of morphine? Would you really be able to shoot everything in sight? No. You just want to survive.

Surviving the Unthinkable

A few months back I read Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide. It’s an odd book. At first you think it might be penned in a satirical, even humorous manner. Wrong. After ten pages you know: Shit, this is serious. After fifty pages you scan the room you’re in the fastest and safest escape route (“just in case”) and after a hundred pages you genuinely consider prepping and whom among your friends you could trust with your life.

Now there it was, the experience, the thing I want to get out: How would it feel trying to survive in a world when the shit hit the fan and you’re not a gun-wielding super-hero without the ability to feel pain or remorse. What if you are are a bespectacled engineer with a fear of the dark? What if you have diabetes in such a world? What if you were pregnant? Those are the things that matter to me.

► Tomorrow: Complex Connections. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

So from yesterday’s post you know my opinion on the reasons why somebody should make a game. Being preachy is easy and fun but as soon as you realize that should also abide by the same standards, the story becomes a bit different. The elephant in my room was the question about my game’s message.

The Medium Is The Message

Thinking about what I posted yesterday made me realize that I don’t have anything to say, that I have no message I want to get out in the world. And so I took my lone index card and put it in my pocket and sifted through all my game-ideas I had noted down in the last couple of years. And I discovered something.

My friends Jot (the indie-developer ilikescifi games) and Steven (who coded on the award-winning Rope!) are hardcore gaming fans. They love the old games, the new games, they play a lot and both also create games themselves. When playing their games or talking to them I realized that it is most often the gameplay, the mechanics, that seem to be most important to them—how a game plays. Only then comes the game’s universe, its the atmosphere and the story these games convey.

But the ideas to games I have always circle around an experience, not so much about the mechanics. “What would it be like…”, that’s how most of my game-ideas start, not “Wouldn’t it be fun to…” nor “If you could…”. In that sense it dawned on me that I will never be a game designer for I take a player’s experience to be more important than the actual game. If I could tailor a world to the experience I want to transport, I wouldn’t really care that much whether the player has to make her way to the end with a shotgun or through a maze. But I am well aware that gameplay and game mechanics are inextricably connected, of course.

So I had nothing to say. It’s okay, I guess. We can’t all be Bob Dylan anyway. Nevertheless, “One day,” I thought, “I might do have something to say and want people to experience it!”. Mentally I retired my idea of coming up with a game. I was forcing it too much, nothing good ever comes of trying to be creative under pressure. But creativity and inspiration are curious entities, they vanish when you look for them and blind you, when you have little resources for them. And that’s kinda what happened next.

► Tomorrow: My Zombie Revelation. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

My urge to create a game, my passion to code despite obvious shortcomings kept driving me to continue working on the basics of my game. After a minor rush of I-really-should-get-started!-panic and mindless coding, I had to make a step back and to reflect on what I was doing. And the current state of how games are made led me to a decision…

Second Thoughts / The Gaming Industry

While I was coding pretty borders instead of a functional prototype for my core game mechanics and trying to write down RPG-character attributes on index cards, I realized that I don’t quite feel like making just another bad RPG. I like RPGs but they are not really my passion. Why was I doing something I didn’t felt true enough inside my guts? Why bother anyway?

Those where the questions that were bouncing in my mind as I was sitting in the cafe, staring into the mocking eyes of the truth. I was clueless. So much, in fact, that I whipped out my phone and started the crowd-opinion-facuet that is Thumb. There I asked what people felt was the most immersive 2D-game they had ever played. Because clearly, I didn’t know anymore.

Half an hour later I had some answers, such as Solitaire, Super Mario Bros. 3, The Binding of Isaac, Tetris, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, World of Goo, Pacman and Escape Velocity Nova. Sure, the number of people who commented was not really a representative sample of gamers all over the world, isn’t it interesting: People still like the “old” games such as Pacman and Tetris, and they like mostly reflex and coordination-based games (Pacman, EV Nova, Castlevania, Tetris, The Binding of Isaac). Yet, most surprisingly, even two indie-games (World of Goo, The Binding of Isaac) showed up.

Can indie-games really become that memorable? Steam just started their new community project Greenlight where users could vote for some games they would consider purchasing. And the majority of them looks like their designer(s) figured that 8bit = $$$ and people would hump-purchase anything that reminded them of the glamorous 80’s. The precious treasures of true inspiration and passion are few and far between what looks like Donkey Kong’s dump.

I reflected on Chris Crawford’s lectures and books, that games didn’t evolve much from the puberal phantasies of omnipotence, domination and combat. Crawford considers games as an art form whereas the big industry players consider games a way to make easy money when you give your core demographic (American, male, white, 10 to 25 years old) the games they want. And obviously the same is true for many independent game developers. They are not about a certain message they want to get out, they don’t have something to express, something they truly want you to experience. Today the majority of people who want to make money with games think in categories such as “What genre will be popular next year?”, “How can we encourage in-game sales?”. Crawford argues that game designers should be artists with programming skills, people who want to express themselves through the games they make. Their games are not about meeting the criteria in a certain genre, instead they focus on their message. And some of those original and pure experiments are trailblazers of new genres.

Take The Legend of Zelda for instance. There wasn’t quite the genre of action-adventure with puzzles out there:

With The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto wanted to take the idea of a game “world” even further, giving players a “miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer.” He drew his inspiration from his experiences as a boy around Kyoto, where he explored nearby fields, woods, and caves, and through the Zelda titles he always tries to impart to players some of the sense of exploration and limitless wonder he felt. “When I was a child,” he said, “I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this.” The memory of being lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family’s home in Sonobe was recreated in Zelda’s labyrinth dungeons.
– Wikipedia

Fortunately, this philosophy of creating games as means of expression instead of monetizing hasn’t gone extinct. Take, for example, Aether by programmer Edmund McMillen, best known for Super Meat Boy or The Binding of Isaac:

McMillen’s childhood experiences and fears were used for the game’s themes of loneliness, nervousness, and fear of abandonment or rejection. The boy’s journeys through space represent inward-thinking and imagination, planets represent fears and the inhabitants personify McMillen’s childhood “inner demons”. He was initially unsure as to whether or not he wished to release Aether, since it was based on personal experiences and made him feel vulnerable.
– Wikipedia

I take from this that there are some individuals in the indie-developer scene that really drive the innovation of the whole medium forward. I am not talking about technical innovation such as cooler graphics or more realistic looking worlds, I am talking about the innovation of the medium Game itself. The AAA-games still cling to the old notion of a medium, mimicking the “old” media instead of really trying to fathom the language of their medium game itself. Games are mostly presented like movies, there’s not so much interaction going on as you are made to believe.

Take the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. It’s like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie where you are allowed to step through: Everything you see can and will explode just for the heck of it, but in the end it’s a story where you, the player, are on a designer’s leash. You can’t bring your personality into the game, you are merely allowed to follow the narrow path down a linear story of a protagonist whose characteristics are formed by the designer, not the player’s actions. Development cost: $40-50 million.

Now take Minecraft: “Have are some rules, here is your world, now venture forth and find out what your individual story will be”. It’s all about your experience, what you make of the rules and the world that surrounds you. You can build, you can explore, you can work together, you can grief. While the phases of the game are pretty much the same for everybody, not two games will be alike. You write your own narrative as you play instead of following a narrative by playing the game. Development cost: Countless hours and a few 10.000 bucks. And guess what game has the better development-to-sales-revenue-ratio? Exactly.

This is not a glorifying manifest for indie-developers and open-world/sandbox games, neither is it a flaming pillorying of linear stories, AAA-games and people who only care about what they make, not what they say (perhaps a bit, though). My point is this:

Minecraft was adding itself to the established genres by providing a unique experience, by treating its players as creative individuals instead of obedient and dumb killing machines. Hundreds if not thousands of game designers (either indie or hobbyists) can craft and distribute their games thanks to the networked time that we live in at the moment. You can reach thousands and it doesn’t cost you anything! The tools are there for you to take and make a game you want to make, a game you have to make, because you have to express something and want to share it with the world. Fuck the revenue, fuck the critics and fuck focus group analysis!

If you want to get rich, you should apply for a job at EA and hope for the best. But if you want somebody to experience what you want them to, then pour your soul and heart into a truly magnificent game and take them on the journey only you can take them. And you can do this, if you really want. If what you deliver is true and honest, people will appreciate it much more, than rehash number 135 of guy-saves-world-and-fucks-the-princess. My two cents.

► Tomorrow: The Medium Is The Message. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

From my previous posts you now know about the reason why I want to create a game myself and you also know from the last post, that I am not only lacking the skills of a game designer but also those of a decent programmer. I do to. But with all that knowledge, is it different this time?

All Too Soon

After the whole process of thinking constantly about my game and its rules and attributes, I realized that I wanted to try out the mechanics before getting lost in the jungle of defining useless variables and structures on paper. With two six-sided dice in my hands (the pen-and-paper folks would call them 2d6) I sat before my index-cards and the shabby notes on the design I had made. There I got a punch from reality right into my face: I didn’t know how to start, nor what my rules actually meant.

And as a result of that terrible realization I went straight into denial and started programming anyway. That’s right, the same old unreflected approach to coding as the decade(s) before. I got me a fresh mug of coffee, cracked my knuckles and coded straight for eight hours in PureBasic, the online-help and Google as my faithful allies.

But this time, I thought to myself, I want to start off a bit more professional (ha, right!) than in my previous programming and game-creating attempts. Instead of trying to develop the game as I was coding it and vice versa, I thought that I implement just a text-based output of the results of some rules’ calculations so that the game could be played on paper while the computer would do all the math of battles and distributions of monsters and item-values.

What I came up with in the end was a console that had two menu-screens whose appearance could be fully customized (see the screenshot below). That’s right: No mechanics were implemented, no game, no nothing. Just pretty borders – one of the nerdiest ways to procrastinate. Having accomplished this make me feel incredibly happy and incredibly bad the same time. It was as useless as a Philips CD-i. At least it worked.

So whereas my code was basically fancy crap, I really gave the game design more thought the following days. I refrained from trying stuff out by coding, I didn’t ponder while programming, instead I started writing the new player’s attributes that came to my mind onto an index card. Like a fucking pro!

► Tomorrow: Second Thoughts / The Gaming Industry. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

Yesterday I told you all about the reasons and my first steps in coming up with a game myself and that I always was interested in making games. This post goes a step back further, all the way to when I was about seven: The day when an elderly man asked me whether I like computer games. Of course I said yes. And then he said I should come to his house to play some…

My BASICs

This story could have taken a terribly wrong turn but instead of being brutally molested the elderly man was Mr Binder, our neighbor. Every time I went over for one of my countless visits there I was offered cookies and milk from his wife and he showed me the glory of his Commodore 64.

And eventually he introduced me to programming Commodore BASIC. I could read and write already and so he taught me some very basic (haha!) stuff, such as PRINT and INPUT and wrote everything down in a little notebook he gave me. I was intrigued, despite not knowing what a “variable” actually meant or what a “loops” was. Yet I still remember that a ? was a short-form of PRINT in Commodore BASIC. So my first program looked like this:

At least I learned soon enough what a loop was:

When I got my hands on a chunky IBM laptop in early 1993 with Microsoft QBasic running on it, there mas nothing more I would need: I programmed a lot of small text-adventures, animations, music, ASCII art and a program that would help me with my maths homework. I even made a very linear sci-fi game with MS-DOS batch files and QBasic that played back some sound-files I recorded, it was called Solar Fighter, it came on five floppy disks and I drew the labels and packaging myself.

Then there was a long time of absolutely nothing in terms of programming, although I still was working on games. Overly complicated and incredibly cumbersome board games for which I even drafted and printed manuals, most notably my Star Trek – The Next Generation-game (picture below).

And still: I attempted some small stuff with Delphi and Turbo Pascal but never quite figured it out. Then, in high school, I found a language called PureBasic but felt it was a little too limiting. A year later I stumbled across it again and it had improved dramatically. So I bought it for 39 Euro and got cracking: I coded a little shooter, a point-and-click adventure prototype with subtitles, music, sound-effects and animations and a little program that would simulate the dispersion of raindrops which could be rendered and used as an animated mask in 3dsmax (I put a short demo on YouTube), called the DripDropper. I had put it on my website and sold one license for about 15 € to Australia. That’s the total gross my “programming”-“skills” earned me up to this date.

Software Engineering

In 2004/05 when I was aimlessly studying English I also took a course titled Introduction to Software Engineering at the technical university in Graz. With my multicolored Windows-XP desktop on my notebook amidst 90% of students with custom Linux builds running Emacs I was easily uncovered as the one without a clue. I learned all about bitshifting-operations in C, what a linker does and how to get the Prolog language to do multiplications instead of just returning “true” or “false”. Needless to say I failed the course.

When I was studying at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Microsoft’s XNA-beta was out and I was eager to try it, despite my lack of knowledge of C, C++ or C#. I even got myself an xBox-controller just for that—talk about priorities! After many hours of video tutorials from a really talented guy but with an incredibly hard to understand accent, I managed to cobble together a program, that made your controller rumble, whereas a fellow student came up with a Snake clone – in 3D. So I surrendered.

Still, I hadn’t forgotten about PureBasic when I was sitting years later in a course titled “Game Development.” One long semester I coded about 3000 lines of a jump‘n’run engine from scratch. It never got beyond a barely working prototype but the game offered a developer-console and collision-detection-overlay (see screenshot below). That was about it for another year.

I never gave up coding in one way or another, I did some MEL-scripts in Maya, finished a Python script extension for Nuke that I never got to work after Nuke 4 or was doing some stuff with the PowerShell in Windows. With one word: I enjoy programming, but suck at it.

Astray

So out of the blue I felt the urge to make a game on the NES. That’s right, the old 6502 processor that was in every kid’s room in the late 80’s (if you had wealthy parents). I indulged myself into registers, accumulators, op-codes (I even got me an ancient book on programming the 6502 processor from the UK) and after a few weeks I ended up with a “program” that displays the text “It’s so cool!” next to a couple of 16×16 sprites depicting my face. It runs pretty okay on an emulator but on a real NES it’s just glitchy (see pic below). I gave up when I tried to play some music along with it and realized that one had to write their own audio-routines first.

Then I played the marvelous Deus Ex: Human Revolution and at the same time got interested in Minecraft, the latter one being a Java game. I thought it couldn’t be too hard to get started with Java and Android App-development but, alas, even if you read all the online tutorials and buy books: If you never really learned how to program, you will never succeed. The best I could come up with in Java was an orange arrow that you could navigate with the cursor-keys like a car from a top-down perspective.

So my plans to put stupid little apps on Google Play hit rock bottom when I realized that for someone not quite grasping Java, coding for Android was like barely making it over a wall only to find a steep mountain on the other side. It was too big for me, even the a little text-adventure engine I was plotting after feeling all inspired when watching the GET LAMP documentary on YouTube.

As a result of frustration I shelved my programming endeavors for yet another year again. But then, as I least expected it, something new tickled my programming bone…

► Tomorrow: All Too Soon. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

I like games. I always liked them and I always wanted (and attempted) to make my own games. I am not a game designer, neither am I a programmer and I am definitely not a writer. What I lack in skills I try to compensate with ambition and passion. This blog post is the first of a number to come, about the game I started currently thinking about; when and how I ended in a cul-de-sac; how I see today’s gaming industry (and what’s wrong with it) and how I ended up with an idea that just keeps pushing me onward.

Today: How it all began.

How It All Began

Usually one starts thinking about new things when something’s wrong with the status quo. That was also my starting point.

A couple of weeks ago I was playing a card game with friends, one that was supposedly “hilarious” and incredibly fun to play. It turned out it was the zombie-variant of Munchkin, a card game that’s a parody on pen-and-paper role playing games. When I got introduced to the rules it dawned on me that it didn’t sound like much fun, instead I was just overwhelmed and didn’t even know whether it was a card or board game.

When we started playing I realized that I found it to be a bad game: Almost any action led to long discussions and debates how to interpret a rule or what the rule actually said and it took half an hour until it was your turn again. Also the administrative tasks each turn by the players were also not a minor contributor to the lack of fun for me: There was too little space on the table and you would always forget something. In the end I won with a nasty trick the game allowed and instead of a good, shared laugh like at the end of a game there was hidden anger, bitterness and boredom. I know for sure that I won’t play this game again. And that got me thinking: Why didn’t I have fun playing it and how could I improve on it?

The next day, out of the blue I started to dig in a little into the whole fuzz about Dungeons and Dragons, the rule systems and open source role-playing-games that there were. All relied heavily on a Game Master or Dungeon Master who led the other players through their adventures. And it seemed to involve a lot of playing in character. I have no problem with it, as long as I am not forced to do it, but I am on the same lines as Conny, my beloved girlfriend, in this case: ”Less role, more playing, more game!“. So I thought I could come up with my own role-playing-game instead.

So before doing anything in terms of game design I got myself the Kindle-edition of Chris Crawford’s old but trailblazing Book, The Art of Computer Game Design, and spent a day in the cafe just reading up on the subject. What followed were lectures on game design by Chris Crawford, Will Wright and who else I could find on YouTube. That really fired me up and got me thinking. The most important gems from all this research are at the moment two things: First, instead of just storing values you should use the power of a computer to actually do a lot with these values, do maths, calculations, whatever for the game. And secondly, give the player interesting options instead of forcing her down a linear path.

In parallel I started thinking about making a 2d dungeon crawl: I wanted the player-character to have four attributes, strength, dexterity, intelligence and health. The environment would consist of 9 rooms of 3×4 tiles, the last room 6×6 tiles (so you could get the coordinates with two 6-sided dice) with monsters and loot in them, all randomly generated by a throw of dice. Or rather many throws of dice. Even without committing or writing down my ideas I knew this would be too cumbersome for a board game. I tried to keep everything as simple as possible (monsters only have health, players only have a fixed defensive and offensive strength) but since it was of no use anyway, I started thinking in more complex terms.

I further split up the four player attributes to four sub-attributes each. The idea was, that the number of points for each super-attribute is fixed for each class (human, orc, whatever) but the distribution of these points among the sub-attributes is part of the character creation by the player. For example, if a class offers 10 point for Intelligence, the players could decide how they would scatter them among the four sub-attributes logical, social, perceptive and creative. The sub-attributes are chosen with a lot of consideration in order to make the rules more open to any kind and setting of RPG.

As soon as I wrote the first few lines down in my personal wiki, I considered programming a prototype. At first I wanted to to this in Construct but I remember how distracted I was and how hard I felt it to actually store and read variables. So I went back to the programming language I’ve bought many years ago and still know how to use: PureBasic.

► Tomorrow: My BASICs. (Blog post live at 6 pm CET.)

When I got started with computers all I knew was the READY. command-prompt from a Commodore 64 and subsequently the MS-DOS command line. I also experimented a bit with the DOS Shell but preferred the cozy familiarity of the black screen with the friendly C:\> more. But then came Windows 3.1.

And I hated it.

I knew how to work a mouse and everything but the whole idea with the overlapping windows, that you could mess up your whole driver settings easily (instead of painstakingly manipulating the config.sys file) was really annoying. I didn’t know how to do stuff. Or what that might be good for. After all, you could do anything on the command line a lot faster and more precise. So I didn’t even quite trust the File Manager. But over a couple of weeks I was used to it, a couple of months I was adept and within a year I couldn’t imagine how I was doing my stuff without Windows. Then Windows 95 appeared and one of my friends at school, Florian, was the first one to have it on his computer where he showed it to me.

And I hated it.

I remember one of the reviews prior to the OS’s public release titled “Windows 95: It hurts the first time” and it really did: I felt that the system was hiding important stuff from me once again, everything was shelved away in tedious menus, there suddenly was some weird “Recycling Bin” and especially the “Start” button was something completely unnecessary. My favorite programs (and games!) wouldn’t run, there were no drivers and it felt overall like something I didn’t want to interact with for lack of content. But the flashy graphics and multimedia made up for it slowly but steady, Windows 98 was more mature yet still quite unstable until I invested in Windows 2000 – “for good,” as I thought. It was the best and most stable Windows and I never ever wanted to see what the folks in Redmont would come up next because I was in 7th heaven. Then I got my first notebook, a VAIO with Windows XP pre-installed.

And I hated it.

Too flashy, taking up too much screen space for the toy-like buttons and it wasn’t shining with flair at all. But the software manufacturers boarded the train and it pushed onwards through many Service-Packs and iterations. It got better and better and the design was bearable (mostly because you could retrofy the appearance to the Windows 2000 chic) and in the end I considered the 64-bit version of Windows XP to be Microsoft’s best system when they launched Windows Vista. Yes, Windows Vista: I saw just a few previews and I already had made up my mind:

I loved it!

It was around the time when I was contemplating of assembling and building my workstation myself and so I early-adopted it three months after it was released. The big, 64-bit version. And it was horrible: At first the system didn’t accept two perfectly fine RAM-bars (so I had to remove one for the time being). Then plugging in a flash drive meant 30 to 120 seconds of frantic copying before the system would throw a Blue Screen of Death. And it threw many. In fact, I have a whole series of blue photographs from that time. Nobody liked Vista, neither the consumers nor the software houses. And they despised especially the 64-bit version. So I had an incredibly expensive machine in my room, with half the RAM and a barely usable system that individually crafted bugs and errors that were unique to me. The whole slick Aero theme ate my video memory like chocolate and the system alone was a memory glutton. Half of my programs wouldn’t run and nobody wanted to update their drivers for Windows Vista because it had such a terrible start: After 6 months I was finally able to print something!

So along came Windows 7 and the minor improvements over Vista were exactly that: Minor improvements under the hood and some ornaments but basically the same thing. As the burnt child who dreads the fire I steered clear of it but everybody seemed to love it. And now it’s running on my two machines and it feels like what Vista should have been in the first place. And the best part: You can switch the user interface still to the Windows 2000 look.

Same Old Story

“How do I do stuff?!”, “Where’s the Start-button?”, “WTF?!” – these are all legitimate questions if you’re used to what you’re used to. I know for sure that the first time I see the new Windows 8 UI I will find it curious, then fail on performing the basic tasks, then get frustrated, curse, eat some watermelon ice-cream and try again. That’s normal. We’ve been through that phase often before. I feel that I prefer to adapt to a new environment quickly instead of desperately clinging onto the melting floe of the past (like the record industry currently is). Of course it will hurt, if course the UI will seem either cumbersome or inane or both at first. But people will get used to it (with a lot of frustration, fair enough) and in the end they won’t miss that stupid old Start-button I only use not more that twice a week.

I say: Microsoft are not the devil, neither are they our savior. Same applies to is Apple. Sure, many of us are in contact with a computer running an operating system a lot each day but in the end it still is just a stupid operating system. I think that it’s neat to have the same on your phone as on your computer. So does Microsoft (although I prefer Android). This might not work out. But at least they’re trying to adept to the mobile market and the new needs of their users. Of course, Windows 8 could bomb and wipe Microsoft out of existence (which would be a pity so shortly after getting a new logo), but we won’t know whether Windows 8 works for us unless we give this a fair shot. And if it’s crap, then improve on it, industry! Like it has always been done.

I had spotted a little Wild-West-themed shoe store on Oranienstraße the days before and today I had the time and nerve to go in. ”Hello! I’m sure you can help me: I’m looking for some new ankle-boots.” I was the only customer and the owner looked like a mix of today’s Iggy Pop and Neil Young. He was proficient, showed me around the store and got me in no-time what I had been looking for. Interestingly the same brand that I had seen a few weeks earlier in Salzburg, only a hundred bucks cheaper! Black smooth leather with a flat heel, sturdy yet elegant and discreet. They even were comfortable. He gave me some shoe-shiner for free along with them and urged me to get a rubber-sole fixed by a shoe-maker so they wouldn’t be walked through after three months.

I headed home, put the shoes in a corner, grabbed my bag and camera and left for the subway. I grew a little bit bolder in photographing people but only hasty and almost unnoticed. I don’t feel like getting into a conflict with somebody who doesn’t like their picture taken. As I strolled up Weinbergsweg like so many times before, it again started to rain. I was lucky to catch my table in the Café Napoljonska again where I feasted on a huge breakfast with scrambled eggs, pancakes, freshly-squeezed juice, much coffee and a heavenly Lütticher waffle. I read a bit more of Lovecraft and again got busy with writing the script to my tutorial while the weather outside just was borderline between sunshine and showers.

Tonight I will meet with Esther and Georg for a farewell-coffee or two for I’ll be leaving tomorrow with way too much luggage, I can tell already. I never thought that I would thank Facebook, but after a little status update asking who would be happy to pick me up from the airport I was surprised that after half a day I got enough replies and will now be transported home by our happily-bearded classmate known as Schranzl.

6:14 p.m.

Oh, the bliss of having an internet-connection on the go! Again I could research for my tutorial, look up stuff and, most importantly, I could chat some more with Conny. She also asked me whether I was duly bored out but all the mind-work for my tutorial left little space for me to just zone out and indulge into boredom. Although I am close to it. Shortly I will leave for the meet-up and hopefully the clouds will have opened up again for a short window of sunshine that I can venture down to the subway station.

11:47 p.m.

I timed my departure perfectly and was at 7 p.m. sharp on time. But I was the only one and so I decided to free me from the burden of my backpack with notebook and all electronic gadgets inside. When I returned with my only my camera, I spotted Georg and Esther from afar. Two teeth had recently been removed from Georg’s mouth and he still showed a little bulge in his cheek, maybe also he wasn’t quite sticking to what his dentist had told him: “Two days I should refrain from smoking, alcohol and caffeine. So yesterday was day three and I had two shots of Whiskey, some vine, coffee and a smoke and it started bleeding like crazy again. Throwing in the painkillers afterwards wasn’t that good of an idea either…”.

We decided to stroll towards Mitte and look for a nice café along the way. We ended up on Moritzplatz in the Prinzessinengarten, a lovely public gardening project in an empty building site. The entrance was inconspicuous, overgrown with vines. Two kids were playing foosball in an open hut, the surroundings suddenly looked like a backyard in Bulgaria, charming nonetheless. Suddenly Esther looked at her phone and was a bit embarrassed to tell us that she had almost forgotten that another friend of hers from the old times was visiting her in Berlin. “I am so sorry but I gotta go. Hannah just arrived and will be there in an hour.” Georg and I didn’t mind tagging along and so we returned back along the Oranienstraße where Esther got some organic vegetables because she wanted to cook instead of going out.

On our way back a guy on Oranienplatz towards Naunynstrasse a bicycle stopped with screeching brakes just behind our group of three. It was Nico, an old-time acquaintance of Georg from Salzburg who also lives in Berlin now. We exchanged our evening plans and he said that he might drop by at Esther’s later on, where we ended up a couple of minutes later. Esther was handing Georg weird presents from Japan and told him all the entertaining little anecdotes that happened to her, like the “Is vintage”-reply she got after trying to connect with her Japanese hosts by stating that she liked to watch the TV-animé Mila Superstar. Suddenly she shrieked: “Ouch! I cut my finger. Damn! Is the skin to protrude that way? Ew!” It looked awful. I ran down to fetch two band-aids for Esther and as I returned she was sitting on the floor, her hand wrapped in toilet paper, a small red dot visible in the tissue. ”Will it grow back?” she asked me. Yes, Esther seemed really worried. ”Do you feel the tip of your finger?” – “Yes.” — “So you severed no nerves at least. Did it feel like you hit a bone?” – “No?” – “Then it’s alright. Just put a bandaid over it and leave it a lone for a couple of days.” Yes, I was really certain of myself giving good advice.

Then the door bell rang and Hannah arrived with a big backpack with beer-bottles jingling inside. We all introduced ourselves, Esther got some friendly pity from Hannah for her injury and Hannah assured her as well. “Don’t worry. You sit there and just tell me what to do and I’ll continue cooking for you, all right?”. She went on to cut the leek but with the first cut she also cut her thumb. At first I thought she was just being funny but she really was hurt and so there was an occasion for the other band-aid I had brought. In the meantime Nico arrived and we all agreed that the cutting was a sign to eat out.

Again on Oranienstraße we settled for a nice little oriental takeaway shop that even had some rickety benches and tables out on the street where the five of us took seat, Esther ate hummus, Hannah and I had a very tasty falafel sandwich and we all chatted a bit. Georg wasn’t feeling well and soon said his good-byes, and as we left to return to Esther’s place also Nico departed. “I don’t know about you but I really would love something sweet,” I said as we walked along the Adalbertstraße. I always had ignored the tacky “Fruit-Döner” shop for I thought it was just ridiculous, despite the joint always buzzing with customers. When Hannah saw it, she was just on fire and bolted in towards the counter, only to be completely overwhelmed with the possibilities. There were different sauces, fruit, sweets and ice cream you could get your waffle with, a waffle folded in the middle like a döner, hence the name. It took me about five minutes to some up with a selection of ingredients while Esther and I smirked as we overheard Hannah’s spluttering talk with the guy taking the orders. When she was told that she could have more than one kind of fruit and more than one kind of topping it almost blew her mind.

In the end I settled for a waffle with white chocolate topping, fresh strawberries and bananas with Snickers bar fragments, chili seasoning (I like it hot) and a scoop of lemon ice cream. No cream, thank you, I’m on a diet! Once we received our orders and sat on the street we all were just completely out of our fricking minds because of the sheer glut of ingredients. Hannah, who has a very strong Viennese accent, put it into words that are almost impossible to translate into English: “Olfaktorisch ur-leiwand, gustatorisch die Härte!” (something like “Olfaktory like totally awesome, gustatory da shit!”) Shortly after we finished reveling in our dessert, Hannah’s old-time friend Joe appeared. He’s also from Vienna and arrived two days ago for his new life as a research assistant in Berlin. At least now he knows where to get some good desert.

We decided to head back to Esther’s once again and sit on the veranda on the roof with a beer and in my case some roasted barley tea Esther brought from Japan. The air was cool, almost chilly and I kept myself warm by holding one of the tea candles that provided us with a little light. So the three of us sat on the roof and exchanged funny stories from our lives while a little fat mouse was watching us. Esther was a bit worried that it might live in the community kitchen behind the door. Esther told the story of her life in Mozambique where the she lived in was constantly haunted by noisy mice at night. “At least mouses are cuter than the rats you see in the early hours running along the Donaukanal in Vienna” Hannah stated, “Or the rat corpses floating in the Donaukanal,” Joe added. “Vienna is a very morbid city…” I concluded. We sat there a while longer but Berlin’s summer nights obviously get very cold and over the clear sky soon a blanket of thick clouds was put. As I am writing these lines it’s raining once again. I hope it wanes when I leave this place in nine hours with my bags.

Oh crap! I should pack!

Half an hour before I had tried in vain to transfer my photos to my computer but my cheap CF-reader finally kicked it and didn’t work anymore. I took the train to Alexanderplatz and went to a big electronics outlet where I found what I wanted within a minute or two. Surprisingly I also found something I wasn’t looking for at all but made an impulse purchase and now have (hopefully) a great gift for Steven. Now I am convinced that you can find interesting stuff in Berlin even outside the Mauerpark flea market.

On my train ride back a homeless man entered the car. I recognized him on his voice, I have met him at least once before. But this time he started differently: “The Luggi (?) is back, I was in the hospital, hair is gone, bears is gone and I still live on the street.” he recited two truly heartbreaking poems about why god had forsaken him and humbly shuffled about with a plastic cup to collect coins. An older man with a very serious and concerned look on his face walked through half the train-car to drop all his change in the cup of the wretched. He thanked him. I’ve given money to homeless people quite a bit in the last few days but this time I really regretted I only had 70 cents in my pocket.

In the apartment I packed my bag and had a quick glimpse into the mirror. I did not like what I saw: I looked even paler than usual, my hair totally ugly and messed up (look like I really need all my hair-care products), my pants with a few dirt stains around the ankles, my shoes with more stains and a lot more dust from the street, a faded T-shirt with a nerdy self-made print on it. With one word I kinda looked shabby. In Salzburg I would have dropped my bag instantly and spent the next hour in the bathroom but today I just shrugged and went out. I don’t need to look good here for anybody, I don’t need to impress. I blend in with the crowd much more that way. I don’t look like a target worth robbing or talking to. I look I want to be left alone.

I went out with my camera now in my hand rather than in my bag and was observant of many of Berlin’s little moments: A group of kids ushered across the street by two teachers, a Bus driver that stopped shortly before the underpass his bus would have gotten stuck to examine the street-map, a drunken man pointing an empty bottle like a gun an people and making juvenile “Bang-bang!” sounds with his mouth. I am not bold enough to point my camera at people I don’t know but I felt like capturing some details of the city nobody seemed to notice.

Right now I am sitting in the Café Gipfeltreffen once a gain, in a comfy chair and writing these lines, reading again Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space and thinking through my upcoming tutorial. But not too much, but just a bit. Conny is right: I am on vacation, after all.

5:43 p.m.

As I was busy working on the script to me next AEtuts+ tutorial, a very talkative patron just walked in, ordered a beer and got all friendly and buddy-like with everybody he talked to, a demeanor that never was mutual. He looked like straight out of Jersey Shore and seemed not entirely sober to me. A couple of minutes later I was assured of it. He stood up and walked up to me and a shy, preppy looking guy indulged in tapping on his iPhone. “Hey I got this idea,” the Jersey guy started, “to fuck Google and Facebook. Yeah that’s right. I fuck Google and Facebook!” I looked at him, sighed on the inside because I know so many Clients from Hell stories with just the same out-of-touch-ness. He continued: “A site that gives away presents for free.” He smiled a second or two to let it sink in. “Would you go to that site?” I pleased him and said “Sure!”. He really liked my answer, walked back and forth. “That’s right! Before you go to Facebook or Google you come to my site that gives you a free gift! What do you think about it?” he turned to me again. There was a lot I wanted to say or ask him. Like How will you finance it?, Where do the presents come from?, How would you deal with certain abuse?, etc. but I knew I am on vacation and I didn’t want to get Jersey guy angry in stepping on his toes with logic and reason. So I just said “Nice!”. “That’s right, I fuck Google and Facebook!“. The owner now pulled Jersey guy aside and warned him to to bother her guests. He kept rambling on about his great idea while the shy guy seized the moment and quickly gathered his belongings and bolted. Jersey-guy angrily returned for his bear and sulked. “Hey. Hey! Johnny Depp! I’m talking to you!” His last attempt at trying to catch some attention remained unanswered. Then he shouted “Alright, I leave. But don’t you ever buy my stock!”. No worries, pal.

Attila

Soon after eight, the little café got increasingly crowded with groups of locals looking for dinner or playing cards. I chatted a bit with Conny but it was so loud and packed that I was happy to finally being able to leave into the cool air and the wet cobblestones. It was a clear evening after the rain and the sun just had vanished behind the Emmauskirche. So I made my way home, my camera clutched in my hands.
“Hey, is that a 5D Mk II?” I was asked as I passed by one of the countless shots and bars. Only half a second I entertained the idea of just walking but I gave in and turned around and answered some questions about what I had paid for it, whether I would recommend the 5D Mark III (“Don’t know.”) and what I do with it. The fellow who was asking me all these questions was Attila. He was in his late 30’s, black hair brushed backwards, very awake eyes and a friendly smile. He looked a bit like some Bollywood actor. ”You know, I am bit into video and filming myself. We just shoots a little something with a RED Scarlet, if you know it? Hey, you are from Berlin, right?” I told him that unfortunately for him I instead come from Salzburg. “What? Really? You look like you come from New York or London? Are there any other artists there? Cause I surely didn’t see any when I was there.” Attila told me how terrible he found Austria in his visit y year or two ago. Salzburg seemed small and conservative, so did Vienna that got boring after three days. “There are no real cities in Austria, man, cities! Like Istanbul, Berlin, Paris or Tokyo!” It turned out that Attila was the owner of the small bar behind him, introduced me to some Irish guy he gave a drink for free and joked with a friend in Turkish who was looking for a parking space and held up traffic. “Sorry, I gotta go.” I told him. “Alright man. Shoot some nice photos and come by when you find the time. You’re always welcome!” Attila gave me a bro-some fist-shake and wished me well as I trotted off.
It was a real nice boost for my ego and buzzing on it for a bit I strolled into the first pizzeria and got my a funghi-dinner. At home I more or less inhaled it and had a shower, this time with so much shampoo it was almost ridiculous but finally my hair feels clean again, although I shed broken hairs like a Golden Retriever…