When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.
At the end of this post, we will have:
All the final documents can be found here.
As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.
One more concept for The Tale 2.0.
Lords Captains MMO
Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.
Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.
Browsers, mobile.
Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.
EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.
"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.
The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.
Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.
The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.
By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.
But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.
So, "Piranesi"
This is the second book by Ha-Joon Chang that I've read. The first one, Bad Samaritans [ru], left a good impression, and it was also positively reviewed by Tim O'Reilly in his book WTF? [ru]. So, "Economics: The User's Guide" took its place on my reading list, and finally, I have read it.
Here and further, all quotes point to the Russian edition of the book and are translated into English by me (I have only the Russian edition) => inconsistencies are possible because of double translation English->Russian->English.
According to Chang, the book was conceived as an "introduction to economic theory for the widest possible audience" (page 299), and this reflects its essence well. I would only add, from the perspective of my post-Soviet education, that the book looks more like an "overview of the diversity and complexity of economics, supplemented with an introduction to the theory" rather than an "introduction to the theory".
The book contains no mathematical formulas or jaw-dropping statistics, just concrete facts. What makes it valuable, however, is a set of prisms through which you can — and should — view the economy to gain a basic understanding of what's happening around you.
Chan provides a set of points of view through which you can examine economic processes; describes their advantages and disadvantages; accompanies all this with examples, historical references, and facts.
Since the book serves as a sort of textbook, I won't attempt to retell it in full — this would lead to an attempt to repeat the book in a couple of pages, and I definitely can't do that. I will limit myself to describing the author's view of the economy as a whole as I understood it.
Recently I've conducted a survey about the preferences of strategy players.
In the previous post, we cleaned up the data, and in this one, we will try to find insights within it.
In this post you will find an interactive dashboard with a bunch of charts, where you can compare two samples of your choice. There are many samples — for every taste and color, so feel free to explore and share the patterns you find on Telegram and Discord.
But be careful with conclusions. There is little data, in some cases very little. For example, the difference between the sample sizes of male and female respondents is about tenfold => you should be very careful in interpreting the differences between them.
In general, do not take this post as a full-fledged study. I'm sure many analysts would have torn my hands off for such a thing. Then sewed them back and torn them off again :-D Use the post as an interface to the data, and make your own conclusions.