Concept document for a space exploration MMO
The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E
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.
Title
Lords Captains MMO
Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.
One-liner
Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.
Platforms
Browsers, mobile.
Genre
Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.
Closest analogs
EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.
About the book "Piranesi"
Cover of the book "Piranesi"
"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"
Computational mechanics & ε- (epsilon) machines
I found a few new concepts for tracking.
Computational mechanics
There is computational mechanics, which deals with numerical modeling of mechanical processes and there is an article about it on the wiki. This post is not about it.
This post is about computational mechanics, which studies abstractions of complex processes: how emergent behavior arises from the sum of the behavior / statistics of low-level processes. For example, why the Big Red Spot on Jupiter is stable, or why the result of a processor calculations does not depend on the properties of each electron in it.
ε- (epsilon) machine
The concept of a device that can exist in a finite set of states and can predict its future state (or state distribution?) based on the current one.
Computational mechanics allows (or should allow) to represent complex systems as a hierarchy of ε-machines. This creates a formal language for describing complex systems and emergent behavior.
For example, our brain can be represented as an ε-machine. Formally, the state of the brain never repeats (voltages on neurons, positions of neurotransmitter molecules, etc), but there are a huge number of situations when we do the same thing in the same conditions.
Here is a popular science explanation: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/
P.S. I will try to dig into scientific articles. I will tell you if I find something interesting and practical. P.P.S. I have long been thinking in the direction of a similar thing. Unfortunately, the twists of life do not allow me to seriously dig into science and mathematics. I am always happy when I encounter the results of other people's digging.
«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
My favorite version of the Princess.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.
About the book "The Net And The Butterfly"
I bought "The Net And The Butterfly" by mistake when I was in St. Petersburg about 5 years ago and organized a book-shopping day. I bought about 10 kilograms of books :-D, grabbed this one on autopilot without reading the contents. I thought the book would be about the network effect and the spreading of ideas, but it turned out to be about how to "manage" a brain relying on one of the neural networks in it. Which network? For the book and its content it does not matter at all.
My opinion of "The Net And The Butterfly" is twofold. On the one hand, I cannot deny its usefulness, on the other… the material could have been presented 100 times better and 3 times shorter. Sometimes, the authors walk on thin ice and risk falling into information peddling/marketing fraud.