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World Simulation

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infocorn
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I'm planning something huge.

I want to make a game where you not only plug a "play" into an online tallying/character tracker but that the online component lives out a simulation of your board. Before your next play, you log in and the plotline has changed, putting alternate rules, geography etc. onto the board.

The setting is complex. It's a race to complete an encounter and get to the finish line. This takes place in a liminal world: at the center, your goal is a wormhole to any other place in an infinite multiverse. Around the wormhole are four realms, each with their own flavors and a grid of viaducts between these four. It's loosely based on the GeekDad book's ultimate board game chapter.

So...where can I make a world that does its own evolving?

RGaffney
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Huh?

You used a lot of words there that I believe have inherent meaning to you which I am not privy to. When you talk about liminal wormholes and viaducts, I'm pretty sure I know what each of those words mean independently of one another, but I'm just as sure I have no idea what you're talking about.

Cogentesque
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Haha you totally did

Haha you totally did infocorn, it sounds great - I love how you started the post, but "liminial" you will have to explain and also "lives out a simulation of your board" you will have to explain.

It sounds very expansive and quite expansive though :)

infocorn
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the clarification post

The game setting is a world "next to" (liminal) our own with a wormhole/gateway/etc. @ its center. Sort of in "orbit" around the center are four play areas (realms) connected with four lanes of game spaces (viaducts) where the players move and have encounters.

The piece I'm hoping to find is a website where you can run realtime simulations of a world's events and come back later to get the results of the sim. The thinking here is that you login @ your game's set-up step, get the "state of the world" for layout, play your game, report your play, etc. When you play again, you login to the site and the world has changed in the time between games. If you know the Narnia stories, it's like that: the kids in "The Lion/Witch/Wardrobe" were only in the wardrobe for an afternoon in our timeline, but had years of experiences in Narnia's timeline.

Cogentesque
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Ok cool so it's a Spacey

Ok cool so it's a Spacey BoardGame?.

Roger on the four play areas and the connections - cool.

The "Piece" you're hoping to find? what do you mean by "piece".

Ok, to run "real world" events and come back later to see how it is: I assume you do NOT mean "Real World" as in, run a simulation on the Meterological events in South Africa and see what happens? And I also assume you do NOT mean to "let the game run itelf for a while and come back to see how it's getting on" because you would essentially need to create a basic artificial intelligence and let the computer continuously run the game - basically like a pc style M.M.O. game.

If you do not mean these two things (which you dont...right?) then what you want to happen is (correct me if I am wrong):

" My game idea is to have a BoardGame that would dynamically change in response to all other players all over the world. The way I will accomplish this is that the players would need to consult a website that would tell them the "current status" of certain elements in the (meta) game-world. This information would equate to certain practical changes of the set=up of the boardgame before play starts. At the end of the game session, players would be asked to upload their data back into the database. This uploaded data would then have a visible effect and change the new (meta) game-world."

In which case - cool idea bro!

You would need to have a clever website with each boardgame sold to have a unique "log in" code or something. Before play players would scrape the current game world from the website and then change their boardgame set up accordingly. At the end they would log in, and tap in their game-end info eg "After your game finished, which viaduct was you close?" answe: "We closed Viaduct 2". This would then update on a big ol' spreadsheet based on your website (MYSQL database). Then if I was the next person to log in and look at game set up - I would go to the website and it would tell me that "Currently, Viaduct 2 is closed. Please can you place the "Closed" marker on Viaduct 2 before starting a new game".

So then this new guy would do the same, at game end his Viaduct number 5 would be closed, he would log in, update it and it would then change.

You could expand this quite nicely by the way: if the info that was updated was the "position on the board of each player at game-end" then, I would go to the website and click on "Current meta game-world for a 4 Player Game" and it would tell me the positions of the player pieces that I would need to use.

If you wanted to go further still:
1. Which Viaduct is closed
2. Where are the player pieces
3. What items does each player currently have

but remember that without basically making the game as a PC internet based online-boardgame (dont even try and think about this btw) you only have the word of players that they will update anything. Also, if they want to update it wrong eg: Put player character: "Andrea the Healer" in a very poor situation just to grief whoever plays a game with the updated "andrea the healer" position, they will find that they "always seem to start next to the Death-Knight..." so you have to think about that too.

You defianltey would need a fancy website with some programming behind it too - it MIGHT be possible to get it done simply but if you wanted to make it a big flagship game then you would probably need a good website to back it up.

:)

infocorn
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Cog...you certainly fit my machine

Cog's hit this pretty much on the head, as usual. I swear we're different people :-D

As I am absolutely not a programmer (At. All. That stuff is beyond Greek to me. I've never programmed more than a universal remote), I've kind of ditched the "mmorpg" concept as...wow.

No.

I think that'd be insanely difficult. Neat, sure, but way too much. At least at first. Honestly, I'd almost prefer just a "choose your own adventure"/"mad libs" kind of feel: there are several situations with blanks that a player's recorded plays would fill in. Like, if it were a game like Risk a play with a win where the Red player won by killing everyone else off, that'd trip a specific next game, but that it'd be within a limited amount of possible scenarios: Red as Rome-- widespread but crumbling; Red as Eden/Nirvana; The Anti-Red Uprising, etc.

I think the roll-out I'd like would have a few in the rule book-- more akin to what I'm envisioning Risk: Legacy to be like. This could be way off (obv) but like "After three games, put this new rule in" or "when a player wins by killing another PC, do this" etc.

I'm porting this discussion to another thread...

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