Buddy/Ignore List
08-28-2023, 03:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-28-2023, 03:20 PM by Maximus Dominus.)
Your thinking on this is right, Mike.
I recall a very long time ago, back in the days of Fall of Rome, one example of what I felt would do better was a World War II map/game/variant, with Hitler, Mussolini, etc. in the mix as characters. I felt that the World War II genre would be more popular than the Fall of Rome genre.. Not sure if that's why Rick mentioned a WWII game or not, but I'm glad to learn that his thinking evolved. In fairness, though, once he began to transition to Alamaze from Fall of Rome, his thinking had already begun transitioning away from Fall of Rome and its generic feel to a broader appreciation for what was possible.
In basic terms, a unit moving is a unit moving, whether it be an army, a spaceship, a single character, or a party of adventurers. And terrain is terrain, whether it's plains, hills, sea zones, outer space, etc.. Largely, it's an exercise in vision - whether big, small, or somewhere in between, as well as time, energy, and resources to bring each new iteration to reality.
My thinking is this - if what Alamaze is doing right now isn't working to the degree desired, then common sense says to alter your approach to what your doing. There were individuals who liked Fall of Rome better than Alamaze. Diws is one of them, because the fantasy genre is not his cup of tea. But from my perspective of today, Alamaze was a much better choice than Fall of Rome. The fantasy genre is more popular and more widespread than the Fall of Rome genre is. The interface for Alamaze 4th Cycle isn't as smooth as the interface for Fall of Rome, but if I remember correctly, something "broke" in Fall of Rome/Java, and it was never fixed - hence why there's the current interface for Alamaze that has been improved in recent years.
The current Alamaze interface could be tweaked and refined further, but it works. It's functional. It's not an absolute nightmare to try and use. It could be and made "prettier," but at its core, it's not riddled nor plagued with bugs. Plus, it's already demonstrated its versatility - groups, characters, multiple different terrain types, magic. It's robust. It's capable. It's really quite nice, once one familiarizes themself with it.
What Alamaze does not have is widespread name recognition, which is why when I began thinking in recent months about how to increase the player base for Alamaze, my mid landed upon The Wizard of Oz. You don't have to beat yourself endlessly, trying to persuade people to try Alamaze and its interface, if you have something with name recognition that can be used to grab people's eyes and attract them. Name recognition is one way of getting them to try your underlying game engine and interface. Just imagine if there was a Taylor Swift game using Alamaze's engine. People tend to be more naturally tolerant of shortcomings in game design, if they are already fans of the game setting.
If the objective is to make money, then a game without a sizable player base is probably not going to be very successful at that. Advertising can get people's attention, unless they tune the ads out. A persistent, sustained advertising campaign can bring new people in, but that requires resources (money spent on top of the money that's already been spent to buy Alamaze from Rick). And there are never any guarantees. Having ideas that require someone else (John/Brekk) to speed their money is invariably the easy part. And if you take things in a different direction, then it runs the risk that Alamaze as you know it now may get lost in the shuffle. But that is neither here nor there, for if the grand objective is to make money with what was purchased, then you have to make changes, if what you bought isn't generating revenue in its current form.
But if making money is not the grand objective, or if it isn't the only objective, then more leeway exists in sticking closer to Alamaze's roots.
I remember exchanging e-mails years ago with a fellow by the name of Thurston Searfoss, who was the guy behind the old computer game, The Lost Admiral. When it and The Perfect General first game out, they were widely praised. Many years later, when Thurston was trying to reinject some life into The Lost Admiral, it proved to be quite the challenge. I remember finding one bug in the game, but bug hunting of programmed code really isn't my thing. Thurston made a heroic effort to bring Lost Admiral Returns to market, but while I am not 100% certain, I don't think that his bid succeeded.
If video games and computer games were all that mattered, there would never have been a renaissance in board gaming. The medium that one embraces (video games, computer games, board games, card games, movies, television, radio, etc.) is ultimately less important than the entertainment factor. have a high enough entertainment factor, have a high enough fun factor, and people will gravitate towards it. But trying to define what one's product or service actually is can sometimes prove to be insanely difficult. What is Alamaze?
When I first played Warcraft 2, did I read a big manual? Nope. What about when I first played Warcraft 3 or Starcraft? Nope. Manuals, by their very nature, tend to inform. Of course, they also tend to confuse. Games of those kinds were very successful, because they were tons of fun, they were addicting, and they were easily accessible, as long as your computer's hardware was sufficient to run them. One thing that Alamaze has going for it is that it is not a resource hog.
I'm not here, now, because I intended to be an Alamaze player. Rather, I'm here, now, because I didn't want Alamaze to die. The several turns that I spent trying to play The Forgotten in Game 5644 (I have turn results from turns 1 through 9 on my computer's hard drive), things just didn't click. In recent weeks, things have been clicking quite a lot.
And when things click, possibilities unfold.
Getting everything right is an omnipresent challenge for any and all games. Fortnite didn't get everything right, literally, but they got enough right that it became enormously successful and popular. Lots and lots of resources went into it. The Warcraft and Starcraft series - enormously popular. Tons of resources went into them. Chess - enormously popular and successful, and it's still here. It's a superb example of getting the basics right. Chess doesn't endure because it's the prettiest board game with the most eye-catching components. It's fairly simple. The board is an exercise in simplicity write large. Sometimes, some chess sets have pieces that are prettier than others, but beneath the thin veneer of looks, it's a plain board of squares with 32 pieces on it. There's what? There's only six different pieces, though - pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king. Simple board, simple pieces, very limited amount of components. Yet, it endures. It's a classic. Its replayability factor is endless, it's unlimited.
Most games created will not prove to be classics. They will not endure. They won't have endless replayability. They won't really prove to be nearly as fun as they otherwise could have been.
When one looks at Alamaze, what do you see? I see a game, but I also see much more than a game. I see a game engine. I also see a game platform. In a nutshell, I see possibilities.
Ironically enough, I see what I was looking for, when I first met Rick McDowell in that Yahoo! PBM Design group. I see something that is inherently flexible enough to offer a world of play. I can see countless games run atop the underlying system. What I see is a form of gaming architecture.
Rick McDowell, as a game designer, wanted to bring HIS game ideas to market. Me? I originally wanted a way (a ssytem, an engine, a program of some kind) to bring my own ideas to life, something to empower me to make a PBM game of my own possible, something to empower others to make their own PBM games possible. I wanted software that was, in my own words, generic. What shouldn't be genric is the game, itself. Me? I couldn't program, but I had created/invented Starforce Battles. I couldn't automate it, though. Most people who want to create games can't automate them, they can't just hit a button and turns process and turn results come out. Doing it all manually, running a PBM game manually can be a very time-consuming and tedious process.
Rick McDowell created Alamaze, then he created Fall of Rome, and then he returned to Alamaze and made it bigger, and in my current judgment, considerably better. How many programmers did he got through along the way? There were at least three that I know of. Names elude me, though.
Now, I'm on the back end of life and sliding downhill faster and faster. But at least I'm still sliding. I don't tend to dwell much, anymore, on creating my own PBM game(s), though the thought does occasionally still cross my mind, now and again. These days, I mostly spend my spare time, such as it is, pestering John/Brekk, criticizing one thing after another, nitpicking may way through this thing that he spent his money on buying.
Game 5684 began a new journey for me. It turned out to be a journey through Alamaze, and when things click, Alamaze starts coming to life. I don't sit and have images of fantasy realms flooding my mind. Instead, my mind as begun to plot and to scheme and to try and figure out how to deal with kingdoms and with players. And that, my friends, is a very powerful thing!
Game 5644 and Game 5684 are like night and day, as far as the internal experience of playing (or trying to play) Alamaze is concerned. Understanding, knowing what to do, having wheels in your mind turning - those things make ALL the difference in the world.
I didn't want Alamaze to die. I didn't come here to help John. I came here to try and help Alamaze stave off death. There was something in it that I couldn't quite lay my finger on at the time, which was worth preserving, which felt to me to be worthy of being preserved. I perceived Alamaze to have value, that all of Rick McDowell's efforts stretching all of the way back to decades ago, when he created the first iteration of Alamaze, were not in vain. I felt that Rick had given up on it, that maybe burnout had got to him, yet her Alamaze was, still in an unfinished state, still yearning to be what it could become.
This whole spiel isn't addressed to Mike, but rather, is just me talking aloud to myself, as I sometimes do. How many hours did Rick McDowell spend designing and redesigning Alamaze? How many hours did unclemike and the other programmers before him pour into programming and reprogramming it? Why just let it die?
It just struck me as a terrible, terrible waste to let that happen. The fruit of this tree, the Alamaze tree, has not yet appeared on its limbs or beneath its leaves. If people look at a tree, and all that they see are limbs and leaves, then the tendency is to mock it as being a fruit tree, if it's a tree that they aren't familiar with. It's just a big plant. How do yo eat the roots, the trunk, the limbs, or the leaves of this tree? How do you taste the fruit that hasn't appeared, yet, much less ripened?
More than ever, Alamaze needs to be nurtured, because it is closer to bearing fruit than ever before. And tending to this tree, and pruning this tree, those things require a rather significant amount of patience and care.
The Alamaze tree, you see, isn't a one-fruit tree. That's what makes it so utterly special. Alamaze is a tree of many fruits, of many different tasty fruits.
And me? The taste of this tree has grown on me.
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...8#pid32418
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...4#pid54894
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...2#pid54902
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...4#pid54904
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...9#pid60029
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...7#pid57597
I recall a very long time ago, back in the days of Fall of Rome, one example of what I felt would do better was a World War II map/game/variant, with Hitler, Mussolini, etc. in the mix as characters. I felt that the World War II genre would be more popular than the Fall of Rome genre.. Not sure if that's why Rick mentioned a WWII game or not, but I'm glad to learn that his thinking evolved. In fairness, though, once he began to transition to Alamaze from Fall of Rome, his thinking had already begun transitioning away from Fall of Rome and its generic feel to a broader appreciation for what was possible.
In basic terms, a unit moving is a unit moving, whether it be an army, a spaceship, a single character, or a party of adventurers. And terrain is terrain, whether it's plains, hills, sea zones, outer space, etc.. Largely, it's an exercise in vision - whether big, small, or somewhere in between, as well as time, energy, and resources to bring each new iteration to reality.
My thinking is this - if what Alamaze is doing right now isn't working to the degree desired, then common sense says to alter your approach to what your doing. There were individuals who liked Fall of Rome better than Alamaze. Diws is one of them, because the fantasy genre is not his cup of tea. But from my perspective of today, Alamaze was a much better choice than Fall of Rome. The fantasy genre is more popular and more widespread than the Fall of Rome genre is. The interface for Alamaze 4th Cycle isn't as smooth as the interface for Fall of Rome, but if I remember correctly, something "broke" in Fall of Rome/Java, and it was never fixed - hence why there's the current interface for Alamaze that has been improved in recent years.
The current Alamaze interface could be tweaked and refined further, but it works. It's functional. It's not an absolute nightmare to try and use. It could be and made "prettier," but at its core, it's not riddled nor plagued with bugs. Plus, it's already demonstrated its versatility - groups, characters, multiple different terrain types, magic. It's robust. It's capable. It's really quite nice, once one familiarizes themself with it.
What Alamaze does not have is widespread name recognition, which is why when I began thinking in recent months about how to increase the player base for Alamaze, my mid landed upon The Wizard of Oz. You don't have to beat yourself endlessly, trying to persuade people to try Alamaze and its interface, if you have something with name recognition that can be used to grab people's eyes and attract them. Name recognition is one way of getting them to try your underlying game engine and interface. Just imagine if there was a Taylor Swift game using Alamaze's engine. People tend to be more naturally tolerant of shortcomings in game design, if they are already fans of the game setting.
If the objective is to make money, then a game without a sizable player base is probably not going to be very successful at that. Advertising can get people's attention, unless they tune the ads out. A persistent, sustained advertising campaign can bring new people in, but that requires resources (money spent on top of the money that's already been spent to buy Alamaze from Rick). And there are never any guarantees. Having ideas that require someone else (John/Brekk) to speed their money is invariably the easy part. And if you take things in a different direction, then it runs the risk that Alamaze as you know it now may get lost in the shuffle. But that is neither here nor there, for if the grand objective is to make money with what was purchased, then you have to make changes, if what you bought isn't generating revenue in its current form.
But if making money is not the grand objective, or if it isn't the only objective, then more leeway exists in sticking closer to Alamaze's roots.
I remember exchanging e-mails years ago with a fellow by the name of Thurston Searfoss, who was the guy behind the old computer game, The Lost Admiral. When it and The Perfect General first game out, they were widely praised. Many years later, when Thurston was trying to reinject some life into The Lost Admiral, it proved to be quite the challenge. I remember finding one bug in the game, but bug hunting of programmed code really isn't my thing. Thurston made a heroic effort to bring Lost Admiral Returns to market, but while I am not 100% certain, I don't think that his bid succeeded.
If video games and computer games were all that mattered, there would never have been a renaissance in board gaming. The medium that one embraces (video games, computer games, board games, card games, movies, television, radio, etc.) is ultimately less important than the entertainment factor. have a high enough entertainment factor, have a high enough fun factor, and people will gravitate towards it. But trying to define what one's product or service actually is can sometimes prove to be insanely difficult. What is Alamaze?
When I first played Warcraft 2, did I read a big manual? Nope. What about when I first played Warcraft 3 or Starcraft? Nope. Manuals, by their very nature, tend to inform. Of course, they also tend to confuse. Games of those kinds were very successful, because they were tons of fun, they were addicting, and they were easily accessible, as long as your computer's hardware was sufficient to run them. One thing that Alamaze has going for it is that it is not a resource hog.
I'm not here, now, because I intended to be an Alamaze player. Rather, I'm here, now, because I didn't want Alamaze to die. The several turns that I spent trying to play The Forgotten in Game 5644 (I have turn results from turns 1 through 9 on my computer's hard drive), things just didn't click. In recent weeks, things have been clicking quite a lot.
And when things click, possibilities unfold.
Getting everything right is an omnipresent challenge for any and all games. Fortnite didn't get everything right, literally, but they got enough right that it became enormously successful and popular. Lots and lots of resources went into it. The Warcraft and Starcraft series - enormously popular. Tons of resources went into them. Chess - enormously popular and successful, and it's still here. It's a superb example of getting the basics right. Chess doesn't endure because it's the prettiest board game with the most eye-catching components. It's fairly simple. The board is an exercise in simplicity write large. Sometimes, some chess sets have pieces that are prettier than others, but beneath the thin veneer of looks, it's a plain board of squares with 32 pieces on it. There's what? There's only six different pieces, though - pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king. Simple board, simple pieces, very limited amount of components. Yet, it endures. It's a classic. Its replayability factor is endless, it's unlimited.
Most games created will not prove to be classics. They will not endure. They won't have endless replayability. They won't really prove to be nearly as fun as they otherwise could have been.
When one looks at Alamaze, what do you see? I see a game, but I also see much more than a game. I see a game engine. I also see a game platform. In a nutshell, I see possibilities.
Ironically enough, I see what I was looking for, when I first met Rick McDowell in that Yahoo! PBM Design group. I see something that is inherently flexible enough to offer a world of play. I can see countless games run atop the underlying system. What I see is a form of gaming architecture.
Rick McDowell, as a game designer, wanted to bring HIS game ideas to market. Me? I originally wanted a way (a ssytem, an engine, a program of some kind) to bring my own ideas to life, something to empower me to make a PBM game of my own possible, something to empower others to make their own PBM games possible. I wanted software that was, in my own words, generic. What shouldn't be genric is the game, itself. Me? I couldn't program, but I had created/invented Starforce Battles. I couldn't automate it, though. Most people who want to create games can't automate them, they can't just hit a button and turns process and turn results come out. Doing it all manually, running a PBM game manually can be a very time-consuming and tedious process.
Rick McDowell created Alamaze, then he created Fall of Rome, and then he returned to Alamaze and made it bigger, and in my current judgment, considerably better. How many programmers did he got through along the way? There were at least three that I know of. Names elude me, though.
Now, I'm on the back end of life and sliding downhill faster and faster. But at least I'm still sliding. I don't tend to dwell much, anymore, on creating my own PBM game(s), though the thought does occasionally still cross my mind, now and again. These days, I mostly spend my spare time, such as it is, pestering John/Brekk, criticizing one thing after another, nitpicking may way through this thing that he spent his money on buying.
Game 5684 began a new journey for me. It turned out to be a journey through Alamaze, and when things click, Alamaze starts coming to life. I don't sit and have images of fantasy realms flooding my mind. Instead, my mind as begun to plot and to scheme and to try and figure out how to deal with kingdoms and with players. And that, my friends, is a very powerful thing!
Game 5644 and Game 5684 are like night and day, as far as the internal experience of playing (or trying to play) Alamaze is concerned. Understanding, knowing what to do, having wheels in your mind turning - those things make ALL the difference in the world.
I didn't want Alamaze to die. I didn't come here to help John. I came here to try and help Alamaze stave off death. There was something in it that I couldn't quite lay my finger on at the time, which was worth preserving, which felt to me to be worthy of being preserved. I perceived Alamaze to have value, that all of Rick McDowell's efforts stretching all of the way back to decades ago, when he created the first iteration of Alamaze, were not in vain. I felt that Rick had given up on it, that maybe burnout had got to him, yet her Alamaze was, still in an unfinished state, still yearning to be what it could become.
This whole spiel isn't addressed to Mike, but rather, is just me talking aloud to myself, as I sometimes do. How many hours did Rick McDowell spend designing and redesigning Alamaze? How many hours did unclemike and the other programmers before him pour into programming and reprogramming it? Why just let it die?
It just struck me as a terrible, terrible waste to let that happen. The fruit of this tree, the Alamaze tree, has not yet appeared on its limbs or beneath its leaves. If people look at a tree, and all that they see are limbs and leaves, then the tendency is to mock it as being a fruit tree, if it's a tree that they aren't familiar with. It's just a big plant. How do yo eat the roots, the trunk, the limbs, or the leaves of this tree? How do you taste the fruit that hasn't appeared, yet, much less ripened?
More than ever, Alamaze needs to be nurtured, because it is closer to bearing fruit than ever before. And tending to this tree, and pruning this tree, those things require a rather significant amount of patience and care.
The Alamaze tree, you see, isn't a one-fruit tree. That's what makes it so utterly special. Alamaze is a tree of many fruits, of many different tasty fruits.
And me? The taste of this tree has grown on me.
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...8#pid32418
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...4#pid54894
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...2#pid54902
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...4#pid54904
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...9#pid60029
https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...7#pid57597
