I thought you were involved with BadAss Space Dragons – am I mis-remembering?
If you were there, you will recall that I was heavily involved in bringing about some of what your “amorphous project” is trying to archive. I did so using game theory.
If you weren’t there, as a group we underwent a transformation much like you are describing. The game was originally designed to encourage players to “back stab” one another. However, despite the incentives, very little of this actualy happened. Instead a more collaborative ethic took hold, which lead directly to the creation of this game.
I would love to talk more with your about your “project.” PM me. @bizmail_public (aka David Falkayn / Bubba Zanetti )
As a lurker of the first game, bizmail knew how to win friends and influence people and became a de-facto puppeteer. Other’s were paragons of backstory, or interaction, or ssssillinesss, but as the game progressed he was directing, and people were following.
I, also, have an open-door policy when it comes to entertaining consultation, should anyone be so moved.
Aha! I was in BASD, but work got the better of me and I never quite caught the thread; think I perished early.
I’ll PM you - could be very interesting. I need to get multiple parties doing everything better, kind of thing. The kind of thing where initially people look agog and say ‘don’t be so f*g stupid’.
On the topic of car selection, lowering the barrier to entry, and adding another option for creativity, I also toyed with the idea of using web-games as an art source.
I made it using this tool but don’t go there unless you REALLY want to hear annoying autoplay music. But such car creation tools seem to be a dime a dozen, and would be an interesting way to show upgrades, dents, scratches, etc, over time. Good for people like me who have no skill at drawing or graphics to slapdash an image that can be unique and iconic to their character. (I’m so amazed when people can do what penguinchris does with pixel art)
I decided not to use it as we clearly settled into a vibe of appropriating 80s movies and I felt more energy there and didn’t want to commit to seeing that conceit through the whole campaign. But, it’s a good conceit that I think could be used, modified, or otherwise twisted to fit a different game.
I don’t have a wholly digested idea for this, especially not as relates to BWD, but did want to share the seed with all you creative folk.
I can’t remember what it was called and I can’t find it now, but there is a website that assists you with making pixel art that I liked. I don’t remember it because I do it in Photoshop (where more advanced stuff is possible, not that I do anything advanced, but also animation is dead simple) but there are lots of similar sites out there if you want to try it.
I enjoy it and I like the style, but don’t do it enough to get really good because it’s very time consuming - far more so than actually drawing things freehand (well, depending on the complexity and detail of your freehand drawings of course). I have a few things posted on tumblr, and some of what I’m doing for BWD will probably be re-worked and posted there eventually.
Though it’s silly, I do like the look of that web-generated truck. It’s very “The Incredible Machine” (more the sequel “The Incredible Toon Machine” if you remember that one). I like though that the game format here allows the players to do whatever they want (or not, if they don’t have time) in terms of representing themselves. For a lot of people, choosing what your character looks like is a huge part of the fun of computer RPGs so having it be completely open-ended here is great.
YEP! I was actually feeling nostalgia for Little Van Goes but TIM is also a great fit (and a series I played the hell out of).
grumble, you might have now pushed me over the edge to get and grok photoshop. I’ve been steadfastly opposed to it for the longest time. But I wanted to include animated GIFs in this here BWD (inspired in no small part by your dance party gifs from BASD), but have found GIMP to be pretty cumbersome in terms of animation.
For anyone that is interested, I’m doing most of my image editing work on my work PC (linux client) and use http://pixlr.com/editor/ to get around using GIMP.
We have a horrible old version of GIMP compared to this the Pixlr editor works like a dream, it even has its own layers format so I can save the car for use on a later background
Something I’ve been trying to do but failing is mentioning my characters name when I make a post. I think the fact we all have two names (one forum name and a in-game name) really hinders story continuity. Usually when I read a story or a book I have trouble remembering all names, now I have to remember not just the name but also the forum name that accompanies it.
When I read a post by someone, or a result post, that mentions a name It’s hard if not impossible for me to connect these names to a person (or face, car, previous post).
I understand this is a hard problem to solve, ideally the BBS would let us pick a alias (or display a alias underneath our regular name). A alternative would be some kind of signature although that would be less ideal since you’d only see that after reading the post.
Having a (soft) rule to post some kind of fixed format name at the top of each post would also be a alternative but I don’t think this is realistic since most people will forget to add this (I definitely would, all the time…)
Something that also helps with the linking of posts to a person is posting a picture of your car and maybe adding a name to this picture here would also help (only relevant for the people who add pictures to their posts of course) although even adding a picture is also something I’ve forgotten before…
That’s actually a pretty good idea, if you post your mood or a random tidbit about your character you could do it more casually and so fit it in a longer post more easily. For example, my last post could start with:
Nervous Mike - Is really happy with his window bars
or Nervous Mike - Still looking for some bionic fingers
I think others have partially solved this problem, like you mention, by putting a picture of themselves at the top of most entries. Think bizmail_public’s Star Trader. Some seem to prefer using a single image for most of posts, while the Ssskiper Donald_Petersen used multiple image assets from an identifiable character/actor. Sufficiently unique images helps create a link between the image and a person (or, if you prefer the term, a “brand”).
People with artistic talent, like penguinchris’s 8-bit style and agfish’s el-esk can use different images because their art style is so distinctive.
A distintive writing style, or voice, also helps with this. I can’t read a line of peregrinus_bis without hearing Eric Idle’s “nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?” I sometimes forget his name is Major, but always know the character without needing to look at the username or avatar. daneel is also doing a spot o’ this.
Now that you have chainguns, your hot rod is really getting distinctive. if you want to reinforce your character name, consider adding it or a unique symbol as a license plate or something. Even NRVS on the plate would do.
Or, you can be THAT GUY and that constantly talks in the third person.
Changing one’s avatar (as some of us have done) is helpful to an extent, and you’ll notice I use different pictures for different “voices” at the tops of posts.
But connecting with the actual name of a character is indeed challenging in this format. I cheated: Cougar is a Mercury Cougar and Blazer is a Chevy Blazer. The kid has no name beyond “the kid.”
Might be we could just start off our posts with:
Charactername sez:
and maybe the effect will spread, as it did with “Favorite Possession” in the signup thread. I don’t know who started that, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a question we asked, and yet a good half of you included it.
I dunno, as long as it doesn’t get changed often isn’t it just going to get stored on the BB server and called from there as needed? I can’t imagine it would need to be re-uploaded every time…
Ah, rather than being concerned about servers and computliers, I was thinking of the optics for the readers, but then I recalled seeing this from @kingannoy:
Thanks! That is actually some google street view imagery of the road the shuttle is supposed to be at now. I had to make it a bit more appocolyptic in color scheme of course, bright mid day with green grass just won’t do for our story
