Dorky Goodness

Red Star Games - Headquarters

So this is what Andy Chambers is up to… Who’d've thunk.

TheMatt Project has a pretty decent discussion of the major problem that plagues computer RPGs and MMORPGs in particular.

While conceptually the idea that souls are the medium of trade for Infernal Corporations and Chunks of Brimstone work as the currency of Hell is fits in nicely with the imagery that I’m trying to build for WOS, the actual economic model makes that a bit hairy in implementation. First and foremost, souls are a fixed “commodity”. They represent dead humans. Only so many of these souls are ever going to plummet into Hell. That’s not necessarily a problem because it establishes a fixed system to one degree or another.

However, in order to truly capture the feel of Wall Street, corporations should be able to manipulate souls in a way that fluff dictates shouldn’t be possible. There’s really two things here. The first is that the souls themselves have an intrinsic value. Souls are purchased from the DHA and as a result may be valued above the value of a corporation’s stock. This presents a problem.

Secondly, if a corporate CED wants to issue a “stock split” this would involve the metaphysically impossible of breaking a soul in two to make independent entities. While it would certainly be possible to come up with a glib explanation, it doesn’t suit the imagery.

So what shall I do? Apply suspension of disbelief and keep going with the existing model or change the economic model?

I’ve been perusing the mechanics of both Black Nova Traders and Alien Assault Tradewars (AA) and I’m finding some things I’m really not terribly happy with.

Let’s talk about Black Nova since that’s pretty much what AA is based upon. The formula for determining how a ship’s tech level translates into game terms is pretty straight forward: 100*(1.5^(the tech level in question)). Each type of tech (I assume) has a different value where 100 is. The equation here is for the number of holds a player receives at each tech level. So a player with a 0 in Hull receives 100 holds. That’s a bit high in my opinion but that’s not such a big deal. It becomes a bigger deal when you start adding tech to your ship. Initially the jumps aren’t too bad. Tech level 1 gives you another 50 holds for a total of 150. That’s not an unacceptable increase. Tech level 2 gives you another 75 for a total of 225. Again, not unacceptable. However, as your tech level rises, the slope of the increase starts to rise at exponential rates. Which stands to reason in that the tech level is used as an exponent to determine the value of the tech.
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Wages of Sin continues to stagnate as Sizzly plays CivIII. More boring news at 11.
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There really hasn’t been much visible progress on any of my sites recently.

Debaser is screwed up because my hosting provider removed one of the required Perl modules.

The Humor of Hades is still daunting. There’s so much to edit since Newspro messed up the formatting.

Wages of Sin - I’m moving slowly forward but I’ve been having to really work the last two weeks so I haven’t been able to code as much as I would like.

Just thought everyone would like to know where everything was at.

Surprisingly, a few folks have even registered! But that aside, I’m making a reasonable amount of progress (even if Debaser is suffering because of it).

I’ve almost completed the background economics of the game. Sure, there’s still a lot to be done but the corporations should soon be able to operate smoothly with little intervention from me from the perspective of generating revenue and realizing costs.

The functionality to run a corporation (at least a sin corp) are almost in place as well.

I still need to work out a few details and I’ve stumbled across a major fluff point contention but overall it’s going well. I should be ready for alpha/QA testing in about a two months.

…sort of. I’ve been tossing around the idea of an online “fantasy stock market” type game for about two years. I start it, get frustrated, stop it, start over, get frustrated, stop it and this cycle has been going on for quite some time.

But then, while trying to find a decent portal application for Debaser, I stumbled across WebApp. WebApp is a membership portal system similar to PHP Nuke but it’s written in Perl. I don’t think I’m ever going to implement a portal for Debaser but this program may be just what the doctor ordered for my new project. It’s pretty easy to write mods for this portal system and as it stands right now I’ve got some of the basic functionality all configured for the game and since WebApp handles all the user profiles, logins, news, forums, etc, etc all I have to worry about is game mechanics.
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