http://www.industrygamers.com/news/doom-creator-fires-back-at-devs-with-snooty-attitude/

What he said only with a fun little story about the nature of innovation.


Once upon a time there was a journalistic judgefest called the IGF.

One of the categories they prided themselves upon judging was the award for "innovation".

Unfortunately games attract nerds, nerds who take the meanings of words far too seriously for the busy professionals who judge these things.

These nerds loved to argue and talk about cases of prior art that often pre-dated these alleged innovations by decades.

To solve this problem the journalists renamed "innovation" to "nuovo" a word without the annoying baggage of actually meaning something.

Once again making the world a better place and no one questioned their authority ever again.

TOPTIP

If you are making art that you really believe is innovative.

Then you just failed art history 101.

Allowing trades breaks everything, leet players can twink noobs or noobs can be used as farms to provide the leet players with cheap resources.

However trade is interesting, without trade there is less interactions, without trade then only the forced trade of attacks remains.

But how, how does one restrict trade in all the bad cases but not in the good cases?

I have a no idea, it is a very hard design problem, mostly you just end up nerfing all trade.

However here is another attempt.

http://hoe-house.appspot.com/

let us explain it by example, say you wish to trade bros for bux.

One player must issue an offer of 1 bros for 1000 bux and another player must issue an offer of 1000 bux for 1 bros.

These offers will then find each other and an appropriate trade happens.

Now we need exceptions to stop the "bad trades"

There is a 12 hour waiting period on any offer, all offers are made in the open and this gives other player a chance to counter offer and cock block exceptionally bad trades. The counter offer blocks for 12 hours again and so on. This relies on the players policing themselves so is a nice simple cheap trick.

All trades go into a magic box and are sorted, only the trade that sits on top is ever active. This keeps the worst trades at the bottom of the pile. Again this relies on the actions of other players out bidding each other to keep the bad stuff down.

Trades are sorted like so:

First by unit price, bros4bux sorts by lowest price and bux4bros sorts by highest price. This means the best deal is always on top.
If the price is the same then we next sort by quantity. This lets the big boys muscle out the small boys.
Finally we sort by time, currently it is set to newest first for maximum cockblockability, maybe this will be changed later.

OK,so we now have these two trades on top, once a minute the server looks at them.

If you do not have what you are offering available, then your trade will be cancelled. So it is up to you to make sure you keep that quantity in stock.

If either of both trades are still on their 12 hours lock then nothing else will happen.

If the bros4bux unit price is the same or lower to the bux4bros unit price then we have a deal (They have agreed a price) The deal will happen at half way between the two unit prices so a 1000 bux per bro and a 3000 bux per bro will deal at 2000 bux per bro.

The exchange will now take place at the agreed unit price, and possibly one of the trades will remain at a reduced quantity. IE only a partial trade.

Finally there is no way to cancel a trade once it is offered and you may only have 10 active trades at a time. Your current trade offers are listed on the trades page.
This stops any attempts to spam trades but cancel them at the last minute.


This all makes it very hard to choose exactly who you deal with and there are plenty of chances for other players to intercept any back hander attempts. At the same time it is reasonably easy to offer say 2000000 bux for 1000 bros and for that to actually happen without you knowing any of the above.

Lets see how this works out this time, mostly I'm just seeing spam blocking as a possible weakness here.

Visit http://wet.appspot.com/data/192603/index.html to behold it in all its glory.

Now you can plop down the tetris pieces and the menu select is slightly more usable, hold down the mouse button to bring up the menu.

Pieces can be chosen or rotated from there.

The pieces are cell base but added to the display as one chunk, rather than as multiple chars. IE we are trying to draw this in a html optimised way. Ultimately the blocks will probably extend outside of their cells slighty as well.

Visit http://wet.appspot.com/data/193601/index.html to behold it in all its glory.

We now have a circle menu, hold the button down for a short while and it should popup. This menu can be used to choose and rotate the current shape although that shape doesn't do anything yet. This needs much more fiddling to get it to where I want it but unsurprisingly text across browsers and finding the size of text before it is rendered is a bit of a mess. I may have to switch to a non html text renderer so I can gain full control.

The movement of the plot has been changed very slightly, however this change makes it much more interesting.

Before it simply alternated between turning left/right on every collision, regardless and if it couldnt go in the direction it wanted to it went in the best next choice.

Now it only alternates if it manages to go in the direction it wants to go in, otherwise it will try the same direction again on the next collision. This is a very small change but makes the movement much more controllable and chaotic.

Visit http://wet.appspot.com/data/186601/index.html to behold it in all its glory.

Lets see if we can blog the development of this RGBTD0 sequel. Who knows how it will end up.

Right now its a little square walking around a random maze thing and you can add or remove walls by clicking.

Its made in javascript and is also a testbed for a little javascript game library/framework that I shall be calling gamecake.