just short notes today,
today has been mostly spent cowering from the sun building and tweaking the central game engine that i'm building in Isadora. Game engines is a term usually used to describe the inner workings of a computer game's program, the central bit of code that churns through all the data and turns it into graphics and ingame physics ect..
well the Agency has no graphics and physics in that sense although there are plenty of graphs and statistics, but the engine that i'm building is intended to churn through all of the game data as it happens, keeping track of the world's statistics and most importantly the effects that these stats have on the game.
This has become both practical and process for me. Stripping away all of the procedural stuff (dice rolling checking charts ect..) and replacing it instead with what we hope are a series of intuitive choices and actions means that all of that needs to be replaced with something, and the engine is going to be taking care of all of it for us, driving the narrative forward. I'm using Isadora to build it, software that i don't normally use for this sort of task, that i normally use to build interactive video environments, however here it's churning through maths equations and spitting them out as graphs and numbers for the players to be able to immediately understand what is happening inside the map (on the ground) so the visual layout of the information is key as well as what information is made public and what remains hidden as 'cogs and wheels'. That last part is the process part, by having to build the engine and the decide what data to pass through it, patching all the paths and routes together i am making creative decisions as to the feel and depth of the experience, as well as the precise level of feedback the players will receive for their actions. At what point does a box begin to glow red as its population level reaches a dangerous low? how fast do the graph columns rise or sink? how many decimal points do i use to give the players a feel of the depth of their choices but without overwhelming them? All of these decisions are central to the design, because although they may not alter the mechanics of play they will have a huge bearing on the live experience and the player's ability to interact with each other and the data intuitively (remember the ipad advert: "you already know how to use it").
Well the engine will be presentable tomorrow so i will post photos of the interface and perhaps some examples of it working. Eventually i may make the patch available if people want to dig around in it. below are some photos if you're into that sort of thing, the central patch is made up almost entirely of custom user-made-actors and other custom actors nested in others as there's a lot of data being handled in 16 separate instances and a lot of repeated maths and triggering.
more on the design and feel of the game as well as less techy stuff soon, promise
B.
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