Author Topic: The Crowdsourced Game  (Read 375302 times)

bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #15 on: 2012-03-30, 08:17:06 AM »
I guess this so-called Canadian face :canadian: is a (obscure?) reference to South Park, who represents Canadians as heads that split at the mouth. Other's have wondered the same thing.

So far I think my favorite idea is still GameQuilt.

Vincent

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #16 on: 2012-03-30, 08:51:11 AM »
Oh, I didn't follow South Park.  I've seen only a few episodes.  Thanks for the references. :)
I'm in for GameQuilt too.
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v6v

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #17 on: 2012-03-30, 03:18:46 PM »
I recall mentioning the Canadian face in another thread. (Those were the days)
Vincent- You're French? That's so amazing! I really need to practice my French. I have a giant AP exam coming in less than a month.

Bluemonkmn, your Grandmother looks like a very happy person. She reminds me of how my Grandmother usually smiles.
Vincent- I agree in a way, Avis makes me think of Vis-A-Vis, although I pronounce it Avvy in class, the spelling is something that I can't shake off.
I had taken an official Comp. Science Java class online in Virtual High School last semester(The only online class that I could get, the State funds one per semester) as the professor on a college open house said I needed to have prior experience with it to excel in my major.

I'd be interested in hearing about your 3D Skies. Are you drawing a 3D Sphere or Half-Sphere, putting a texture onto it, and rendering a 2D or 3D world?
If you're using the 3D skies in combination with a 2D world (2D sprites and tiles) I'd definitely love to see some videos. It's rare to see someone utilize that concept.
I'm sure if you're mentioning the OpenGL technical information only, it won't be (treason :) )

I hope your game development goes well.

I like the Quilt concept, but does that mean that what's already existing in the game is permanent and only new content can be added, like adding a new patch to a quilt? Forgive me, I don't have experience with quilts.


bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #18 on: 2012-03-30, 03:40:51 PM »
Well, source control (at least what I'm familiar with - Team Foundation Server) generally never involves losing what's there. It's always there in the history. However that doesn't prevent someone from laying a new set of changes on top of yours. I suppose you could do the same with a quilt, though I've never heard of that being done. When someone gets the latest code from a particular branch, they will effectively see only the outer-most layer of the quilt. But using source control labels, one could choose pieces from any point in time, effectively enjoying the quilt as it appeared on any particular date. But no, users will be able to edit existing (overlay) pieces, not just add new pieces. I think the quilt can also be used as a great metaphor for describing to new users how their changes are merged with those of others. Think of it, even the term "patch" applies to both software and quilting!

BTW, as soon as I get CleanGame (Nanobots?) working, I think Mercurial will be the first source control I look into -- I've never seen it before, but it comes highly recommended I guess.

Edit: I'm reading some interesting examples and info about how Mercurial works.
« Last Edit: 2012-03-30, 03:48:26 PM by bluemonkmn »

v6v

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #19 on: 2012-03-30, 03:51:41 PM »
Well with a quilt concept, will we be able to step back and see what the original game looked like at a certain point in time? (Backups- I'm not entirely familiar with Source Control)
Say I was nostalgic and wanted to see what this looked at at an earlier stage.. (Say when we just started making it)

And when you say getting Nanobots working, are you referring to the HTML5 implementation?

bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #20 on: 2012-03-30, 06:07:09 PM »
Yes, source control generally has "branches" and "versions". A branch is a separate path of code changes that would run in parallel to someone else's changes based on the same root or parent. A version represents any individual set of changes made on one branch. With source control, you can get any version of any branch to see what anybody's version of the game looked like at any point in time. Without yet knowing more about Mercurial, I can be too much more specific than that.

Yes, I'm talking about getting Nanobots working as an HTML5 game.  I'm making progress.  I got it to actually run for a few seconds before hitting an error now (just gotta keep translating C# to JavaScript).

durnurd

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #21 on: 2012-03-30, 07:09:38 PM »
I've been using Git at work recently, which is similar to Mercurial. I've found it to be really nice to use, but it has a pretty steep learning curve.  It has all the same ideas of branches, tags, and distributed control.

I don't mean to be a downer, but I don't like the quilt concept. It doesn't evoke the idea of crowd-sourced changes in the way he word crowd itself does. If there's a good synonym for crowd, it seems like it might be a good idea.  For the second part, since the idea here is to take a bunch of small pieces and putting them all together, it reminds me of the steps of compiling a computer program. You could go with compile, assemble, link, or something I can't think of.  Or maybe just something to specify that this is, in fact, a game.

CrowdLink.  GroupLink.  CloudGame. CloudLink. Which turns out to be the names of main characters of two mainstream RPGs.

I dunno, I can't think of any particularly good ideas, but the word quilt just doesn't sit right with me.  Sorry, I'm being a downer, but I think that getting an opposing point of view is good for the process.
Edward Dassmesser

bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #22 on: 2012-03-30, 09:01:30 PM »
The person who suggested Mercurial was really down on Git for some reason.  And if it has a steep learning curve, that seems like a bad choice unless we make some kind of wrapper to make it simpler for the masses to use.  Will have to weight the pros and cons of source control systems a bit I guess.

On the one hand I agree that quilt is rather far from the "mental space" I was looking for to express the idea of what this project would be. But then I think of Little Big Planet and remember how much like a crafting project that looked like when you started to see the various materials you could use in its levels. And it reminded me that maybe if you want to appeal to the masses, you have to speak in more down-to-earth terms... maybe? But I'm not sure I want to appeal to *those* masses :). Will have to keep thinking. I forgot to mention that one of the ideas I had (before starting this discussion) was "OurGame". I may have discarded it because it was too mundane. I can't remember now. Good thoughts, though.

v6v

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #23 on: 2012-03-31, 09:30:49 AM »
Super ____ World?

Ethermeal/Ephermeal?

Quiltr? (Tumblr, Twitter)

Struct?

Play3r?

I think FreeRealms sounds good but I've heard of it somewhere before.

It's hard to find something nice..

bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #24 on: 2012-03-31, 11:42:33 AM »
At some point I'll have to stop brainstorming and start collecting / deciding, but another idea occurred to me to make the name be an acronym of all the words I wanted to include, but thought the full words would be too difficult.  Perhaps the acronym will flow better than the words.  For example, NOVAGEM:
Noosphere
Orthogenesis
Via
Assembling
Game
Edits
Massively

Vincent

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #25 on: 2012-03-31, 11:56:43 AM »
okay, way off topic but:
@#Sharp: I would be happy to help you with your french.  Maybe start another topic or send me a message.  I don't see any obvious relation between "vis-
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Vincent

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #26 on: 2012-03-31, 12:03:42 PM »
I like NOVAGEM.  If you make it clear that it is an acronym, it's pretty cool. :)
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v6v

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #27 on: 2012-03-31, 12:14:03 PM »
Vertex coloring on an overlapping sphere for Day and Night Cycles! I never thought of that! It's much easier than trying to morph a daytime and nighttime texture. :O

And back on topic again, NOVAGEM sounds nice- well Nova sounds great too.

Maybe Neo?

Here's another one... StoryWriter?

Eon?

But if you don't like those, NOVAGEM is nice. I do agree, we should progress soon.

mltsy

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #28 on: 2012-03-31, 04:51:23 PM »
Other terms that come to mind that could contribute to a good name: Assemblage, Gamelan, Chorus

I kinda like Gamelan (Project?) because it has the word game in it, and is essentially a collection of pieces which are sculpted and tuned to fit together into one grand instrument :)  I also like GameChorus - but that may just be because I'm particularly inclined to musical analogies ;)

bluemonkmn

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Re: The Crowdsourced Game
« Reply #29 on: 2012-04-01, 07:13:03 AM »
OK, just having 2 conflicting thoughts:

1. Thinking about it more, I am starting to think that, unless there's a really remarkably appropriate term that sounds great, the name should do more to convey what the project is actually about rather than sounding fancy or interesting. With that in mind, and considering some of the other ideas on this thread, I am thinking now of the name "CrowdGameX", which is intended to convey that this is a Crowdsourced Game eXperiment, plain and simple. If the experiment goes well, maybe other projects will spring up with more specific and interesting names, but this being the first one, maybe it's appropriate to name it something relatively straightforward. I was thinking also that there will not be a separate name for the larger project independent from the specific (CleanGame-based) SGDK2 project. But now I am led to thought 2...

2. It doesn't seem right to name the SGDK2 file "CrowdGameX.sgdk2". It should be more specific to what the game is like, like MineCraft. But I still think having 2 names is going to get confusing. So maybe we should focus more on what the name of this first project is going to be rather than the nature of the whole crowd-sourced game experiment. Sure this project will be a *type* of experiment in crowd-sourced gaming, but we're not starting a company here; we don't need to name a company (at least not yet :)). The homepage for the game can talk about the larger philosophy/experiment. But as for a name, I think we just need to name this particular game. People will learn about the experimental aspects in other ways. That doesn't mean the game name can't include any hint of the larger project (it could still have an X), but there should at least be some hint of the content of the game itself in the name.

So taking both of *those* thoughts into account, CrowdGameX doesn't seem right because when you think of the content of the game, it's not so much about how it is crowd-sourced, especially at the beginning when very few people have touched the game. But the word "Our" does seem more appropriate because it's... less philosophical, and more just referring to this game as one that multiple people "own". But the noun to go with it is the trick. OurGame is still too generic. OurGameX? Still not speaking enough about the content of the game. Yes, the content of the game could change wildly, but there should at least be some vague attempt at referring to the content like "world" or ... heh... "planet" (just not a "little big" one).

Thinking... IotaBuildIt! This might be the silver bullet of names in that it accomplishes many things:
1. It sounds like "I oughtta build it", so it's kind of catchy in that way (multiple meanings)
2. Iota means a very small amount
3. The idea of the overall project is for people to build their own pieces of the world
4. The (current) idea of the game is to build nano-robots that accomplish certain tasks.
5. Each contribution to the project can be very small (like an iota)
6. Nano-bots in the game are very small things that you build
7. "I oughtta build it" suggests that people really *should* help build the game, we really invite them to add their own content

How do you all feel about "IotaBuildIt" (or possibly some variation of this thought) as the name for the project and the game?

Edit: One more thing: 0 results on Google, so we would "own" that term.

Edit 2: We could also use the unique iota symbol "ɩ" in a logo. It's a unicode character that looks a lot like "i", but it has no dot. So even with a single character we can hint at this game/project... ɩBuildIt
ɩBuildIt
I like the Times font representation better.
« Last Edit: 2012-04-01, 07:38:09 AM by bluemonkmn »