Fantasy RPG Action adventure Game

I woke up today thinking about Zelda or something, where hoards of blackness is attacking Link or a link like character (very cute and huggable). Link has this energy sword (but ring-like in one of those fighting games) and he is swinging it around and as the sword hits the black they die in a fiery flash. There is this ominous sound that precedes them so the player knows what is about to happen, and the hoards come in either CW or CCW fashion so the player needs to swing the sword in the correct direction to kill all of them. Also when changing weapons it doesn't stop the game but slows it down, so there is still a rush to get to the right weapon but enough time where it is playable.

As I thought more about this I decided to write it down and came up with a rather comprehensive list of features for an RPG to have. Not sure why I thought so much about this since it has nothing to do with science or mecha... In any case I concentrated mainly on the mechanics of the game, list of stuff to keep track and some stuff about how the software would calibrate different settings to make it playable. By no means was this an exhaustive explanation for a production worthy game, but I thought it was better than memorizing another 100 words from the GRE prep book.

If you have any more ideas please post it up. I personally think designing a game is a very entertaining and rewarding enterprise.

Played in third person, this game will be an action adventure puzzle-based platform jumping magical world with more RPG features (than Zelda) and more experience based, complex enemies and puzzles.
Feature: the ability to use either the classic turn based fighting system or a real-time system--this can be useful for harder bosses at the end of the game.
Rewards altruism: by giving away weapons, food, money, etc, various attributes can change for the player's benefit such as the enemy's stats becomes weaker, the player's stats become stronger,
Player character must drink, eat, and sleep on a regular basis to maintain a good health index. This index can drop rapidly if the character is in the heat and she is not drinking. Depending on the difficulty the player is playing at, the character can keep drinking until there is no more water or the player must trigger each act of eating or drinking. The character will say "man, I am thursty." or "I am so hungry I can eat a horse right about now!" when she is hungry. Player can set up camp fires to cook meals and her cooking will get better each time she cooks. However, she can gain more strength with she catches food and eat them raw! She will have a greater chance of getting sick though.
When the player gets sick, the health meter will drop depending on what kind of sickness you get. You should go see the docter when you can or you can choose to sleep it off. This will waste a day though. If the player gets bitten by a snake or something,
When the player goes to town, she can meet any boy and start up a relationship. The stats can be viewed but most of them will be blurred. There will also be a compatibility index, this can change over time and the player can work to make it better, such as cooking for the guy (this is where the cooking experience comes in). Also, once the relationship has approached to a certain level, then everything will go hazy and the stats on different things will change, such as the price of things that will make him like you (this might matter more if the main character chooses to be a guy) and your physical health in relation to the distance the player is from the NPC. After a strong relationship is estabilished, then the health and strength of the player will increase by an order of magnitude (there by giving the player an incentive to fall in love). I suppose the player can also court a member of the same sex. It will just be harder to find the right person. There is also a "Love at first sight" where your character will fall in love without your intervention, then you can't pick the person with the best attributes you might want to boost your strength. Another dimension to be considered is the attributes of the NPC the player courts. It can be a fighter or just a regular civilian, so the NPC can level up and follow the player around (maybe the player can also play as the NPC?) or just wait in the village for the player to return. There needs to be an incentive for the person to fall in love with a noncombatant. This can be an extra boost in your health and strength or more money for you to spend (if the player selects a girl as her main character of course!) when you return to that town.

The game will start out with the character as a little kid, she has an appetite and aptitude for magic. Out of her whole town she is the only one who can wield the powers of the ancients. So the game starts out by teaching the player how to use different types of spells that will be used later in the game. She will learn the basic techniques of magic:

the elements: fire-instigate flamable substance, water-douse fire from nearby water sources, air-blow enemies away or make them harder to move, earth-throw dirt or sand in enemies' faces to distract them, love-heal friends and your self, convert wild beasts to pets;
the socery stuff: move simple things around-fallen branches and rocks but nothing that is attached to things, make people not see you, hover, make pets of wild animals,
potions: poison, heal, and... whatever other things there are.
fighting tools: long sword, short sword, bow and arrow, spear, shield, etc.

The player uses these powers to fight off enemies coming to her home town. The villagers are very greatful to her and start offering family traditions and ancient tales of their ancestors' powers for the player to master on her own. The player must train and learn the timing of each power. The computer will judge how successful the player is with the timing required by each skill. If the player is taking too long to master a particular skill then the power of that skill will diminish but its timing window will increase. So the player will still have to train a lot but there will be an actual need for it. There will be time later in the game where the player can go on side quests to hone in on these skills (get better with a narrower timing and thus increase the power of the skill).

The player eventually discovers the source of some of these enemies and must go fight them at their base. But the village will still be attacked so the player must fight and claim more weapons and potions for her villagers to use to defend themselves in her absence. The player will most likely want to save the best sword or healing potion for herself. If she gives the best healing potions away to the villagers then her health will increase and it will also regenerate abet rather slowly. If she gives away all her weapons including the best magical sword (even an average villager can wield the sword, and the magic in the sword works even if the villager cannot wield it directly), her attack strength can increase by quite a bit as a result of her generosity.

If the player does not give any weapons or gives too few and not powerfull enough weapons for the villagers to defend themselves then the village will be attacked and most of the people will be killed! To reduce this, the player will be given updates every week on how the village is doing. If the player did not give away as much weapons then the player will have less time to kill the enemy and return.

Each source of enemy will have a boss. Each source of enemy can be thought of as a level. However, each level will be categorized by their difficulty. The player may discover these levels in arbitrary ways so she may find out about harder levels first. There shall be villagers that tell her it would be very hard to slay the boss of that particular level as a way to warn the player she does not have the skill level to defeat the boss at the end, or even have the necessary skill to defeat the guards around the enemy base. The player can go back to a nearby village to restore her health and retry again or go to another level first. Some level will be required to be finished first before more will be given to the player.

After each level, the player must go back home to defend from ever more powerful enemies. She will have to carry more and more weapons back home to defend them. To do this the player can befriend other villagers of other villages and recruit them to carry weapons back to home and also enlist them to defend the player's home town! (this will help with the attrition in the village) The player will be able to talk to various NPCs on the way back home and learn the aftermath of slaying the boss. The player will also here about other bosses she must face. Some times she might hear about an invasion about to happen and she can do something about it before it happens. Sometimes going straight to other bosses will be better than going back home. Other cities are being attacked as well so if the player help them out her own village will benefit as the player can recruit more mercs to help her out! As the enemy keep on increasing, more and more of your villagers will die off.

As the game progresses, the player will learn more and more about magic and the world around her. The player will gain new skills that are built on top of the ones she knows (such as summon a flood when she is far away from any sources of water, or rain a barage of fireballs on the enemy) as well as completely new ones such as manipulating the minds of others, kill many enemies telepathically, and teleport, and resurrect the dead, which the player can perform on the villagers in her home town. Those the player brings back from the dead will be even more powerful then before (since they would have learned from their mistakes that led them to their deaths). Each level forces the player to go farther and farther away from her home, making each return trip longer and subjecting her village to more attack in between trips. The levels would be from all around her home, not all straight in one direction. The player must then make sure she acquires enough weapons and support for home so it will not be over run by the enemy, so there is a certain element of strategy in it.

Eventually the player will have gone through all the bosses and the final boss (as there must be) will require all the friends you have made to stand up as one body and fight the tyranny that threatens the very existence of your village and others. To rally people you only have to travel to the village and call for support but if you have not helped them in some ways (such as saving them from an attack or something) you will have to go on some mini side quests to gain their trust.

Side quests can be:
Go help a village in trouble from monsters, an invasion from another village, or from a natural disaster.
Rescue a person from kidnap, this person can be someone you love (in which case player's health will drain by a lot because of the mental state she will be in)
Slay minor subbosses that are posing only minor annoyance.

Optical Computer here we come!

Makes me glad I am not concentrating in semiconductors but instead in microprocessor architecture. I wonder what the future of computers would look like? This will be incredibly hard to conceive because new technologies that can radically reshape the whole industry can appear as if spontaneously. As a futurist, one can either take great risks and envision a world so strange based on a completely random or made up technology or one can take no chance and envision a slightly improved reality in the very near future. The technology will be bizarre because that is most certainly what will happen. But the technology that will revolutionize the industry will inevitably be unforeseen and unpredictable given the nature of quantum physics and... well anything that we can use to do computation work.

A couple of things come to mind: optics (linked), quantum mechanics, and some unified theory I read somewhere.


Well optics is clearly the way to go after electron based computing. Light does not generate heat or nearly as much as electrons because of the nature of semiconductors (unless room temperature superconductors have been found, but even then electrons move much slower than light). If they can make switches that can operate on various wavelengths of light, then computers can become exponentially more powerful. Imagine instead of using boolean algebra we can use something much more complicated! Instead of base 2 we can use base 8 or 16! What would happen if computers operated naturally in hexadecimal? I guess that would be a computer engineer's wet dream, or worst nightmare if I think more about it. Figuring out just a simple unit like a decoder could get messy. I wonder how base 16 could work in an algebraic fashion. I guess it would be a lot easier if the actual hardware has been invented. What would yellow + blue equal to? Unless the wavelengths can some how merge or confuse the receptor into seeing green... but how would the receptor know what to do with a green? I guess it depends on how the thing operates if such a thing ever come into existence. So it is useless to ramble on on that subtopic.

Quantum mechanics have a lot to offer, even though scaling it to anything practical is still not feasible. Perhaps one day they will figure out how to scale it and operate on killobits or killoquebits at a time. Not much I can say about that since I don't know much beyond what Discovery channel has taught me, that and Isaac Asimov. The only thing I can think of is they better invent better encryption devices.

I remember reading about a theory of how everything is actually connected to each other, how every particle is connected to each other through another dimension. So what would appear to have been separated in our 3 dimensional space is actually not at all in another space. If we can tap into that, somehow, then processing power could approach infinity! Now I'm just rambling. It's getting too late for me to think of anything worthwhile for anyone to read.

In short, I think AI is achievable in the next hundred years. At least, it will be feel feasible from the perspective of science fiction :)

Oh wait, processing power doesn't have anything to do with self awareness!! I'll have to ramble about that next time... next week.

Until then!

What I want to read (read: write)

Everywhere I go to find military scifi I see a regurgitation of the same thing: aliens, hyperdrive/wormholes, galactic scale, and something mystical. It is so hard to find hard scifi and especially good quality ones. What I want to read is something in the near future, perhaps a hundred years from now, basically at the point where it is no longer easily imaginable, where humans have started to explore space like the ghetto ol' days when Columbus discovered America. Entrepreneurs have just started tourist destination and launch payloads to space, mining asteroids and sending them down back to Earth for huge profits, collecting space trash to reduce collisions (though this will be commissioned by UN so the quality of the service will be lower than the other enterprises). Humanity can now build bigger and better structures and floating islands. Mars has been settled by scientists and Jupiter is being mined for its helium/hydrogen for nuclear fusion power.

Actually, I have been thinking about this universe for a long time; it is the one I would want to write about one day. So it is probably a good thing that not many authors are writing in this particular sub genre.