• Do that Hello Kitty Online! video.

My idea with this is to have a car driving along and the world around it being taken over by Hello Kitty. Houses, pasted on other cars, and so on. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I’ll probably get Andy to help, but Windows Movie Maker is entirely unable to do the job. Maybe, since I won’t be getting source video from Fraps, I’ll be able to use some Linux tools like Cinellara to do it. I think if I can get a compositing layer there, I can just do the Hello Kitty overlays in POVRay. I have lots of JPop music to use (because I love J-culture, proving I am white, apparently) as the background, but I think Hello Kitty is Chinese. I don’t know if I have any Chinese pop. Maybe some of the Fushigi Yuugi stuff, which was set in China. Although, since I am an American gamer, it should probably be some really loud metal. Symphony X. Oh, Miranda Sex Garden! It’s not KMFDM, but it’ll do.

  • Work on my Emergent Intelligence raid demo.

I have this wild notion that raids would be more fun if they used the properties of emergent intelligence on the part of the enemies. It’s easy to make a boss fight so powerful that it isn’t any fun, but what if it could adapt itself so that any particular boss fight would always be different, always be a challenge, always require you to know your class well and have good gear, but not be so overwhelmingly hard that it isn’t fun? Because it’s all about being fun and feeling your presence on the raid was important to its success, and then being rewarded with appropriately scaled loot.

Anyway, there’s been a bunch of studies over the past couple of decades on what they call emergent behavior – which basically states that if you have a large population of entities operating with a couple of simple rules, that their behavior as a whole will show signs of intelligence and adaptability. The famous example is flocking behavior. The researcher who discovered this programmed his birds with a couple behaviors – don’t get too close to a neighbor, follow the nearest bird flying in front of you at a certain distance, fly straight otherwise, avoid objects – and noticed that the flock as a whole behaved like flocks do in the real world – wheeling and flying around, sometimes splitting in two and merging back together – a flock being an entity in its own right comprised of individual birds but not controlled by any of them but showing behavior never explicitly programmed.

So I thought we could apply this to raids. Sprinkle a couple dozen low level trash mobs of various classes, each obeying a couple of short rules, along with a boss mob or two with more complex behavior, and then throw a raid at it and see if we can get some emergent behaviors from the enemy force that will give it a sort of rudimentary ability to intelligently fight off the players while giving each player class unique ways of dealing with the threat.

Players would go in knowing generally the abilities of the bosses, since they need to be unique so that raiding doesn’t become purely a randomly-generated encounter (boring, players like to put themselves against the game designers, not a RNG), but with enough random, emergent elements that every fight will be different and challenging. Are the monsters going to try and keep you clustered together and then AE you? Are the mobs just going to keep healing themselves up? Will they all go stealth and attack you from behind? Some deadly combination? Who knows?

So I’ve been wanting to apply emergent behavior to raiding but don’t want to put a lot of effort (read: any effort) into tools development. I used to have a Java applet framework I built for animation back at Harcourt, but Java is passé these days, applets even more so.

Wired had a feature on animated, procedural artwork, and I noticed every single one of them had been animated using a language called “Processing”, and looking at it, it looks cool, but then I got thinking about PyGame, which wouldn’t require me to use any language but the one I love most, Python.

Also, my son is going away to Marines basic training this weekend, so it’s likely I won’t get to the emergent behavior applet. I have to do the HKO one soon because it is due Sunday. Just like school, always waiting until the last moment to do assignments. Mostly because it takes so long to think of good ideas. If I start on something without giving it a good long think, it sucks in the end.

While my son is away to boot camp, though, I’ll have a lot more time in my evenings for Rock Band and games programming, maybe I’ll finally be able to come up with some recent stuff so I can get some ideas into code and attend GDC next year, which would be fun.

I just want to write games so badly.