On account of being a City of Heroes fan, my second week of development was somewhat interrupted by Issue 14's release on Wednesday. I tried to back to work on Thursday, but it was largely consumed catching Cromartie High (the whole series is only about $35 off Amazon). I might get to work again over the weekend (Friday included) but it's doubtful given that it's prime spectacle time to witness Issue 14's impact on City of Heroes.

I would, however, like to bring up a few games that inspire me in my own work on Project Cyberverse.

The first would be Dwarf Fortress. The concept is that you're managing a small civilization that quite literally digs a living niche out for itself in a tile-based world. It's a truly impressive little microcosm, albeit one with a steep learning curve. It would be fascinating to take this game massively multiplayer, and you can already see one attempt to do so on BYOND's very own Dungeon Master.

However, what really impresses me about Dwarf Fortress is something missing from Dungeon Master, and that is that the units are capable of working independently with a fairly advanced AI. I've had it explained to me by brother (an avid Dwarf Fortress fan) as the various objects in the game will advertise themselves, and then dwarves will be assigned to these tasks. Navigation is actually node based. Really, the whole thing sounds a lot simpler once it's explained, I could code the basics of such a routine like that in a day.

Micromanagement in RPGs is a problem, in my opinion, in that the decisions are really quite pointless. There's an enemy: hit it. You're injured: drink a health potion or cast a healing spell. I spoke about this partly in the last entry - it's the main reason why I'm turning things on their head and having the player manage instead of be the individual unit. What needs to given to players is the important decisions, not the easy monotony, and having a little workforce happy to perform that monotony for you is the kind of game I'd like to make.

Another game that turns things on its head is the flash game Orbital Decay, which I just finished before blogging today.

The interesting thing to consider about Orbital Decay is that it, too, turns its genre on its head. Where most shmups have you play a single fighter darting about taking down a battleship, Orbital Decay has you play the battleship taking down darting fighters. Once again, the indies surprise us by showing that the other side of the game can actually be more entertaining than the one we're typically given. There's actually quite a bit of this going on in the indie scene these days.

Lastly, I came across a game called Efencea, another one being developed on BYOND. To put it simply, Efencea is a PvP Tower Defense game. I haven't played it, but I can tell from the screenshots that it's very literal in this regard: two sides send waves of monsters at each other while building towers to thwart them.

I differ a bit in that I don't want to take the concept quite that literally, but suffice to say the idea of Tower Defense (with possible PvP elements) taking place in a persistent space is one of the possibilities that excite me. Tower Defense as dynamic content is a small part of what I'm doing.

So there you have it - three games that inspire me. Right now, I'm at a bit of a crossroads that brings about a great deal of writer's block with it: there's many good options, it's paralyzing. However, I know the answer to overcome this - simply put the inner critic on hold and forge ahead in a freewrite, as there will be time to iron out details later. Doing work I decide to scrap later is a small price to pay for overcoming paralysis.