Wizkidd's Place

"It would seem that I've brought a slight addiction back with me from China," I thought to myself when I woke up at 4:30* this morning with a weird craving for tea.

Before I went to China, I used to occasionally like to drink fruit-flavored teas like "Ginger Peach" and "Red Raspberry," but not in a regular addiction sort of way. Coming back from a week of being served various kinds of tea at every meal, I'm now regularly experiencing cravings for much stronger kinds of tea like "Irish Breakfast."

*Hopefully more for jet-lag reasons than for addiction reasons

I've been in Beijing and Shanghai for the last 9 days, but am too tired to write about stuff just now.

As proved by experience, "no evilness" is just too vague. Therefore, I'm making better rules. So far, I've come up with this:

http://members.byond.com/Wizkidd0123/files/ wiz_chat%20rules.txt

What do you think should be added/removed/changed/improved? Please comment.

So splatty muted one Dark_Yondaine for homophobia today in wiz_chat. Soon, he spammed by joining/rejoining the Lounge repeatedly so I banned him. Then, tried to spam with other keys (and was thwarted by wiz_chat's spam protection). Finally:

[Oct 10 04:36] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: Unbann me from Lounge please
[Oct 10 04:36] * You tell Dark_Yondaime: No.
[Oct 10 04:36] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: Yes
[Oct 10 04:36] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: Do u know who i am
[Oct 10 04:37] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: i am Dantom
[Oct 10 04:37] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: so UNBANN ME
[Oct 10 04:37] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: Or Face the consequences
[Oct 10 04:38] * You tell Dark_Yondaime: Dantom = Dan + Tom (two people).
[Oct 10 04:38] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: i know i am Dan
[Oct 10 04:38] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: my bro is tom
[Oct 10 04:38] * Dark_Yondaime tells you: thats why our key is Dantom

After writing a comment in Developous' blog today, I realized that I had just explained how to play his Armies game. If anybody else wants to try, they may find the comment useful (copied from his blog):

I played Armies today and liked it. It took me an hour and a half to figure out how to work it (I was bored enough at the time to make the attempt), but I like puzzles, so I enjoyed that. There are still portions of it that remain mysteries to me, but I can see that you put a lot of work into it, and that it could potentially be fun if multiple people who understand how it works played together.

The real problem (as I see that you recognize) is incomprehensible documentation. The source of that problem is that your writing makes assumptions about what the reader knows when in reality, he probably doesn't know it. Pretend you're writing for a newborn infant who needs everything spelled out. You might think that some of what you're writing will be obvious, but really, it won't.

For example, you say things like "have your villager build a burrow." Instead, explain it like this:

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Every tile in the world of Armies has a property called "energy." The energy of a tile can be found by standing on the tile and looking at your statistics verb panel.

Every time you want to build something on the tile, it requires the use of a certain amount of energy from the tile depending on what's being built. Every time you the player spend a turn standing on a tile, that tile's energy increases by 5.

As a player, you have something called "spare energy." Spare energy increases on every new turn. Using the command "give energy," the player can transfer a chosen amount of this spare energy to the energy of the tile on which he stands.

The player has three different "modes," which allow him to fulfil certain roles. Two of these are for attacking enemies, while the "builder" mode is for building up your base. At the beginning, you probably want builder mode. Select builder mode by right-clicking on your character, choosing the "Change Mode" option, selecting "builder" and pressing OK.

The first time you do this, because it is the beginning of the game, you are given a free villager unit. This unit is created while you are standing.

A move consistents of a movement one tile up, down, east, or west. Each unit has two moves per turn. Each unit has a "specialty." Villagers have the specialty, for example, of building on tiles and upgrading pre-existing buildings. To use a unit's specialty, right click on the unit, and select the "Specialty" option. In the villager's case, a menu filled with element names (eg, "fire," "earth," "water") will come up. These represent types of buildings [Developous, there should be a -detailed- explanation somewhere of what each building does].

The "earth" building is called a "burrow." With it, the player can create wolves. To build one, using the "give" command, transfer 15 units from spare energy to the energy of the tile on which you want to build the burrow, move the villager on top of that tile, right click on the villager unit, select "Specialty," select "Earth," and select OK. Now you've created a burrow!

To create a wolf with this burrow (wolf creation, after all, is the function of burrows), stand on top of the burrow. In this position, a new verb panel entitled "Hiring" will appear. Transfer 25 spare energy to the tile's energy using the give command (25 energy is the amount needed to build a wolf), and press the MakeWolf command in the Hiring panel. Now you have a wolf!

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When writing documentation, you need to be -at least- that detailed (probably more!). In fact, if you wrote that way even in writing blog posts, I think everyone would understand what you're trying to say much more. =)