There’s a game idea I’ve had for about 20 years, and for some reason (*cough* Phaser HTML5 game engine *cough*) I’m revisiting it. The basic play design, even the playfield, has remained surprisingly consistent, although now the humour is even more puerile and the art style draws inspiration from Roger Ramjet. Especially for the cutscenes.
Or, Honesty in Fantasy Titles.
Personally I read all four of David Eddings' The Blue McGuffin series, and I enjoyed the Pern books up to All the Weyrs of Pern, which was a natural ending to the series.
After a while though, I began to notice much of fantasy and sf can’t escape the Comedy Troupe Take the McGuffin on a Road Trip format.
What if the great mad inventor wizard sage has created their most profound invention, a machine that traps a deity inside it?
“Yes, we agree, it’s the marvel of the age. Yes, it worked exactly as you claimed. There’s just one thing.
“It caught the wrong god.”
Since people often ask “Alright, well this is fantasy! Why can’t we have boob shapes in plate armor?!” I decided to make a post about it. My frustration has nothing to do with historical inaccuracy and I’m all for imagination and freedom— but I’d like to (very quickly) illustrate this for you:
Hmmmmm…. really fascinating article in the original here.
I wish Peter Jackson would make a Skyrim movie.
Actually I bet he’d prefer to make a Fallout movie. He must be sick of epic fantasy by now.
JasonJ, commenting on Charlie Stross’ post The Death of Genre, said this:
Tags, as long as they are accurate, are just what I’ve wanted. I long ago stopped bothering to seej just fantasy or just sci-fi – there are plenty of sub-groups within both that I just don’t care for, but there’s no quick way to spot them, even with the book in my hands. Tags could do that for me. I don’t need a genre, I need a range of subject matter.
And genre is a rather subtle limiter too. I would mentally classify quite a number of favourite 18th, 19th, and early 20th century classics as fantasy, but according to the world at large they are simply “literature” (and owing to their age and establishment as classics, people I speak to just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of, for example, the works of Dumas or Haggard being fantasy). If I went looking by genre I might never find them. Remove genre and just use tags like “adventure”, “swash-buckling”, “futurism”, or even “bodice-ripper”, and finding books to match your interests becomes so much easier.
As a virtual DJ, I myself find that the existing Genre field in ID3 tags is increasingly restrictive. Obsolete, even, given the way musical styles subdivide and combine, not just on a per-album basis but a per-track one as well.
Increasingly, a song, article, image – or book – will reflect the influences of more than one traditional genre. For instance, I have a catch-all genre I call ‘bronycore’ (i.e. music created by fans of the TV cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic), but in that genre are tunes whose style ranges from classic filk (e.g. The Beatle Bronies) to dubstep, chiptunes, rave… you get the idea, crude as this example is.
However, tags are only as good as the tagger. An item may emerge with no tags at all, or be plastered with as many tags as the tagger thinks are even remotely relevant.
Personally, I would prefer a more subtle system of weighted tags: searchers can add to the weight of tags they consider most important, or irrelevant to the content. Yes, such a system would be open to abuse, but so are any other cataloguing fields. (Twice I have obtained completely misnamed files through Songr. Not good when you’re performing live!)
Whether or not such a system is feasible in the real world, however, is open to debate.
I’m still not quite competent with the graphics tablet, but here’s an initial sketch of the first area you visit: the throne room. If I can ever draw a decently straight line on this thing, I’ll wash out the linework (and put it on a separate layer) before flood-filling the parts. Flat colours and almost-but-not-quite straight lines are all part of the intended art style.
Currently I’m intending to use a canvas of 800x450 pixels, a quarter of my screen size. This should make for a decently sized download on most connections. Also close-ups probably won’t have detailed backgrounds to a) save space and b) avoid FIGWITs.
You’ll see this longer than you’d like in the initial cutscene.
