One Billion Mazes
So you can find a copy of the latest set of source code for the engine here.
C++ is a pain, but I suspect its just because higher level languages have left me spoiled and lazy. I am strongly resisting the urge to abandon C++ for something more interesting, like Common Lisp.
But I won't.
In other news, there is this site, which features, as the URL implies, exactly one billion mazes. Stripped of its outer skin, all video games are essentially mazes of one kind or another. BlueArizona, as an explorating game, makes its maze nature particularly evident.
Mazes are strange things, in their purely abstract form. The user proceeds purely algorithmically, since no strategy beyond exhaustive search of paths presents itself for their solution, and this leads in many cases to a series of dead ends. Without a story or a setting, a dead end is a penalty, and a minor irritant, though perhaps the very imaginative child might supply the experience with a narrative.
Video games, especially the really good explorating games, make dead ends the reward, while the ultimate end point of the maze is a foregone conclusion. In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night there are countless such dead ends, useless little rooms in which we are treated to nothing but the life cycle of nesting birds or some similar little detail. Dead ends also become fertile places to plant power ups, useless or superfluous items, bits and pieces of the story.
BlueArizona should exploit its maze nature in this way.
C++ is a pain, but I suspect its just because higher level languages have left me spoiled and lazy. I am strongly resisting the urge to abandon C++ for something more interesting, like Common Lisp.
But I won't.
In other news, there is this site, which features, as the URL implies, exactly one billion mazes. Stripped of its outer skin, all video games are essentially mazes of one kind or another. BlueArizona, as an explorating game, makes its maze nature particularly evident.
Mazes are strange things, in their purely abstract form. The user proceeds purely algorithmically, since no strategy beyond exhaustive search of paths presents itself for their solution, and this leads in many cases to a series of dead ends. Without a story or a setting, a dead end is a penalty, and a minor irritant, though perhaps the very imaginative child might supply the experience with a narrative.
Video games, especially the really good explorating games, make dead ends the reward, while the ultimate end point of the maze is a foregone conclusion. In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night there are countless such dead ends, useless little rooms in which we are treated to nothing but the life cycle of nesting birds or some similar little detail. Dead ends also become fertile places to plant power ups, useless or superfluous items, bits and pieces of the story.
BlueArizona should exploit its maze nature in this way.
posted by J.V. Toups at 13:57
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home