Bay 12 Games Forum

I like the story but it is very crony, and I would expect the victor faction to be a mix of psychos and alturists, rather than simply agreeing to be the mark every time and getting a posthumus award.

I think that the story is crony, but that is because the message is crony. Fable of the Bees is interesting because it advocates a unexpected chain of events: altursits convice psychos to stop being evil and accidentally cause the destruction of society. I would like a story with a mix of the Antmen and Bees, where neither the altursists or the psychos create a perfect society, but instead one that has realistic flaws and benefits.

Good job!

And it's over. I have finally finished Zybourne Clock Redux. It's a game playable in your browser, and only requires JavaScript. The game will work fine on modern web browsers. There's a quick tutorial that I would suggest reading.

I'm not entirely happy with the final product, but I have met my requirements, and the game is indeed playable. I would like feedback, if any, so that I can improve myself in the future.

It was exhausting trying to produce a game with unique mechanics. I think these mechanics did what they were supposed to do, and playtesters were excited about playing it. They however did not play it a lot though, suggesting that I may have inadvertently created a "casual" time-traveling game. Oh well.

I am still somewhat surprised how popular Technocracy became in the 1930s. I suppose that some people were so desperate for solutions that they were willing to trust 'scientists' to solve their problems. I sometimes idly wonder about writing an alternate history story where the Technocrats had succeeded in taking over the US...before realizing that such a "planned economic" society would be pretty much similar to totalitarian communism, with the only difference being that at least the totalitarians plans on the state eventually withering away while the technocrats believe that their society is indeed the best of all worlds. So such a story about the Technate would only be interesting if the Technate was incompetent...but then again, the USSR can be said to be pretty incompetent too.

If I reinvented the Stalinist Comrade Squad from the ground-up, I would have probably considered styling their rhetoric to be more "Technocratic" and less "Populist"...at least the former would have been more ideologically consistent. But I probably would stick with the populism. Movements like the "Tea Party" and "Occupy" shows that populism today can whip up a mob quickly in favor of [INSERT CAUSE HERE]. Pretty hard to gather support in favor of peer-reviewed papers written by ivory-tower academics.

Thanks for reposting the link! Reopening the map and watching civilizations rise and fall bring back memories of the "Great Schism". Of course, since I had it run on super-speed mode, I didn't really see what those civilizations were actually believing in, but I did see a rather odd religion that venerates both astrology and math and has its 'god' represented by Integers.

Update on my life as a careerist game developer:

After making a prototype "time-modification" game in JavaScript*, the school has cooled off on its game-making craze. Most of the work we're doing now are somewhat more practical. However, there are still a few extra credit assignments that I ended up doing, and the toughest of those assignments was to remake Battleship. The AI is pretty terrible (just random shots all the way), but you got player versus player, CPU versus CPU, and player versus CPU. I even added my own story about the game taking place after a nuclear World War 3, and some people seemed to like that. (Future expansion would be a better AI, of course.)

Some of the assignments can be twisted into unique games, if you wanted to. For example, one of our mandatory assignments were to make To-Do Apps, and isn't HabitRPG just one big To-Do App with gamification? Another extra credit assignment, called "Self-Replicating Robots", enable me to trace the rise and fall of a robotic space empire, which, you know, seems to lend very well to any game that deals with space empires. I'm interested in expanding on the "Self-Replicating Robots" challenge, possibly by using Iron Testament's economic simulations.

Again, the aim is not to go into game design. The point is to gain enough skills and talents that will enable me to work in a cubicle. But it might be interesting to develop your skill set properly, and it does seem slightly more fun than building Fibonacci algorithms.

*"Zybourne Clock Redux". The prototype was interesting, but some more tinkering needs to be done to make the game fun.

The FTC has fined a man $111,793.71 for not fulfilling his Kickstarter project and failing to give out refunds*.

*Technically, the FTC and the man agreed to a settlement, and the fine itself is suspended because the man has no money. The man himself raised $122,874 from the Kickstarter, so he probably got off easy.

I would think that the New Earth Conspiracy would be scarier if it was an "apolitical" conspiracy dedicated towards the goal of human supremacy. Let the CSS, AM Radio, and Cable News focus their efforts on promoting petty conservatism, but the NEC will play the "long game" and maneuver its way through the changing American political landscape. No matter who ends up winning, the NEC wins too.

In this view, the NEC will support extremist non-L+ politicians, trying to convert conservative politicians into Arch-Conservatives and liberal politicians into Stalinists (this is, of course, assuming you actually want to have Stalinists in your game). It doesn't matter to the NEC whether unions controls the means of production or are brutally suppressed by said means of production. All that matters is that, in the end, mankind stays supreme and the eco-weenies' political influence squeezed out.

It might even be possible for the LCS to make a deal with the NEC devil, abandoning several L+ positions on Animal Rights, Pollution, etc. in return for the NEC providing their own backing to L+ extremists (though such an action would certainly anger the TV and is overall considered a pretty terrible outcome).