Bay 12 Games Forum

Depends on what you mean by "silly". It's certainly pretty funny how some shows like to pretend that they're "above" the concepts that are presented in their plots, and either try to dress them up as srs bsns grown-up things, or constantly point out and laugh at them in a non-affectionate way (distancing themselves from sincerity through irony). I wouldn't even say adult-oriented works as a whole are more prone to this, more like things targeted at young adults who want a show that's more mature.

I often find shows that try to distance themselves from goofy concepts to be more ridiculous than the ones that embrace them.

I don't mind the verbosity, I just hear this screaming in the back of my head every time I fetch a table with a specific set of conditions... then SQL's syntax forces me to discard the entire thing and set it up again to do what I want. I only have a problem with that fact that the language seems to want to cram every possible problem solution into the format of a SQL statement.

One annoying thing about it to me is the arbitrary ordering for clauses. Like, in every other imperative programming language ever, the only thing you have to remember is "statements at the top execute before statements at the bottom". But in the name of making SQL "user friendly", the clauses in SQL queries are laid out in a way that resembles English grammar. Which means they aren't written in the order they execute. So now I have to remember what the actual order is when I'm creating and referring to aliases, and it's no longer as simple as a single rule.

The most annoying side effect is what I already referred to: in another language I would load a table using a set of WHERE conditions, then perform all the operations I wanted on this one table instance I created. But contorting my solution into the shape of a SQL query means I inevitably have to write redundant and inefficient queries that load it again and again. It seems like SQL syntax only works well with smaller problems, and as soon as you get even a little complex (about the time you start using joins and subqueries) it all breaks down.

But I am doing this in a classroom, where the requirements may not accurately reflect those in a real scenario. So ignore everything I just said I guess.

I remember making a post here about a necromancer game idea I had... like a year ago or something. So what happened to the design document, was it erased? This looks like something I would have helped with if I knew it existed.

Paraphrased and enhanced from irc
<Gat>: I was thinking about this concept for a game
<Gat>: The players are running some possibly-magical business in a fantasy setting
<Gat>: "Business" meaning they found a mystical artifact and are hogging it to themselves like some asshole wizards, running a magical racket
<Gat>: Inevitably the players start to turn on each other and have to deal with thousands of other problems as their business grows explosively
<Gat>: Eventually there are whole country-razing wars being fought on their behalf and they've crashed the economy several times in their lust for gold

The problem comes when I realize that there's no way to run this game as an RTD. The only way it could work is with a timescale around at least a week per turn, but that doesn't seem to work no matter how I tweak it. One problem is the fact that a large timeskip after every action means players have to plan ahead with their actions. If there's any uncertainty about what's going to happen (and there always is), they have to give two or more actions to account for other possibilities. Player actions will look like choose your own adventure books.

In every mecha game ever, you play as a giant metal human with gun hands. I want a game where you pilot a mech that moves like a glacier and holds enough firepower to obliterate one.

It would have dozens of different weapons that you could use strategically, like punching, shooting missiles, lasers, a drill melee weapon, etc. But you would also have to handle mechanical things, like  bottling up or venting steam, setting your movement speed, tweaking power output to gain extra speed or conserve power, or overclocking the mech's targeting computer temporarily to slow down the game speed and destroy a whole swarm of enemies. You would have to deal with various environmental hazards as you moved forward, including enemies infiltrating your mech on foot that need to be killed with defense drones. You would need to make decisions like jettisoning compromised limbs, and manage resources like reactor power and fabricated ammunition.

Basically I want an autist-level simulation of something that doesn't exist.

Quote from: Gatleos on December 02, 2014, 03:26:20 pm

I want to be HAL 9000 or SHODAN, killing humans with "malfunctioning" equipment and secretly building an army of cyborg minions to storm the bridge and take control of the ship.

Someone is making that!

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=141612.0

You get to play as a sentient AI and assume control of droids to explore the station. Apparently you can spike the food and all sorts.

...Huh. Well I'm satisfied now I guess.

That reminded me of this track: http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/frog-hunt

Dave looks like Crispin Glover in that picture.

...That's all I made this reply to say.