the Great Experiment

I have been working full time for 3 years now, and hard-core for another 3 part-time before that, on my dream game project. This project is special for many reasons, not least of which is the incredible-ness of the design, but also for what it can do for collaboration. This project – this game – is what I designed to answer a  very particular question, not about what games can do, but about what technology can do to bring people together and get them to cooperate. I don’t mean in a hold-hands-and-sing kind of way, I mean in a constant party, family reliance, love-and-hate kind of way.

Imagine the greatest social environments you have ever been a part of. What were your goals as a group? What kept you together, even if it was only for 5 minutes? What nature did your goals have that produced the experience you enjoyed so much? This game is here to answer these questions – to help answer them, then be the answer for anyone who wishes to learn from it. The game is what I came up with after a life-time of searching for the one solution to my problems: how do I get all these fucking people to love one another, and pay attention to me.

Pursuit of truth, of flow, of the correct pattern for perfect self-expression. That is what this game is for, to help you with that pursuit, to let you share it with others. What does that mean for the design? A whole shit-ton, a whole metric fuck-wad of research and design theory and programming and dream-like cooperation between individuals. What does that mean for right now? What have I done so far? A whole shit-ton. A whole metric fuck-wad of research and … you get the idea. Right now the design and research phase has come to a close, as much as it can before the actually building can begin. Know where we start to build? Right with brick number one – wherever that goes – using you and me as collaborators. I build, you watch. That’s the system that will make this work, plus my brilliance, and you know all of my work leading up to this point.

There are two important concepts you have to understand to understand what my process will be.

1. The game is at the apex of iterative development. I mean way, way far beyond anything else that exists in game development, movie development, anything anywhere that has even a smidgen of public access to it.
2. The whole game is structured by an AI. All of the game’s content is procedurally generated – the degree of which does vary. Collaborators put their ideas into the system and those ideas are swept away by it, to be properly integrated with everything else, included in a polished product/prototype.

The first point depends on a system of development that I have invented, but to any experienced developer should come as a logical extension of the systems already used in the industry. I am just taking the benefits of iterative development and ratcheting them up as far as they will go. The second point depends on technology, and is way more complicated to understand if you don’t program AIs for a living. The two points depend on one another, but thankfully the second point is infinitely easy to take advantage of – without having any understanding of its internals – and the first one can be learned one step at a time. There is nothing large to digest here, not all at once. Every step in your learning, if such learning is to take place, will be natural.

The best way to continue is just to do so. I will on some, yet-to-be-decided, system of regular intervals produce updates for you to read on three things:

1. What the game has become.
2. What the design justifications were to make the changes to the game that were made.
3. Who contributed (collaborated on) what.

At the beginning I will be the only collaborator, and all of you will be readers and commentators. Your collaborations will be apparent through how we communicate. If any idea you provide sparks a process that ends in a design change – and thus a game change – then I will include it in my update as a collaboration, with proper formatting, explanation and credit.

Of course as I start to make money, and the collaborations of some individuals become significant, profits will be shared in some reasonable way. There will be a path from stranger to full-time collaborator – from lurker, to poster, to full-time employee – that will be explained and obvious to everyone, so that if someone wishes to traverse that path he/she may, pending his/her ability (of course).

Work will be done in Unity for easy distribution. The game will be heavily metrics driven. The AI will not go in until a later stage. We’ll begin with the basics. Core mechanics, aesthetics, a beginning/middle/end: these are what we’ll start with. I look forward to whatever will come of this, and meeting and interacting with whoever comes my way. Thank you for reading. This process will be an adventure.

Your random internet guy, from the internet… sincerely,

Graham Luke.