Games


22
Aug 05

Lost: The Game

Watching the latest episode of Lost last night I started wonder whether anyone had already seized on the idea of turning it into a game.
Maybe it’s a little close to the bone given current events, but helping survivors build a working community after a plane crash or shipwreck seems like an interesting spin on the whole God Sim genre. Those kind of games revolve around basic puzzle solving and resource management.
Throw a means to write mods to alter the game play, add new elements, etc and you could quickly create the kind of bizarre and strange scenarios that we’re seeing crop up in Lost.
Kind of “The Sims get Lost” or “Post-Apocalyptic Civ”.


1
Apr 04

RDF Adventure Game

Liam Quinn wrote an adventure game using RDF (data). Found via the SWIG chump, and noted here so I can find it again in the future.
I was reminded of it after stumbling across Inform a design system for interactive fiction that’s been around since 1993.

Since its invention…Inform has been used to design some hundreds of works of interactive fiction, in eight languages…It accounts for around ten thousand postings per year to Internet newsgroups. Commercially, Inform has been used as a multimedia games prototyping tool. Academically, it has turned up in syllabuses and seminars from computer science to theoretical architecture…

This is exactly the sort of thing that could be a huge time sink for me. I used to spend vast amounts of time playing, designing and running role-playing games. No surprise there huh?!
Apparently Inform is based on a world model and accompanying rule system that deals with “rooms, items, vehicles, duplicates, containers, doors, things on top of other things, light and darkness, switching things on and off, opening, closing and locking things, looking up information in books, entering things, scoring and much more”.
I’ve always been a frustrated game designer, that’s why I used to spend a great deal of time on this project. Maybe there’s still time. Text based adventure gaming is still all the rage isn’t it?