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Archive for April, 2015
Rough consensus and running code
This was the motto for the Internet Engineering Task Force efforts back in the 1990s, seeking to define the various emerging Internet standards. It was stated as a rejection of “kings, presidents, and voting” in defining those standards. While the phrase was coined in a setting of open-source group standard development, I want to repurpose it […]
Modeling systems
I spent some time the other afternoon jotting down thoughts on models for systems, planets, and regions. Of course, I almost immediately got sucked down into the vortex of star system generation. This was actually a keen interest of mine for many years back in the late 1970s and through the 1980s (one of my first articles […]
More historical background
[Based on an e-mail I sent to BruceH on 4/22/15] I’ve actually been laying out the background for the Sundog novel (and by extension Frasgird) for several years. The multiverse/jitter cycle is an essential aspect of reality; in the novels, it helps account for the matter/anti-matter imbalance, for the non-uniform structure (supergroups of galaxies, etc.) […]
What would make Frasgird fun?
After spending time in the last post talking a bit about what Frasgird isn’t, I think it’s important to talk about what makes Frasgird fun, or at least fascinating, and why people would want to play it. The stakes are, of course, survival — not just personal survival, but survival of humanity itself. There is […]
What Frasgird is not
I’ve covered some of this here, but I think it’s important to set boundries — at least for now — around the game design, and so let me state what Frasgird is not, at least at present and in my own opinion. I’ll likely come back and edit/add to this post from time to time. […]
Modeling economics (first of many parts)
In Sundog (the game), there were 30 types of cargo that could be transported by the pod (and thus by the ship), plus nothing and cryogens (the ‘green ice’ pods) — 32 types in all (because, binary). Each had an associated base price. Here’s the data from the original game, with the base price for each […]
Modeling characters
I have a number of thoughts about how to model characters (individual sapients) in Frasgird; I’ll try to capture some of them here. First, as much as possible, I would like the character ‘model’ (attributes, status, available choices, other info) to be consistent across all races of sapients and across the player, all major non-player […]
Modeling and representing the colony
I believe the modeling of Frasgird itself should be slightly abstract but still present some sort of graphic representation. We don’t need or want a SimCity-level model (though it might look cool). I’m not even sure we need/want one on level of the original Sundog, where you can drive/walk around the city, because I’m not […]
Modeling genetic diversity
One of the factors in achieving the main goal of Frasgird — survival of the human race — is creating a population in the colony with sufficient genetic diversity (and size) to allow it to progress. One of the backstory assumptions is that the various scattered human settlements (almost all of which are on predominantly […]
Welcome to Frasgird
This is the initial website for a new game under development, Frasgird: Defying the Endtimes. Keep checking back for more details!