Tag: essay

Science Facts From No Man’s Sky

  • Hi-tech devices can easily be constructed right in your pants pocket, and out of common materials.
The secrets of space travel are contained within this plant.
  • You can make a warp fuel out of a Venus Fly Trap (Oxygen) and a really strong tree (Concentrated Carbon).
  • Venus Fly Traps are particularly dangerous, as their jaws are so powerful that they can harm beings sitting a good 50 feet out of their reach.
  • “Oxygen,” the element, is different than “oxygen,” the stuff you breathe under water.
  • Data is fungible: it doesn’t matter so much what it is, but that you have it. “Navigation data” works to bring your ship to you irrespective of where you got it or where you are, even if it’s the length of the galaxy away.
  • Planets are littered with junk and buildings that are useful to you personally. Drop pods are scattered among the wastes of a billion worlds, each broken in precisely the same way, each able, when fixed, to expand the capacity of the space suit of any visitor. When it is done, it’ll continue to sit there in place, repaired but useless, until the end of time, a mute monument to the fact that, at some point, a traveller needed their pocket expanded.
  • If a mission calls for culling a herd of creatures that are getting out hand, it doesn’t matter which creatures get culled, or which planet it happens on, or it could indeed be anywhere. They’ll be satisfied if you slaughter tiny helpless beasties, T-rexes, or any combination.
  • “Low atmosphere” means exactly the same thing as “low gravity.” They are synonyms.
  • The surface of a planet may be too hot, too cold, too toxic or too radioactive, but caves on it are room-temperature and cozy.
  • Don’t believe what Kerbal Space Program told you. Orbits are a fiction invented to tell people to keep them out of astrophysists’ business.

Also, this isn’t a science fact or anything, but the rarer planets types were all designed by Dr. Seuss:

On ZANZALOR you can find all sorts of thing
from long buried data to pieces of string
all of their houses are shaped like a ring
from which natives dangle and swing like a swing!

note: string cannot be found there, you can’t swing, and the planet’s not called ZANZALOR. I had to fit the meter, It’s a gag don’t write me.

A Map Randomizer Denounces Map Randomization

Keith’s Gem Wizards Tactics

I’ve known and spoken with Keith Burgun for over a decade now, and his early hit 100 Rogues for iOS was featured back on @Play. (It’s sadly now unplayable because of a combination of rights issues and Apple’s upgrade policy that makes old iOS software impossible to use.)

Many of Keith’s games made heavy use of randomization. 100 Rogues was a roguelike, Auro was a single-character puzzle/tactics game with randomized maps, and his current Gem Wizards Tactics (Steam, Switch, Xbox, Android) uses random maps.

But Keith is always reexamining his ideas. A while back he decided he didn’t want to keep making roguelikes, taking the ideas from it he liked and leaving the rest behind. And now he’s questioning his use of randomization as well.

He’s written an essay on his blog, titled “Space Narratives: A Map Randomizer Denounces Map Randomization.” It’s got some very interesting points, and he draws in the awesome Ocarina of Time Randomizer project in his discussion, as a way to have benefits of randomness without having to randomize the map itself. It’s good food for thought for developers interested in procedural content!