Thursday, October 18
We've got it! We got our SDK! Well, I mean, we don't HAVE it yet, but we have a promise, and a promise that times nicely with my being done with Delicious Library 2 and looking for something to do before I start on v3.
So what are we going to do with it? Sure, we're going to port Peggle (from PopCap), the BEST GAME EVER, and I hope there's a native version of Xeno Tactics (please write me if you know who can make this happen).
BUT WHAT ELSE! We need to take advantage of the incredible and unique features of the iPhone... So, I'm going to try something new in the comments, here, and encourage people to brainstorm with me, either with new ideas or refining previous ideas to make them more possible / more fun.
Let's look at the perfect storm of features the iPhone has brewing:
- Always on. No other handheld consumer device is always on. Laptops go to sleep, as do DS Lites. Always on means that if we write social software, our iPhone can find other iPhones to talk to
for us based on some criteria, and then notify us as it finds matches. Welcome to the REAL social, bitches.
- Always with their masters. Nobody who owns an iPhone will venture more than 20 feet from it.
- Pretty damn popular. Sure, there is an order of magnitude more DSes, but iPhone is growing at a crazy rate. I see several every day at the café that I actually did NOT buy!
- A cool variety of inputs, including acceleration detectors and a touch screen.
- Really good resolution. Fairly fast graphics for certain subsets of drawing, but not something that'll run Quake 3 at a billion FPS.
- Great networking, including Bluetooth, WiFi, and Edge. (Bono to be included in the next version.)
- Doesn't require a cartridge per app, like Gameboys or Sony PSPs. All apps are resident in the iPhone at once, and multitask, so having a few casual, silly apps is much more likely. (Eg, you don't have to scream to everyone in the café, "Hey, let's all put in our social networking cartridge so we can break the ice!)
- Is not butt-ugly like Zune.
Idea 1) "My Pokémons, Let Me Show Them To You."
Imagine carrying all your Pokémon (or Magic, or whatever) cards around on your phone, and you can show 'em off CoverFlow-style, baby. If some other iPhone-wielding fool wants to step to your deck, you press a button for a WiFi connection (or bluetooth, even) and get to use your fingers to point to cards you want and throw them out on the playfield - it gives card battles a real tactile interaction.
How do your cards get in to the phone? Well, if you want to use existing cards, you scan them in with the iPhone's camera, and recognize the photo (compared to a database of cards) and add that physical card to the user's virtual collection.
Finally, you can trade virtual cards to people around you. For extra style points, you could list a bunch of cards you want and cards you don't want, and other iPhone users running the same client would just get notified that a potential trade is in their area. I imagine Gabe at the opera (yes, I like to imagine him going to the opera, ok?) and suddenly his phone starts buzzing and someone wants to buy one of his chimpochocs. "Honey, shhhh!"
Idea 2) "My zombie beats your werewolf. Or mates with him."
Like with the Zombie mini-game on facebook, all iPhone users could have zombie (or mutant, or zombie-hunter, or whatever) avatars, and whenever two iPhones get too close, they start to battle. It'd be super-funny if they did this on their own, so you could just be walking along and you and another dude's phones would suddenly go batshit making fighting and gurgling noises.
You'd win persistent points, which would be tracked by a central database on some website, so you could see who trumps who. Each time you fight someone who is stronger than you, and you lose, you wouldn't get points but you'd get some of their "DNA" on you, which your creature could incorporate to become stronger. But, there'd be diminishing returns for fighting the same person over and over -- essentially you get zero points for attacking a creature with the similar DNA, so you want to find diverse creatures. You'd be much better off wandering around downtown and fighting strangers, because then you'll get a lot more possible mutations for your creature, and a lot more points for victories you make.
Idea 3) "Screw Pokémon, We Make Our Own Collectible Card Game"
Like idea #1, but rather than screw with licensing, we make up a new game that's like Magic meets Pokémon meets all those other game Richard Garfield wrote or inspired. BUT, and here's the cool part, we just make up the base system, NOT all the cards.
Like, we say, "Oh, in this game there is POWER, and POWER can be fed each round into ABILITIES or SPELLS or ATTACKS, and the order in which these things happen is this and this and this."
THEN, we let people invent their own cards (in a high-level language we invent), most of which will contain exceptions to the rules or things which change the rules, because that's what's actually fun about these games. There would be some ground rules for developing cards -- eg, you'd have to win some matches to earn the points to do it, and your total card strength would be limited by how many points you are willing to spend. And you'd have to incorporate "flaws" with abilities or affects, too, so nobody could just say, "This card is free to play and requires no power and stops time and all your hit points go away."
Even so, obviously some cards would be unbalancing. So: there's a central repository for card ideas, and before ANYONE can play a card (in matches which count towards points) it has to be digitally signed by the repository. The community views new cards and votes on which ones should go "into production", (and which ones should be retired) and those cards are made available... BUT, you can't just buy 'em directly. There's a random element to getting cards, as there should be... one cool thing we could do would be to finally do what Garfield wanted, and have it so you win cards in battle. Like, the loser of a battle could decide if she wanted to allow the winner to pick her best card and get a two new cards randomly from the repository, OR just let the winner get a single new card from the repository herself, OR vote for a single card from the winner's hand to be banned from play. (This wouldn't immediately ban it, but at some point really unfair cards would get too many votes and leave circulation.)
Players would also be able to create "testing decks" -- they could use any number of any cards, legal or not legal, BUT matches with those decks look different and don't give any points or ranking. And, like, the iPhone takes away some of the graphic glitz, so it's clear you're just beta-testing your deck, you're not REALLY playing.
Idea 4) "Gnip-gnop"
If you go to the kind of parties I do, about twenty people at any gathering have iPhones. What if you made some fast, silly gams (drinking games, maybe?) involving the phones? For example, take something as simple as a ball bouncing between people -- you'd see it coming towards your screen, and you'd have to flick it away, and you could flick it towards other players, and they'd have to keep it going...
Or, imagine an iPhone game where you do that old sliding-picture-puzzle thing, where each iPhone's screen shows a section of a larger picture, and then everybody has to move around and stand next to each other such that the puzzle is solved.
You could do this with teams -- maybe have it so there's a message, and each iPhone shows a different letter, and you have to re-arrange the iPhones to figure out the message first.
Or you could show pictures on everyone's iPhone, but only two of them are similar, and those two people have to race to touch their iPhones together before a timer expires... I wonder if bluetooth signal strength is detectable on the iPhone, or WiFi signal strength -- whether one could actually tell if two phones are in very close proximity vs. 10 feet apart.
Idea 5) "Flash Mob Friends"
Not necessarily a game... imagine tying in to the iPhone extension that can tell where your iPhone is based on the cell towers around it, and using that as a way to gather groups. You could have a tiny app that simply has a button for what kind of group you would like to hang with, and others in your group would be notified if they are in a similar mood.
For instance, if I'm hungry, I could have a group of friends I sometimes eat with. So I press "Dinner Friends" and I go to Saluté, and everyone in that group can see where I am and that I am, in fact, actively getting dinner and would like company. They can IM me or just show up.
This is a lot like what I do right now for dinner, actually, except right now it's more aggressive -- I have to page like 20 people with "Hey, getting dinner, what up?" and they have to actively turn me down "OH, sorry, just ate." I think it'd be easier on everyone if it were more passive, "Hey, everyone, getting dinner, if you are hungry and available then ping me, otherwise cool." And without the urgency of a page -- just a status you could check, like in Twitter or iChat.
Labels: mac community, random ideas
Thursday, October 11
I own an Apple TV. (Yah, I'm the one.) I turned it on when I first got it, thought it looked really pretty, then turned it off and never touched it again.
BUT! I think Apple TV will be an amazing device, and a massive success for Apple... after they make a few changes.
Why did I turn mine off? Well, because in my TV room I also have a Mac mini hooked up to a 2TB drive. The Mac mini runs Front Row, just like the Apple TV, so it could be looked as a more-expensive version of the same device.
However, the mini also runs iTunes, so I can buy new shows on the same system on which I'm watching TV. With the Apple TV, I have to have my laptop downstairs and turned on, and buy and download a new movie on the laptop before I switch over to my Apple TV to watch it. Clunky! (The situation is worse if you have a Mac Pro with your media on it -- what are you going to do, run upstairs to the computer room every time you want to buy a song or show?)
And because the mini has a huge drive hooked up to it, it also acts as a content server to the rest of my house, so I can have a unified home for all my music and TV shows and movies, whether ripped or bought from iTunes -- it's my "Windows Home Server" without the Windows. Unlike with the Apple TV, which can't have an external disk, I never have to bring a second system into the equation, so the mini ends up being
cheaper than the Apple TV, because the Apple TV
requires a separate computer.
And now I don't even have to bother storing my movies on my laptop, which is great, because my drive is already pretty damn full of porn. Uh, I mean builds of Delicious Library 2. In fact, nowadays if I want to buy a new movie and I'm not downstairs, I remotely access my mini from my laptop using Apple Remote Desktop and buy it from the version of iTunes running on the mini, so it's right on my server where I want it. Again, possible because the mini is running a full OS, not just Front Row.
Note that a lot of the movies and TV shows I want to watch aren't from iTunes -- but since the mini is an open system, I can download
Perian, an open source QuickTime add-on, and play movies AVI, FLV, MKV, DivX, and a billion other gibberish words. Hell, I don't even know what an FLV is. But, the point is, some of the content I want to play is in these formats, and Apple doesn't support them in QuickTime natively, so I can't play them on my Apple TV, since it's a closed system.
If a friend brings over a DVD, I just pop it in the mini and we watch it. The DVD player under OS X has a much nicer interface (and remote!) than any other player I've had, so I put my super-expensive multi-region player into cold storage. The Apple TV doesn't have a DVD drive, and you can't hook one up, since it ignores external USB devices.
For my personal DVDs, I can rip them using
Handbrake and store them in my Movies folder, and Front Row magically finds them! No more pawing through stacks of DVDs! I finally have a DVD jukebox, the ultimate geek dream. The Apple TV doesn't allow me to install any third-party software. Heck, I can't even rip my CDs on the Apple TV, since it doesn't run iTunes and doesn't have a CD drive.
--
To sum up: Apple TV doesn't allow developers to get at its UNIX underpinnings. It doesn't allow for modifications of its system software. It doesn't allow people to hook up an external disk or a DVD drive. It's a completely closed system. And, as of right now, it's pretty much a failure.
Apple took a guess as to what features the market would want, and because Apple didn't allow for third parties to tweak and optimize what their system does, their guess had to be perfect the first time. It wasn't, and the Apple TV stays off in my house.
There appears to be a battle being fought inside Apple, on whether Apple will be a company that provides solutions or provides tools. iTunes and Front Row are solutions -- really great solutions, sure. They are very friendly and they solve very specific problems beautifully. But they aren't particularly extensible by themselves. We can't make new functionality with them. (Note that if we have access to the underlying machine, as we do with the Mac mini, we are given the tools to modify these solutions -- we can make Front Row play MKV files by adding QuickTime components, even though it was written before MKV existed. We can make iTunes play WMVs.)
Having a system be open, having it able to freely accept peripherals and new programs, turns it into a tool
as well as a solution. Each customer can decide what she wants the system to be, and developers can create new solutions -- and if those solve compelling problems, the entire system will be that much more successful. And, at the end of this cycle, the makers of the original tool can integrate these third-party solutions, so the tool grows for everyone.
The amazing thing about the Mac mini vs. the Apple TV is it perfectly encapsulates the debate between providing solutions or tools to your customers. They are very similar boxes, from a raw-capability point of view, but one was closed and the other open. The Apple TV is a solution, and right now it's desperately searching for people who have the problem it solves.
With the Mac mini, Apple provided us with a mix of solutions (iTunes, Front Row, etc) and tools (expandability, compilers, access to UNIX, access to plug-in directories). And, as a set-top box, the mini is incredible. Now, obviously, I have no idea what the mini's sales numbers are, and Apple hasn't really pushed the mini as a set-top box, and it does cost more than the Apple TV, blah blah blah... but it's clear to me that if the Apple TV did what the mini does, the Apple TV would be a GREAT set-top box and home server. It would own the Microsoft Home Server so hard that Ballmer would wake up with a sore back.
--
Why doesn't Apple just fix their solutions themselves, you say? If we all want MKV movies so much, why doesn't Apple just include support for it?
Well, first off, they probably should, in this particular example. But Apple only has so many engineers on QuickTime, and besides it may not be particularly popular to add support for bizarro file formats from other companies, especially when Apple is pushing MPEG-4 (aka QuickTime) as the One True Wrapper.
Second off, third parties can afford to sometimes make very limited or kind of half-baked solutions to dip a toe into the water, and if those are popular they can be fixed up later. Open Source projects don't make headlines in the NY Times when they push a major release that has some bugs, so we collectively get to invent a TON of different things let the market figure out which ones are pursuing. Consider the original CoverFlow, which was originally just a (really cool) demo by a third-party, in search of a problem to solve. Now Apple's bought it and put it into everything it ships except for iPod socks.
Apple can't anticipate every change that is coming, or which changes will end up being popular. No, I don't think they should give up trying to do so, but I
do think they should share the burden. For instance, I've never seen an "FLV" file. Let's pretend for a minute that Apple did spend a bunch of time writing an FLV component for QuickTime, instead of speeding up h.264 encoding or something. And then, it turned out basically nobody used FLV, and Apple wasted their time and lost other neat functionality because of it.
Now, the nice thing about FLV support being add in Perian is that Apple essentially has a bunch of suckers (I use the term lovingly) taking all the risk for them. If nobody cares about third-party movie formats -- well, Apple didn't spend any time on it. Shrug! If EVERYBODY cares about them -- well, there they are! Go download 'em! In fact, hey, these are open source -- Apple could just start bundling with them. No effort spent on Apple's part, but their marketshare just got a lot bigger.
This is the beauty of open systems. Apple has a ton of very talented designers and very smart engineers. But they shouldn't have to be the ONLY smart people in the world, who must anticipate everything every customer might ever need. It's asking too much.
--
This whole post is ironic because Apple pays its AppleScript evangelists to say exactly what I'm saying, but back to us developers: Add scriptability to your apps! You can't anticipate everything the customer will want, but you can make your app into a tool! Allow other vendors to tie into your system and everyone wins!
--
I expect Apple will rev the Apple TV soon. One thing they could announce is that you can now rent movies over the internet, or maybe they'll announce you can access the iTunes store from directly inside Front Row. Either of these would be nice, sure. But they'd just be more pre-made solutions -- maybe they'd be popular enough to make the Apple TV a decent success, maybe not. But we would never know what Apple TV
could be.
What I want Apple to announce is that they are merging the Apple TV with the Mac mini, and making it a hybrid closed/open system - a machine that boots into Front Row but can be used as a standard computer if you press some magic keys. A turn-key solution that can be opened up by advanced users and developers. The first mainstream consumer device that is infinitely hackable.
The world is waiting for such a product. Apple's the company to do it.
Set me free inside an Apple TV, see what I do for you.
Labels: business, mac community
Tuesday, October 2
Themes explored: when does the player feel violence necessary, how do people's backgrounds influence this decision, and (major theme) that you HAVE to make a decision on this point, that you can't decide not to decide because reasonable people disagree and people will be hurt or happy either way.
Setting: you inherit a rescue-and-treat space facility from someone (your dead, estranged dad?). You are put in charge fresh out of med school. At the start of the game you are presented with a modified hippocratic oath which you must "sign" to go forward -- promising to "do no harm" before you can play the game.
Your base is a space hospital that is a stationary (at least at first) facility with a space ambulance / boarding vessel that is surprisingly tough. The hospital is asked to help in all kinds of space emergencies -- it's not just a hospital, it's a hostage rescue, fire-fighting, plague-containing, pirate warding all-purpose help-people-out kind of place.
The staff of the hospital consists of a handful of doctors who go on missions with you. What's special about these doctors is they've all joined the space hospital guild, which has a secret technology which only its members get, which enables them to magically teleport back to the hospital before they sustain enough damage to die. Thus, they are (for our game purposes) unkillable, but they aren't unstoppable -- you can't continue a mission if everyone gets killed and sent back to base, duh.
We want to keep the number of doctors small so the player gets attached to them (instead of having a party of zillions where you plug in and out faceless, nameless numbers) and feels that developing them is worthwhile -- trading them in on better models isn't an option. Also, when one of them quits in disgust, it should really hurt.
Big plot: Not-so-friendly, very advanced, very xenophobic aliens (a la Heechee/Gateway books) have decided the easy way to ensure their dominance is to spend several milleniums locked inside a giant time capsule and wake up occasionally, taking the good ideas from all life forms that have evolved, and then wiping them all out and letting new ones start.
The first thing that happens before they wake up is thousands of automated probes are sent out to all inhabited planets, and the probes start subtly screwing with the creatures on the planets to discover their strengths and weaknesses.
Phase one is the probes start dredging up each society's long-dead plagues and trying them out.
So, after a long period (thousands of years) of relative peace, the player is born into a galaxy that, for the last hundred years is falling increasingly into war and savagery, because the delicate balances of societies are being screwed up. Eg, planets that have become specialized in, say, robot creation, and don't even bother farming any more will find that they are all starving when the farming planets that supply them are attacked by plagues, and so in desperation they'll try to annex other farming planets that other advanced societies are depending on.
Plagues are becoming more and more common, and each plague is getting nastier than the last, because the probes are learning which ones work best.
In phase two the probes start exchanging information, and so plagues can't be contained any more, and need to be cured or the galaxy will be wiped out.
In phase three the probes start creating new plagues based on what they've learned, and so the player needs to find a supercomputer that can come up with cures as fast as the plagues are being changed, and get societies plugged into the computer.
Further phases (not finished yet) involve the aliens actually waking up and kicking butt, which the player will finally figure out and have to deal with.
Missions vs. plot: 911 calls come in, and each hospital (there are others in the universe) will claim them depending on the hospital's effective range and the mission distance. After a while any given call will either be claimed or just time out. The player should aim for 100% of the calls in her range to be claimed by someone, but since there are other hospitals she won't have to do all of them herself, either. But if the player ignores too many in a row, the other hospitals will get piled up and calls will start going unanswered. (Simulate this for real or fake it?)
A lot of the missions will be randomly generated, non-plot missions. However, many of these, if you succeed at them, will be changed by the game into plot missions. Eg, if you answer a pirate attack call and save the captain, it may just so happen that captain saw something anomolous in another sector that you should check out blah blah blah. If the captain dies, he didn't see anything, but maybe the next pirate call will contain the lucky captain who did?
The basic idea is, no plotline can be "lost" by the player failing a mission that leads to it, because we just define the missions the user failed to not actually be part of the plot, and only the ones she succeeds at are made available to the game's mission engine for inclusion in the plot. (Eg, the game engine needs a captain for the next part of a plot point, so it waits until the user gets one in the hospital, either as a walk-in or a rescue or what-have-you.)
There will also be walk-in patients all the time, some of whom may have interesting plot points but a lot of whom will just be background noise. The user shouldn't have to do anything with the walk-ins unless she wants to. (Eg, they'll automatically be treated, billed, and released unless there is something really unusual about them.)
Note that the plagues are sort of background noise at the start of the game -- the player has known of quaranteened planets all her life, and doesn't think there's anything odd about it. New plagues popping up is just a fact of life, just another kind of mission. But early in the game wise authority figures start pointing out that the universe wasn't always this way, that there are statistically too many plagues right now, that something is really wrong with the whole universe. Of course, there will be lots of paranoid theories of what that thing is that's wrong -- some will feel mankind has just lived to the end of its useful life and is dying of "old age", others will feel it's the inevitable triumph of microorganisms over macroorganisms that some people today think is inevitable, etc.
Actually, it should be at the start of the game that whoever who left you the hospital also leaves you a note that tells you that something isn't right in the universe, and that although the old hospital chief couldn't figure it out, she did start to figure out who had the right ideas, and that the player should contact Professor So-and-so as soon as possible and resume her quest to set the universe right.
Prof. So-and-so should probably be already dead, but there should be clues to someone else who can start explaining what's going on in the world. (This first plot person should probably only explain give information about the plagues and suggest ways to combat them, and hint that there must be a darker force doing this but not have any idea what or who it is.)
Mission structure: When the player goes out on missions (most of the game) she'll enter what are usually high-risk areas (often with combat going on) and have to make decisions about what kind of approach to take.
For example, if a pirate ship has boarded and taken over a freighter and has hostages, and the space ambulance docks, what will the player's boarding party do? THIS SHOULD BE UP TO THE PLAYER.
Some valid things to do:
- kill every pirate, then heal all the wounded merchants.
- heal wounded merchants as a priority but kill pirates if/when they interfere.
- sneak around and get all the wounded merchants out and treated without killing any pirates, letting the pirates have the ship but not the people.
- heal pirates and wounded merchants, stun pirates who resist, let pirates have ship
- stun all pirates, heal everyone wounded, give ship back to merchants.
Sure, the last one might sound the best to a lot of people, but it would also be the hardest -- the pirates don't want to be stunned, they're fighting with live ammo, and if they kill your team you lose the mission because you're teleported back to base and they'll surely get away before you get back to them.
Also, MORE IMPORTANTLY, people ARE DYING as you are traipsing around the ship. When you board a ship there will be people actively bleeding out, some of whom you can treat and stabilize but some of whom will require a doctor to monitor them or they'll just plain die. So, as you go through the ship, you'll have to make decisions every time you encounter a wounded person (pirate or merchant) -- "Can I spare another doctor to look after this person, will I be able to finish the mission with one less gun?"
Note that you WILL be able to group critical patients together and have a single doctor look after multiple patients, but hauling them around takes time and other people might be dying elsewhere, and also it gives the pirates more time to secure the ship. (Say it takes the pirates a while to get the engine codes cracked, so there's a period of time after pirates take a ship where they can't fly it, and that's how you managed to dock with them -- they are dead in the water for a while.)
There should be valid reasons presented to the player why she might want to do the mission each different way -- for example, the "kill-all-pirates" approach would result in the pirates having the ship for the least amount of time, and thus there would be less chance for them to actually get the engines restarted and actually make off with the booty. (Note that, since your ship is docked with the freighter, you can still take off and get all the wounded off after the pirates crack the engines, but you'll have a limited time before they go into hyperspace or your ship is scuttled and you're toast.)
Each approach should also effect how pirates in the area (and others) treat you in the future -- if you kill all pirates, then pirates will start to fear you and piracy will decrease, but when pirates do strike they'll be better armed, in greater numbers, and they'll attack you without mercy.
On the other hand, if you never kill a pirate they'll only stun your crew to keep them out of their way. And, if you actually heal pirates but otherwise don't interfere with them, then they'll completely ignore you (like the borg) and just let you go about and collect bodies and treat people (like the Red Cross during an ideal war).
Piracy is a big problem now because entire planets are starving and so all space cargo has become incredibly precious. There should be some sympathy for the pirates: "Our people are starving, we only want to get them resources so they aren't wiped out," but it shouldn't be complete, eg, they should still have killed innocent merchants and they are still taking resources from other groups that may be equally hard off.
CAST:
RODOP7 ("Dr. Roboto"): Giant, ugly, scary, loud (clanking) Robotic Doctor Prototype that is a couple hundred years old and the oldest healing droid currently in use. It's so antiquated that it doesn't have the ability to synthesize speech, it can just replay back 20 or so phrases that it has on "tape", like, "X is in trouble, you need to help him," and "Greetings, I am here to heal you, please relax."
The catch is Dr. Roboto has evolved a form of intelligence over the years, and so he "feels" very strongly that no human should ever die, that all men who are hurt need saving. He tries to express this by stringing his pre-recorded messages together in new ways, and as the game goes on he'll learn to play only parts of his messages (separated at punctuation points?) and string those together to express what he "feels". This will surprise the player, who after the first 100 times he hears the same sentences will assume Dr. Roboto is just an unthinking droid, just as everyone else inside the game believes.
Hideous radial arm saws on him. Patients are afraid of him. Rumors abound that he's a killer, or that he's just an organ-salvage droid for patients that are terminal, so nobody wants him to operate on them. He's also the best trauma surgeon that exists. HE CANNOT BE ORDERED TO HURT ANYONE.
At some point the player should find an encyclopedia entry about droid doctors: "Although robotic assistants have existed in the operating theatre since at least the diaspora, for the purposes of this article a robotic droid is defined to be a unit that is ambulatory, self-determining during a single operation, and self-contained. The first of these were created by X in Y, the Robotic Doctor Prototypes. Prototypes 1-3 had coordination problems and did not understand commands well, and as such got a bad reputation for losing patients. Although the fourth had these problems corrected, it was deemed a failure because it wasn't self-determining enough (fix wording!). The fifth had a very complex morality model that ended up being nondeterministic, and after being forced to make some moral choices that would be difficult for even a human doctor it got into a bad state and became, to anthropomorphize, a homocidal killer, further tarnishing the reputation of robotic doctors. It was later lobotomized and used simply as an autopsy droid and occasionally to harvest organs from recently-deceased patients. For the sixth prototype they ripped out the complex morality and put in a very simple logical routine -- always try to save anyone wounded, but always ask first. Strangely, there are no records of the tests or outcome of the sixth prototype, or whether it was ever put into active service. It is also unknown how the seventh unit varies from the sixth, but the seventh was the first robotic member of the relatively new space-rescue guild, and it is still in active duty at a backwater hospital, kept running as a curiousity and tourist attraction despite its incredible simplicity compared to modern droids.
After that [much better droids were built, much sleeker and more capable, blah blah]"
Subcloud LRLLRRLRLRRRLLRRR: Like a little raincloud. Can't talk, understands English perfectly. Operates by entering the patient through the lungs and using its particles like nanomachines. Incredibly good at viruses, cancer, poisons, not so good at massive trauma. Incredible at stabilizing patients, though (can physically just remove shock chemicals from bloodstream).
Communicates by forming itself into one or two symbol "emoticons". Color indicates whether it is asking a question, making a statement, or giving an order. So, a red up-arrow would mean, are we going up?
Name comes from the fact that all members of its species are actually part of the same cloud that can split into two at any point, and so they just name themselves by specifying their last position in the binary tree. THEY AREN'T TELEPATHIC. When two members of the species meet, they reform into a new cloud, exchange memories, and then (usually) split off again. Whichever subcloud was highest and leftmost in the tree is used as the basis of the new name, and they add L and R to that. (Thus, the player's cloud may change names during the game.)
Is willing to kill, but obviously is limited to choking and poison attacks. Since it floats it can do cool recon, but it can't pick anything up.
The Twins: two bodies, one brain, both bodies talk simultaneously but always express two sides of one idea, like:
"This mission will be very dangerous."
"The rewards for this mission are great."
Thus, it's hard to pinpoint exactly how it feels about any issue. [It's like Andrew at Omni.]
They can only be commanded to do things as a pair, even though there are two of them.
Lt. Indian: A human who experiences time in a "byte-swapped" manner from the rest of us. That is, in roughly ten-minute chunks, he experiences the future first and then now later. The result is he assumes you know things he'll tell you later, and he knows things you'll tell him later.
To code this will be tricky, but here are some sample ideas:
- You can't tick him off, because every time you start an argument with him, he just says, "Apology accepted" and walks away.
- You are told to get some tissue sample from him, and when you show up he asks, "Did you bring the tongs?" before you have a chance to ask him for it. He then explains, "Look, I'm going to tell you that you can't handle this sample without tongs, so where are they?"
- In combat, he always just randomly chucks grenades places, except it always so-happens that those places are exactly where the enemy will be soon. (Code this by making enemies by attracted to his grenades. If it so happens the enemy dies first, just chalk it up to bad aim on Lt.'s part.) On the other hand, sometimes he fires at thin air where an enemy was a few minutes ago.
[ ... other members, including one who is kill-happy ... ]
A central conflict is that some of your doctors believe in never harming anyone, while others believe that some people must be harmed if it saves more "good" people. You will NOT be able to make all your doctors happy -- these two doctrines are fundamentally incompatible, and no matter what you decide, one of your doctors will eventually leave your hospital in protest. You must decide where your morality lies.
Part of game play will be the missions, fought as in Fallout, and the other part will be managing your base and finances, like SimHospital. This combined model worked well in the original Jagged Alliance (without base building, but with finances and a staff that needed to get paid), and X-COM: UFO DEFENSE (spelling correct).
Both treating walk-ins or saving people from space will give you money with which to buy new equipment or hire new staff (nurses, etc), or upgrade your existing people (buy training for them, upgrade your robot, purchase nanobot upgrades for the cloud, etc), or buy better weapons, etc. You can dedicate more of your hospital to treating non-emergent cases if you want to play it safe and let the chronic patients pay your bills, but obviously you'll have a harder time dealing with the big emergencies that pop up as part of the plot.
If you do a good job in your sector, the government may grant you certain boons -- making you an official resource, giving you more interesting missiones, etc. Another possibility is that different space services (fleets) actually "subscribe" to different rescue organizations (instead of it being sector-based), so as you do better more fleets sign up with you. This would modify the above-described universe a bit -- in this version, civilian ships would carry a (VERY expensive) beacon which is tuned to your base, and if they ran into trouble they'd hit the panic button and the beacon would teleport your crew onto their ship, hopefully to save the day. So, each fleet would have to decide ahead of time which rescue organization's beacon they want to carry, and you could bid against other rescue organizations to put your beacon in various fleets -- but if you undercut the competition too much, you'll find you're not turning a profit with all the expenses of saving people (ammo, medical supplies, teleport costs, etc).
[ ... ending not decided ... ]
Labels: random ideas
Delicious Monster
