Motivation, Reaching that last 25%, and plans for the future.

Hello again. I flew down to Florida a week ago to visit my parents on my Spring break from school. For my flight, I brought along the latest issue of Wired which happened to be a special issue on games edited by Will Wright. As I'm sure most of you know, Will Wright is one of the few designers out there who is truly challenging how games should be approached. His article was fascinating and very motivating to me as an aspiring game designer. I really think that our industry is about to have a renaissance of sorts within the next 5 years. The focus will hopefully drop from graphics and shift towards actual innovating game designs.

I do have a new game idea still in the design stages. From playing the game in my head and with my near archive-like knowledge of computer/video games to compare it to, I think I have a winner on my hands, er, in my head. I do obviously want to get a prototype going before I get too excited about it, but I've run the concept across a few other people (including 2 people that I sat next to on the plane) and recieved very positive responses. If my prototype is as fun as my head plays it out to be (I know that doesn't happen often, I've tried it one too many times, but I have a good feeling about this one), I'll be sure to go into great detail about it in the future.

In other news, the T2D(I'm still not used to the new name) Adventure Core is inches away from being feature complete. I ported it to the 1.1 Beta 2 but there have been some odd glitches in the porting process. I'm sure it'll straighten out soon. Anyhow, there are only a couple more features to add and my first pass on the core will be complete! Of course, this is the mirage stage of any Software Engineering. Once the first pass is finished, I have to go over every single thing I wrote and make it work better. I've also been drafting a list of 2nd pass features I'd like to add. My current goal for the core is mid-Summer time. As for "Issue #37" itself? It's going, but it's going slower than the core development (and the core devtime is much slower than I would like it to be). Short answer? Our whole devteam is made up of 3rd year college students; we don't have much time on our hands. Still, I'd like a demo to be out at approximately the same time as the core.

Sorry, no new pictures this .plan, but maybe we can have a nice discussion here instead? How about a prompt inspired by the Will Wright article: How do we allow players to feel like they have a "free will" to explore as wide of a possibility space as they would like but without making the world around them seem generic or filled with artificial constraints? What games have come close to doing this, and how could they have improved? Most importantly, how can such a design be realistically executed?

Here's to the future,
/Jared