Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 2

Continuing where I left of last time, been captured and left in a cell with no doors, being the hero of the story of course we promptly escaped and got a magic hat and get a new area to explore and a bunch of new mechanics.

The most interesting one is probably the hardest to explore. The key puzzle to the dungeon is to change your name, and this is done through breaking the in-game cypher and gathering a couple of treasure. One will find memory locations for you, the other will let you change the value at that address. The problem is that other than your own name, it is pretty difficult to actually find a use for these items. I am sure that some people have really put them to interesting uses, but not really sure how they started playing with it in the first place.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 1

I have been experimenting a bit with recording my gaming sessions so that I can share them with friends and I think I have most of the major obstacles dealt with now, and I thought it would be interesting to try sharing them a bit further.

So here is the first episode of Let's Play: Hack 'n' Slash.

Hack 'n' Slash is a fantasy action adventure themed puzzle game that was pitched during Doublefine's Amnesia fortnight 2012. The key concept is that it is a game that looks and feels like the old Zelda titles, but the items and puzzles you are gain allow you to tinker with the back end engine of the game. The first item you get is a USB ended sword, which when used on appropriate objects and enemies lets you alter their variables, you can not longer reduce their health, but you can change their faction, attack pattern and damage.

I was pretty keen on it, despite not actually getting very far through the prototype and picked it up during its early access debut, where most of the game was available save for the final act. But now it is out of early access and is currently available on Steam at a promotional $13.37 price.

I have to admit I am pretty nervous about showing this, but I would really like feedback on what people like and what I could do better.

Eurovision Voting - Simplifying

Since last time I have spent a while thinking a bit more about the two Boring World test cases. Each was designed to be the most boring according to each metric for suspense I had come up with, the idea being to try to judge the relative weighting of each factor.

But the two results have what feels like a pretty important similarity. The country coming first never changes. It occurred to me that this seems like a much simpler, better measurement.

Suspense = Number of times the country coming first changes.

This isn't perfect, because this system is likely to produce many ties for most suspenseful. I am not sure that it would be worth the complexity to avoid that.

I do have a couple of ideas for tie-breakers, so the full metric will probably be:
Number of times First changed, highest round for the last change.

This still leaves the problem of actual ties, 2+ countries coming equal first, depending on how we sort this may be static despite being pretty suspenseful. I think that just looking at the very top slot will still work though. Will need to ensure that I test this so we will need to include Eurovision 1969 as one of our early tests of the algorithm.

So we finally have a fitness function. The next step will be tacking the search space. There are 37! (That is 37 factorial, i.e. 1.3763753 * 10⁴³) different ways of ordering the current Eurovision voting nations. Definitely can't brute force it.

Shadowrun - Bringing Sydney into the 2070s

I really like the setting of Shadowrun. It is a cyberpunk-fantasy dystopia that was created in 1989. It features megacorporations that are more powerful than countries, the Matrix an immersive VR internet along side magical beings, spirits dragons, orks, trolls, dwarves and elves.

Being an RPG setting you can theoretically play whatever you want but the default has you playing a band of Shadowrunners, criminals who are hired by rich individuals and corporations to achieve illegal ends without the need to dirty their own hands.

As with a lot of Earth based RPG settings, they haven't really done much with Australia. It was only mentioned in a few side notes in various Shadowrun books until 2001, when Fanpro released Target: Awakened Lands.
Theoretically, it was a sourcebook about awakened sites around the world, but at least half of the page count was dedicated to fleshing out Australia as a location. While the materials in there are pretty good there are two problems:
1) Target: Awakened Lands is a little internally inconsistent especially regarding population numbers. The population summary table and the text have very different figures.
2) It is 13 years old, both in and out of game. The fluff material in the book is dated 2062, the year in the Fifth Edition sourcebook is 2075. A lot has happened in those 13 years. I think it would be good to try to update things.

The Shadowrun Almanac has the most recent canon information on Australia. It got almost 2 pages and I will probably use some of it, however the writer appears to have not read Target: Awakened Lands and seems to have missed basic information about real world Australia. The Almanac implies that Canberra is only the temporary capital of Australia for example due to the problems Sydney.

The basic plan is to go through and write a reasonably consistent and interesting setting for running a Shadowrun campaign set in Sydney. I am not going to go into much about the rest of Australia unless it seems particularly pertinent. This is both to reduce the workload and also because in Shadowrun Sydney is a relatively isolated city. A combination of nature and magic are not very happy make access quite difficult at times and hopefully I can find ways to highlight that aspect and the struggles it causes.

Tune in next time where I will talk about the weather in 2070s Sydney.

Eurovision Voting: Boring World Test Cases

Now we have decided what contributes to suspense, we can test them by comparing them to what are hypothetically the least suspenseful votes possible in Eurovision.

Since currently I have two factors, I am coming up with a scenario that minimises each of them.

Boring World Scenario A:

The juries involved in voting are all identical sets of clones, each country thus votes exactly the same way. 12 countries get away with cheating by voting for themselves making the reveal order irrelevant. Presumably they get away with it because of mind control satellites or something.

Boring World Scenario B:

One country puts in a performance which is breathtakingly phenomenally better than all of the others, who kind of all forgot about Eurovision and ended up sending a man and his old arthritic dog who get up on stage and awkwardly warble for 30 second. As a result one country gets the maximum (432 points) possible, and every other entrant ends up with the other 25 getting the average. Given that the average is 69.56, the .56 means there should be 14 countries in 2nd place, each with 70 points.

Both of these situations would be pretty boring purely from the context of voting results. In A there is no shifting of positions, once the first results are announced there is no movement, but theoretically the result could change until right near the end. There is only a difference of 74 points between 1st and 2nd. The positions are technically only certain when the 31st set of results are out.

In Scenario B the winner is made clear as early as I think is possible within the voting rules for Eurovision, which appears to be round 21. But it should be pretty clear what the result is well before this point in both cases.

Honestly I think that scenario B is the less suspenseful of the two, but I am not sure. What do you think?

EDIT: As Krellen pointed out, I had messed up the numbers. I had been thinking in terms of a system where each country gives out 12 scores, worth 1-12 points each. In Eurovision each country gives out 10 scores,1 through 8, 10 and 12. This shifts the positions of the tipping point to be a little bit earlier.

Eurovision Voting: Suspense

Last weekend I watched the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest with my partner. It is the first time I had ever paid any attention to Eurovision and it was a pretty fun evening of spectacle. While I couldn't follow the Swedish commentary, my fiancée could and would generally relay any particularly interesting information.

One thing she mentioned when we were approaching the end of the night is that the order in which the voting results are revealed is algorithmically sorted to generate the maximum suspense. I can't help but wonder what would that algorithm look like? Seems it would be an interesting challenge to try to create my own version.

As a first step, we need to find an answer to the question: What do we mean by suspense in this context?
Without knowing the answer to this question, we don't know what we are trying to maximise and that will make it very difficult to produce an effect system.

I definitely don't know all the answers here and would like to hear your ideas, but here is what I am currently thinking. High suspense means:
- A lot of movement in rankings (especially the top position)
- If there is a clear winner, their victory is made obvious as late as possible
- If the final result is close, the second last round should show positions 1 & 2 as close as possible, ideally with the final victor being second.

In other words, you want to ensure that the audience is unsure of the victor for as long as possible, and to try to ensure that as many countries as possible are in the running and jockeying for position.

So what other factors do you think contribute to suspense?

Living in Lund

I have been living in Lund for a little over 2 and a half months now and think it might be helpful to write a little about what I have been up to. Despite the time, I have yet to do any really touristy things. I have mostly been saving those activities for when friends visit since (hopefully) we will have enough guests that I will get to see most of the touristy sites in good time anyway.

So many bikes.

Lund is a pretty compact place. From the central area of Lund most of the places I tend to go to are within a half hour walk. Not only that but Lund is very bike friendly, there are bikes and bike paths pretty much everywhere and vehicles are really considerate, they make sure that they will only pass you if they can give you plenty of space.

This means that I really have not needed a car or even to use public transport very often. In general it is simply faster to walk than to catch a bus, definitely faster to ride.

I can understand why there is a different attitude regarding distances and locations here. Lund is located in Skåne county in Sweden, this county is about 1000km² smaller than the greater Sydney region. It contains a bunch of cities and towns, all of which are distinct locations, in that they have fields and more rural areas surrounding them. Travelling between Lund and Malmö definitely feels more like travelling between 2 cities than going from say Seaforth to Croydon Park, despite the distances being about the same.

Lund is also old, it was founded somewhere around 1000AD, and it shows it. Not only are lots of old buildings and cobblestone streets around the town, but there are also fountains, statues and runestones just lying around the town. It makes walking around the central area of Lund just a little bit cooler.

Runestones, just sitting there like they are unremarkable!

Day to day I haven't been doing much of interest. Mostly looking at jobs, doing some household chores, grocery shopping and playing some games. The morning is the best time to be online for me, as that is when friends and family are online in Australia. Which is great in terms of contact, less great in terms of getting work done, since the people I am talking to have all finished their work for the day and are relaxing in the evening.

Afternoons are spent on job searching or personal projects. My current project is an exploration of the Steam Trading Web API, which is sadly much more limited than I expected.

Evenings are spent either on Swedish (I go to a course 2 nights a week), Karate or games. My partner and I joined a gaming society here called DMF, which has a play space on the southern side of the town and a lot of regular events. I mostly go to a savage worlds RPG on Monday nights but will probably start going to boardgames on Thursdays again once the Swedish course finishes.

During my first month and a bit here, I was slowly navigating my way into the Swedish system. I had to get my biometric details read so they could make my residency card. Then I needed to wait for it to be delivered. Then I had to find out why it was not being delivered. Then once I finally had it I had to apply for a personnummer, and once I had that I could do little things like make a bank account and register with Arbetsförmedlingen. Now I have a bank account I can do all sorts of things, like add credit to my phone online, join Lund's car pool organisation and order furniture from IKEA.

Right now my partner is in Australia on a trip leaving me to my own devices here in Lund. Just before she took off we got our keys to our new apartment, so while she is away I have been moving. Fortunately a friend from DMF helped out and we carried most of our stuff between the two apartments; fortunately as both places are at least semi-furnished apartments it was mostly clothing, small gadgets and devices. There is still some bits and pieces left at the old place, waiting for me to receive my car pool membership card so I can move them by car. The only other remaining step is receiving and assembling the rest of the furniture we need.

The furnishings in our new place don't include a bed for the master bedroom so we have put in an order with IKEA for that along with a few other useful pieces of furniture, they should arrive sometime on Thursday and on Friday a friend and I will put them together, so that when my partner arrives on Friday one of us won't have to be sleeping on the couch.