I’m purely pulling this firmly out of my ass. While I genuinely doubt they have any intention or plans at this point, I assume being able to tell investors “oh we can pull the plug and walk away from these legacy costs at any time” is a plus in someone’s column somewhere. Of course the issue is that what is possible to save money often becomes reality.

I’m a 45 year old American. Yeah I know him. I remember him from having a hit song 15-25 years ago. I don’t think I’d heard of him since until he had a movie a couple of years ago. I knew he was a bigger deal in the UK and Europe, but I didn’t know that much of a bigger deal. I wouldn’t be surprised if any random person in the US didn’t know him.

I am legit surprised we never saw Red vs Blue: The Game back in the day.

Valve loves to justify games with them being examples of new tech. But I think there’s a Portal 3 that can do this!

Have your main story pick up exactly where 2 ended (Chell is gone, go with the co-op story,) with GLaDoS having you turn things back on. You do a few missions and then she sends you outside the compound to remote testing annexes. Those annexes are user generated.

You’ll need a new map making tool, like P2 has. But you’ll also want to include narrative hooks and triggers for audio hooks for players. They shouldn’t create a map, but a series of them, complete with a new AI, powered by a unique player-made personality core. You can do anything from have them help the player to be a mini-boss.

And when the player is done, they get the MacGuffin that GLaDoS needed and you go back to do a few more quests. Maybe get in 3-5 outside quests. Maybe even let players host their own servers in a menu somewhere.

Creators could tag the user created annexes for content, and have players rate them in-game. Maybe even suggest or veto tags.

Use generated content and mods have really gone by the Eastside as AAA games went live service. Something needs to be done to show the value of it. I think Valve actively leaning into it even more than "just being open to it could be a big help.

Good job with the recommendation. Friends suggested this to me and it was the right series at the right time. Loved it

That’s a really neat narrative context for a game! It could fit into about any play style, too.

So what even makes a game fun to play?

You might not be genuinely interested in the topic, but if you are there are several books on this! A great start is Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun. (There’s a revised edition of two out by now.) Long story short? Learning. You learn a system and display your mastery of it, and that’s fun.

Oh god, where to begin? Which ONE? Let’s go with the zombie survival idea that’s NOT based on killing zombies.

CONTROLS

I’d start with a first person control scheme based on primarily using the trigger buttons to grab items, then the shoulders to cycle between uses. A gun would have shoot, hit, and throw. A sword would have swing, poke, and throw. A broom would have the same, with sweep added. Using “throw” gently should just drop items. From there it’s about coming up with fun items and interactions. You should be able to grab things like furniture and dumpsters and walking should push/pull them.

CONTEXT

A few blocks of a big city. Enterable buildings, climbable areas, lots of junk to pick up and use, some base building… You start as a random person in a random situation. Extra lives would be in the form of other survivors you rescue (either by helping them barricade or by bringing them to your base,) and becoming them if you die. Different survivors have different skills and inclinations, like faster/more stamina for the athletic, better results with medkits if they’re medically trained, better aim for military/law enforcement, etc. If you declare an area your base and it passes a secure check, the game won’t spawn zombies in it. They’ll wear down access points over time, however, and possibly get in.

STORY

Put in a light story based on survival, not “solving” the crisis. Like a good zombie movie, the big danger is the people. But the reason to go light on story is because you want to go heavier than normal on random events. Small ones would be the other people that spawn, and where they spawn, and their own situations. Big events would be like a horde, an explosion that opens a new extra area (small but interesting,) a plane crash, etc. A few major, many smaller. There should be enough events that it’s unlikely you’ll get a major one repeating in back to back games. Your first dozen playthroughs should feel moderately different from each other.

WINNING

If you survive X in-game days you get a chance to get picked up. If you miss it you have to try again in X more days. Access points get written down in your base quicker as you make it more difficult. In hard mode fewer hits make you infected, and you get more dangerous humans. Or go “realistic” with one hit infects. Infection slowly drains your max health until you convert. This gives you a few in-game days of play to get your affairs in order, with subsequent injuries draining that faster. Game duration is different than difficulty, and changes the frequency of exfil attempts. Maybe every 5 days, every 7, every 15, every 30… Or go endless and see how long you can survive as zombies get back up eventually and resources become more scarce.

And ideally multiplayer. That’d be neat.

So, slightly unique controls, lean in on procedural changes to the world and characters, narrative based around events not hard coded story, and customizable elements like difficulty and game duration.

For me it was debating what music service I wanted to pay for and I decided ad-free YouTube without having to get around anything was a fine bonus. And it was a decent trade to my brother and cousin when I was in their HBO and Netflix families. But I’m not going to say it’s “great” or anything. In fact if they ever cut my brother or cousin from my family plan (we’ve moved around the U.S. since I first got it,) I’m dropping it.

I will say technologically my trials of both Google Stadia and Xbox Live Play Anywhere were both impressive and ran well for single player and co-op games. But the idea of actually paying an ongoing fee to play my games? Fuck that.

I kick myself every day for putting off replacing this 2017 build of mine… My 1080 weeps.

You might be right. But charging them $15 a month to stream their whizbang-5000 games is still an option. Especially for Microsoft and Sony. (And Amazon wants in on that too.)

I’m 45 now. I grew up in a generally conservative community as well. Now I work in TV news and there are strong stereotypes about journalists. But people mostly think that about national journalists who generally live in major metropolitan areas. I work in local news, and I’ve lived in Georgia, Alaska, North Carolina, and Florida. I’ve heard co-workers bad mouth all of the presidents, and posit that at least 3 of them (from 2 political parties) intended to enact martial law to stay president.

Having similarly political minded people around you can be soothing to a degree. Like you said, you’ll be thinking about things that others have figured out for themselves a long time ago. But some of those things are personal decisions anyway. Even given an answer you’ll have to think about how you feel about trade-offs.

What’s good is when you find someone of similar temperament and kindness. Even when you disagree, there doesn’t have to be anger and resentment because you’ll both feel that effort was made to do things the right way, even when you come to different answers about the best course.

Good luck with that.

I’d spend half in a combination of paying down debt and giving money/things to family and friends.

Then I’d probably spend the other half of chasing down the dream of getting a game made. Hire a programmer for a few months and see what we could do. Given a smaller scope, I imagine a lot.

Thanks for responding and giving me the insight!

It’s sheer curiosity when I ask if this is a hard and fast rule or is there wiggle room?

Does this mean you’re not a fan of cold pizza? Or second day spaghetti/lasagna? I feel like they famously get better for a day or two of reheating.

I always wanted to write a 1 minute ad for Mastodon. Any artists want to animate it? I figure images of social media posts and a cute little mastodon tooting (from his trunk) might be worthwhile.

If anyone does, here’s the copy I was thinking:

So your social media is changing and you don’t like the direction it’s going. Maybe it’s the owner, maybe it’s the algorithm. The good news is there’s an alternative. It’s called Mastodon.

Mastodon works like other social media. You follow people, and they follow back. There’s sharing, likes, replies, and everything else. Only, you see your timeline in order, not based on an algorithm made to sell you things. AND Mastodon lets you pick your server based on an interest. So in addition to following your friends on their servers, you can also browse your own virtual neighborhood, choosing from things like video games, music, or even your real life city or country.

You can even create and host a server if you don’t see one you like.

Mastodon also offers extra features like hidden posts just for your followers, and content warnings so you can hide triggering content, or use them as spoiler warnings if you don’t want to run a new movie for everyone else.

To see list of servers, head to Join Mastodon dot org, and join the herd.

I’ve seen a few Discord servers I’m on use some bot that creates a honeypot channel. It immediately bans anyone that posts in it. It’s so low tech that it perfectly handled the weird problem of people getting their account taken and posting spam in every channel. I can’t help but wonder if honeypots could appeal to the “loose with rules” nature of modern LLMs/AI tools.

Don’t even get me started on Facebook’s “everyone’s pivoting to Facebook video! Don’t be left behind!”… “Oh, we lied about your views repeatedly. Sorry.”

Nine Inch Nails released a new remix project album a few months ago called Nine Inch Noize. It’s with a German DJ called Boys Noize. They fine tuned it during their last tour by playing together, and released it with a couple of live performances at Coachella. You can find the album anywhere you stream music, and here’s the concerts if you’re curious: https://archive.org/details/nine-inch-noize-live-coachella-archive

Also, been on a lot of Paris Texas lately. They’re a rap duo with some heavy guitar usage, and punk/grunge/alt influences. Their most recent releases have been two EPs, of which I generally prefer They Left Me With the Sword. (but They Left Me With A Gun is good too.)

Also? I went back to Flobots too. And a little Czarface.