Hee hee, my blog got positive attention from Ville Vuorela (who’s apparenty becoming a strange raving gnosis-gnome mascot for my blog, based on how I end up referring to him constantly; I probably should get his picture in the sidebar or something), which has interesting results for blog visibility. One of the good parts in being hosted by WordPress are the pretty powerful usage statistics the software keeps for me. These tell me that while I’ve been writing my blog for the last couple of weeks, I haven’t had any significant traffic. This isn’t really such a surprise, considering that I haven’t told practically anybody about the blog yet. I told Ville a bit ago because I’d love to hear what he thinks about our developing game project, and I linked the Acts of Evil playtest report I made earlier to the Ashcan Front forums. The latter brought in around ten people during the last five days, WordPress tells me. Ville’s blog seems to have brough 17 visitors as of this writing, and it’s only been a couple of hours since he made the posting, I understand. Pretty interesting, the day is my best yet with 55 views total at this point, and it’s not even finished yet. Not that I have any use for views per se.
Anyways, Ville had a very good point about MMO games being such only insofar as the player utilizes the game as a social structure. I’ll be wanting to discuss that at some point a bit more, not the least because that part is still vague for Theomachia. Another thing Ville alluded to that I want to write about is public game development, especially as it relates to this project; a great influence in me setting up this blog in the first place, as I told before, was Ville’s own vivid description of how computer game designers are often rather limited about discussing their own work.
However, before I’m getting to those topics, I’ll be writing some specifics about Karta Machiton, the combat game module I’m designing for Theomachia. This is what I’m supposed to be designing right now for the jarkkovuori-project, so I’m at a pretty concrete stage with it. There are some interesting things in that game if it comes out the way I want it to.
Other topics that I want to cover at some point, when I have the time, include web comics. I understand that cool kids are putting those in their blog rolls (link lists, as they used to be called) , and as I have something of a relationship with this fine and progressive art form, I thought it’d be interesting to write a bit about some of my favourite comics and the way I read them. Not much to do with game design, though.
Regardless, I think I’ll try to squeeze some time off my schedule to write about Karta Machiton now. I’m kinda curious to hear what Ville and others think about it, and even more importantly, I’m hoping that writing an English abstract will help me order my thoughts for the imminent efforts at designing a roughly playable version. I need to test the game with actual cards before I waste anybody’s time with programming it; lucky for me that I’m almost there, or at least think I am. I’ve been working on the game mostly in my head for the last week or two now, so no idea if it’s all just vapors or not.