Thoughts on Starbound and PCG

Well, it's been awhile, my vacation was pretty good, thank you :).

Meanwhile Starbound team posted some updates. Some thoughts on that. First pickaxes are confirmed. This leads to conclusion that Starbound is definetely a Terraria clone, in a good sense of that. I mean look at Terraria it's a clone itself (of Minecraft of cousrse).

However it's became more and more obvious what will be the feature of Starbound. It's procedurally generated content (PCG). This is not a new thing per se, but Tiy has a vision of moving it to a next level.

Usually PCG is limited to thing which I call 'playfield' (major) and item properties (minor). In Terraria it's, for example, a world (earth) structure. Item properties can be for example some modified items which can then start to glow (enchanted sword, etc). In Starbound, most items itself are created via PCG (more of a pseudo-PCG) which means that not only stats, but visuals of an items are somehow unredictable. This is very cool.

The key question however is how well randoness will be controlled and constrained. By that I mean, that PCG games lacks that soul part of a manually designed worlds. Imagine, for example, Fallout with PCG land. One the one hand each game would be somehow unique, that's a good part. On the other hand, you loose sense of the game world reality. The real worlds are static. So, it's really a challenge for a Starbound team how story mode (if any) will deal with randomness.

Tiy already mentioned some kind of global coordinates which players can exchange with each other and which will lead to exact same location for any player. I assume this coordinates are basically the RNG seed values which will allow to recreate world precisely on another user machine. This feature is already very good.

As a conclusion: so far Starboud is looking pretty awesome! Can't wait to play it.

Terraria, second encounter

Redigit, after some 3 months, appeared again on Terraria Online today with extemely intriguing private profile post, which says just "Planning something big..":

Despite all my respect for his courage, plain and somehow awkward honesty, I had a strange feeling about all that situation. And now that little post is a relief! Looks like Redigit just took a really big vacation with his family after that incredible pace from the moment terraria was released to Terraria v1.1.2. That's was just 8 months. Eight months!

I think he needed this time to evaluate current situation. I don't think he wanted to halt development in such a way. I think something went not so good within a team. Particularly Tiy (main spriter) left to potentially rival project Starbound. BTW Starbound site is updated today with new info (good coincidence for starting conspiracy theory). Also I have a feeling that Terraria main codebase was of a rather low quality (negative fact of rapid development), so it's harder and harder to add new features and fix bugs. Major refactoring would require significant amount of time, which is probably not worth it. Stopping project this way is also hurting his reputation seriously, I'm pretty sure he understsnd it even better than me, so there surely was some serious s**t which forced him to such decision.

Anyway, that happened and so be it. I'm just happy that Andrew didn't took a three year vacation, but just three months.

As for what he is planning.. I have no idea. For now I have just some guesses (in decreasing probability order):

1. "Teh final" big Terraria bugfix patch for 1.1.2 version, signed as final version;
2. Terraria 2 (or put any other name here) announcement;
3. Announcing new team and continue of Terraria development.

Items 1 and 2 can be announced together.

How should development of a game ends

This one is a good example (there is also part 2). Terraria is incredibly good game. Actually it's the best game I played in a last year, and I mean all games, not just indies. But. You should be honest to your players and youself, you should not be a pusher. There were, clearly, big possibilities to continue further development of Terraria. But it would be a fake. If developer is making only money on it. I think modern game development suffers pretty much from make money goal. So such an action may seem absolute madness to them. If it was, say, Blizzard, then we would see Terraria 2, 3, World of Terraria etc. But with such pusher behaviour, your game idea, your game world, is on steroids and will always results in unnatural and very predictable games. Starcraft II is an example. It's a very good game, but it doesn't have a soul, it's a pure marketing product. I think large game studios became hostages of themselves, they just can't work another way now, or they will go bankrupt. This is the part there indie studios have major advantage over them. This explains why indie games are so popular lately: they have soul. Like an old games, then there wasn't unstopabble sequels, addons, prequels. There is exception though. Valve managed to fight temptation to make money, and continued to make good games. But that's a personal opinion. 

Anyway, there is some very interesting game in develppment now from some other creators of Terraria. It could be a hit, it could be a failure, but I'm most certanly will try it!

Update. An interview with Andrew "Redigit" Spinks the creator of Terraria. I'm glad to find this particular answer which just says that I meant to say, but in some fewer words:

What is your take on the future of indie games vs. the big-name developers?
It’s not my intention to bad mouth the big-name developers, but from my perspective the recent rise of indie gaming is due to big-name developers losing touch with what gamers want. Gaming shouldn’t be treated like a business. If you genuinely enjoy your product, then there is no risk involved because others will as well.

Conjurer: crafting engine for a games

A small PR of my own open source project. Conjurer is a game crafting engine. It's relays on a Terraria game as a model for it's functional capabilities. I mean by that (since I'm not a native speaker and can produce gibberish sometimes), if you use this engine in your game all major tasks which are required to perform crafting can be performed by the engine. For example: can a specific item be created now? Answering this question requires checking if all of the requred items are available and all required conditions are met. Crafting not always result in an item. It also can be some new condition of the game. Other questions can include:

• What items can be produced by a player with his current items?
• What items use this item as ingredient?
• Which ingredients are missing in players inventory for creating that item?

and, most probably, many others. Not all this questions are answered by current version of Conjurer's code (actually only the very first one), but that's the point: it can be not an easy task to implement all of it from scratch. However easiness is not a major factor for any good developer. Most of us will gladly solve some interesting task. But if this task isn't interesting to you, then it will be, I hope, very useful to you.

P.S. Terraria is a great game, you should absolutely try it.