Pulp Friction

When you talk about balance in a multiplayer game, what you’re talking about is ensuring that no entity or grouping has an inherent advantage over the other. In an unbalanced game, players will flock to the side with the advantage, making that advantage even worse in cases of team-based play, or just refuse to play the game at all.

In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, players begin the game by choosing a class and other attributes for their character: their avatar. In most MMORPGs, your class is the most defining attribute of your avatar. Your class determines what your function will be in the game. If you choose a priest archetype class for example, you know you will be supporting other players by providing enhancements and healing damage. Defining these classes and balancing them so they are all fun and interesting to play is one of the hardest parts for the game designers when developing the game.

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I had applied to be a writer for an online company that provided writing services. After some research, I discovered that there was no legitimiate business beyond providing essays to college students, which I think is a deplorable practice.

Because of how easy it is for an online publisher (blogger) like myself to have their online resources taken offline without due legal process, I’ll refrain from publishing the name of the company. Please contact me via e-mail if you are curious.

The following is my letter to them.

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I’ve been doing more and more PHP development lately. Along with other projects, I’ve been doing some ongoing development for one client and I’ve been having a lot of fun nailing down my personal style, figuring out my personal best practices.

I realized recently that I should be looking into object oriented programming, and deciding whether or not I should be integrating it into my programming practices. I cut my teeth on C programming back in the 80′s and my programming has always been procedural.

Fast forward 20 years and now OOP is the rage. If you don’t know how to do it, you’re not a real programmer. (Of course, most “real programmers” wouldn’t consider PHP development “real programming” anyway. There’s a definite hierarchy amongst programmers with regards to language and style.)

I did a lot of browsing and sampling different OOP books and online resources, and I have to say I was struck by how vague and haphazard were the terms and definitions most writers gave when attempting to explain OOP. I was unable to really understand OOP because the authors were as clear as mud. I kept looking.

I’m currently about a third of the way through “Object Oriented PHP Concepts, Techniques, and Code” by Peter Lavin, published by No Starch Press. It’s from 2006, so it might be a little dated as far as some of the technical specs of the latest version of PHP 5, but it explains terms like method and interface in clear language instead of vague, empty jargon. The author uses simple, practical, real-world examples to demonstrate the concepts.

I originally wrote this in the Metaplace forums, but it was long-winded and rambling enough that I figured I could just copy and paste it here and make it look like I’m active. A lot of this post assumes you’re familiar with Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO’s) and other games.

So anyway, this is my argument as to why PvP is where you should look to give your game longevity, with specific reference to MMO’s like World of Warcraft and EverQuest.

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I’ve had a lot of fun building a small website, which I’m calling “EZ Smiley”. You can see it here.

Basically, you can just click to build a Smiley, and it will build it immediately. No more hitting submit like on those other smiley generators. They suck compared to this. You click on a body, and shazam, your body shows up in the view window. You click on a pair of eyes, and bam! You’ve got eyes on your smiley!

It’s not rocket science, but it is something that nobody else has done in relation to smileys, and I’m proud of it.

I’m going to be adding a lot more smiley “parts” as I go; so far you can make over five million unique smilies technically, but some of those are going to be pretty lame. But there’s probably at least a million decent smilies possible in there.

Anyway, have fun!

Well, I’ve been doing a lot of web-related projects lately, including registering my own sites and building them from the ground up. Yeah, the big dot com boom came and went years ago, but the internet isn’t going away anytime soon.

Have you ever heard of Guitar Hero (and the sequels, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80′s, and the upcoming Guitar Hero III)? If you say you haven’t, well, let’s just say that’s unlikely.

Anyway, Harmonix is developing a new game called Rock Band where instead of just one or two players with guitars, there’s an entire band, including (of course) guitar and bass guitar, microphone, and drums. The microphone as a console peripheral has been around a while, what with Singstar and the Karaoke Revolution games. However, the drums are an entirely new beast, created just for Rock Band.

I anticipate Rock Band becoming huge. Unlike the Guitar Hero games, the majority of Rock Band tracks are going to be originals instead of covers. Whole albums are going to be released for Rock Band, including The Who’s Who’s Next? and Nirvana’s Nevermind. Harmonix anticipates dozens of downloadable tracks by year’s end, and hundreds more in the future, including more whole albums.

So, I created a fan site based on Rock Band, and I’m trying to grow it, but it’s really difficult to drive traffic to a site and get people to register yet another forum account. So, it’s a work in progress.

Anyway, that site and a half dozen others are in various stages of completion. When I make the post that says I’m moving into a house with an ocean view and I can’t decide what color Ferrari to get, you’ll know I’ve succeeded.

We finally moved out of our cramped 1-bedroom Parker apartment with the noisy neighbors. I haven’t mentioned them before? Well, regardless, we had neighbors who played loud music at all hours of the night, any night, and we had other neighbors who complained when we had our TV volume up too high at 10:30pm.

So now we’re in a very nice 1850 sqft home in Denver proper. We have a 17′x12′ loft with plenty of room for our desks and computers and bookcases and even a futon. We have a spare bedroom for guests, and even a room just for our exercise stuff. The living room is enormous, and we plan to have a 65″ widescreen HDTV in it, along with two couches and a love seat. Plenty of room for guests.

A friend of mine would call it a McMansion; I would call it our home. It’s large, roomy, and (particularly evil in his eyes) too similar to other homes in the area. Unfortunately, that’s the price you pay for capitalism. Larger vendors inevitably hold greater purchasing power and can provide a product cheaper than the smaller home builders who may have more creative floor plans. Another unfortunate fact is that in most cases you cannot build your own home cheaper, unless you can build it yourself. Unlike some people, I cannot square a wall and put up sheetrock. I cannot plumb, and I do not grout. So, we’re stuck with a McMansion.

I’m not complaining too much.

Anyway, I have a lot of projects in motion, so look forward to new things here.

Subtitled “The Writer’s Guide to Making More Money,” Kelly James-Enger’s book about freelancing is a good introduction to becoming your own boss and freelancing full time.

If you are already a freelance writer, you might get a few nuggets of wisdom from this book, but for the most part this book is aimed at the novice who hasn’t started freelancing, or maybe has submitted a few articles to magazines but hasn’t made the jump to fulltime writing yet. The book walks you through some of the realities of writing full time, including the solitude and unpredictable nature of the business (read: unreliable pay).

$ix Figure Freelancing doesn’t delve into any one topic too deeply, but gives you enough information to start and research the intricacies on your own. For example, the book gives some general advice about the differences between writing as a hobby and writing as your job with regards to taxes. The author then suggests consulting an accountant or a different book specifically on the legalities and tax implications of being self employed, a pattern you will see repeated throughout the book.

One section of the book that I thought could use some bolstering was chapter 6, concerning query letters. There are a few examples given, for different types of work, including novels. I would have liked more samples, personally, but the shallowness of this chapter is similar to the rest of the structure of the book; it gets your feet wet and gives a recommendation for places to look for further information.

Be aware, though, that I’m not saying that the book is worthless. It is a good high level introduction to freelancing from an experienced freelance writer–a writer who has published many articles in mainstream magazines and published books about topics other than writing, not just a writer whose primary claim to fame is books about writing. However, if you need this book, you will also need more books (she recommends several), or some other source of information about your potential markets and being self employed.

Half the book is common sense, the other half is enough to get you started. The language is friendly and informal, and the print is large. If you’re considering a jump to freelancing but you don’t know anything about the business, I would recommend it. Plus, it’s only $10.47 through Amazon, with free shipping. I don’t even have a referral link, so I’m not going to make any money off of you getting it.

I’m going to start reading Robert W. Bly’s Secrets of a Freelance Writer next.

We said our goodbyes to my brother in Reston and started up toward Pennsylvania and New York. We decided to stay on the Canadian side of the border, for some reason I can’t remember now; possibly for cheaper hotel rates. Although I didn’t get any pictures of the town of Niagara Falls, Canada, believe me when I say it’s kind of an ugly little tourist town, but with some redeeming features.

The streets can be very steep, so wear some decent walking shoes. There are lots of eating establishments and entertainment venues for the traveler looking to lighten their wallets of some of their heavy dollars. Definitely worth a look around if you’re in town. We ate at a restaurant owned by Kelsey Grammer, and the food wasn’t bad, if a bit expensive (nearly $20 a person for sandwiches and a drink). We didn’t flinch at the cost, however; it’s a tourist town, that sort of thing is to be expected.

We had a mixed view from our hotel room, as you can see from the pictures in the gallery. We could see lots of lights and towers, but right below us was the dingy, dirty parking lot for the hotel. It was very well lit.

The Falls themselves are a great treat if you’ve never seen anything like them before. Watching the thousands (I’m just making this up, it could be millions or hundreds) of gallons of water pouring over the falls every second made me feel like this was an artery of the Earth, pumping blood for a giant of such magnitude that dwarfed my insignificant viewpoint. The flat ocean just doesn’t convey the same amount of power and weight that tons of water falling does. I suppose that feeling is a small part of what people on the ocean in rough weather, or people facing a tsunami, might feel.

We got the tickets to go behind the Falls, and that was a 4 on the excite-o-meter. It was a cool perspective, but it was very limited (and slippery). The real excitement was riding the Maid of the Mist. No, pervert, it’s a boat. Actually, there are several boats named Maid of the Mist with a Roman numeral following to tell them apart. If you take one of these boats, you’ll realize where they get the “Mist” part of their names.

First, you don a cheap plastic poncho. Then you take the several minute ride to the Falls, all the while hearing the roar of the water getting louder and louder. At your closest point to the Falls, the noise is deafening, and the spray is constant (and cold, depending on the weather.) Definitely an interesting and unique experience, and I highly recommend it.

See my gallery for photos and possibly more insight.