“The Game”
Exposition
I think many people have some idea for something big, complicated and epic what you want to make. Some idea; like write a book about universe and everything inside it. And maybe at some point you started to write it and started organize sections and chapter. And may be you started couple a story lines or may be you have idea about a game and you think it would be awesome to make MMO game, game simulator to Oasis game from Ready Player one.
For me after I started developing, putting things on paper I was running out of ideas and direction and just motivation. Questioning: why I am doing it? Is not it waste of the time? I need to find some fundamental values I passion about. Some examples of “wrong” values. In quotes because they are not necessary wrong, but they are not fundamental enough. Mobile games, augmented reality, VR, MMO, social, addictive, user generated content, crowd sourcing, open world. As I mention before it is not necessary wrong but it is not fundamental and is was making me to question: Why the game has to have it? would it make it successful game? Is it right thing to do this way?
Values
I grew up in Russia on brothers Strugatsky books. Brothers Strugatsky are Russian SciFi writers, in many books they are challenging idea of happiness. Spoiler warning! In the book Roadside Picnic the main character at the end of the book found the golden orb which can make any wish true and this character did had only one wish in his mind: HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!
This thing stuck in my head and become my meaning of my life.
Later on in my life I realized I do not know what makes me happy, but I have something inside me which give me happiness, also I realized I cannot make happy other people, they have to do it by themself. But there is something which can help become them a little bit happier.
It is hard to explain what is it, I’ll give some examples:
- Cup of coffee at morning
- Sunlight at morning in your window
- Dying zombies and skeletons under sun in Minecraft after restless night
- Chasing and hugging and kissing your kids
- Seating on the beach and watching waves
I think the game what I want to make should feel like this. I want the game bring this bit of happiness everyday to billions of people.
Conflict
Billions of people quite a big number, all of them have different set of buttons what make them happy, different cultural background (Star wars empirial march cannot make exited a person who never watch any Star wars movie), different dreams, different personalities.
I realized a lot of people would not like what I like. I realized it is hard and probably not possible to learn culture and needs of other people.
I was doing some research and was trying to figure out Fortnight phenomena. First I had hard time to find the person who likes Fortnight, second the person had hard time to explain why she likes the game.
I was trying to talk with random people and understand what dream what makes them exited. It is hard, it feels like they do not know by themself.
Billions of people is a big number. Even if I knew exactly how to bring this bit of happiness personally too every single one, someone has to program it, model, animate, it is a lot of content and a lot of work. Where to get army of artists?
Proposal
I play two games at the moment VRChat and Minecraft. Both of the games are driven by player generated content. VRChat provides SDK to allow players to make worlds and avatars, Minecraft main gameplay is building. In VRChat you can create quite complicated content you can use all power of Unity and SDK has rich set of perf labs, but learning curve is steep. Minecraft is very simple a lot of kids play Minecraft, but you can build only big things in Minecraft red-stone mechanics is limited.
I want to combine power from both games, my thinking is to make the game like Minecraft and add in-game device which can make things smaller. So players would be able to make all different new in game items, mobs, NPC, avatars using similar like in Minecraft blocks and program them using similar as in Minecraft red-stone circuitry and when make them smaller. Also have ability to make a copy of the item.
Players can make a clone of the whole world and make a parallel world.
It is MMO game.
It is voxel based game like Minecraft. Players can make new items, mobs, NPCs, quests, avatars, mounts, skybox, sun/moon/suns/moons.
This system would be powerful enough to be able to make mini games: escape room, simple 3D shouter, build quest line, puzzle game.
Players can make a parallel world, exact copy of the world the player right now located.
They can talk with each other using voice or text chat. Ability to hear them depends of how far away people from you. Like in VRChat.
Game will have phone so you can talk with friends regardless where you are in the world. Also you can teleport to your friends.
You can install in your world a teleport and it will give teleportation stones. When you use the stone you will teleport to the place where teleport is installed.
Owner of the world can give different permissions to other players: visit, build, clone.
🌸 Thu, Jul 4, 2019 🌸
“C.”
Almost month ago I meet amazing girl on VRChat. I am going to call her C. to protect her privacy. I almost immediately fell in love with her.
How we meet was kind of comical, and I am hesitating to tell this story. Probably later I’ll tell you.
She is amazing girl. Her voice and laugh cut my attention. The way how she speaks. Her language usually is very clean with proper grammar. Her intonations like little bells. She says “oh my God” a lot, and I love the way she is saying it. I still can hear her voice in my head. Very often she calls me on Discord and says: Mika, and I reply: C. And sometimes she makes a kissing sound, at this time my heart is melting, it feels like I am under big warm blanket and waves of happiness are rolling other me.
I learned about her life. She is studying architecture in the college, and has internship and also has additional work in Dominos. She lives alone in the apartment. She values honesty, she tries to be honest with other people, with herself and expect other people to be honest with her. She fights for her happiness. She hides her pain, her voice is always cheerful and she laughs a lot. I adore her.
We spent quite a lot time playing VRChat and Minecraft. Later we played Portal 2. We had couple movie nights and spend a lot of time on Discord on voice, texting, sending to each other hugging, kissing and provocative gifs.
Several night we were on voice while we were sleeping. It is such a nice feeling when you are waking up and you can feel: someone is here.
Two nights ago I decided to give her my Instagram. So she can see my pictures. I am not sure what happened, but since she replied twice on Discord. I am reading again and again and I cannot understand. I thought I know her good enough, I would understand if other girl would do it, but not she.
Later on she replied. I am still not comfortable to share what she replied, but is is my fault. She cannot talk with me anymore. I hope, someday she will forgive me.
I am lonely and I do not know what to do to get rid of the pain in my chest. Before I met C. I was used to be lonely and get used to emptiness in my heart and now it is back. I need to do something with it.
My life is like semi-assembled rubik’s cube. A lot of colors in place and I do not have courage to misplace colors to put in place other colors. I have kids, house, job, great weather here in Southern California, stability… a lot of things. But I do not have someone who would share my values, who would understand me, who would kiss me and hug, who would take care about me, and support me and challenge my ideas and just makes me happier every day. My soulmate.
I figured out by myself how to solve rubik’s cube. It is strange way to solve it, one of algorithms in my solution, if colors are set is certain way mix the cube and start other, basically my way to solve rubik’s cube has 50/50 chances.
It feels like my life at this point, I have to leave my kids, sell the house, quit the job and start over hoping my life would become better.
Kids are the hardest part. Last year I went to the conference for a week. And the first question from my son when I came back was: why your conference was so long? He was missing me. I do not know how I can handle a conference lasting for the life.
I don’t think I would ever to have courage to do it. This is why I adore C. She burned a lot of bridges trying to find her happiness.
I miss her a lot.
“Pho”
I brought my son for coding classes and because I did not have any time to have a lunch, I am having lunch at Pho place right now.
Yesterday, I bought a new iPhone. It is upgrade from 6s+ to Xs. I am happy with the upgrade, had some problems to reactivate Duo, but everything else went very smooth. I like the new way without home button, I like smaller size of the phone and slightly bigger screen. I was thinking a lot about switching to Android ecosystem, but I realized I do not have mental energy to do it. I use 1Password for instance and all passwords stored in iCloud, I have no idea how to transfer them to Android. Or this app Working Copy, probably I would need to buy all this apps again or find analogs. Pain. Face ID is good improvement, I do not noticing it, it is noticeable only if it fails to recognize your face, it happened once then my head was covered with hoodie, and other time when my fingers were in the way.
I disabled True Tone, looks weird.
Several days ago I found ravine in Minecraft. I was looking for a village, but found ravine, so I am building mining operation in ravine. I was looking for a village because I want to build armor stand, and I need to take something from village.
Also I want to see something under water, but it kind or hard to start alchemy at this point. Everything is mined in nether.
Ok. Pho was good. It is almost time to pick up my son from the classe.
“const”
Last year around December I posted a bug on SDL2. Here is the link: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4421 . The request was simple: SDL_Texture should be passed as a const pointer. And example was:
int SDL_RenderCopy(SDL_Renderer* renderer,
const SDL_Texture* texture,
const SDL_Rect* srcrect,
const SDL_Rect* dstrect);
In SDL2 API texture is passed to the function without const. So my bug was closed as invalid. We had some back and forth, read the conversation in the link. Your thoughts?
“More Minecraft”
I was streaming Mincraft on Twitch yesterday for… 7 hours. It is surprisingly little I have been done for this time. I built a Nether Portal, made 9 cakes and made some minor decorations in the house and that is it.
“Um…”
Lately while I am doing some randome thinkgs (playing games usualy) I am thinking: “What am I doing?” Um… actually I do not think like this anymore. I just play. So I was playing Minecraft three days in the raw - at night - until 2am. Yeah…
I did not build too match. Just house. Mostly wondering in the caves and mining iron and coal and listening Late Night Jazz on Spotify.
“Minecraft Update”
Minecraft server is updated to version 1.14.1.
“Minecraft”
Hey, I have Minecraft server.
“Starting”
Testing, testing. Mic check. This is my first blog post.
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