Author Archives: Self Similar

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The Crafting of Mines

This seems like my first game log in quite a while – in fact it is. I’ve simply not been playing a lot lately, disappointingly, and the one game I’ve been playing the most I’ve been putting a lot of effort into “100 percenting” so it is taking what seems like a huge amount of time to complete. I’ll report back on that when I’m through with it but check this out in the meantime!

A little while ago a friend introduced me to this small, still in development indy game called Minecraft and I’ve quickly become addicted to it. It’s basically a game in which you can freely build things in an open world – from tunneling underground, to building massive structures. The main game-type has you doing so while building up resources, crafting, and dodging and/or fighting the occasional creature.

“My humble little hobbit hole.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about this game that is so charming: Is it the Doom meets Mario style of simple, low-res graphics? Is it the Lego like ability to build anything in a world which is essentially a big toy box? For me, I think the sense of immersion I get from exploring these strange, randomly generated, infinite worlds is the most appealing part. I’ve always considered myself to be at least a little bit of an “explorer” but Minecraft has really managed to reveal just how extreme that side of my gaming psychology can be.

I could spend a lot more time attempting to describe Minecraft and its many glories but as luck had it early into writing this post I read this fantastic article on Bitmob describing the game. Check it out for some thoughts on and a quick introduction to the game.

Anyway, here’s the meat and potatoes! A short chronicle of a few days (of mostly ~1 hour play sessions) in a newly generated world:

Day 1:

I started by building a house on an ocean front beach near to where I started. There were mountains close by with several caves in them as well as quite a few trees scattered about and of course an abundance of water for farming later on. My current preferred way to start out with a house in Minecraft is simply to dig a pit, whatever size I feel like, 2 blocks deep, and then use the dirt I gathered from the dig to build a 1 block high dirt wall and ceiling. This is advantageous because it can be done quickly before nightfall on your first day without any tools. You can then block up the door, or half block it if you prefer, to keep safe for the night.

“A view of my home from above as night sets in.”

I started the usual way – chopping down trees by hand to get some wood to construct a workbench with. Next I made some wooden tools, specifically pick axes, and set out to survey the hills. There were a number of caves in the nearest, largest mountain, but absolutely none of them seemed to contain any ore. After upgrading my tools to stone I set out for some coal. A little more searching, this time in a small, craggy rock face across the valley from the aforementioned mountain, yielded a pretty massive vein of coal. Now I could really get down to business! I started by making a mass of torches as well as some additional stone tools and a furnace.

Day 2:

I spent a night digging a stairwell in my house’s floor down to a long, straight hall which I lit with torches as needed. I came across some coal here and there but nothing spectacular. As day broke I went back outside and began gathering additional wood and cloth while searching local caves for signs of iron. Unfortunately iron and coal were rare finds and as night set in I took refuge in my home once more. I ended up crafting myself some glass to turn the top of my lowly, dirt house into a classy skylight. I tunneled a bit more below my house turning my long corridor to the right. I came up with vague plan to make a series of tunnels, forming a grid, and then cleaning out the entire space between them, harvesting any resources I might find along the way and making a massive room to serve as a foundation for further mining efforts. Just as I decided to start doing just that, turning another right corner with my original tunnel, I hit a natural cave.

“A massive natural tunnel leading deep into my mine.”

I had broken into the cave towards the top of it and carefully made my way to the bottom. The large main room broke off in several directions. I set an array of torches as I began to explore what turned out to be quite a massive cave system which included 2 underground rivers and what seemed to be a large amount of iron and coal. I was quite excited to start excavating and fully investigating this cave system but I needed to quit for the day. As I didn’t quite explore every last inch of the cave, meaning there were possible unknown, unlit tunnels where creatures could be hiding, I built a door onto the tunnel leading down to the cave. I also finally built myself a real front door to my house while I was at it.

Day 3:

I was pretty anxious to get to mining and immediately returned to my newly discovered basement cave system. I started by mining all of the ore out of one of the smaller tunnels close to the entrance and then signaling that I was done with it by building some dirt pillars around the entrance of it. I may do something a bit more interesting with closed off areas later on. I then went another direction and began exploring pathway up towards the ceiling that I had missed last time. Unfortunately it didn’t have anything of note in it and it ended up in a small, square room a lot higher up than the rest of the cave. I thought to myself “hmm, I wonder how close I am to the outside?” and mined a single rock from overhead. I saw some water above me and thought “cool, I’m under a river!” Barely enough time for that thought to have processed passed before the cave started flooding. I ran for my life. This being my first encounter with underground water accidents I thought my mine was done for but luckily the water produced a nice, clean waterfall and didn’t flood too much of the surrounding area.

“An underground river spilling into a lava flow.”

I continued to explore the cave system, constantly finding new areas further and further in. This thing was even more gigantic than I originally suspected, eventually leading down into some huge natural caverns. The first time I ran into a bow carrying monster I must have jumped 10 feet out of my chair in what was probably the most scary moment I’ve had in a video game since playing Doom 3. That *thwack!* sound just totally caught me by surprise. Exploring Minecraft doesn’t really put me in that sort of a tense mood like Doom 3, Dead Space, and other similar games do though – I’m usually much more curious about exploring then I am nervous about what will happen to me around the next corner which I suppose is why this surprise attack freaked me out so much. I ended up crafting a set of iron armor and an iron sword for such encounters in the future.

“Score! I found a second diamond vein while taking screenshots!”

Eventually I reached the bottom of the caves – a complex system of smaller caves teaming with iron and coal interconnected by giant underground rivers of lava. The lava let off a warm glow which was quite enjoyable after fumbling around in the dark for so long. This is also where I discovered my first diamond vein which yielded 3 of the precious stones. As I explored more of the depths of the cave system it became completely obvious that I wasn’t even close to having explored the entire thing yet so I came to a good stopping point and returned to my humble home to call it a night.

Day 4:

More exploration! I spent almost the entire session yet again exploring my newly discovered mines, though this time a bit more methodically than before. I was able to seal off a couple of sections, having mined out their coal and iron, with the dirt pillars I used yesterday though I also, for better or for worse, discovered some exceedingly large and often deep new sections. I marked the entrances to those sections with a series of new torches to point me in the right direction. Even after I explore all of the conventional cave, which may yet take quite a while at this rate, the entire bottom floor of the deepest section of the system seems to be riddled with a sprawling maze of lava filled tunnels, some of which I suspect lead to yet more caves and tunnels.

“It may be hard to see in the thumbnail but there are two skeletons, a creeper, and a spider on the other side of this waterfall.”

After I do finally explore it all and mine out all of the precious ore I’m toying with the idea of going through with my blocks and my pick and basically remodeling the entire cave system so that it looks man made – fixing craggy edges, rough floors, and strange turns. It might be too much work though, given the size of this thing, especially considering how massive some of the caverns are. After that I plan to look for a new place to build a better, much more complex house and new places to mine.

Clan Down!

It amazes me to see how little I’ve actually posted about my attempted America’s Army 3.0 clan considering how much work I put into it and how much it dominated my gaming time for a little while. I intended to post an update about how that whole thing turned out but it seems I never posted much about how it even started out so I guess I’ll post the whole story, abbreviated as it may be.

“Myself having just suffered a rare, humiliating death by the VIP.”

America’s Army 3.0 (referred to as AA3 from here on out) was rumored to be a reboot of the popular online tactical FPS America’s Army. It was basically going to be a new game from the ground up. I ran a small gaming “clan” dedicated to these sorts of games with aspirations of playing them in “serious business” tournaments and the like. Since these types of games are few and far between these days I generally keep a close eye on new releases and AA3 really caught my attention – not only was I a big fan of the original game, having played it for countless hours with my old clan [TPG], but it sounded like it was going to be amazing. The more I learned about the game the more inspired I was to take my clan, <8AT>, out of the mothballed state it had been in for years and get things going again. Eventually I got into a last minute private beta of AA3 and I liked what I saw despite it still being a bit rough around the edges. After looking around a bit and not finding any existing clans that interested me I made the decision to relaunch my clan.

And so I did! It took a lot of work – I revamped our website, setup a new Ventrilo server, reserved a ranked AA3 server, and started work on a recruitment campaign, never mind revising all of our rules, policies, and hell, even the entire focus of the clan. This was going to be something slightly different then the last incarnation of the clan and I was quite pumped up to get it going. A lot of my old clan buddies who had played SWAT 4 with me in <8AT> and/or America’s Army with me in [TPG] had expressed interest in joining. Things were looking up.

Finally the release date for America’s Army 3 arrived and while the game with rife with technical issues it was still quite an awesome and fairly unique experience. There were some troubling things, such as how many of the bugs from the beta hadn’t been fixed yet, including some pretty major ones, in an apparent rush to get the game pushed out, and the news that apparently the entire civilian development staff of the game had been unceremoniously fired by the Army the day after the release to move development in-house. Still, many of my old friends joined or rejoined the clan including some I hadn’t expected to show up while sadly some I did expect (and hope) to show up never materialized. We started strong though – my old co-leader from the original America’s Army days in [TPG], 20kill, was there and took the much needed role of second in command.

For the first few weeks we spent our time suffering through bugs and bizarre issues with the game’s central authentication servers, and simply trying to figure out the many nuances of the gameplay. Much fun was had though the bugs and unpolished state were simply too much for some members to deal with and there was a small, gradual exodus of mostly old friends from the clan very early on. Recruiting didn’t go exceptionally well either – it seemed that most of the clans in AA3 pitched themselves as super serious, hardcore “realism” clans where members had to follow strict orders, call each other by rank, and all sorts of other silly things. I didn’t have any problem with such realism clans but this wasn’t what I had envisioned <8AT> as being. Unfortunately though, I quickly noticed that most of the people who were looking for a clan in AA3 were looking for that kind of an experience and the majority of those who weren’t simply weren’t looking for one in the first place. Thanks to a combination of technical problems with AA3 itself and the fact that we were mostly adults with jobs who didn’t play the game 24 hours a day, our server floated around wildly between obscurity and semi-notoriety but never really gained the full on popularity I had hoped it would, putting yet another dent in our recruiting efforts.

The state of the game improved a bit with a fair amount of mostly small patches in the first month of its release in June. Many of the changes seemed like minor fixes and band-aids which did little to comfort us in the shadow of some of the bigger issues that loomed. The communication from the devs also all but stopped during this period which was a shame considering how active it had been in the old days and even lading up to the release of the new game. Finally, after July, the patches stopped, and I had a lot of serious questions in the back of my mind about the decision to dump the previous development team and what it had meant for the future of the game itself. Was this just some sort of fumble? Had the funding been cut drastically? Was the entire project being canned? Who knew.

During this lull in official activity the influx of good new recruits into the clan still hadn’t been strong enough to counter the previous departures and I found myself losing a lot of interest. Originally I had to more or less force myself to carve out a section of my free time, especially on week nights, to play AA3 and with the state of the clan and more so the game itself it began harder and harder to do so. I also changed jobs from that of a programmer to that of a network engineer and while the programming tasks I was assigned left a lot of breathing room to surf the web here and there, reading about the state of the game and keeping up with the clan, my new position was hectic and saw me putting in quite a lot of overtime. At around the same time 20kill, who had been instrumental in keeping the clan alive and active, suddenly departed. At first he returned a few times but eventually left and was never heard from again. The clan probably could have survived my reduced commitment but with 20kill now completely out of the picture and interest from the rest of our membership waning I knew the end was near.

“Fighting the fog.”

Finally, after a month of silence, another patch was released in early September. Everyone was hoping it would improve things in big ways and breath some new life into the game but it didn’t seem to deliver and certainly didn’t help out <8AT>. I felt like the depression brought on by the state of the game was something we were all feeling across the board to different degrees. Even the official America’s Army forums seemed to have noticeably slowed in activity. Eventually the few remaining members dispersed unceremoniously. The clan was dead.

I stopped following the game and hadn’t even really played it since around this time though I did keep my eye out for patches: there weren’t any. Surprisingly there hadn’t been any patches since that September until February. Finally, another patch was released just yesterday which is what prompted me to write this post. The last two patches were large but don’t include any new maps or promised features and seemed largely unimpressive for having taken so long. It seems my original suspicions about the change in development were quite possibly correct – depressing since I did in fact enjoy the game and, even after <8AT> dissolved, hoped it would succeed and I could possibly even return to it.

I have no idea what the state of the AA3 community has been like for the last year (I picture a lot of rage posts) but I can’t imagine it had been as healthy as it was in the America’s Army days when communication from the development team was frequent and, while patches were often few and far between, they were usually also fairly major. In my opinion if a company wants their game to have “long legs” online it has to try to create and maintain a community and it needs to feed that community with at least little chunks of carrot on the end of a proverbial stick semi-often. With AA3 that online community was literally all there was to the game so it was critical to keep people playing, especially considering the goals of the project as a whole. Personally I find it to be a bit insulting when a developer asks players to commit themselves to a game yet does not offer any commitment in return, at least in the form of the occasional bug fix here and there. This was why the original incarnation of <8AT> stopped playing SWAT 4 – I loved the game but it had issues and the development team and/or publisher seemingly washed their hands of it as soon as they had our money.

Then there is me. Over the years I’ve participated in several different clans, guilds, and the like, and have often found myself quickly rising up the ranks into positions of leadership. I’m not sure if I have a natural knack of leadership and/or management or if I was just better suited to it (or maybe just to be nominated for it) then others in the particular situations I’ve been in. At times while being in these kind of “officer” positions I felt the urge to break out from beneath whatever structure or leadership was above me, frustrating me, to start over and do things my own way which is, in part, how <8AT> came about. In practice, however, I’ve consistently found myself to be much more suited to those kinds of secondary leadership roles where I’m not under quite as much pressure or commitment yet can still be useful and contribute the group. I suppose with this, what might prove to be my final run at running my own clan, I’ve finally come to terms with this.

Being out there, putting the whole operation on the line by myself was often a big bummer, even with friends backing me up, the pressure felt like it was solely on me – others could come and go as they pleased and often did. I especially disliked having to worry about recruiting and now better understand some of the attitudes I encountered when joining or watching others join past clans and guilds I was in. For me, I suppose, there is a delicate balance in the feelings of pride and accomplishment, and even control, gained from running or helping run a group, and the enjoyment I need to have in actually playing the game. When running the group saps the fun out of the entire thing, or worse, the stress bleeds over into day to day life, then the balance is too far off.

I may give running a clan, guild, or some other type of community another go at some point in the future. It’s quite possible, even, that <8AT> itself will have another run some day. Hopefully if that does happen I’ll be able to concentrate on running the group and playing the game without also having the state of the game being as much of a concern as it was the last two times. For now though I think I’ll be content to let others run the show and try my hardest to resist the temptations of sweet, sweet power. 🙂

The Tale of Garn Chapter 23

Warning: potential side quest spoilers ahead!

From Garn’s recollections:

The Hunted

The next day I spent most of my time hanging around in some of Bravil’s taverns. Unfortunately most of the taverns in the city were more of the inn variety thus most of the relatively few patrons were travelers rather than regular locals. Still, it was only a matter of time before I heard rumor of a woman who was claiming that her husband had been kidnapped. This, naturally, sounded worth investigating.

I found the woman, Ursanne Loche, chatting with several others outside of the city chapel. She was easy to spot as she wore the look a person who had done much grieving in days passed. After I introduced myself she told me that her husband Aleron had manged to get himself into a significant debt thanks to an out of control gambling habit and had been kidnapped by a loan shark named Kurdan. This sounded like absolutely none of my business but I figured it couldn’t hurt to at least go chat with this Kurdan character.

“Since you’re obviously incapable of getting it yourself I guess I’ll accept.”

After asking around a bit I located Kurdan hanging around at The Lonely Suitor Lodge. Kurdan was a large Orc who seemed suspiciously well armed for a loan shark. I was surprised to find him offer me a straight up trade without much discussion at all. Kurdan simply wanted me to travel to a nearby ruin and track down a lost family heirloom of his. While this sounded reasonable the whole setup seemed a bit too casual, and I remained suspicious of his intent even as I agreed – or perhaps that was why I agreed! Once I accepted Kurdan’s offer he seemed eager to have me leave and said he had even provided me a small boat to take me to the ruins. After agreeing he seemed oddly rude and forceful, even for an Orc, insisting that I leave immediately and not dilly-dally. My hand never left my sword’s pommel as I stepped into the boat and made my way down the city canals.

“Looks like a nice place…”

I reached the ruins of Fort Grief, just across the bay from Bravil. The ruins consisted of a large, destroyed tower poking out of a sandy beach. For being so remote the area looked well traveled and used, even having a dock to tie the boat off on to. The only entrance to the ruined tower I found was an archway blocked by a large metal portcullis. A small leaver raised the portcullis and I cautiously stepped inside.

The portcullis fell back down with a loud clanging noise as it slammed against the stone. While I wasn’t too surprised by this my attention quickly shifted to trying to locate a means to reopen it from the inside. Unfortunately I couldn’t locate one near the archway itself though my search was soon interrupted by the shouting of a man. As shouts of “Hello?” and “Is anyone there?” echoed through the ruins I made my way towards their origin. Much to my surprise I saw a Breton man who matched Ursanne’s description of Aleron perfectly.

“Doh!”

After introducing myself Aleron hurriedly told me that he had been lured here by Kurdan in a similar way as I had, and that we were now apparently unwilling participants in some kind of bizarre hunting game run by Kurdan. Unfortunately it seemed that our roles in the game were to serve as prey, and that the only way out was to go into the sub-levels of the ruins where the hunt took place and survive the hunters, one of which would have a key to the outside. I had heard tale of such “man hunts” while in prison though I never bargained I’d ever see one myself, never mind be the one being hunted in one. I told Aleron, who certainly didn’t look like the fighting type, to hide himself nearby on the outside while I searched down below.

Thankfully I still had my equipment and my magic so I didn’t feel like I was at a large disadvantage in this game. I lit a torch, drew my sword, and walked down a stairwell into the enclosed portion of the ruin. The inside seemed to be relatively well kept, with obvious attempts at recent repairs and modifications made to much of the structure. Near the entrance was a locked room containing a leaver – likely the key to our freedom. I attempted to pick the lock for several minutes only to discover that it was an uncommon sort of lock that my picks were not suited to working with and continued on my way.

“Ok, I’m reporting this to the Better Business Bureau.”

The walls were scarred with signs of battle, pocked with arrow hits, and there was even the occasional humanoid skeleton to be seen – obviously Aleron and I were not Kurdan’s first victims. My train of thought was broken by a battle cry as a man wielding a massive poleaxe rushed towards me. I sidestepped his attack and slashed across his belly as I did so, landing a lucky hit on a weak area of his armor. As I turned to continue the fight he was already dying, clutching his wound.

“Shield bash!”

As I continued on I came across many traps – some of which were probably part of the original structure while others, such as crude pit traps, were obviously recent creations meant to spice up the hunt. Some of these traps were hidden quite well as the second hunter who attempted to ambush me discovered. A large boulder smashed into the hunter, sending him flying off of a ledge and to his death before I was even aware of his approach. Finally I reached the end of the accessible part of the ruin, and the last hunter – an Orc who fiercely charged me as I entered the chamber. I struggled to keep the Orc at bay with fireballs while continuously moving away from him before we finally clashed and I finished him off. I claimed my key from his corpse and started to backtrack.

“Look out behind you!”

I was quite surprised to find that the key that I had found on the Orc hunter didn’t fit the locked door to the gate room either but I had little time to contemplate the situation as I heard screams coming from the outside. I rushed back up the steps to find Kurdan himself standing over Aleron’s body. He turned to me and smiled before lifting his sword and approaching me. I didn’t hesitate to engage him. Kurdan was a strong warrior but I quickly found that his brutal, overbearing attacks were of little match for my sword skill and I finished him as a brief but violent sword fight. Upon searching his body I found the actual key to the gate room – Kurdan obviously never intended to let us leave the hunt alive regardless of the outcome.

“Leaving Bravil…”

I loaded Aleron’s body onto one of the small boats still tied off near the ruins and rowed back into Bravil. I sent for Ursanne immediately upon seeing the first city guard and by the time I had tied off a small group had gathered around at the docks. I told her that Kurdan had double crossed us and that her husband had been brave despite the circumstances. I left the somber scene quickly and headed off to the stables to purchase a steed. This job hadn’t gone at all as I had hoped and I wasn’t very pleased at failing to bring Aleron back alive. It was time to continue on to the Imperial City where I was hopeful that better fortune awaited me.