.Update-Lack of Uploads.

Sorry guys, getting my life together, just got a new puppy so wanting to focus on her until she calms down. Posts will be coming back soon!

Lots of worldbuilding posts planned, for gods and other creatures, stay tuned!

.Looking For Creature Inspiration? Astronomy-to-Zoology!.

Link: http://astronomy-to-zoology.tumblr.com/

This blog has provided me countless reference material and inspiration when it comes to creature design, I hope it does for you as well! This person is a biology student so this is sort of his livelihood, I’ve been introduce to new creatures I have never even heard of before.

.World-Building Wednes-friday (Don’t Judge Me) – Energies of the Soul.

As always the conflicting views of Sci-fi and Fantasy is that whole ‘magic’ issue right? Fantasy you typically accept the nonsense, and Sci-fi they give you some reasoning, but you also accept that nonsense. Mass Effect got its name from it’s space ‘powers’ aka the Mass Effect fields, Star Wars had the force, you had to just take off your reality cap for a moment and take it all in. However lets think for a moment that souls were able to change, evolve, mutate, it allows itself to flow and become something new, much like how nature is. Nature loves conflict, a soul could be built of conflicting particle which could bring along why creatures are the way they are, sometimes were destructive, cruel, and other times were compassionate and selfless. A mortals nature is chaos, conflict and change itself, couldn’t a gods soul and energy be like this as well? One of the ways scientists like to see if they can study or find the soul is think it may have to do with Quantum energy.

Like this article here: Vedic Philosophy and Quantum Mechanics On the Soul

Also just in case your a little lost you can Google about Quantum Theory or look at these articles for a good gist of it here or here.

Anyhow, now if we all thought how things would work in a biological or chemical sense we find out there is only so much we know and even with all the research you could do, the physics of the world you are creating is limited to how much you are willing to fill in and let the reader rely on faith. Giving as much detail as possible to make this believable. Getting to the butter of this however…

I have Gods, Demons, Other dimensions, and other things in my Sci-fi world, however I spend hours on trying to explain every little detail, mainly for my own satisfaction. For example we have many stories over demon possession, shape shifting, energy manipulation. A demon’s soul could simply be composed of particles that interact with each other much differently that a mortals or gods, possible it is more chaotic thus is what determines their default nature before external energies influence the personality.

Gods possibly are made of purer energy particles, however they also are chaotic but not in the same sense of a demons. Thus how they interact with energy would be on a different scale than a demons or mortals.

Souls possible could have different colors as well: (example of star colors: here), and what this can do is determine the power and starting standing other being with this color of soul. Souls possible could divide and become multiple beings, or come together, but all must be cycled into new bodies eventually, or non-living creatures, just become particles that are hibernating before they are recycled into something new.

This is all on the subject for now before I ramble on even more, so what are your guys thoughts on this? Comment and Like!

Hey Calling all World-Builders! Check out the Cartographers’ Guild!

Hey Calling all World-Builders! Check out the Cartographers’ Guild!

Look, short, sweet and to the point. If you like making maps, world-building and want to find a like minded community who love doing that for fictional worlds. World-building is more than making maps, but its a start. Come and join the forum, make a blog, and be inspired!

World-building Fodder: Adventurers and Economy

World-building Fodder: Adventurers and Economy

Bringing you another post from Worldbuilderblog, about how Adventurers can influence and bring in a whole new economical function to the society within the world you have built. This is something to consider if you want to make your world feel lively and progressive in what it is doing. You cannot get to the point to where either its impossible to make money, or your protagonist or character has too much money to spend and their isn’t any reason for them to get involved in the world in some form. Games I believe who have decent economy systems are typically MMOs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Everquest and recent single player games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Civ 5. Books don’t usually always go so in depth into economy but board games typically present it quite well, I haven’t played too many good ones but maybe you can recommend me some good ones. See you in the next post!

.World-Building Influencing Game Design: Choice.

Last week, I decided to advocate as well as chat about an article that talked about how world-building influencing the design and overall experience of a game. One of these factors mentioned is choice. Meaningful choice has more impact than any other choice when it comes to games, these sort of choices feel like real life situations. Where everything is at stake depending on how your choice turns out, your actually feeling a bit of the pressure, if the choice isn’t executed right, you may end up killing a character by accident and can never get them back. This adds a sense of immersion and depends on the games world-building, choices wouldn’t make sense in a action game. However in a Detective/Mystery or RPG they can become increasingly important and impact heavily to the overall development and progression of the protagonist, the world, story, and other characters in general. I believe that Brice Morrison’s post on “Meaningful Choice in Games: Practical Guide & Case Studies”, summarized it the best. Mainly with these 4 core points:

1. Awareness – The player must be somewhat aware they are making a choice (perceive options)

2. Gameplay Consequences – The choice must have consequences that are both gameplay and aesthetically oriented

3. Reminders – The player must be reminded of the choice they made after thay made it

4. Permanence – The player cannot go back and undo their choice after exploring the consequences

Now say what you will, games like Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Dragon Age, and Dragon Commander, to name a few games show a massive executed of these four choices. Let us look a bit at the nice image of the mass effect ‘point’ bars:

Damn look at all that paragon, going for the good ending aren’t we?

Mass Effect maybe has one of the most well known version of choice and narrative dictating the games outcome, as you can see if you pick paragon (good) you would get points for that, and it would open up more paragon choices, however if you chose Renegade (bad) you would instead get more ‘badass’, albeit a bit too black and white, decisions to increase your renegade side.

These choices would eventually effect mainly your positions with characters, how loyal they are to you, and the chance would some live or would others die when it came to the final mission in Mass Effect 2. And not just the narrative, all choices were meaningful, conversing with the characters became important, making sure they had the best stats for what was coming up, you wanted to make it out with most of your team alive. You didn’t want to have that ending where you lost like four team members from a stupid mistake. Heck if you spent to much time doing side missions before the final mission, (AKA Suicide Mission), you would lose valuable crew mates. Knowing how to manage your times and make the right choices in Mass Effect determined final outcomes with lasting choices that would pass on to its sequels, and just like with Morrison’s example when it came to Fire Emblem. Your going to feel the consequences, which pushes you to investing even more time into the game to make sure you get the ending you want the most.

I don’t really want to babble on about choice in games, I think reading Morrison’s article would give you the best idea of what I am trying to say, I hope to write more about this eventually. But for now, bye bye!

.World-building Influencing Game Experience.

World-building is the process of creating a world, the overall setting and background, of a fictional universe for novels, games, movies, or any sort of media/entertainment that the audience will be able to either view or interact with. When it comes to games, specifically when the world is everything, it influences the mechanics and how the player interacts with what is within it. It is important to make sure you limit how much control you have over the story within the world, as well as how much the player the has in order for the experience to be the most immersed, and satisfactory. Games, being an interactive medium, are being explored more frequently now for a way to tell a story, to get an idea across (however be sure to not limit yourself to using only games), and the main way to do this giving a player choice, and that that choice has lasting consequence. I believe Joao Beraldo’s opinion in World-building for a better game experience is phrased the best in this quote:

“And what I learned during all this time is that the story you got to tell will never be as powerful as he story players will experience.”

Why I Agree with This

You can’t influence a story reading a book, you cannot influence a movie while watching it, however people sometimes like feeling a sense of control and games over that. We are placed in a protagonist position, and what we hope for most is that we can make the story go in the direction we want it to, and feel a moment of satisfaction that even if the consequence is negative, we made the choice ourselves and that makes the experience much more valuable. Rather than just going through a virtual space and just watching as the game happens in front of you, YOU are making the story move forward, YOU are creating this experience mainly, not the developer, not the game.

“If you want to empower players with choice, why not weave story into it? Why not allow them to take meaningful choices before each battle? Why not give them a world where choice and consequence are a fact of life?”

If you don’t do this, sure the game may still be interesting, but this adds another sense of depth to the user experience, which is very important. User experience sells games, if your audience is not enjoying the product, it is possible the user had a negative experience with the product. For there may of been too many choices, too few choices, the writing is terrible, the world just isn’t detail enough. Taking all this into consideration is what makes great games, when the designs go that extra mile to make sure that they know enough about the world they made that every choice you make actually feels like it has some weight on its shoulders. Be it a combat decision, a political decision, a companion decision. Decisions drives players to become invested, challenge in any kind of decision with consequence even makes it more appealing towards any player. However make sure the decisions scale with the difficulty the player chose, so that it doesn’t feel to weak, or in turn feel too hard.

World-building is such a key component to making some of the best games, from the culture of a fiction race, to the layout of a city, to the structure of the world’s government, to even the design of a characters house. That all has to do with world-building and that also influences choices and consequence of maximizing the experience.

.Common Blog Sources for World-builders.

So with my teacher wanting us to do a connector style post about ‘supernode’ blogs, I have come to realize that in this search that unless its a well known novel or movie, not many world-building bloggers actually use supernode blog sources. Luckily however i was able to find that a couple of my blog rolls use i09 and Writers Digest on some of their articles when wanting to help explain their topic.

World-builders are creators, they are writers, they are game designers, they are artists, they are animators. Which means unlike news and sports blogs we’re not technically always writing about the now, and what is happening. We are writing about what is happening in our fictional worlds which can either take place before the time now, after or during. This all depends on what we are focusing on, which genre we are writing in, what exactly do we feel like writing about. I have made posts that may seem like they have nothing to do with world-building but they do. Game Design requires world-building, knowing social norms from personal or other sources allows us to as a new twist to our headworlds cultures. However we have to draw from many, many sources, and some we may not always share. Be it from wikipedia, youtube, the similarities stop here because the branching out happens in an instant.

i09 and Writer’s digest I had found on the blogs: http://worldbuildingrules.wordpress.com/ and http://mqallen.com/ , i09 I have used myself and it has been a wonderful resource for finding tips on writing, creative inspiration, and just some weird wacky things in nature and science that just have to be added to my headworld somehow. Writer’s Digest of course is a magazine, so it’s not surprising they have found sources to push them to detail their fictional worlds more. Along with their being many online articles it’s an endless source for writing tips and inspiration.

A personal one of mine I use is Gamasutra. Which is a gaming news site, however it has helped immensely with finding news, opinions, tips, resources, anything that anyone in the realm of fiction can manipulate and find a new way to fit into our world. However people who are not in the field I am going into, of course wouldn’t use this source. Thus this brings back to the point that unless its a book, world-builders will not always use common supernodes because their job is to dig deep and find as much new information as possible that they can apply to their story, manipulate it, make it theirs.

.Builder of Worlds.

Some more useful tools for world-building, not all of it is free but reasonably cheap, you can never have enough supplies when creating an expansive fictional world and I believe this author goes over the ones she found quite well.

.Want interesting women in video games?.

Want interesting women in video games? There are binders full of them

A recent article about women in video games from narrative designer Jill Murray, at Ubisoft Quebec. To tie in with my recent post I did about feminism and racial representation in games. I thought it would be good to link you guys to an article that expands upon it. Hope you enjoy!

Though to add a bit more of personal opinion, this is basically pointing out what the core problem is with representation of other races and genders in video games, people who do not want to do the research or even spend the time dedicating themselves to making a strong female, a strong Indian, a strong homosexual character as a main, sure they sometimes do it as a side character. But how memorable do they even make these characters? The only instance I can think of is possible Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Which Bioware have done a wonderful job of saying ‘Fuck you’ to anyone who isn’t comfortable with that, and we need more companies to do that. Sure in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, the main character isn’t on a console but the PS Vita, but still, its nice to see more characters like her being made by triple A companies.