AltSci Cell

A modest attempt at development on AltSci Cell can be viewed below. Months now with very little progress is disappointing, but I suppose I'll continue on. A rant about how easy laziness is would probably not advance progress any better than the past rants, so I'll spare you.

Today, I came up with a few ideas on the way to and from Uwajimaya Asian market. The first is that the sky has a quantifiable set of properties even though it is very complex and interesting in reality. But complete quantification of every meteorological property of the sky is not my plan. I want a fairly reasonable dynamic sky so that the player is not faced with 24 hours of daylight and something to break up the blue sky and black night. Adding a sunrise and sunset is not the only thing that a developer can do. Adding a gradient to the sky also helps. Artists will tell you that the sky has a white part near the horizon. Some days the sky is very deep blue, some days it is very light blue. How can we decide? First lighten and darken the sky randomly by day. Secondly, use the time of day to decide the deepness of the color. The next thing is clouds. It's obvious that the sky will have clouds in it some days. How do you properly add clouds? One way is by adding the clouds to the texture. Another way is by having a transparent layer with different types of clouds. This way if you really want to have fun, you can make moving clouds. Of course you can make textured clouds move, but it might require extra work. The final thing is stars. Of course, it's easy to add stars to a sky, right? Well, you are going to have a bit of trouble depending on your choice of UV coordinates or if your sky is a box. It's possible to do it correctly, it's just a matter of work.

Hi,

I thought I'd update this blog with some actual AltSci Cell information. It's been over a month since my last post. But actually, I've only gotten a few days of work done on AltSci Cell, so it hasn't been very long.

Greetings,

You may be wondering why I am updating this site more regularly than other sites, such as Javantea's Fate. JF is no longer in production (it's been put aside for two projects that are more interesting to me). Since this is the second and thus most interesting applicable site, it is where I post my blog. It's a developer blog, similar to Making of Javantea's Fate. I stopped posting blogs at #378, posted on 2006-03-07. How far will this blog go? Hopefully I'll move onto another project before Spring, but I'll probably post a note or two here just for kicks (in the same sense that I plan to post blogs on JF now).

Greetings,

As of today, this site is totally upgraded. The features that it supports are:

If you're just looking for my latest blog, find the yellow Articles tab, click the Blog with the latest date, and you'll probably find a link to my latest work. What is AltSci Cell about? If you got here through the domain cell-game.com, you probably know that I am writing a video game called Cell. This website will show pictures of it until it's completion, at which point it will have downloads available and it will allow you to purchase the game.

What type of game will Cell be? Cell is a game about the technology of communication and how we use it to define our reality. Even before I owned a cell phone, I wanted to write a satire on the high cost of cell phones. Now that I have a cell phone myself that costs $80-100 per month (don't ask me how), the satire hits home. While satire is still a motivation for Cell, it's not the main motivation. Now that I understand the idea of cell phones, I am much better equipped to ask and perhaps to answer the question "Why do we really need a cell phone?" Don't expect me to lecture you on your bill.

More specifically, Cell will have a semi-traditional gameplay based on the love sim genre with a bit of American style mystery and plenty of philosophy. I'm going to try my best to script as little as possible in AltSci Cell (opposed to Hack Mars, which will have over hundred scripted sequences) so that the player is the engine through which the plot is explained. People seem to like controlling their own destiny and video games give them a very weird (read: unique) way to express it.