Boots with heating

Every cold winter same problem - feet freezing. Seriously it is doesn't matter hows cool your boots you've got the same. What if place powerful battery inside sole and connect it to  a heating element around your feet. Next we can make charging of this battery from kinetic power of walking or sun energy.

Game balance and stuff

It's rare to see, a good and interesting balance in a game its sad but true. The problem is that rock paper scissors its not a good example of a good balace, dont get me wrong, its perfectly balanced, but its naive and boring, you know each outcome and you can predict the result very easy to make an example we can go to the MMORPG games well almost each and one of them are have this issue, allways the same story tank healer damgedealer blah blah blah you can say, "But Ater, what should we do? Who can help us to make an interesting balance?". Well my young friend there is only one answer, your imagination, combination and random!

To make it more appliable for any kind of field where balance is needed we will find out the objects of interest, what fields of an object can participate in balancing? Here some examples:

  outcome (what pluses item,object,story,event can give to player and minuses)
  accessability (how easy player can get it)
  timed usage (we can balance it with timed usage like, for example some bonuses can be recived only for 15 minutes in hour)
  usage (how easy, or hard to use this object)
  random (how random this object, is it more predictable or it can give awesome results but its fairly based on random)

And this is just an example, you can add any field that you want, but goal is to make object more better in one field then we need to balance it from another field or mabe fields, or give a good range results for several fields and make one field really really bad, this is and example of interesting balance!

I will give an example:

In a MMORPG game, we can make an really OVERpowered class with higher damage and tank abilities than other classes on a field, and to defeat this guy you need the same class or several guys of another class, someone can say, HEY its not fare, why there can be one class that so overpowered so I cant take it with my perfect archer!?!? Well, the point is, first, Deal with it, the real life outside is NOT fare and this is why its so interesting, some people get results really easy and someone put a lot of hardworking to get the same reults and other examples, SO say to me, why should we make games different from our lifes? But its not the one point, to balance this guy we can make his leveling process really hard, put some problems with quests, like some NPC wont give him quests cause of his class, like you know random NPC: "Oh you! <class name> I hate you! I dont need help from your kind go away!" but only this, to make his life even more complicated we can make him to use only really rare weapon that can be found in shops or crafted, only taken from monsters with reare chance, so after that, this class is not so overpowered huh? Yeees, but still, there is a lot of nolifers that will go to doing all this to get this overpowered class, and he will ruin the balance of us, normal lifers, well, you know what can I say to it? If this guy can pull of all this why should we dont revard him with this benefits of beign so powerfull? If he can do more and better and put more himself in game, why for the gods sake he must be on the same ladder then you? My dear normal player? If you want to deal with this guy, get some friends from you life, cause you knowm you have your life, you have friend, and he dont, so its even more balanced that you think!

So think about it, if you are involved in game creation process in some kind, say to your fellow  game-designer: "Hey, lets make it more interesting, shall we?" and if he will answer, screw you, I will go with a safe way, than, I have a secret for you, here it is, read it in whisper: "he is, not a real game designer, he is an alien, imposter, agent, Sam Fisher, 47, or anyone else. It seems to be like this guy killed a real game designer or taked him somewhere far far away and taked his place, you need to help him! Rescue him! Faster while we still have time!"




Andrey "Ater" Goncharuk

Just some Sci-fi story

Story begins when first mars colony find the crystal, rare glowing mineral with really complex structure, after some research scientists find out that if you put that crystal in a specific magnetic field with special parameters, you know science stuff and so, and if you put around a copper wire its become a perfect block for dynamo engine, it works for some time, depends on magnetic field the stronger field less time and more power and in other way less power more time. And all this story starts from this mineral, after years of development mars become more and more efficient and start to become less controllable from Earth goverment and blah blah long story short, on the highest level of cold war between mars and earth, on earth starts apocalyptic scenario all nuclear missiles that was controled by new super duper mega smart AI shot right into the sky and wipe out entire earth, on mars in the main time it all shows up like a civil war on earth and some malfunction that cause this disaster, so mars send some expeditions and help to earth but soon when they have reach the planet mars lose signal from them, with no reason. After some tests mars decide to research this phenomena they send automatic zonds, but anything that you send to earth stop working. to be continued...




Andrey "Ater" Goncharuk

Game Prototype: Aqualung

Good day to everyone,  we're a great team from Ukraine working on this awesome Unity game for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS

Here we are:
http://anoxemia.net/

Here is a work in progress build so there will be what speak about:

 

  Mouse control ( on the tablet  touch control ) pull movement foward , click on the hero pause, the protagonist is subject to gravity, text side debug info: all time, time from last death , oxygen level, and the time when oxygen will end, the game itself is conceived absence of any text or any kind of interface (except main menu) everything important will be shown on hero itself and by sound.

Write to us your angry comments :)

See you.

Also check this out, early sketches:

Dear developers

Dear developers of net based games (MOBA, MMORPG, Shooters and so).

Every time when on forum some players start to make a wave of hate like, change this or change this! This is stupid, make it like this, and their argument will be like, "I paid for this game and this is what I get? Change it!" well in this situation, just imagine on the place of a game another product, like book or picture, anyone who bought a book cant ask author to rewrite some story cause it look stupid from the point of this guy, or so, cause they bought a book, they paid for it already, and there is a lot of people who bough this book and they have NO problem with this part of story, why should author rewrite something? He shouldn't, or imagine an picture in a museum and after buying a ticket one dude decides to find an author of an exhibition and say to him something like: "Dude, I saw a picture that you draw, and this tree behind house on the right, see, its sucks, can you change it? I got a ticket, so I think I have right to ask for it" sounds a little bit stupid isn't it? Well, but why it must be different with games? Always with this kind of stuff look how many people agreed with patch or changes and how many is angry and have an issues, if in a game of 100 000 people playing 1000 asking to change something Cause they pay for the game, well, screw them, lets start to put a disclaimers like, you bought a game for your own risks don't complain :)

P.S. Of course Im talking about some changes patches and rebalances, not about bugs glitches and so that kind of stuff Must be fixed.

Andrey "Ater" Goncharuk

Procedure generation

 I was wondering why there is not so much procedure generated games, I mean not like Diablo when they just mix some level parts and items parameters or like borderlands when they just make bazzilions of guns, Im talking about when you involve so much procedure generation when game can be played for example you can generate persons and items of interest for quest, you can even mix situation and places, for example you can have a template of a quest with several variations of problem solutions main characters and level based parameters, and starting from this you can make bazzilion quests, but wait there is more, just have some random spots for NPCs and other locations plus random level locations plus random item generation plus quests generation plus main story and you have different game have problems with using this methodology by several reasons for like, hard balancing, hard testing, more each time you run it, it will increase playtime and replay rates. I know for modern developers they work to do when player will get only part of it in a first play, but for balance, you can balance the generation process just take 1-2 programmers just for making procedure generated parts so they will try to make it balanced from the beginning, for testing, you can just make a public beta tests with online automatic data collection process, as for the  problem with amount of work to do to fill the generator well, its depends on what you want to do, good game, or just game that will sell itself.


Andrey "Ater" Goncharuk

Sci-fi future gun

Idea is to have a smart gun that will have an mechanism to prevent a recoil and spread by moving and changing the angle of shooting part of a gun, and almost all shots are going to the middle of a crosshair ( I mean, its future dude! we have flying space cars and shuttles for each family but we not advanced enough to make a precise gun :(


Andrey "Ater" Goncharuk