Oh, f-ck

The title summarizes what I feel right now.

The weekend passed and I got absolutely no time to just recharge. A friend turned 30 and had a really nice party which I of course don't regret attending, and the day after had me and my mate go for some much needed furniture shopping. A good weekend, but oh how I feel the repercussions of not taking even one single day off from it all.

The game client is compiling. I need to get in there and look some things up before moving on to my other point on my schedule - defining what sounds we'll need to request from our sound artist. It looks like I need to do a full recompile. That'll take an hour. Guess I'll have to start with the list anyway.

The reason I'm on my seldom updated blog right now is that f-ck. I need to vent. Not anger or anything like that, but just everything. My load is currently extremely high, higher than I'm used to, but the difference between now and - say - 6 years ago, is that feel that I can handle it. But, I need to shut down now and then and recharge. To wake up one day of the week at least and think "hey, what's the time? oh, it's THAT day, I don't need to care... but I'm up now, so what to do? yeah I think I'll fire Guild Wars 2 up... no wait, I'll just not get up from the couch and then I'll look at something stupid on Netflix. or, some tutorials on some cool thing that I've been wondering about for a while..."

I'm not really getting that here on the blog, of course, but at least I'm braiding text out of the strands of my mind and getting some feelings out in some form of orderly fashion. It feels soothing. It helps, I think.

I've got a cup of coffee before me and the game is still compiling. I started watching "Moon" on Netflix yesterday and got halfway through. That's a movie I probably would have never watched if it wasn't for that new service (new to Sweden anyway) where I can just click and watch instantly. It's nice. It's very different and I want to know what happens next. I'll probably finish it in the evening. And that's another thing - I'm looking forward to watching a movie. Movies. Like, I haven't done that in many years because getting to the point of watching something is always filled with obstacles. If it isn't the drag of downloading a torrent it is the drag of buying a disc absolutely filled with advertisements... that I just paid for. Buying a DVD or Bluray today almost feels like willingly kicking yourself in the crotch, taking a photo of it and shaaaaaaring it with all your friends and family.

*sip*

Yep, still compiling. This is a long one. So, a sound list...

That reminds me of the LiveStream I did with our publisher Paradox Interactive on twitch.tv last week. You can find it here. It's an hour of babbling and game play from "my" latest DLC release for Magicka, "Dungeons & Daemons". I haven't watched it myself yet actually, but I know it's rather lame and embarrassing. I was relatively prepared for it, I thought, but then they changed the setup at the very last minute and suddenly most of my preparations went through the window. That, and it's two very different things to build English sentences in writing and in speech. And screw trademark symbols - I'm not a representative for anything here but myself™ and my creativity.

Back to sounds. I'll have to go through all the scenes and "play" it in my head. This'll take a while. Good thing I don't have to wait for my brain to compile. Hm... or is that what this just was?

Idea: Minecraft, Bases

I would like a mod for Minecraft that does the following...

When you create your world, you start next to your "base". The base is a obelisk of some sort, or maybe a magical tree, or something similar. Something stationary. Once built, it cannot be moved.

The mod would add a lot of monsters and animals, and maybe resources. Some of the monsters are basic ones, like the one's already in Minecraft, and the others will be more and more difficult.

Now, the "base" obelisk erects an area around it, stretching 200-500 meters or more, that gradually decreases the difficulty of monsters spawned in that area. The farther you get from your base, the harder your encounters will become (or, technically, the less decreased the difficulty of the encounters will be).

Also, the farther away from the starting point of the server you get, the encounters will get generally harder and the resources and treasures should be generally better. This gradient should stretch over several thousands of meters. Some resources might not be found at all around the very start. Base obelisks does not affect the resources, only the difficulty of monster encounters.

You should be able to build a "base" obelisk. This is a process. Let's take a magical base tree as an example. You first need to plant it using a special seed that you've found somewhere. Maybe you must enchant it as well, or something. When you've planted it, you must grow it. Using some sort of relatively difficulty-to-get-yet-attainable resource, you feed it either directly or through some sort of internal "inventory". With time and player presence, this will grow. The more it grows, the farther and stronger its "encounter easification field" will grow. However, before its become a real trunk and not just a growing sprout, it will even attract  a steady raid of monsters, so you will have to protect it while feeding it. The tree will then need both water and sun to not wither.

From time to time, there should be light enemy raids, even in the "safe" areas. The tree should be a main target for these raids. If it gets damaged, the remaining pieces of it will wither and the safe area will fail. How this will work with no players around, I'm not sure. Maybe it would feel Ok if the raids came only with players around. You'll probably want to be in the area a lot of the time, since it's an area of general safety for mining and building. The enemy raids should be fairly light. Nothing armageddon-like as that would defeat the purpose of erecting a safe area.

The Nether could be similar, but require another way (or no way) of building such a "base" obelisk. Maybe its difficulty should simply scale with distance from a portal, and nothing more, making it hostile as it should be.

A mod like this will make it important to get further away from safety if you wish to find good resources. More difficult monsters will yield better rewards when killed, but will hamper you if you wish to harvest the natural resources in the area. You will have to erect well protected bases here and there with a base obelisk if you want to make the area habitable and workable which will probably be worth it, but you'll have to travel further away from that safety in order to find the lucrative monsters. The mod would also make it important to work together. It could possibly even increase the density of encounters by a factor based on how many players are in the area or on the server.

Apart from the new monsters and resources, this should not be that tricky a mod to make. It would give the game a more tangible and acute sense of progression. Granted, the progression would still be limited in how many interesting monsters and resources you can throw into the system, but still. I seldom fight monsters when looking for diamonds in Minecraft. Or clay, or fine wood, or plants or anything. My biggest fear is falling into lava and as long as you don't mine downwards you're always fairly safe.

EDIT: Similarly, monsters could have their own bases that increase their numbers and strength in the area. If we use the tree as an example, they could have their own decayed and moldy version of it that they protect with powerful monsters. Maybe it doesn't even need sun to grow, to make it more interesting and hard to find. These bases are rare and generally just generated when the world is. They may, when destroyed, drop something extremely rare that does something arcane and awesome. Perhaps a seed to a giant bean stalk, or fertilizer that allows the players to grow a tree in the Nether, or something. Something really worth getting.