Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Now that we're focused on recruiting teammates for beyond the demo, it seemed like a good time to profile what exactly we're looking for. Here's a start:

All teammates need experience with playing realtime strategy games, be it Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, or Westward. Everyone on the dev team should have at least 2 years experience with building a realtime strategy game from concept to market release. They should have at least deployed one realtime strategy game.

Everyone who wants to participate in design of the game must also get familiar with the stories of social enterprise like "The New Heroes" DVD, "How to Change the World", and "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (FATBOP)"

Roles:
Producer- Must be able to handle local and remote teammates. Must know quality people to outsource sound design as well.
Lead Programmer- Extensive experience with programming multiplayer realtime strategy games. Experience with Garage Games Torque is a huge plus. Needs to have AI pathfinding experience. Coding physics doesn't really matter in this game.
Art Director- Needs 1+ experience in 2D and 3D environments.
2D Texture/GUI Artist - experience with Torque Game Builder is a huge plus.
3D Model/Animation- must know how to render 3D models into 2D sprites while we are still developing 2D.
Lead Designer- Must have experience with designing multiplayer realtime strategy games, must take time to get familiar with social enterprise
Level Designer- must have experience designing for strategy games. Must also develop a cursory understanding of how social enterprise works.
Writer- Must get familiar with the stories of social enterprise like "The New Heroes", "How to Change the World", and "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (FATBOP)"

Inside Village the Game, we have a score called Village Points. It roughly shows the impact the player has on improving the village. As the game evolves so will our metric for Village Points. I'm working on breaking down all the factors inside a spreadsheet. I'm hosting the spreadsheet on Google Spreadsheets and if you would like to contribute to it please let me know: founder@villagethegame.com. I can add you to the list of collaborators.

Labels: social impact

Darian did a presentation to the Reuters Digital Vision Program on Thursday at Stanford and it went incredibly well. A few leads and lessons learned:

• Conveying the Village vision is ten times more effective as a PowerPoint presentation at an organized meeting rather than as a casual conversation at a noisy bar.
• The search for the right Stanford people to advise Village is much farther along now.
• The game is going to be much more useful to existing social entrepreneurs thanks to the input that the RDVP fellows are feeding into the design.
  
• We might have to change the name of the game to "Pimp my Village". They liked that name a lot.

Check out the presentation here uploaded to Picasa Web as a slideshow.

Demo Cleanup

We're not too far off from having this demo all prettied up. We have the 64x64 map tiled out. Once that's done we'll work on villager and player avatar sprites. One major touch up we want to do to the current HUD is to recreate the 'jewel look'.

Making buildings
We're going cartoony and easily recognizable. One challenge is juxtaposing average everyday business buildings with the social enteprise buildings that we want to stand out on the map, looking attractive and easily recognizable. Bright, clean and shiny for the social enterprise buildings. Average, not entirely decriped for the average office buildings.

Pretty HUD

We need to re-create our HUD. We got the layout figured out but right now it's too flat and brown. We need to recreate our topbar using the same texture, depth as the windows XP start bar except make it green instead of blue. The borders around the bottom part of the hud should match it well. Our HUD is fitted to 1024 x 768 pixel screensize. Make the topbar 1024 pixels wide and 30 pixels tall.

Player Character
We need a character made up at 60 degree angle. I know, I know. 45 degrees is the overwhelming default for these kind of games, but they kinda annoy me. I don't like it when my character disappears behind a building or tree and I can't click him, so we're going with a high angle like Warcraft II. The character will fit on one tile but can spill over into neighboring tiles. When we get around to animating the player character we'll he/she will move only in 8 directions, up, down, left, right, and four diagonals. I doubt we'll have time or budget to create several animated characters so if we complete one cartoony guy with the same skintone as the guy in our cover art that will suffice and use him for our player avatar and our villagers. Yeah, our village will have the same gender ratio as the Smurfs without Smurfette, but oh well. To add variety we'll have to make a simple change like different colored shirts.

Animation
The highest priority animation for the villager and the player character is walking in all 8 directions. After that we'll nail down 'tending crop', 'pumping pump', 'rejoicing', and 'crying' animations.

AI Pathfinding Write up

We need to create a lightweight pathfinding algorithm to support 100 villagers running around on one map that ranges in size from 64x64 tiles to 128x128 tiles. This pathfinding algorithm should be written in C, or C++. The map on which villagers are moving contains heavily trafficked routes as well as completely untrafficked areas such as river or forest. The AI should be able to handle basic collision between two villagers and reroute them efficiently. A typical map will have a town center which is a very common destination for the villagers and 20 to 80 huts which are another common destination but more spread out. The edges of the map do not wrap around like PAC-man. The map just ends there. The villagers can move in 8 directions only. up, down, left, right and the 4 diagonals in between.
Further requirements:

1. For weighting tiles on ease of traversing, use the scheme: 0 = impassible, 5 = open grassland, 10 = well-paved road. Conditions of a tile can change over time, for example dirt roads (6) can be improved to well-paved roads (10).
   
2. Destinations for some paths are multiple tiles. For example, a villager can complete a walk to Kickstart store by arriving at any tile adjacent to the Kickstart store.
   
3. Pathfinding has to allow for interruptions. For example, the player avatar can walk up to a villager and the villager must stop to converse and then resume walking after the conversation.
   

This code will be incorporated into a realtime strategy game built on Torque Game Builder. We'll be testing at the minimum system specs that GarageGames recommends on Windows.
Windows Minimum: 500 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, Windows 98, OpenGL or DirectX compatible accelerated 3D video card.

Here is a sample map where villagers will often be walking:

Labels: design

This is outright ingenious! Researchers at CMU have figured out how to turn tasks still difficult for computers into games for humans. They are creating a new concept called human computation, and they're getting it done by creating simple games playable over the internet that pretty similar to games like Catchphrase or Taboo. I wonder if this has any application to identifying solutions to extreme poverty?

The knowledge modelled inside Village the Game has come from many sources over several years. Here I'm hilighting the websites, documentaries, people, and books that have shaped the content of Village the Game.

www.WorldChanging.com is the awesomest website for keeping up on sustainable development, green technology and the already existing innovations for making the world a better place.
www.NextBillion.net focuses on documenting social enterprises across the world, companies that are working on eradicating poverty through free-market business practices.
"The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits" by CK Prahalad is an awesome book filled with case studies of companies like Voxiva who have come up with a great model for controlling epidemics where medical staff are few and far between.
"The New Heroes" documentary funded by the Skoll Foundation tells the story of 14 social entrepreneurs across the globe from Fabio Rosa renting solar cells in Brazil to Muhammed Yunus pioneering microcredit. Many of their stories are incorporated into the story of Village.

Labels: research