Penny Arcade guest column on VATSIM

 Posted by (Visited 3935 times)  Game talk
Oct 082007
 

Penny Arcade is doing guest posts, and the one today is a good primer on VATSIM, the Flight Simulator MMO most people have never heard of.

  2 Responses to “Penny Arcade guest column on VATSIM”

  1. Musings says:
    October 7, 2007 at 12:44 am

    Penny Arcade guest column on VATSIM

  2. Greg Sterling says:
    October 10, 2007 at 5:45 am

    I figured I’d say thanks for posting your brain dump over at penny arcade. I have been off and on trying to write games in Java/C++ and currently Flash and beyond taking an existing formula such as Sokoban, Asteroids or Tetris clones. I have had plenty of potentially cool ideas, but they rapidly become so complicated that it can be hard for me to find a good starting place. Worse is when I start coding without a design spec and end up with a mess of code. The funny thing is that I program professionally and have no problem writing up design docs, assessing customer needs and then delivering on a product.

    After having read your post over at penny arcade I came to two realizations. For starters you said games are nothing but turtles all the way down. A simple statement, but it was so easy for me to miss, and was a huge “duh” for me as soon as I read it, but hugely insightful. I think trying to put the creativity into the spec was confusing me from the way I traditionally would spec out a program at work. Essentially I now feel like I’ve been confusing the ideas for a design document, technical specification, requirements and high level overview all together. The second realization I had after reading your post was that it is much better to write out the thoughts no matter how strange or silly it may sound. It isn’t like what is written is in stone, but it gives a good place to come back to. So, I’m not sure that I would be better at writing down my thoughts for a game, but I guess I do need to start practicing.

    At any rate, thanks for sharing and I am glad I got a chance to see your site. I’ll probably poke around and see what else you have on offer. I noticed you have a cd for sale which is really cool. I have been self teaching myself how to write and compose music over the last six years (wow can’t believe it has been that long now) and been having a blast. Plus I am also an artist in my spare time as well.

    Who knows… maybe somebody will take up your ideas for a construction sim. It could be a hybrid of puzzle pirates meets the sims meets sim city. While the demolition parts are bound to be fun, I imagine the construction parts of the game would have a more long term reward to them over all.

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