Wasteland wrap-up #88

An event for the Oregon Road '83 game, the Extinction Symbol, the new Spider-Man movie, a film about how we memorialize the past...

This week has been one of writing for me, as I have an article for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that I am finishing up for imminent publication. I enjoy the writing of these things, although I can’t quite say I love deadlines. Well, it takes something to get them out the door, I suppose.

I happened upon this bar, La Bombe, while trekking across town to pick up Lyndon’s dog food this week. I have not been there yet, but now I know where to have nuke people meet me when they are in town and want to get a drink.

I feel like this week has just been writing and reading and some programming (for the Oregon Road ‘83 game). All of which is fine, but it sped by so fast that I cannot really believe it is Sunday already. What do I have to show for it? Well, the article I wrote, I guess. That’s something. And the game is incrementally improved. The problem with working on the game is that every time I come close to finishing something, I realize there are like 3 more things I need to actually finish it. So I go in and finish those things, which creates 3 more things to finish… and so on.

For example, I programmed over the last couple of days, as an example to the students and also to just increase the population of the “pool” of events that can happen while driving your car, an event in which someone else with a car tries to get you to pull over, by driving behind you and honking. Do you stop? Do you ignore them? Do you try to escape? I enjoy this kind of thing, because going through the “tree” of possibilities leads to all sorts of neat little ideas and creations.

Ultimately, I decided that if you tried to escape (by speeding up) there would be some chance of getting into a car accident. So then one has to work out a table of chances, and maybe severity of the accident. But if the accident is bad, it should harm both the car you’re in and perhaps the people in it. But to harm the people in it, I realized I had to make some new health conditions, like “concussion” and “cut_head.” And then I thought, well, “cut_head” is not too bad, unless it brings with it the chance of infection, and now I’ve got to program a little condition called “infection.” And so on, and so on. Oh, you want to damage the vehicle? How does that work? Oh, you want to make it so that the other NPCs in your car might give you advice? How should that work? Etc.

Chaz, a child NPC you can “recruit,” registers his disapproval as your car is about to get hit by the truck. But this is also what the inside of my head looks like when I realize I have a cascading set of things I need to do.

And half of the time as I work on these things I get a “clever” idea for a function that would speed things up a lot (in this case, an easy way to say “pick me a random NPC who has the trait ‘afraid’,” which is not hard to do in code, but if this is a common thing to do, shouldn’t there be a way to do it automatically?)… which is great, and I am happy to use the function once I’ve written it, but now I’ve added yet another thing to the endless list.

My goal this week was to flesh out some more random events that could happen while driving on the highway. Here’s the little list I came up with. Think of each of these as completing a sentence that starts with “As you are driving down the highway…”

• …you see what looks like a deliberate barricade across the road in the distance.

• …you turn a blind corner, and are forced to hit the breaks as a barricade has been made across the road.

• …you suddenly find yourself pursued by a pickup truck, whose driver is honking wildly at you.

• …you suddenly find yourself pursued by a police car, whose lights and sirens are on.

• …a deer suddenly jumps across the road! (This would be biome-appropriate.)

• …you see that a massive truck has jackknifed itself across the road, and been abandoned.

• …you see a truck stop/gas station/diner coming up on the side of the road.

• …you see a lone person walking.

• …you see a large group of people walking.

• …you see a sign advertising a tourist trap at the next turnoff.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? That’s the fun of all of these. In some of them, you can just ignore the thing safely (don’t want to check out the tourist trap? No problem!), in some of them the player is forced to deal with the situation. Some of them are probably one-off things, some of them are likely going to have practically unlimited variations (like truck stops and gas stations and diners), most of which will be boring but useful (e.g., the possibility of getting food or fuel). Some of them are going to be possibly deadly. (Have ideas that should be added to the pool? Just post them as a comment, and I’ll consider them…!)

Behold… the meter! This is the last standard meter (mètre étalon) in its original place in Paris, attached to the Senat. There were 16 of these originally installed around Paris in the late 18th century. There is one other, but it is not in its original location.

The tricky bit is actually getting them into the system, because while it’s easy to think up a basic idea, and even easy to flesh out the basics of it, once you start getting into all of the possible contingencies, it just ends up being elaborate.

So for the pursuing pickup truck one (which is the only one I ended up actually getting more or less done), there are again three basic options: ignoring the truck, driving faster to escape, and pulling over. If you have NPCs with the “wary” or “careful” trait, they will tell you not to pull over. If you choose to try to escape, an NPC with an “afraid” trait will complain, and any with a “careful” trait will tell you that this is dangerous. Choosing either “ignore” or “escape” will roll a dice to find out if the guy chasing you gives up. For “escape,” it also rolls a dice to decide if you crash. If the guy doesn’t give up and you don’t crash, nothing changes (the guy is still following you), and now you get to decide again. Eventually he will give up.

Lyndon ponders the nature of existence while I explain all of this to him.

If you do pull over, he’ll demand half of your food. If you have an NPC with the “intimidating” or “armed” traits, they’ll offer to tell the guy to buzz off. You can tell the guy to buzz off, you can have the NPC do it (if you have one), you can give him a smaller amount of food, or you can give him what he wants. He leaves no matter what (it turns out he is not willing to actually hurt you). If you ignored an NPC’s advice, they’ll get annoyed with you.

That’s more or less the event. You can see that this involves a lot of checks and contingencies. I like that, because it means that the event will be very different depending on who else is in the car and what choices the player makes — it’s not a simple sort of thing where there is an obvious right answer, and many pathways out of it. Dying is actually quite rare in it — the only way to die in this event is to crash your car and get a bad roll for how severe the accident is. But one still feels compelled to make sure that possibility is there, and that means adding more complexity.

Of course, the only thing driving me to add all of this complexity is… me. And there’s an argument to be made for simpler-as-better, because simpler-will-get-done… but anyway, here we are.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote a very brief post on a strange thought that I’ve been rattling around my skull the last few weeks: What’s the opposite of the Doomsday Clock? And I’m not sure I know what the question even means, much less what its answer is, but I had some thoughts, and I wrote them up, for better or worse…