Bane, Week 6. Ergh Time.

So, here we go, first blog post of the noo year: AnooYear, AnooYoo, as it were. The complexity of our game (still sin nombre, but that'll probably be remedied by 3:59:50pm on Wednesday) is such that we could either program some very complex AI, or we can plot it out by hand, and I'm assuming we'll take the latter path. Time-consuming, yes, but incredibly rewarding -- something along the lines of sitting here even now and looking over what we've come up with thus far. Maslow, Myer-Briggs, Keirsey, Spranger (to whom my computer is refusing to allot a single measly umlaut), the Golden Ratio, and pitcher plants. Or something along those lines. All with ultimate playability and REplayability -- which is, of course, rockingness.

Thus far I'm still grappling with the idea of experimental vs. mainstream: where do those lines fall? I'm fairly dead-set against the idea of an Answer (sacrosanctity=bullshit to our generation, that of the straight-from-the-womb gamer), but I do understand, from much personal experience, that fulfillment is intrinsically tied to the idea of a definite leaving-off point, even if it's not where Thus The Tale Endeth. This wariness is somewhat tempered by the concept of an adaptable backstory that changes based on how you play: whether a computer figures it all out, or whether I'll be sitting at my desk (read: cat butt sprawled in my lap -- there are three of them, after all) drawing lines between boxes in a Gordonian knot of chronospatial hoojamawhatsit, this is a concept designed to make the player feel like we wrote this game specifically for their aesthetic. After all, they won't necessarily know at first blush *exactly* how many aesthetics this game contains, which will be quite a few when all the malleable factors are taken into account.

All right, enough ranting for now. Time to dive back into the pile of literature that's my typical go-to stack for creative inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Atwood, Garth Nix, Orson Scott Card, Jorge Luis Borges...