[NTLUG:Discuss] re:Hilcrest idea

[Kathleen Weaver]

>Is the game itself a 'shared' experience (like a MUD) or is each player
>in
>his/her own private world?

Oh, I haven't thought that far.  Either would be interesting...


>Are you thinking about interaction in the old adventure style (verb
>noun, eg
>get bird, go north, say xyzzy) - or some kind of point-n-click interface
>(eg
>the Kings' Quest series) ?

I think point and click would be more fun.

>
>It would be pretty easy to add still pictures - but only if we have a
>talented
>artist somewhere who could paint 100+ images. (Maybe we could get some
>of
>the kids to do this?  Given a verbal description of a location.)

I've got kids for that...

>Games of this sort are pretty easy to write - in fact I believe there is
>a new adventure design kit to enable your to script such things without
>any programming at all.

And that might be what I picked up a few days ago....

>The additions to make it limit the time you can play and keep game saves
>and statistics on a centralized server might require a little more work
>though.

Right -- and that's where linux comes in for sure.  I know that part at least I'd like to put on a Linux server.


>> What type of interface would you be interested in?  With a web browser you
>> could have the cross platform aspects easily, but you'd be limited in what you
>> could do.  Do they all have newer browsers, say Netscrape 4.x?  If so you
>> could probably do some interesting this with the DOM and JavaScript.

We can specifiy when it comes to Netscape.  I'm going to start another message with some more ideas I've come up with.

>Using a web browser is certainly do-able - there is an online version of
>"Colossal Cave" (the classic Crowther & Woods adventure).  If you did
>that,
>you could probably run ALL the games on the server - those kinds of
>game use almost zero compute time and are easy to run as CGI programs.

That would be very neat.


>What the heck do you teach in "Multimedia"?   Perhaps we might get our
>pictures painted there?  (Although technically, that's a "Monomedia" :-)

I'm not real sure, but I bet we could get about whatever we'd want.