Thinking aloud in a post helps me better know what I'm up to which without the effort would remain purely intuitive and prone to undue mucking about. That alone makes the excercise of inestimable value, for any who may be bemused by these odd utterances, somewhat reminiscent of talking to oneself out of an antic disposition. Rest assured, the antic is but an appearance. Then again, the inordinate investment in detail and the glee in subverting some basic game play design axioms, could easily be construed as antics of a manic nature were you to take the DSM-5 for a gospel of science.
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Back from a slew of South West adventures, recharged and atop the saddle of this effort. Threading the magnificent landscapes of Arizona has added fodder to the fire and though the work progresses, much remains to be done. However, completion by Yuletide is in hand.
In savoring the process of getting the details just so, I'm propelled by the vision of a certain experience I would have as a player that is thoroughly satisfying fun, in both a martial and aesthetic sense, that some may quietly share in kind and that will, alas, also serve as an apt swansong for this sort of making.
While previous expression of goals has been clearly nuts and bolts pragmatic, I would now hope to articulate, briefly, a driving poetics that dovetails with the utilitarian - along with some story weaving postulates which, btw, are derived from the expanded 2-part WZ Timeline / Backstory, whose most current iteration can also be found in this thread. It all connects and no work goes to waste. And though I've mentioned it in passing already it merits repeating.
Whilst this is not a map mod in itself, it is entirely designed to run under the mod bundle of "Contingency / USM / NullBot" and whose FlaMe Data Set I'm also making judicious use of. (So if you have any interest in checking this project out I would suggest getting to know this mod bundle in the coming weeks. It could help you some, but just how pivotal, and instrumental, it will be in your penultimate success is yet open to debate because there is no other 250 x 250 map of this type matrix of challenge and complexity to practice on - at least that I'm aware of.)
My aknowledgment and appreciation goes out to all these creators: Flail 13, Shadow, NoQ, Berg, Black Project, Goth.... as well those contributors to the core game whose work also plays an important part of this effort - like Gerard and MaNGusT most apparently, but I've no doubt work done by members of the development team has also had a critical hand in what is possible now that wasn't at all not so very long ago.
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At its core, it's all outside the box. Inequities balanced outside the box. Always - and in all ways concievable to me. That is where trust in the designs will reside. In itself, a concept to wrap your noggin around that will challenge a few basic assumptions I will touch upon shortly.
It is a game world steeped in a poetics of fearful beauty. A lurking beauty that invites at every turn to come hither and thither as it simultaneously projects uncertain byways, weird warping trails and Ouroboros passages that can hardly be commited to memory and thereby strike one venturing headlong to uncover their mysteries like the mythical journey of Theseus into the Minotaur's Cretan Labyrinth. But instead of a subterranean maze, it is under an open sky, with ever morphing horizons part of sorting the puzzle pieces of landscape that, in dispelling fog of war, you merely scratch the surface of grasping.
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In essence, audacity will take you just so far and in place of that half human, barbarous beast Theseus engaged, you will face a relentless juggernaut of humanity driven to ruthless defense of the world they've cobbled together, with herculean persistence and clever improvisation, out of a post collapse surface nightmare lasting half a generation which they had no choice but make the best of.
To these fierce surface dwellers would come the early years of interloper emergence from below ground, small in numbers but greater in war tech and that these would inturn compell thier exodus to the equatorial south to retrench and refine their low tech tacs of stealth, misdirection, select harvesting of battlefield wreckage and, most pivotal, mastery of earthworks. All these they would have to develope to a high art to counter the might is right of the undergrounders, thier superior war machine, and their inevitable expansion from the northern realms conquered but growing stark.
So this swelling invasion of pre-collapse elites (who'd hunkered safely from nuke winter in underground enclaves), becomes the South American mission, theirs and now yours, to lay claim to the scarce resources of a post-collapse world thoroughly abandoned for well nigh two decades (to the aftermath of flesh consuming mushroom clouds, scourching firestorms and the cold comfort of arctic night) to ultimately, make no mistake, displace the lower tech, but canny, surface survivors of their hard won equatorial haven.
Even when driven by the nobelest of self-sacrificing notions, making war and making empire have a powerful affinity and, more often than not, are joined at the hip like Siamese twins.
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Previous experience will provide little solace, or lifeline, into this conflict that grows as you think you know more, as you think your grasp firmer. But of course cheating will always be a tempting umbilical and as close as you'll get to Ariadne's skein of thread.
That its shape-shifting form and function will inspire wonder is as vital to every encounter as it is that it mingle, seamless, the awful consequences of high risk gone awry right alongside incalulable opportunities to triumph against odds clearly, and without reservation, artfully stacked against you from the outset.
But triumph only if you can turn your imagination from staggering under the threat of going under, of abject failure, or the temptation to cry out - it just ain't humanly possible to deal with it all.
Imagination can be your able and key ally or your worst enemy. This is part of the game I would bring to the fore.
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That you shall be seized by desire, an eager voluntary effort, to overcome a host of varied and totally unnecessary obstacles (which is the heart of any game), and be as much intrigued as rattled, that so basic an expectation, challenging fairplay, heretofore unquestioned, dare be subverted and yet be uncanny in its allure.
Our WZ would have you believe in the paradox that it is emulating an arena that is anything but fair, warfare, and be content as such with the illusion. I would have you believe in triumph over the unfair, over terrors couched in beautifully detailed and perplexing landscapes, over quakeing at your keyboard (though no one but you would know) and, in the end, to yearn for more in kind.
========>"All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power." - Louise Gluck quoted in Maps of the Imagination
The next set of screens i'll be posting tomorrow will provide a glimpse into the latest forms, I trust appealing but certainly benign. They also represent the most complex mapping I've ever attempted. I push the envelope of visual aesthetics and detail whilst not hampering PF and PW efficacy. However, what won't be obvious to most are the functional threats that the forms will harbor upon final completion, for I feel these must remain a mystery to unfurl in the game play experience. In the end, though I've shaped it in its entirety, I will have to confront more mystery than what I think I know of all its nuances as its maker. Perhaps those with eidetic memory, deep know-how of mapping and the game's heretofore winning mechanics will have an alternate experience than I.
Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose learn.
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