Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Review of red team's campaign "The cafeteria"

Red team's campaign "The Cafeteria" is about mafia life. Player has to manage little mafia group, leaded by "godfather" Rocco who has couple of men. Amount of men depends on difficulty level (there are three levels available). Unfortunatelly I wasn't able to play the whole campaign as third scenario gives runtime error. (I tried restart, reinstall Wesnoth 1.6, changing languages and so on, nothing helped.) Thus my opinion bases on gameplay of first two scenarions and brief review of .cfg-files.

What I liked:
1) Strong story with logical storyline, something different from others Wesnoth campaigns.
2) Graphics is nice enough and stylish, supporting story pretty well.
3) Used some features of BfW which blue team didn't use (and that's a pity)- adjusting difficulty level with amount of men, using captions in messages.
4) Various goals- not just killing enemies, but also collecting certain amount of money.
5) All used units are new, created for this story.

About what I didn't care so much:
1) Maps weren't very interesting.
2) Player has only two types of units to manage- hero and non-hero.
3) The objective of 2. scenario is "Punch Wobernard in his remaining teeth or gather 200 gold", but looks like only way to win is to collect 200 gold. This "Punch..." is confusing, scenario's attribute victory_when_enemies_defeated=no. Also it is not written in mission objectives that player loses if enemy collects 200 gold- so very likely player has to lose once before he gets aware of winning-losing conditions.
4) Sometimes story tends to be "too strong" for sort of tender-hearted persons. For example, may-be rape as objective had to leave only into hard-mode. (Yes-yes, killing people is also bad and wrong, I know :) but still I think R-rating is not too much here.)
5) Units range is too long- therefore there is no point to group units or consider how to move units from longer perspective. Maps are too small if units can reach from one corner to opposite corner within just two moves.
6) Lack of WML-coding- no special events, no bonuses, no carrying units between scenarious.

Final conclusion: result is better than I predicted on Monday, but story is better than gameplay itself. As much as I know, nobody from blue team didn't manage to the last scenario, so it seems to be just buggy.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Cory Doctorows business model

Cory Doctorow is a journalist and a science fiction author from Canada. He promotes liberalizing copyright laws and has published his books under the Creative Commons licence. In January 2003 he published "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", allowing readers to distribute it freely for non-commercial purposes, create derived works wasn't allowed. In March 2003 it was re-released, but this time under licence which allows derived works (but still for non-commercial purposes). Later novels have been published under the same licence. In parallel with print versions digital versions have been published without charge. Business benefit for him is at first free promotion. His works are widely and freely distributed, reviewed by many readers, so he is well-known and therefore paper versions are sold better than it would be without free digital copies. In fact he sells his novels as well as giving for free. Also we have to take into account that Doctorow is also co-editor of very popular tech blog BoingBoing (which produces very good income as well) and proponent of the Creative Commons organization- this is not just business stuff but ideology, world-view in general ("branding" if you want). Activity in one field supports others and vice versa.
Käesoleva ajaveebi otstarve on õppetöö TLÜ informaatika magistrantuuris (kasutaja ott198@tlu.ee). Esialgu tulevad siia e-õppe vahendite standardite kodutööd, kuid tõenäoliselt lisandub siia teisigi aineid.