Eye of the Storm

Announcement

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 16:49:01 +0100

I've decided to move the actual concultures data to my own webspace in the hopes of it being more accessible and browsable and ~~user-friendliable~~ user-friendly.

I'm going to use DokuWiki, G-d willing...

It's likely going to have three sections.

1. The Worldbuilding Repository, only writable by me. This is where the 100% canon material on the world background will reside.
2. The EotS Repository, where the planning of the game will take place. This will be writable by anyone who wants to participate, let me know if you're interested and I'll give you an account.
3. A general area for everyone to post recommendations/etc. (obviously writable by anyone)

As I'm changing physical locations over the course of next week (to a whole different country, if I may add :O ), I don't promise anything soon, but I will try.

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More sketches

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 14:39:03 +0100

For some reason, Vox is excruciatingly slow today... and right when I have a heap of sketches to upload. *sigh* So I'll only share the first batch and more will be coming tomorrow, IY"H.

Logo sketch

This is only a quick logo sketch for EotS, just showing the masses, the layout and the color scheme. Other than that, it's hideously ugly. ;] I just want you to see the progress from here to whatever beautiful logo we'll end up having... er.... *flees*

Soldier sketch

Soldier's uniform. (Today seems to be clothing day.)

And this one, showing a random citizen and another random citizen's head:

Clothing #1

The Ereni have a heap of color symbolism (just like I have a heap of sketches...) so maybe I should post something on that, too, before I delve into the clothes thing.

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Q&A #1

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:37:28 +0100

A brief service announcement:
If you're reading this through the Livejournal feed, feel free to comment on LJ, I mark all entries as watched so I get comment notifies in e-mail just as I would if it were a journal.

Betonabrosz asked:
If this game is going to be 'heavily story-oriented', does that mean it's also going to be completely linear?

And the answer is, nope. This is not going to be an adventure game where this sort of thing is perfectly accepted - some of the titles I recently played are very good examples of this: the new episodes of Sam and Max on PC and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney on the DS. The replay value in adventure games lies not in the many different options, but in the storyline and humor, and there is a sort of delay to this... you most certainly wouldn't replay Sam and Max twice in a row. But a couple of years later, it's a real possibility - when the Lucasarts Classic titles started appearing in gaming stores, I happily re-played most of them.

But what I am ranting about right now is not an adventure game, it's a RPG - role-playing in the sense that the players get to make some real choices.

In computer RPGs, you can introduce choice by having a multitude of different characters to pick for your party. EotS is going to have that. (Characters are always cool to design!) The limited amount of characters you can have in your party and their different ways of reacting to things add to replayability... but you can have the "character variety effect" and a mostly linear storyline with a fixed ending, as in Final Fantasy VII. EotS is not going to have that.

But since a large portion of the game is about political machinations, which build on each other (psychologists call these "enabling events"), the gameplay cannot be nonlinear to a significant degree. What to do? I do not claim to have invented anything radically new... Games like Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire have the same structure that EotS is going to have (with a twist): both enabling events and the ability to choose between outcomes, thus reducing choices to a manageable level (from a coding and plotline POV) but still giving the player considerable leeway.

Now, I'm a gamer myself, and what I don't like in such games is that the choice ends up being "good vs. bad" most of the time. (I don't know about Jade Empire - I'm still waiting for the PC port - but based on the reviews, it still seems like a 'left hand path' vs. 'right hand path' thing to me, to bring an analogy from occultism... Which is not that far from good vs. evil, one has to admit.) EoTS will not have any of the good vs. bad sort. As Isaac Bonewits put it, evil for evil's sake is pretty dumb and will not get you too far.

Anyway. The game is not going to have a good vs. bad system, what'll the choices be instead? Let me introduce the Loyalty System! Players can choose sides, which are just as exclusive in the conflict as good or bad. But just like in a real life conflict you wouldn't call eg. the Hutu good and the Tutsi bad or vice versa (unless you are Hutu or Tutsi yourself), in the game you also wouldn't be able to call any side "bad". Both sides will do some pretty mean things, yes... things that make complete sense and are "good" from their own POV. But the other side will probably not see it so... And the poor player character is going to be caught in the crossfire and forced to choose sides.

(BTW, party character choice is also going to depend on the player's side, but this has been seen in many games already.)

More Q&A coming up: Varpho asked about flags, and I promised an outline of Ereni occultism to the Doctor.

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ATEF

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 15:02:39 +0100

"Storm"

After the graffiti intermission (and the l33tspeak I couldn't resist), we will continue with Alliance military operations...

The Alliance has a special military branch named Alliance Treaty Enforcement (ATEF). At the time of the Emeki Civil War, roughly 300 Earth years ago, the ATEF had a very limited mandate in most cases, and was a small and inefficient force which rarely saw action due to the Alliance policy of non-interference. During and after the very bloody civil war, a consensus had emerged that change was necessary, and the ATEF was expanded. However, it was still not a rapid reaction force by any means, and it was still severely limited by the non-interference principle - usually by the time Alliance decision making sent the troops in, it was already too late in several senses of the word.

Another wave of expansion followed 160 Earth years ago, with the incorporation of special units showcasing the unique strengths of member worlds. Eren sent a unit specifically trained in māwal-based reconnaissance. Later, infantry units trained in māwal combat were also added, and the Alliance increasingly began to rely on these for the bulk of their operations.

The next big political shakeup happened approximately 120 Earth years ago (I should come up with a shorthand for this, or post my long calendar rant I have on my laptop... hmm), when an Ereni unit could not stop inter-ethnic violence and sustained losses itself because it did not have a proper mandate to intervene. The commander, Rāwamaurel, deeply shaken by what happened, renounced his Ereni citizenship and disappeared for months - only to reappear on Central and commit a very public suicide in front of the Alliance Central Assembly, injuring many. The event had shaken the public on many worlds, and soon large-scale reforms were implemented. (As to why this unfortunate event didn't backfire and ruin the reputation of Eren, I am planning on posting a quite detailed writeup of exactly what transpired.)

In most part thanks to these reforms, the ATEF is currently a powerful force, which can and does engage in operations of a wide range, not just conventional peacekeeping, but more often than not actual peace enforcement. This also suits the general trend of the Alliance becoming a truly supranational body, with member worlds ceding more and more of their sovereignty to it. Currently, the Alliance most closely resembles the European Union, if we need an Earth example; while 500 years ago it was more like the United Nations. As to where this tendency of unification will stop... who knows?

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EotS intro

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:21:12 +0100

Head sketch #1

A very quick sketch of Eye of the Storm's main character. She is from Norway, and after LONG deliberation and making sure no one else has this name (tusen takk til SSB) I named her Silje M[arit] Martinsen. There are some Silje Martinsens (I didn't want a very rare and/or implausible-sounding name) but no Silje M. Martinsen. Yay!

I originally wanted her hair to be blonde (read: yellow), but I didn't like the end result so I switched to orange. BTW she is going to change hairstyles during the course of the game.

I discussed ideas with Betonabrosz. He made me realize that since very little is posted yet, I should post a little outline of what my plans are...

Eye of the Storm is going to be a Nintendo DS game, in the 'Japanese' RPG genre (think Final Fantasy N, Chrono Trigger, etc.)
* mainly controlled using the keys, but with some features that use the stylus and the microphone (the latter will be optional)
* hand-drawn graphics, no 3D (unless we come across a great 3D artist who can create really stylish stuff... stylish is important)
* no real-time fighting (we're considering turn-based or phased fighting at the moment) and "button mashing" kind of scenes
* heavily story-oriented
* gameplay roughly 40 hours
* serious themes including war crimes, torture and genocide, but not a "gory" display - we aim for a T rating if possible
* aliens! psi! cyber freakishness!

The main character is a Norwegian military intelligence officer who is sent to Eren as a liaison officer a few years after the war. She is chosen for her skill with the māwal, but little does she know that it is going to do her more harm than good, at least in the short term...

After a nice intro set on Eren which showcases the game's unique universe and weirds the player out (at least that's the goal) the actual story is going to start on a planet that is much more Earth-like than Eren: this is so that the player is gradually experiencing increasing weirdness. If everything was dropped on him/her at once, it'd be rather hard to digest. (One of the themes is culture shock, though... so it will not be easy to digest, but I still want it to remain intelligible.) Silje's first task is to observe the operations of the Ereni Peacemakers, the subject of the following update...

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Design update

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:20:51 +0100

Made a header for the blog and re-set the page settings. Blue is love! Check it out

More updates will follow soon...

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Māwal intro post

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:49:39 +0100

Just a quick sketch

Yay, drawings. Gasp, if I keep this up, this blog might actually INTEREST people. Quick, delete! :P

So, where was I? Oh, yes, poor Mr. Chalmers. He has an interesting article I've never ever managed to get anyone to read. Abandon all hope ye who follow this link "Consciousness and its Place in Nature". It's about... consciousness and its place in nature. Because no one will EVER read it (I've managed to destroy quite a few threads simply by bringing it up) I'll summarize in one sentence: Chalmers divides the possible relations of consciousness and physics into 6 very neat categories. We know from experience that neat categories do not really work most of the time, but this article is ideal for concultures stuff: pick one of the six, proclaim it to be real in your fantasy universe, and presto, the Very Advanced Civilizations you will be writing about will have solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness. :P

Anyway, my choice is "type F". Let's quote Da Man:

Type-F monism is the view that consciousness is constituted by the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical entities: that is, by the categorical bases of fundamental physical dispositions. On this view, phenomenal or protophenomenal properties are located at the fundamental level of physical reality, and in a certain sense, underlie physical reality itself.

(and from then on, let's elegantly slide into the realm of science fiction... one of my nightmares is that one of my colleagues finds this blog and decides I am posting about Real Aliens and I'm some kind of wacko. I am not! I'm just a science fiction writer in my spare time. It sometimes generates real money, even.)

These poor protophenomenal properties (ouch) are called māwal by the Ereni. The māwal relates most closely to statistical physics, but the exact details should be shrouded in mystery (as I am not a physicist - I can't be everything at the same time!). One more thing it does besides creating consciousness is governing the ways consciousness interacts with other elements of the physical world. Let's just assume for the purposes of Shiny Fantasy World that psi is real. (Which could, you know, actually be so.) I am going to abuse parapsychology literature in a similar manner I abused Mr. Chalmers above, and lift the claim of Spottiswoode et al. that solar activity is related to psi. Go here for the technical articles

In the universe of Eren, each sun has a māwal rating that tells approximately how inhibitory the effect of the sun is on māwal. Both ends of the scale are rather inconducive for civilized species to arise.
0 - disruptive to consciousness. People don't even go there.
1-2 - consciousness is possible, but what humans would call psi is not, or just barely
3-4 - average psi
5-6 - lots of psi
6+ - w00t fireballs!!
(Yes, I know that Spottiswoode et al. claim geomagnetic activity plays into this, too. That is also assumed to hold true here, so ratings will be provided in the next section for planets, not entire systems.)

Earth is a 2, Emek is a 4 and Eren is a 6+. And yes, this is why our poor miners fled - the ghosts and similar scary stuff they saw was produced by the direct action of their consciousness on the physical world. Your nightmares are suddenly real, and a small underground facility is claustrophobic already... meep! :P Note: 320 years ago, when the Emeki abandoned the moon, they had no clue about this.

(And yes, this is why the forefathers of the Emeki settled in this system, but it isn't why their settlement was abandoned.)

Imagine a normal distribution... er... bell curve. Smack me in the head when I speak too technical. Most planets are in the average range.

Māwal sensitivity varies from individual to individual, usually greatly. This often creates divisions in society: eg. in the Emek of 320 years ago, talented māwal-users were Servants of the Empire, effectively enslaved, and "employed" by the Imperial Court... and as such, not a single one of them set foot on a remote mining colony, or directed anything more than a stray thought there... the court was busy using them to spy on each other. (Talk about decadence. :P )

In the Emeki Civil War that soon ensued, māwal-users teamed up with another group and turned against the Court, but that's a story for tomorrow, IY"H. (And maybe I'll get more technical about the māwal.)

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The first map, and some background info...

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:06:50 +0100

Jump point map #1

This is a little map of how jump points connect in the area close to Earth... which is a quite peripheral area indeed. Basically, Earth has only one exit, that to Ōran. (This has its own in-story reasons, should I tell them right now?) Eren has two exits, which is why the country could secede from Emek to begin with - an Emeki embargo would have been useless. (Eren has always had good relations with the Alaraf Commonwealth, who otherwise try to be on friendly terms with all their neighbors - does wonders for business, you know.)

Emek, or as its own flashy name goes, the "Empire of the Three Stars", used to be a much larger empire - the ruins on Hīawan are one of the remainders of a bygone era. This Empire was one of the earliest spacefaring civilizations, but fell into chaos for millennia - its current rulers trace their origins back before the "Dark Ages", but such links are tenuous at best, and indeed other civilizations might actually know more about the Empire's downfall than the rulers of Emek themselves. (Those other civilizations watch current Emeki developments with amusement and the occasional cryptic comments that are to be expected.)

The "Three Stars" used to stand for the Empire's three central planets, only one of which, Saīa, is currently inhabited by the Emeki. (The other is Ōran, and no one knows about the third... some say it was Alaraf, which would certainly make sense given the jump point locations.)

The post-Dark Ages government claimed the Three Stars were Ōran, Saīa and Alaum; a quite transparent lie, since Alaum was only settled after the Emeki ventured out into space for the second time. Then with the independence of Eren, which will be discussed in tomorrow's update IY"H, Ōran was lost again - nowadays, the Three Stars are claimed to stand for Saīa, Goion and Alaum, and the establishment tries to pretend it has always been so.... with an uneasy feeling, because the only inhabited planet in the Goion system is nothing but a holiday resort. (well, at least it's a popular resort! Not too majestic, but y'know, it could've been worse.)

Eren was a quite unsuccessful mining colony orbiting a planet in the Ōran system, its only reason for existence being that it made Emek available to still claim Ōran for themselves. Even then, it was abandoned approximately 320 Earth years ago, mostly because it was constantly plagued by accidents, equipment breakdowns and the like. (Some of the miners claimed they had seen malicious spirits, and they spread many stories when they returned.) 20 years later, the moon was turned over to one of the factions in a bloody Emeki civil war as part of the Alliance-enforced peace negotiations. It declared independence, which the Alliance promptly recognized, and thus the modern-day State of Eren was born.

We're going to talk about the civil war in quite some depth pretty soon, but tomorrow IY"H I will post stuff about Eren, why the miners saw ghosts, what the new inhabitants did about them, and what does David Chalmers have to do with all this.

A final note: this map uses the Ereni names for everything, but those might not be the more commonly used names on Earth - Ereni phonotactics is quite restrictive (see the previous post...) and does away with most word-final consonants. Alarafu is called "Alaraf" both by its inhabitants and Earthlings. Maybe next time I should just use Alliance Standard... :P

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Pronunciation guide

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:14:02 +0100

Here is a little guide to phonemes in Eren sā - I'm posting it early on because I would prefer everyone to pronounce everything the way it is intended to be! I know there are other topics that would interest everyone else more, but I'm kind of obsessed with such details... and if I were to post this later on, people would already have their own guesses on how to pronounce the names, words, etc. by the time they read this, and unlearning associations is always harder. (Or not.)

The first one is the common Latin transcription, the second is IPA. There are many interactive IPA charts, but all seem to be using some arcane method of webtrickery, so I don't know which to link that is compatible with all browsers. You will have to look around with Google a bit. I linked Wikipedia, because while it doesn't have sound samples, it does list examples from many languages, so it might serve to clarify matters a bit...

It's rather straightforward and easily pronouncible (I think)... English speakers might have problems with the trilled r and the uvular fricative, but the rest is quite simple.

Consonants:
b - b
d - d
f - ɸ
g - g
k - k
l - l
m - m
n - n
p - p
r - r
s - s
(sh - ʃ)
t - t
w - β
x - χ
y - j
z - z

Vowels:
a - ɑ-a
ā - aː
e - ɛ
ē - ɛː
i - i
ī - iː (slightly higher)
o - o
ō - oː (slightly higher)
u - u
ū - uː

And a little bit of phonotactics... possible syllable types are V, V:, CV, CV:, and CVN#. For some obscure reason, "l" is also classified as a nasal in this respect.
(For the non-phonologists: V - vowel, C - consonant, : - long something, N - nasal, # - word boundary)
So basically you can only have closed syllables at the end of the word, and even then they have to end with n, m or l.

I think CV:N# is forbidden, I don't think I ever ruled it out but I can't seem to dredge up a single word that has such a string. Which makes sense, but whatever. Next time: shiny pictures! Or not.

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Intro #1

nobody@vox.com(prezzey) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:26:20 +0100

I've decided to start posting stuff about my conculture here, especially since all this is going to form the background of a novel - The One Day War - (in Hungarian, sadly) and in the not so foreseeable future, a Nintendo DS game currently titled Eye of the Storm. This is also meant as a call to developers, so don't be shy ;]

A little bit on the setting (more tomorrow, IY"H):

A few years from now, a jump point to another solar system is accidentally discovered, and humans find themselves face to face with a plethora of advanced spacefaring civilizations. The jump point leads to a system with one inhabited planet, a small moon called Eren by its inhabitants. As per the intergalactic protocol on first contact situations (who said aliens didn't have red tape?), humans have to negotiate their way into the Alliance, the interstellar diplomatic organization, with an Ereni delegation. However, things soon begin to go horribly wrong...

The Ereni look surprisingly humanoid, but they have a completely different mindset - one that the human delegation keeps on perceiving as hostile and cruel. After a particularly nasty diplomatic incident, where the Ereni are accused of kidnapping a young human, all hell breaks loose, and the UN - yes, the UN - declares war on the Ereni. Which obviously doesn't last too long...

This forms the core of the novel. The game is set a few years after that, as relations are beginning to settle down.

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