Dungeon Scrawler

In my previous post , I finally gave shape to what a "socialcrawl" could even look like. The last step I can take to convey a vision for this concept is to literally visualize it, and I think the most interesting and useful way to do that is to end where I secretly began with this tirade and show you a rough Dice Drop Generator. Design vs. Generation The one interruption I'll allow myself this time before delivering the goods is to muse for a moment on the tradeoffs between designing a bespoke experience, and generating one: Designing something guarantees that all the elements of the finished product will work in concert towards a desired gameplay experience, but requires much more time, and some skill. For some this is "work", and the gains are only marginal anyways. Generating something saves you a lot of time leaning on the creativity of someone else, but, by virtue of the randomness involved, gives no guarantee that the finished product will make sense a...

Last time I introduced this idea of the relationship-crawl, or socialcrawl*.  The quick summary is that social networks are graphs, and therefore they can be theoretically "crawled" in a fashion very similar to what we do with dungeons and other forms of exploration. To come up with something that looks more like an actual procedure, we laid out some ideas for worthwhile goals or rewards embedded within the social network, and we discussed some types of challenge that would create interest in the midst of the crawling procedure. All we need now are a sense of the actual mechanics and constraints we would employ in our hypothetical procedure, and to do that, let me start by identifying some of my goals for what I imagine this procedure to look like at a high level.  * comments on the last post would seem to indicate that "socialcrawl" is the term readers prefer, so I'm going to run with that for now. Overview The goals of this procedure emerge readily from the ...

I recently read an  interesting blog series  about city-crawls and why they don't really work. The basic argument, as I understand it, is that cities are rarely suitable for spatial exploration mechanics. As cities are generally safe, and the activities that take place there are typically supplemental to the more exciting activities of delving dungeons and exploring wildernesses, it's just not generally desirable to employ a procedure for walking two blocks and hooking a left down an alley to be assailed by thugs on your way to buy extra rope. This argument really piqued my interest and got me thinking though: if a city is not suitable for exploring in terms of it's spatial qualities, might there be some other  sense in which a city can be generically "crawled"? Can you crawl a settlement in a less physical sense?  The epiphany: can you crawl  a social network ? And would that even be fun ? Crawling through graphs I have to take a moment to reinforce the basic i...