David Baity, founder and chief technical officer of MegaWars, joins us on the podcast. The now seven years’ running gaming project, which builds upon the legacy of its 30-year namesake, updates the classic text-based space shooter MegaWars into modern times. David discusses engineering through the ages, values for gaming, and the phenomenon of emergent community behavior.
The company producing MegaWars, Crimson Leaf LLC, is an independent entertainment software company based in Orange County, California, with a mission to create fun games that bridge the gap between the retro and the modern. MegaWars has just opened up its alpha. You can try it out here: http://www.megawars.net.
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Broadcasting from the Ministry of mind in the kingdom of time when you don’t know what is to come. Making big brother look like a cancer step So here is Maximus groves. Good evening Internet be my Comcastro My Name is Maximus Groves and this is my conversation with David Baity the chief technical officer of the mega wars and now seven years running project to update the classic text based space shooter into modern times. They’ve just opened up the alpha. You can learn more at that mega Wars dot net Here we discuss engineering through the ages values for gaming and the phenomenon of emergent community behavior. Let’s have some fun. Here we go. Yeah I think it’s been because for some reason it’s actually quite difficult to like hack of the inner audio to be like Save locally. So instead we just pump the output of the computer to this board and local mixes. You know that’s where that works good. Yes yes I did a little bit of audio visual and well I do want to say if I told you it was in junior high and high school then you go you’re a Navy guy. Why would more I would more say oh see work that was like a summer camp at Bell Labs in the fifty’s or something. So most are not that old. That’s just impressive though that was like some of the like most guard engineering of its time. I had a guy that I worked with and he did all of his programming in sixty four bytes. Man Hey yeah sixty four bytes. OK It was insane and he used Fortran and did urban blade calculations on it for doing too. Blades man and the job that he did he made a impeller that went on the underside of a tank and wow the plow through water. It was basically a hydrogen that that just when the when the treading is not able to grip on the modern need to kind of like adds propulsion to it. Yeah it was crazy. Wow that’s cool that’s really cool. Which is what this old like with old like Saturn five technology to it right. Oh yeah I mean if you take a look at so I refuse to. Oh what is it called that in Georgia it’s a big Air Force Base down their homes that you know the other one is the repair one that they do all the robins Warner Robins Air Force Base. Yeah I had a project down there we did X. rays through a fifteen’s looking for water because the water would crack the wings and so I wrote software to determine what cells they need to drill into to drain the water out. So they take these extra panels so when we were down there I got up close to S R fifty one star fifty once and then I got the engine out. Everything on that bird is titanium. Amazing craftsmanship and every time they flew an S. R. seventy one the titanium he treated and when he treated the grain structure became better. Every time they flew the plane. That’s interesting when I was a stronger by use for something right. Yeah it’s crazy it’s not everything on this planet to Cade’s except I may have to carry him in some way everything just keeps getting stronger. That’s right and I run. That’s cool so you can say you’ve got a long career interest in real solution based engineering. Yeah actually I started out in a machine shop. My dad. Me I was eight years old staying around to made a crate in the basement of the garage cranking handles and learned how to run away and then by the time I got to high school I got into a metal shop and then that led to drafting and all those other things. And then by the time I got to college that led me to see and see equipment. OK And then the love of computers came about that time when I got in right as I was in the high school get in the college and the attitudes were pretty predominant at the time but I started playing games. Probably one of the earliest games or play was the type and game on the Apple two and the members I want I like research games like academic work. Look up type in type right. Yeah there’s a couple of versions of it out now but that really was one of the first trading games that I fell in love with you started out with a with a ship and you were going around the Orient buying things and you could buy opium so there were certain ports they would bust you out and seize your ship and you’d have to start all over again. But so you would sail between the ports and then you’d fight pirates and then so it was I mean really a simple game. The when you came into a port you never knew what the prices were going be it was all right and I’m OK so there was no this is like the calculator game drug wars right. Just more of a kind of yeah yeah. But this was back on the Apple two years I mean this was a long long time ago I was in a fog maybe that guy in the U.K. who started the Silk Road on the dark man maybe should have a skull in the big game and didn’t realize people were actually making transactions possibly going to fans were games who knows exactly and then that led to the point of I my first. Here was an apple and not an apple but a T.R.S. eighty Model three. OK And it was souped up it had a double speed Z eighty processor and it hadn’t been so it was hard for votes ours actually was turbo they actually call the turbo turtle makes no sense because when they sort of talk or something like that. Yeah. To speed up the clock and we hit the guy bought it from the computer for fifteen hundred dollars and he had a ten megabyte hard disk that was fifteen hundred dollars. OK so I bought both of those in a tiara say to you know ten megabyte hard disk was you know huge company like a tradition like pre objects of like just pure mechanical like machine working and then creating wildly expensive stuff from that. Yes And that’s and that’s where a lot of my background comes from. And so when I bought the Tierra Saidee I knew I wanted to get on line and I knew I wanted to. Now I’m lying back then would you dial the phone number and connected your modem to another number. Yeah you’d actually collect a phone receiver on the thing right. Yeah actually this one was and I actually had spent a little money I wasn’t married at the time so I don’t want to run up and up machine shop you know you think of buying a machine. Same thing here man married sort of put a plug us together just savings. Oh there you go. So what it ended up doing at that point was when I bought the modem I got a little starter pack for Compu Serve and that had ten hours in it that own name I have not heard in a long time. Yes So I took that and that and then led me to go gangs because you actually typed in the commands there was no menus no. I think it had to come into a command prompt and you tell us it’s something to do and go games and go to games took me to a little thing called Mega Wars three and that is where all this started was when that little modem with that ten free hours got me hooked. And so I come to find out later that it was the very first war I had come into the very first work and I got the manual I printed out the commands and here again it’s all typed in every But it’s typed in and you’re reading basically like a teletype. So this was this was the command line spacesuit or takes based games. Zachary what it was and so you type I.M.P. space comma one hundred and then that fired up your impulse engines at a hundred speed now. You know I’m just imagining all the details to stay on top of already. Well if you want to try it I can spin up mega Wars three dot com version and it’s all text based and very similar to the original game and will will probably end up spending up a war every now and then just so that people can get in and get a feel. So you you come out of the fire appear engine to leave orbit. You come out you’ve got to and a lot of these rules are exactly the same effect. I can turn on a text based interface for mega wars. OK so you can type in the commands because it’s sometimes easier just to type it. And so you come out you have to you have to get out of the gravity well the system to be able to go to war. And one of the unique things about mega wars is space. Is free flowing. There is no jump gates you don’t jump from this system to that system and we’ve kept that with our version of mega or no free faster than light travel just got it. OK You just you get out and it’s all based off of Star Trek the original series so warp speed is a cubic of the logarithmic of each. Yes I think I’m OK and there is no speed limit the only thing that keeps you cool is how much fuel you have to dump to keep the engines cool so warp thirty is possible. So if you do thirty times thirty nine over speculative or one thirty in ours it will be OK. Yes I came out here I have tech space first game I come out and I go right into hyperspace war Camas zero and put I mean hyperspace and instantly I’ve did. It’s the greatest game ever. It’s always like that isn’t it like the sort of things that have that little finicky thing it doesn’t work quite right but you need to like master it as there are so much research these days is like complete flow perfection like not getting in your way at all right. Yes and Yes but every time I remember this very specifically and we had one class just to learn old style development we would make Game Boy games right. Oh wow OK yeah they all they taught to see and devise architecture through the Game Boy Advance and running the stuff on emulators and whenever we were demo ing it at the end you know the cool stuff was fun but it was always the worst game with the most broken controls that got the most interest from people to be like you know I can beat this. I can figure out how to get through like this bizarre little finicky bit yes. And so we like the police just like that little things reminds me so much and see that is where this is where I have a dilemma sometimes. Especially with development and doing the megawatts project. I I don’t want to baby people too much right. Well I mean wars is the history of the game itself than the stodgy I mean they’re coming out and people blow you away because that is what the game was originally. Right you and other times you come in the space nobody shooting. Everybody’s friendly. You have no idea if there is nothing like I have I have played them all I have. I started out and I have played everything. You know I’m not as I mentioned names here but believe me I’m an old man I’ve played everything. OK Well there is nothing like the mega Wars experience. That’s actually a very fair. That’s basically at the front of every multiplayer game right now is how what kind of behavior do you want to welcome in the community and how do you reward what your values are right. Yes and so on. Some people like League of Legends are very aggressive in finding ways to essentially reward the best social behavior within this in fact they have like I think psychologists on staff for precisely this purpose. I just read an article about that. Yeah exactly. And on the other side of that you have I suppose also in Minecraft communities they have their own sort of like will they systems but in other ones it’s all based entirely kind of on the values of the players themselves. So they just open everything up to be one hundred percent briefing and then they have to police their own misbehavior. And and that is the way mega work has always been in the past. Someone comes in and is a jerk. There’s another word that most people use but jerk is a jerk killer was like think anyway. Yeah make the words they use use the word I guess unless you don’t want to that’s not the OK Well that’s why I have to know what your rules are. I should do more of that to do more so perhaps it was jumping into it but you know independent media you can get that way. Yes that’s fine but what would happen in most cases if you were a jerk you would come back the next day and you would have a plan that you were wiped from the universe. OK So you know if you were a jerk. So now you’re left to I have a three hole ship and I got torpedoes and I can’t do anything so you go establish a base somewhere and you start been absent paedos you come back on line the next day and also in your. You have no planets again. OK And players have police that pretty good over the years there’s been a couple of times that actually our biggest problem has been the forums is that they will start rag and I show them the forms and then if you try to censor and it’s bad so I think that with this version of yours we may control the forums a little better because you know you have to express your anger sometimes and and I understand that especially with make yours because it is a highly emotional game because you go out and you search for your planets and you get this little planet you stablish your colony and you love it you can grow it and you set the settings on it and do you how many workers are working here there. And this plant grows and you grow an emotional attachment that will plant because it’s your baby. It was means I make sense you have eight of these right right it’s like your first like a Minecraft settlement or something. Yeah yeah so you have eight of these and you come in so what is taking it from you. If there is rage there’s emotion in that at that point and so. You will. I can’t I can’t attack this guy or do anything about it so I’m going to have to find a friend to help me get revenge especially if when you sign off they’re completely defenseless. No your plan is will defend themselves if they are a bit of work to be taken. Now one of the things that we’ve done in this in our version of mega wars at this point we’ve made it a home planet and where you settle your home planet will determine the rules there’s three different areas of space we have Empire which is completely protected. You can even shoot anybody else in Empire space you can’t take their planets from the you can’t bomb their plant you can’t do anything so it’s like the bunny area OK. Then the next level up we just change the name of this and it is a core type. So your core planets are your next level. OK Now those planets in that space you can shoot each other there is no so international donors like depart international waters I can shoot open piracy going on. Yeah exactly. You know if you see somebody and you shoot him when you destroy their ship you get their taxes and there’s a lot of that going on. OK And so you shoot the other ship you guys guys taxes not only that but he loses that ship you have to go build another one. Now ships are not like what you see in some of these other game for like four hundred dollars a piece OK fine work it’s like a huge economics involved some of these things. Yeah you just go to a hall or you put down the money you got to ship. OK ships are there are like pie crust. They’re meant to be to destroy them to pee to sort that’s cool. More space battles bigger things less commitment more explosions right. Oh exactly. That’s what it’s all about. We had well let’s let’s continue with the Aries a spacewalk so we have we have core play. When it’s can be bombed and you can drop somebody score on that planet. OK so you can bomb their shipyards and that kind of thing which will drop their score. You cannot take their planets in core. OK then the next level up is what we call open territory open space you can the weapons are hot you can fire anyone you can in here again friendly fire is completely doable in mega wars. OK if you fire a photon torpedo it hits the first thing it’s fired at first that it done. OK so if you have to learn your friends Iowa here’s a question if I get on to lightspeed and instantaneously come out in a three second period where looks like there’s two ships alongside each other. Will you let me get the wrong results and fire the wrong one potentially yes they can yes. OK So you actually enable the Picard maneuver as part of the battle against. Well actually we call it we call it we actually call that there’s a guy this perfected this you know any way we can pop a matic. OK and it will enable disable to look like there’s ten ships or on a planet or something well heeled jump into a system that’s near yours and then he’ll pop up a whack a mole is what we got. He pops up into hyperspace fires and drops back into the system and you only see him for an instant that pops up shoot you and drops back down again and he knows what system you’re coming from so he knows what angle to fire upon so it pops up fires and drops back again and he has macros set up for this totally hilarious. OK so he does little pop a matic loop jump up jump popped up and pretty soon you’re sitting there all over the place. OK So is there is there like a defense can you like put sort of like a radiation field up there like I was up the best thing to do is fire a missile at him. OK This got a little bit of energy in it so it goes. Slow So when he pops up he hits the missile first will take the damage. OK. All right so back to the open area space. Planets can be taken. All right and what you do is you put fighters on your planets and then the other the attacker has to attack with let’s just keep it simple four times the amount of fighters you have on your planet. So that was the biggest rewards are from like these open territory planets. Yes the planets is what gives you score planets is where the money comes from the population. So the goal of the game is to end up with the best scoring planets now that ends up being a combination of the planetary population and the standard of living. So very simple math. If you have a hundred million population but you have twenty percent standard of living you do the math on that you end up with kind of a crappy score that points one hundred thousand times Point two is what to twenty thousand. OK so you end up with some places where you enrich what academics are like this inside me and others where you just exploit for resources. Yes So at the end of the game the core of science and the tattooing. Yeah so basically you get to the end of the game the goal is to get the person with the best scoring planets and we’re going to make some other changes could we want to reward the people that are really good at combat. But the way the game is today is whoever has the best going planets at the end becomes the president. Time for you when you present you get the award and you get a sticker and you could say I was president during this war that is basically badges. That’s probably the best achievement badges there kind of thing. Now what that will then do is qualify you for the work of the galaxy’s which is an invitation only qualifying for war that everybody shoots for. A war of presidents can strike rounds where the president sets exactly what it is man. And so if we take that promise and we go to the next step the teen then is all the players planets scores put together with some math calculations you end up with a team score so the team with the highest score then the per the captain of that team becomes the Emperor of the universe. Wow. So what are the basically just two factions fighting against each other for totality or they can do they grow out of small micro networks so that you could have like twelve different divisions all kind of fighting at each other. Yeah there are no factions there are NO it is how the players decide to do it. OK so you could have like one time like everyone or sizes can be two sides and in the next on three hundred sides Yeah exactly. You have no idea what it’s going to end up with to like do you like reset like the way how long is a game last game last for weeks or weeks starts on a Friday night. OK everybody goes out and scout the universe and then you grow your planet. It’s a cut in phases you go out you scout the universe you find the best planets and then we have a little bit of battles during that first week you know jockeying for position that kind of thing and then the next week is usually pretty quiet because they’re braced hardest. OK And then the third week is when we get into the the Dreadnoughts in the bigger ships and teams compete to get to that two hundred holes the first because when you have two hundred holes you can drop more fighters on a planet and wipe out that guy’s fighters much quicker at that point. OK so plus dread not to can take a ton of damage and they can deal out a lot of damage. Read not with with a broadside can take out a battleship single shot kind of situation. OK you’re gone. Well huge. So you can tell that you’re pretty committed to trying to essentially I guess like a balanced start point for everyone to come into the game from. Yeah and everybody comes in completely the same and that’s one of the great things about making word if you get eliminated or you don’t score very well. Just wait a couple weeks will start a new war time and the goal is if we get this thing grown to a certain point we will have a new war starting every Friday night and we will have them being summoned started at noon so that you know people in other countries will have their own war start at that point. So I’ve I’ve got big visions here I’m going to tell you a story here because see this some of the best stuff because you can’t make this up because it’s really kind of fun. If we had one war a couple years but two years ago a team captains came in and he found this guy and he goes look you’ve never been on the team with me. You’re going to join my team this time or I’m going to take out all your planets the first week you will not be able to hold the planet. The first week will be completely wiped out. So you need to join my team. OK And so he told it to another guy so there are two guys who were blackmailed in the join this team. Otherwise you’re going to get wiped out. So it got to the Inn of the war the day of the end of the war so it was like two o’clock in the afternoon. These two guys defected from his team because they were on the team they had the biggest planets in the universe. They joined the other team and then they attacked that team captains base and he lost that war that he had buttoned up because he had blackmailed those two guys they saw like screw you. OK So this is like. Even when I display the slow game right. Yeah like CIA style so when he shows up and demanding a tribute of lands like of course and some with the last minutes backstab Yeah well I guess you can’t make this up as I know the way some of the greatest accomplishment of a game to see like emergent behavior that is since we can’t plan for. Yeah. Yeah I mean I could keep you here all day telling stories where the other good ones is just fascinates me as we talked a little bit about fighters and so what you end up doing is if you’re going to attack a planet you get another planet in the same system and you ferry fighters to the Stager base and so you build up four times as many as what you think is on the base so that you can attack it. So yeah this guy’s been all night going in and out of the system carrying fighters carrying fighters carrying fighters and he was about to do the attack because what you don’t want to do is attack a guy’s plan then go off and get fighters and come back because that’s about a fifteen minute cycle going out to the Imperial base back. So the guy would begin all these alerts. You’d have all these were so put a stager there let you attack it very quickly. So he was getting ready to start attacking this guy pops up. There he is in space right in the system with their egos are you caught me. Yeah you’re dead you know he shot and killed him right there. And so he got on the radio with the guy and he goes look what I want to do is you caught me. If I try to get those fighters off that base and move them out to one of my systems you’re going to kill me every time. And you’re now going to add more fighters to that base which means I have to ferry more fighters right because it’s a four four to one ratio. Right so he’s like OK The only thing that we could do is. I will sell you those fighters on that base. The guy was like What. He goes on to say the fires on the base I’m tired I want to do it is all night. You caught me. There’s no way to do this I will sell you all those fighters at cost and this is what it is. Do you we have a deal on the guy goes I’ll buy a ninety percent costs you lost somethin fine and they made a deal in place that they did to transfer the guy opened up the planet. The guy pulled all the fighters off the base and the guy gave the money and if you can’t plan for that there’s not enough. So now it’s like the Romans at the Visigoths at the gates of Rome being paid off and sort of sacking it right exactly. OK Mansour is being itself a micro little situations every single time. Yes when a cool that’s fun kind of cool. OK So what are you in a place where you seem like the are using the tech space players like outperform the Kiwi players or vice versa we have seen that in the past in mega Wars three. We ended up having some players start building screen scrapers. OK screen so they could scrape the screen owns up here like Data from him is like the data from it and then calculate or beat torpedo trajectories from it when I need to look at things develop like I bought for it right. Yeah and so we saw that our player Lucifer that is that his so he got I want to list the first yeah yeah. And his six his ship is six six six of course and and he made a whole variations of of six six six and and so he ended up taking a Linux box and being able to script too. I think he had thirty two. And he named them all bird names. OK OK. And exit door. One of the other great players of the game came along and just started killing these bots off tie killed your bots and I think if I remember correctly his record was over six hundred baht kills. OK just kill in these spots and that was just by doing screen scrapers. So different bonds just to go against each other and just basically aggregate each other as well. Yes and I would love to see and this is one of the things I thought about would be really cool if we could get the game expanded to the point of doing it run a mega war story universe which is all tech space and allow college students to write programs controlling their bots and have bought wars in space. So what you going to do now is create like an in game in game Emacs interface. Yeah. In order to create a mini max structure or just program your body inside of mega wars right. Yes and we could do that with the mega worse three in fact you could put in Web services so that you could learn web services as students and allow your your bots to fight other bots and you could teach your bots economics you know when do I need to change from a mining society into a agricultural society or you know it can make all these choices and you could have teams compete against each other it could be very very interesting it would be even more interesting is it. Oh my God if you used in game currency to pay for the cloud sessions for computing states of the program the better you did economically in game was the better. You can make your AI from how much you compute from it. After Celt there’s a lot of cool possibility to do with a text based game. Oh my goodness that’s crazy. Yeah so how long we’ve been running the furthest interactions we have been running. Actually coming up in August it will be seven years that we started the project. Yeah there’s been a lot of work under the bridge is this our first goal. OK Our first goal was to duplicate the original game as closely as we could and we started that project in two thousand and eight. We opened up to the very first war in January of two thousand and nine. Had a group of players that play the original game and came in and said OK this doesn’t feel right that doesn’t feel right which with this we tweak that you can go look at the mega Wars three forums there’s fifteen thousand. It was like twenty thousand messages and we ended up deleting the the ones are talked about earlier where the players you know flamed just waited up waited some of that out but I think we ended up with about eleven thousand messages of all the interactions of how do we do this how do we do that how is this right how’s that right kind of thing and so we worked for about two and a half years as a community and duplicated the game one of the players lady’s wrath. She came to me one day and said I want to make a graphical interface. She goes I have I have a screen scraper that’s working in the call that warlord at the time she goes I want to take that and I want to turn it into a game that my grandson can play. And so she and I created our first work plus game and that was the first test of a good and how it felt how it looked and it just didn’t feel right she did a great job she learned C. Sharp programming. Able to do this. She did a wonderful job on it but it just didn’t feel right and so we did that and Silverlight and tried to run it but it just didn’t gain any traction and she was retired and said she’d learned what she wanted to learn and went on from there in fact she has moved on to doing a D.N.A. analysis for for looking up ancestors. And she’s got a great following on that right now but she took those roots go back to her learning C. sharp with Bangalore’s And so she’s been a great supporter of the game over the years and so I then moved in to Silverlight. We took that base and then created make a worse four out of it because her biggest work plus what does that mean you know and just kind of confused by so we do want to make it worse for and that’s up and running still not a big player base over there but a lot of the players the original players play in there and we had a war back. We had about fifty players in a couple couple months ago and so I met up with Neil Hartford hall for sorry you know Hall for about gosh just caught up on three years now and he looked at mega wars because I had asked him to do some writing for promotion for us and he goes Dave do you know what you have here though so I got a little game we play it we have fun you know. He goes you have game gold here. He goes This is the reason that I got into games in the first place and we tried to get Silverlight to work and it was doing a pretty good job too. Last November and last November we had met up with Matt you’ve talked to him and match our C.E.O. and we. He loaded on his MAC and none of the special effects worked it was like oh my gosh I’ve done all this work and so unity five just came out and said that the week before and so it was like OK I’ve got a subscription nearly five I’ve tried it before. The interface is terrible I don’t know how I’m going to do this. And I moved into unity five and with the new changes they had made to unity allowed us to build that interface and there and it was like OK great. And I got it all in and then we met up with Jeff Rimmer and Jeff goes to the ships because I give you three D. ships What can you do with that. It’s like well should be able to do some because my background is CAD CAM Hello. I have a reverse engineering baggage that I wrote for a guy called design works and it’s a solid model space reverse engineering package and so yeah I know a little bit about three D. So I and this was back in and so we were just it was like the flow of like an incredible most enthusiastic fan project that’s now become its own product. I love manga lawyers absolutely love May or so. OK so you guys have just been a labor of love and is it just time to open it up to everybody and it’s time to open it up to everybody. Because we have an era of peace in the videos but we we have a realistic three D. universe now. We’ve got the planets they have the clouds I mean some of the the assets that we’ve got now the unity store have been fantastic it would have taken us years and years to make this stuff. Jeff Jeff has come along and he has done a wonderful job creating some ships for us. I have I don’t know if you heard of the locks of. They they ran a Kickstarter campaign back in the it was October and I became friends with the C.E.O. of the company Christoph and great project. It is it’s basically Minecraft but every blocks the little boxes have their own properties and explode. OK OK great project. OK So they built a game with that. So when you destroyed a car it didn’t disappear. All was little voxels go all over the place. Part of you blow up a building. It can actually fall on the other back. OK you know project but they didn’t get it funded and he had some issues with that. And you know I’ve been talking since then and he came to me about a month ago and against Dave I got some to show you and he showed me he had started building up some ships besides the ones that Jeff has built and so with instructor building we we’ve talked about that but no it’s not we would have to to change the engine would be pretty severe Yeah. It would be very very severe and it’s something that we may include in the mega Wars universe in the future because there’s a lot of expansion that we could do with the mega Wars universe first person shooter to where you’re fighting on the planet space Fighter game because the mega worse is more of a macro game where you’re you don’t get down in the mud. So we could actually have you flying fighters so that could be a segment of the game itself. So but he came to me and said look I built these ships for you and I said Man I can’t pay you because we don’t have any money and he can. States we’re friends. This is for you this will help you get to get your Kickstarter done. And last night he completed the shaders for it and and is going to allow us to be able to have ships with logos on them you’ll be able to put decals on and you’ll be able to color the ship the color that you want and it’s like and I’ve never met him. He lives in England he is the nicest guy to come along and help us and we’re going to do all that we can to help him get his game going to but it’s it has been a labor of love not just us but of the players I mean like all the time that the players have spent helping us test and debug and it has been a community effort. I can’t take credit for all that. Well I have a few guys setting crowd funding for the process. No we don’t have a big enough crowd for crowd funding so what we have done we’re we’re building the crowd I think Matt has got us up to about thirty thousand poor her followers are just awesome. He has worked his butt off he’s done that since April. OK so he’s built that up. I think we’ve gotten like forty thousand views on the website through all of that and so what we’re doing right now is we’ve got a publicist that’s lined up to get some money. So what we’ve decided to do is we’re open up pre-sales and we opened it up last night. OK And one of our players last night stepped up and bought a lifetime subscription for fourteen hundred dollars and that is going to help us get a lot of stuff done it’s really exciting. And we’ve got another player that committed today is he may be able to do it by the end of the month too so that that’s a possibility I can’t count that one but we’ve got the first one and I think we’ve got another sale or two since then also but we’re trying to stay independent. And we’ve we’ve run across some people in our dealings. Yeah we want this and we can you know give you the money to get this finished. But the price that we would have to pay we would lose the independence and we would also lose the the love of the game at that point it just be a job is basically the hope is just to make a big political thing that you guys can just do this forever. Yeah yeah if we can get it to the point we have about ten thousand players it will substandard a nice team. Then we can continue developing this and other games. You know how Ford has some great ideas about taking that you know we talked about that low level play when we first started. Planets are protected. And years ago he had done a game called planets edge and what was unique about that game is that I think I forget what company he did that with I have to look that up. But I don’t think that’s right. But he it was one of his first games that he wrote for and every time you visit a planet it was based off of like this Star Trek episode it was its own self-contained little adventure and he wants to bring that to mega war so that we can have an R.P.G. to where you know if there’s any battles going on you’ve got this R.P.G. you can play. So like if you Turner’s universes explore and people are fighting for planets it’s only the well defended ones can go deep to enrich the communities there. Yeah but you can have them for a week long game don’t have to be like two months long right. It’s if it’s a four week game so what will happen is your character that you build up you will build him up and give him experience and you will put him at risk sometimes so it really isn’t. No your prime directive in some groups where you can interfere with non-work speed plants know who are going to be like a benefits of not interfering with tribal peoples are to screw it down screw taking over. Yeah just take over you know. But that’s that’s kind of the goals that we have we want to have. We don’t we don’t. If if we go big I mean if it goes as big we’re going to benefit a lot of things I mean one of the things that we did with the mega Wars community for a long time and we had a player that rode his bike for cancer and the mega worst community decided they were going to get behind him and so I backed it and I said OK fine for the month of January we’ll have a special war that no one can play unless you make a donation and so they made a donation to to leukemia and so we ran our special war we called the anniversary where we did that all the way up to this year we just didn’t we didn’t get a chance to do it this year because with this event of development like this but I want to get back to that I want to get back to hey this is a special war if you want to play then you make a donation. Let him know and we’ll let you come in and play this special war and we want to be able to do things like that. Yeah and I’d like to see clinging to like Christmas events hauen stuff all that kind of fun. Yeah we have not planted on dots not stand and not OK And so what we did with him is you hit it with a photon torpedo and he gives you a present and then he disappeared somewhere else in the universe and so we had huge battles taking place of I’m going to get set it just killing everybody so that you can be live because it only took one shot you know and he disappeared. OK He jumped to somewhere else in the universe. Like so if the community takes off you can just keep adding like game modes like let’s say like the leg the Meklit sure something more dead ships form like this own army of itself or something. Yes one of the ideas that we had one of our our discussion groups was that you pick up little pieces all over the universe and these little pieces assemble into that snake thing on Star Trek you know the one with the look like a snake with a big hole in the front and blew up planets and that kind of thing. Forget what that episode is called Oh I have to look it up there’s been a few like scavenger hunt things like Mass Effect three was kind of like that find the parts to build the beginning or whatever or what else was it was a clue some of them were like trying to like find genetic origins of every species to discover that cling on humans and Romulans will see that by some proto existence. Yeah yeah so there’s there’s going to be a lot of cool things that we want to be able to do in the mega Wars universe and so it’s that’s that’s where we’re going with all this. And like I said if we can we can get over this little bit of a hump and and get it get get a nice player base going we can grow this game and and make it what the community wants it’s not a sort of what I want and you can look back at the very worst threes the mega worst forms that we’ve made decisions based off of what the community wants and so it’s been it’s it has been a labor of love and it’s been a lot of fun. Well when you go projecting a beta opening up we are are starting Alpha Now that’s one of them. We were holding off a pre-sales until we had something we could get players into OK and we were at that point so that’s what we chose to open or sorry Alpha intraday. Yes breaking open. Yes And so the next step is if we if we don’t sell enough through pre-sales we will do it. Crowdfunding and most likely will be a Kickstarter. Most likely it will be probably September or October and the days that we in the Kickstarter is the day that we will open beta. So you won’t be sitting around for months waiting for the game to open. That day we close the Kickstarter is the day we open beta and players will enter at that point. That’s that’s all I’m talking about. Not sit around for that. Yeah you know when the whole thing out. Yeah pre-sales if you do pre-sales and you get the alpha so you’ll be in there with us and probably next couple weeks. So what are the obstacles to take from this meaningful product right now. The we need to do some debugging of the interface. Now remember we’re a server based game that the server based game has been running since two thousand and nine. OK so the server code is good and solid. So mainly we’re just testing the interface. The other thing we want to test is the number of players and make sure the packet sizes are right and I really you can’t have a lag in this case you just can’t have it. And so we need to make sure there’s no lag so we’re going to gate players through the door. We have a beast of a machine she has seventy two gig of RAM enter and twenty four course you’ve got dual processor with six six cores which give you twenty four if you do the math on that because they’re hyper threaded. She’s a beast of a machine and we have two of those. We figure we can support about thirty thousand users a dozen machines. So we want to gay players and that’s our biggest obstacle right now getting the players in the make sure we don’t have lag and figure out how many players we can get into a war safely. Do you do perceive let’s say let’s do something someone like what is it like Activision or Blizzard want on board right. What do you see yourself like getting into the bigger business side or are you just going to stay as independent as possible. I’m not stupid and if you have money I’ll talk. OK but I would you know it it would have to be good for the community. Believe it or not I will make a decision for the community at that point. It doesn’t take a lot of money to have a good team and to have a lot of fun. Mega Wars was originally killed by E.A. back when they bought Kaz my and I’d hate to see it go away again. Well now back to work was a but let’s just clarify that they bought has my and they bought stellar Emperor which is different the mega wars. But yeah so. Well it sounds like it’s not like the whole world opened up for a like is the start of something being used to a snowball more. Yeah yeah I hope so and it’s a lot of fun. It’s it says as they say live in the dream. Well people go to find out more into joined. Joined the war yet to join. What we’re doing is mega Wars dot net net net we have to deal with that because the guy with the dot com wanted two grand and I can buy a biased set of ships for two grand So we’re going to leave it with dot net and so many wars dot net and come on and in addition stuff let us know that you came from the show and we’ll chat with you and get you started and take a look at the pre-sales to that’s how we’re going to get people into office. Fantastic. Well I’m there. Thank you so much for talking about. Again with me it’s been a lot of fun. Yes it’s great. My favorite subject in the world. Thank you thank you we appreciate they were every bit of every person we can talk to to talk about the games. I mean it is built in the community and I appreciate the time. All right. Well yeah and so much time. Thank you so much for listening to comcastro. If you enjoyed this please subscribe rate and review on i Tunes or stitcher or wherever else you heard this from hello to all of them. 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The post 34: Gaming Values & Emergent Community Behavior with MegaWars Game Founder CTO David Baity appeared first on Comcastro Podcast - Geek Culture Talk Show.