Text adventure games, a la Infocom.
My friend and I want to create a roguelike. We hacked stone soup a little, then ran out of time. I'm interested in EAs like ericb, and want to see, if combined with human creativity, they can produce interesting creatures. Also, once I have time, I've thought of implementing a MUD in scheme so that it is reprogrammable by the players. I'd use kawa so they also have the power of the java libraries.
Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
141–150 of 173 posts
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#142I'd rather make an impact in space exploration, but I'm not sure how an individual would do that, yet. But I'm watching Cringely.
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#143I'm doing this right now, with a game site devoted to multi-player turn-based strategy games. It's still a small site (as far as the number of players go) and I'm sure it could be monetized, but I doubt it'd make much money right now. Certainly not enough to put it outside the realm of just doing this for fun. The site's Vying Games (vying.org) if you want to check it out. : ))
Nice. Some of your games use a Go board -- are you planning to implement Go itself at some point? I develop a Go web app myself in my spare time: http://eidogo.com/ . It's more for studying and bot-playing than multi-player, though. I decided that since I'd probably never make more than a pittance off it, I'll just give it all away for free and open the source. At least it makes for a good resume item to show off my…
I plan to add games like Go and Chess eventually. I've tried to focus on mostly lesser known games so far. The Go and Chess communities are very well served, and I'm not sure I could add much for those communities.
Some of my site is open source, btw. The ruby libraries that implement the game rules and bots is available at:
The server itself is closed source, but I plan on adding a well defined http api for outside apps to play there this coming week.
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#144The Nintendo orchestra simulator is a taste, but my dreams were/are far bolder.
Something nice - there is huge crossover in the latin used through much of the choral repertoire. Thus, it's a nicely defined group of samples you would have to record for each singer - would probably only take a couple of hours per singer to get to a point where their voice would slot in and be in effect generic. Perhaps you could break down constonants and 'cambridge vowells' and come up with an even simpler and more flexible sample set.
If money were no object I'd also buy a second-hand stone church, build a house on the back, take up serious lessons and se if I could find a way to get an apprenciceship as an organ builder. Maybe get into choral conducting and try and bring music to people who have talent but haven't had the sort of childhood full of exposure. I'd read a lot of economics. I'd like to think I'd get more exercise.
Oh - I'd also like to work on an interaction engine at the same level as HTML but far more advanced. I think Silverlight and an Adobe project are trying to address this at the moment, but we really need something that's free software and has a lot of the simplicity of HTML without its suckiness (and with better asynchronous event support).
The great thing is that there's so much money washing around the world today that I'm working full time and still getting plenty of time to explore ambitions that are not too far removed from what I've listed above - and what I have written there is my ideal. Computers are stupidly powerful; demand for geeks is high; there are lots of people doing neat stuff with music.
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#145Evolutionary algorithms to create music (attached to libraries for sound generation and modification, drum beat, samples, etc) fronted by a reddit-like vote-up, vote-down system for the output of different algorithms. I'd try out different strategies for evolving things. I'd focus on electronica or something without vocals initially. Each "subreddit" would be focused around the evolved algorithms for a different them…
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#146An alternative to hierarchical file systems.
Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#147Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?
#148The "free" facebook. - no ads, period - all personal info is held under the watchful eye of a seperate, non-profit org that ensures no personal info is ever shared with third parties - you can delete your own account whenever you want, and you won't get hassled. An actual deletion of your data, too - all source code is open source, and people can contribute whatever features they want
How do you delete your data when "your" data is mostly other people's relationships to you? For just one obvious problem, other people "own" messages you post to their wall (they get the deletion rights to them, not you.) It's like deleting yourself from others' e-mail archives or RSS feeds--just doesn't make much sense.