> I think so too but couldn't work out how. It needs something extra on top to give you a reason to work through the puzzles I think.
I've been thinking on these lines recently too, and maybe the game could be to allow others to experience the fun you're having in building these rules and watching the outcomes? Letting them author the rules, and watch the outcomes. Or letting them manage and upgrade the bots, sorta like an overlord who doesn't actually chop wood etc.
This is kind of a nebulous idea (and definitely not new), but spawns from the fun I've been having the past few weeks in writing a bunch of simple rules for cities to attack, ally, trade with each other. Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh). But it is a scary path to go down, if the intention is to market it as a game, because it doesn't look or sound like any "real" game.
On a different note, Dwarf Fortress is ripe with such emergent outcomes. On another different note, Robocode is quite fun where you author bots and rules and watch how the bots fare against each other.
> funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun.
I love emergent AI game situations like that! Even that feeling of seeing enemies in Doom fighting each other hasn't been surpassed by that much in modern games I feel. Spelunky had a few moments like that though.
> Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh).
Sounds fun! Any more situations like that?
I tried another prototype where it was a text adventure in a single room containing NPCs where certain NPCs liked, loved or hated each other (which limited their actions), there was objects characters could obtain (like a gun to threaten people to do actions for you or money to bribe people), characters had attributes (like intimidating, gullible, jealous) and as the player you could ask characters to do things for you and they could do the same. It had the same issue of nonsensical things happening which were unintentionally funny. Huge state space explosion though.
So I gave a NPC the goal to make a sandwich from bread and cheese which two of his friends were holding. Instead of just asking his friends for the ingredients, he obtains a gun, threatens a NPC he hates to steal the ingredients from his friends then threatens him to make the sandwich and hand it over. A valid but inefficient solution in the search tree basically. You'd probably want some common sense logic that most characters want to achieve their goal in a way that doesn't impact their social standing. Same thing as before though, instead of making the NPCs normal humans you could come up with a story about why they don't act normal to sidestep the common sense issue.
I've been thinking on these lines recently too, and maybe the game could be to allow others to experience the fun you're having in building these rules and watching the outcomes? Letting them author the rules, and watch the outcomes. Or letting them manage and upgrade the bots, sorta like an overlord who doesn't actually chop wood etc.
This is kind of a nebulous idea (and definitely not new), but spawns from the fun I've been having the past few weeks in writing a bunch of simple rules for cities to attack, ally, trade with each other. Watching kingdoms evolve, alliances form and break, funny situations like a rock shortage eventually triggering a massive war among all kingdoms, was fun. It might not be as fun for a passive observer, but as the author of the rules, the feedback loop of making changes and watching the emergent outcomes was pretty neat (kinda like programming, heh). But it is a scary path to go down, if the intention is to market it as a game, because it doesn't look or sound like any "real" game.
On a different note, Dwarf Fortress is ripe with such emergent outcomes. On another different note, Robocode is quite fun where you author bots and rules and watch how the bots fare against each other.