Problem Machine

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    1829

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Problem Machine

  2. Posted

    32 minutes ago, Urthman said:

    But the paradox is that once you get to the decision phase, the AI has already either put the money in the box or not.  You can't change that by your decision.  You can't change the past by choosing just one box, so you might as well just go ahead and take both boxes.  Anyone who could see the contents of both boxes would tell you to take both boxes.

    I mean but so what though? A decision that's been made in the past unbeknownst to us is not observably different from a decision that's made on the spot right in front of us. I don't see how that should affect our reasoning at all, especially since we have so much to gain from, in essence, colluding with the AI. I have to assume that someone in the past thought they could get one over on the AI and it figured them out, why would I think I could do any better just by being a 5-year-old's idea of sneaky?

  3. Posted

    This actually becomes an easier choice I think the huger and more life-changing the amounts involved are. If there's a way to consistently get enough money that you will probably never need to worry about money again, that's always what you're going to choose -- I would take a sure 1 million over a 50:50 shot at 10 million any day, even though a naive assessment would put the latter as a 5 times as valuable play. However, if it becomes a contest between risking 2 months rent to get 6 months rent, it becomes a much more agonizing choice.

     

    This sort of thing comes up a lot in game balance. I wrote a bit about how weighting these choices often goes wrong in games a while ago.

  5. Posted

    re: PUBG spawning imitators, while I'm sure that will happen in its own right it's also probably worth mentioning that PUBG is just one of a spate of battle royale games like this that have come out recently, many of them before PUBG, with I think the most notable of these being the King of the Kill mode for H1Z1, which is almost exactly the same game as PUBG but worse. I think it's likely that this streak of battle royale games will continue and cohere into a genre with its own conventions, and I think as that happens we'll probably see the sorts of changes you guys are talking about as these games try to distinguish themselves from their competitors.

  6. Posted

    3 hours ago, unimural said:

    I quite enjoyed Mike's genie-email, but I think the poop-apocalypse math was off. The mass of Earth is roughly 6 * 10^24 kg. A ton is 10^3 kg. A billion tons is 10^12 kg. To increase the Earth's mass even by 1 percent means increasing Earth's mass by roughly 10^22 kg. With the extra 7 billion tons a year, this would take 10 billion years. In roughly 5 billion years the sun will turn into a red giant, swallowing Earth and all the extra poop. Stuff is big and takes a long time.

    Yeahh I was pretty sure that there was something that wasn't adding up about the "humans eat 50% of the world a year" theory. Thanks for running the numbers on that.

    I love that this podcast has become the "we turn your emails into a 90s movie" podcast

  12. Posted

    Yeah it's fascinating that Dark Souls didn't actually represent a change in approach for From, it just represented them getting good enough at the kind of game they've been making all along for people to really sit up and take notice. It's really blatantly obvious how much shared DNA there is there if you've spent a lot of time with both series, with the biggest standout common element being the stamina/energy system.

  14. Posted

    1 hour ago, Patrick R said:

    I don't know if I've ever wanted the "all the enemies you've encountered" curtain call at the end of a game more than with Dark Souls. But I know that Dark Souls has too much ~sErIoUs LoRe~ for such a playful touch.

     

    Also I just got to Blight Town and have no idea what % of the game is left.

    Lots%

  16. Posted

    1 hour ago, AngryGiant said:

    Hi all, first time Wizard Jammer here! I loved watching the stream of the last jam's games being played, and am excited to participate in this one!

    A little confused on the timing for this though, seeing two different dates?:

    1. Friday 2nd June - Sunday 22nd June
    2. Tomorrow (6/1/2017) at 7:00 PM to June 18th 2017 at 6:59 PM (Assuming this is correct?)

    Will probably be streaming at least some of my development on this, feel free to stop by: https://www.twitch.tv/reallyangrygiant

    Let's make some awesome stuff guys!

     

    Both sources I just checked (the forum description and the first page of this topic) said 2nd-18th. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from getting started a day early, and as long as you get a submission in in time nothing stopping you from continuing work on the project afterwards,

  18. Posted

    The "you have 72 hours to breed" movie idea sounded a lot like The Lobster, which posits a world in which adults who are unable to find a life partner are killed and their remains are turned into an animal of their choice. That deadline is a bit longer than 72 hours (I'm thinking it was maybe two weeks), but the atmosphere of horny dread is very much in line with what you had in mind I think.

  19. Posted

    I think I'd like to take more of a support role for this jam than to make my own project, so I'll be doing music for anyone who wants it, up to maybe 15 tracks total or so. Here's the track I did for myself last wizard jam:

    I'm not very good at making classic video game sounds I think, my music tends to be a bit quirky in a way that might not work with all games. But you can listen to a bunch of it at my Soundcloud/Bandcamp and figure out for yourself if my approach will work well for your project :)

    https://soundcloud.com/problem-machine/

    https://problemmachine.bandcamp.com/