Chapter 10 Questions

1: What entities and resources will be in the game?  Which resources are made up
of individual entities (such as a resource of airplanes consisting of individual planes
that the computer can track separately) and which are described by mass nouns
(such as water, which cannot be separated into discrete objects)?

There will be various flora, fauna, and inhabitants that will be separate entities within the game.  Other entities will be clouds, masses of water, various worlds, and the planet Earth that are not individual.

2: What unique entities will be in the game?

Half of these entities such as the ones the player can directly interact with will change or only be encountered based on the player’s decisions to interact with them.  The other half will only be interacted with indirectly, such as atmospheric conditions. 

3: Which entities will actually include other entities as part of their definition?  (Remember that an avatar may have an inventory, and an inventory contains
objects.)

The various player controlled avatars will have various items in their inventory as well as clothing.  Natural entities will be things such as trees composed of leaves and bodies of water containing aquatic/amphibious life forms.

4: What attributes describe each of the entities that you have identified?  Which
attributes are numeric and which are symbolic?

Each and every sentient entity will have a predetermined path, positioning and lifespan in the game world.  The actions and path of these entities will be symbolic while things like the positioning and lifespan will be numeric.

5: Which entities and resources will be tangible, and which will be intangible?  Will any of them change from one state to another, like the resources in Age of
Empires?

Things like the flora, fauna, and items will be tangible while things such as sources of natural resources, the game world itself, and atmospheric conditions will be intangible.

6: What mechanics govern the relationships among the entities?  Remember that
any symbolic entity requires mechanics that determine how it can get into each of
its possible states and how other entities interact with each possible state.

Walking into or stopping an entity will cause any one of them to have a different reaction and perform their different actions.

7: Are there any global mechanics in the game?  What mechanic governs the way
the game changes from mode to mode?

If the player should die, they will restart at the last check point they encountered and triggered and/or have the option to load a previously saved game.

8: For each entity and resource, does it come into the game world at a source, or
does it start off in a game world that does not provide a source for additional entities or resources?  If it does come in at a source, what mechanics control the
production rate of the source?

The games’ entities will reproduce to create more of their population as they would in the real world.  Natural resources like water and lumbar will reproduce naturally as they would in the real world too.  These functions happen automatically as they would in nature.

9: For each entity and resource, does it go out of the game world at a drain, or does
it all remain in the game world and never leave?  If it does go out at a drain, what
conditions cause it to drain?

Resource entities such as wheat and trees die at the end of their lifespan are consumed by the sentient entities to be used.

10: What conversion processes exist in your world?  What trader processes exist?  Do
any feedback loops or mutual dependencies exist?  What means have you provided
to break or prevent deadlocks?

Since everything will be mutually dependent, the sentient and natural entities consume each other in one way or another to survive.  If one entity or resource dies off then the whole natural system fails, the world then also dies off in the natural process of extinction, another way for the game to end abruptly.

11: Can your game get into a state of equilibrium, static or dynamic?  Does it include
any form of decay or entropy that prevents states of equilibrium from forming?

Once an entity dies it decays, while other entities must consume each other or resources to survive.  This creates that natural equilibrium found in our own natural world.

12: How do mechanics create active challenges?  Do you need to establish any
mechanics to detect if a challenge has been surmounted?

That feeling of having to fight your way out of a pinch, or seeing a problem or someone who has a problem and you can help them out if you want too.  These events will trigger challenges, surmounting them will require that all enemies be beaten or the boss eliminated for instance.

13: How do mechanics implement actions?  For each action that may arrive from the
user interface, how do the core mechanics react?

User interface is controlling the current avatar to interact with the world around them, who’s each and every action there is an opposite and equal reaction from the game world or any of the other entities.

14: For autonomous entities such as nonplayer characters, what mechanics control
their behavior?  What mechanics define their AI?

The autonomous entities will act on their own being an animal performing actions and displaying behaviors natural to them in the real world and more sentient entities such as people like humans or otherwise living out their own lives (i.e. doing tasks on schedules, working, eating, swimming, traveling, etc etc).