awfulsummerjam2018

Title: Aperiology

Concept:

You are a movie studio exec and have been tasked with creating blockbuster sequels to existing movies. Get advice from your subordinates, conduct surveys, use focus groups, and examine box office winners and losers in order to create the very best (grossing) sequel possible!

Look:

Text-mode ANSI graphics look, but taking advantage of the modern environment that allows smooth scrolling, particle effects, etc.

Interface

The interface is based on a set of pages that take up a large portion of the area I think it would be nice to have some things that are always shown

• a clock / calendar
• quick status bar
• buttons to select pages
• We will have plenty of room to have additional stuff, like sparklines or status numbers
• Buttons should have on-hover

Pages

• Status
  • Current profit/loss, active projects, chart of money stuff
• New Work
  • list of possible titles to sequel
  • each title has info about the previous movie, actors, gross, themes
• Projects
  • See info about the projects you have taken on
  • Show grosses, what types of people are going
  • Give options to modify the project
  • Projects go through 3 phases: preproduction, production, released
  • Actions are limited by the phase of the project, you can't change actors in a movie that is released
• Research
  • Find out about actors, movies, box office grosses, etc
• Focus Groups
  • Ask people what they think

Simulation

A world is created randomly

people that have ages, sex, interests, movie-going likelyhood actors and directors that are people but have social attributes and movie history movies, with a selection of old movies and new, so some can be used for history and providing new work projects are movies, but with additional info attached

Movie generation

Mad libs of a set of movie title templates

• "The <noun> of <noun>"
• "<word>"
• "The <word>"
• "The <adjective> <noun>"

Roles are filled with people: Lead, support, director, writer

The words selected are used to select some further words to describe the film

All the words are used to match against people's interests

People generation

- Basically all random
- it would be cool to have some hair/clothes choice like little ascii dolls
    that could be used for player avatar

Movie Attendance

For each citizen, it decides if they go to all playing movies, based on likes/dislikes
We simulate each day or week, and use probabilities to decide who goes to a movie, which movie, etc

Rankings

All movies that are out get ranked by box office, so we can tell the player that
theirs is #1 or #40

Things the player can do

• change amount of advertising, theme of adverts

• select actors w/ attached salaries

• choose release date

• change writers w/ rewrites

• change directors

• scrap projects

• rename

• change out theme words

• doing things has a cost, in $ and time

• there could be a per-turn time limit

• or doing certain things take time but time ticks by slowly too so you could do x things per turn, but if you wait too long you can only do x-1..

• and a movie should have a production time

Queries

• there is a cache of queries
• in the background, query for relationships between words
• there can be a priority queue, basically stuff needed now and stuff that can wait
• at a deadline (making player wait too long), it will collapse everything at that point, using totally random values if need be

Word relationships

• Hmm try stuff till it works or doesnt :)
• I think i can use the related words query on all the words and then see what hits

Musing on stuff, warning sleepyness ahead

• One way?
• They should have a distribution of possible values
• Need to find a way to propogate them I think this is a normal technique from ray tracing and has a name like probabilistic arithmetic or maybe probabilistic logic

maybe something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_logic_network

In PBRT they fill in the integral/distribution with random samples, that might have some nice bits about how to add up the stuff