MiniGame (S.MG), August 2014 Statement

S.MG has a total of 88`096`605 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009988 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009926 BTC.

S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, and is not expected to realise operating revenue next period. The P/E implied value per share is thus 0 BTC.

S.MG has Special Stock Warrants outstanding, as follows :

Provisional statement, will be considered accepted within 24 hours. Make any observations or corrections below.

There are a number of very exciting updates regarding Eulora this month. First off, day/night cycles :

Second, (one of two of) the crafting prize(s) have been claimed : Making My Eulorian Cake and Eating It ; Boxy and His Leaky Bottle.

It took a rather determined statistician about four days or so to play through, which quite flatteringly for MiniGame is significantly longer than the useful life of the vast majority of the modern iPad game.ⁱⁱ Apparently at least some people enjoy playing Eulora to some degree, which has me tickled pink.ⁱⁱⁱ

Thirdly, the harvesting part of the crafting system^iv is just about ready to go in. Here's a sneak peak at how it will work :

Player wanting to harvest a resource - say herbs - equips a special herbing tool and goes looking for herbs. At any arbitrary spot on the map, player can activate his tool. This decays it, making the attempt have a cost. If the player is in a herb zone^v a roll is made. Based on his skills^vi, the quality of his tool and other considerations^vii, what he finds is decided. If he finds anything at all, a special buildable marker is put up on the map.

This marker will require some materials some worktime/skills to build up, but once completed the player can take whatever raw materials he found.^viii. A small find will basically work out as a small chest, however hitting a large enough resource will actually allow you to build a large mine, which will have its very own map. That's right : you build your mine, you go into the mine. You allow other people to go into your mine if you wish. Your mine, with your name on it. And you can tax them for working your mine. Or you can sell your claim so someone else develops it. Excited yet ?

There's not just herbalism (for herbs), lumbering (for woods), mining (for various minerals). There's also archeology, which fundamentally works as a way for the players to introduce dungeons into the game. Find it, "built it"^ix, fight whatever horrors may be guarding it, loot it, tell your grandkids. Excited yet ? The general idea being not for a NPC to tell you the same tired old tale about how rats invaded his basement / ghosts are in his mine / goblins stole his farm. Instead, have an actual player looking desperately for other players to kill the god damned slimes in his mine claim so he can start taking the god damned scheelite out, god damn it all to heck!

Excited... yet ? Good, because there will definitely be at least one more. But you see, it won't be in the game to begin with. It will have to be discovered, by players. Just like most of the better skills, and most of the better blueprints. Who knew research is a skill, and who knew the intelligence of your game character can and will shape the game world ? Heh.

Fourthly, because we're not quite done yet, even though this will be a little more arid, technological sort of discussion : we're considering using a completely new, never seen before in any computer game login scheme. Upon registering an account, the player is required to provide a PGP public key. On each login attempt, the server will send the client a base64 blob encrypted to the corresponding key, which the player is to decrypt (such as by copy/pasting into a gpg session) and feed the client the resulting base64 string. That's the login.

The way this works under the hood is that the client silently XORs all outgoing and incoming communications with the respective blob (moving on to properly salted^x hashes^xi thereof at certain intervals). The computing cost for this is minimal while the security benefits quite significant, making me wonder why is it that absolutely nobody implements this - it's not like the tools haven't been available for decades.

As a rough timetable, I fully expect point III above to be implemented this Autumn, which will mark the move from Alpha to Beta for Eulora^xii. I am somewhat hopeful that point IV can be implemented this year, marking the game's official release.

Aren't you excited ? :D

PS:

chetty actually better than automating it, make people learn about building trust

You know there's going to be a Gribble NPC don't you.

1. The significant drop in server expenses reflects chiefly the strengthening of BTC, we're paying slightly more than we did a year ago. Also, more professional artwork has been commissioned, so there's going to be expenditure related to that in the future. [↩]
2. We're still over a degree of magnitude into the hole here, but I've done the math and all the needed technical analysis to be reasonably hopeful that sometime in 2016 players will have spent more man-hours playing the game than engineers, coders and designers making it, and I seriously intend to see three degrees of magnitude in our favour. For great justice! [↩]
3. And in a rather typical manner, it seems it's already chock full of gotchas, which makes me so proud :D [↩]
4. As you might recall we made the strategical decision to implement crafting first, fighting will come later. [↩]
5. Yeah, you'll have to map the map. [↩]
6. Yeah you'll have to find out which. The good part is that you'll know you're getting experience in the ones you have. The bad part is that you're probably missing some and won't even know which. [↩]
7. Time of day and day of year may play a role, perhaps. Other factors may also play a role, perhaps. I hope you'll be having a lot of fun figuring it all out. [↩]
8. They will be raw materials, will need drying or tincturing or whatever to make them usable, but that's a different story. [↩]
9. More like, dig it up and build access to it, but anyway.

   [↩]

10. Say by adding the client IP in there, auto-locking any session to the IP it was initiated on. [↩]
11. I'm thinking SHA-3 (SHAKE256), with something like 8kb of output. Anyone wish to suggest an implementation / make comments ? [↩]
12. Expect a full reset at that point, and expect to have to spend a little Bitcoin to acquire game cash from that point forward. [↩]