hi everybody Carol's Hoskinson here this is gonna be a slightly different video from what you guys are used to this videos a bit orthogonal to Cardinal but I wanted to make it to talk about something that's a side passion of mine and hopefully we can find a connection to Cardinal for it so let's do a little bit of a screen share so recently over Twitter you may have noticed that I'm finalizing the acquisition of a very old game that I played when I was a kid came out 1992 game is called legends of Valar and it was created by synthetic dimensions and it was a park a husband-and-wife team Kevin and another gal yeah Kate coke steak and Kevin died in 2011 but what made this game so special was that this game was really one of the first 3d open-world RPGs so basically the story was somewhat simple but it was a lot of fun for somebody who was 7 years old you played a character that you create yourself and I actually have some screenshots here so right here is the character creation area I and you have a background on a story and then basically you enter the city called middle dwarf and you're looking for your cousin named Sven so you're looking around the city and how you try to find him is by going to various taverns and they have a message note board system inside the taverns and basically on the message note board Sven gives you some instructions and inevitably after a little bit of the runaround as phen tells you to join a bunch of the gilts well there are four types of guilds there's a temple type there's a magic type of Thieves Guild and two different types of warrior guilds the bursary guild men arms so each time you join a guild if you complete all the guild quests you eventually get a skull one for each direction and they use that with an orb of vision in a book to summon a demon and it turns out that the demon can help you free the king so I played this game and it was really revolutionary in that the city was huge in fact it was several square miles large in there thousands of dwellings and there was an underworld component so there was the main city level and that there was dungeons underneath the the city it had kind of a novel mapping system for example you can see here the the green area that was the in-game map it was actually a full 3d world and you see all these beautiful that bitmaps there I and then it had some cool things like for example over here in the in the HUD you can see the health bar and you can see the combat wounds and other such things and you could actually get conditions like boils and you could smell in the game and you could starve to death or dive in insomnia you catch a vampirism for for the time there was quite a bit of thought that was put into it there was even a trading system there were six different types of resources Jim spices pigments or hide and tar and you could trade these things amongst the different stores in town wealth was basically allocated where if he went north in the city it would be the rich areas and if you went self those were the Slavs so for the trading system you'd go to the stores in the south part of the city and then you go and resell stuff from the north part of the city and make money but there was all kinds of cool little trading pairs there there were a few different types of weapons swords axes dagger would be thrown and then there was a crossbow that was connected to a quest in the game outside of that I don't recall any other weapon types and combat was super simplistic and then here's a picture of the underground cave and there were actually three different items to find there was a necklace some gauntlets of power and then some boots oops let's go back all right let me click escape on the keyboard get out of the screenshot there we go so anyway it was a favorite game of mine Todd Howard played and he's got created the Elder Scrolls and it was a big inspiration for his team as they created arena which later evolved into the game Skyrim over many many generations and iterations so basically what we were what are we gonna do with it what am I gonna do with this so I personally acquired the game and we're just finishing up some of the last-minute details on the let me clear this canvas we're just finishing up some last-minute details on the acquisition but it shouldn't be too much of an issue mostly just payment information and things like that but just sign the IP acquisition contract but the state of the game right now is that the IP is here and there's some assembled code and not much else sadly you know and that's the problem when you buy these old dos games I went through a broker who buys a lot of old dos games and games made in the 80s and 90s early 90s and this is very common where you'll find that the studio's out of business it's not really clear who has what where you know you're lucky if you get a single light a stars code and in fact even in famous games it's sometimes very difficult to get things for the most famous example of an enhanced edition of a game was Balderas gate now this was a triple-a title super popular made millions of dollars made by a top-tier gaming studio both the top tier publisher black isle with interplay and despite that they still had trouble getting all the source code and getting all the game assets and they had to do a lot of work to get it to a point where they could actually add new content and modernize the game so it's quite common especially with these older games to start at bedrock so the first thing we're gonna do is right now in the process of disassembling so disassembling is where you go from compiled back to the source just to try to gain an understanding of all the things that are actually in the game the dialog the character names hidden quests unfinished things so there's a lot of secrets to uncover so it's almost like archeology you know so we're gonna walk our way through these things and that'll take a few weeks two months and I'm doing this with a personal team that I'm working with so this is something for Charles not a ohk as I mentioned or agonal and and we're also trying to hunt down anybody who was involved in the testing development of the game unfortunately several of the core developers have died because it was well over 25 years ago but we will probably find somebody and we're just gonna try to figure out what the unfinished ending was supposed to be so what happens is that after you get those four skulls and you free king I think it's wilf I the game just kind of says okay and you ask around where it's Fenn my cousin the guy you've been looking for the entire game and everybody replies he left town every single person in the kingdom and you're like okay well what next and there's nothing next and so that's gonna have to be redone so after we figure out what we want to do basically to end it I'm going to create an enhanced addition for the game and the enhanced edition will basically modernize the game to a point where that's playable on modern PC and like Baldur's Gate enhanced edition I might find a way to make it a bit more cross-platform they even did an iPad and an Android version of it and I even played the I had version of it on on many plane rides across the sea was actually a great experience so kudos the bean dog for their great work here really enjoyed that and you know it'd be really nice to see if we can get this to 4k resolution we can do redo a lot of the bitmap art and make all that a lot prettier kind of like when a lot of those action-adventure games were remade Monkey Island I believe was one of them but there's been several that have been modernized for the days I and then the map system needs to be redone there's a lot of prop there you need a quest log is here in the pictures what what exactly do these things really mean like what is the difference from the health symbol from the heart symbol yeah what's the difference is a lightning bolt versus the sword right it's never really super well explained in the in the game so there's a lot of really cool things that are gonna have to be thought about added in in addition to an ending and you know just keep chipping away at it and I'll find a nice way to end it and a nice way to modernize it and really bring it into the 21st century and make the game playable so that's kind of the first step after going from here I'm gonna go from this rough basket of nightmares we're doing some archeology code archaeology with disassembling and eventually we'll get to a point where we understand enough about it that we can know all the secrets and then we'll either write something completely new or figure out what they wanted to do and then the enhanced edition is basically about bringing it to the masses and then I'll release that and then what I'm gonna do is rewrite and remaster the entire game remake as a triple-a and I'm gonna probably do this in Africa so I will train up a whole group of game developers probably in Central Africa and we'll have a lot of fun writing the game enclosure it's a cool language I've always wanted to do a prodigy in using something called Arcadia and Arcadia is a framework to use unity3d with closure how about that alternatively I have been looking at a peer script plus Babylon yes that might actually be a more viable option so that'll be a decision I make in the years to come now how this is relevant to Cardno is that I'm really keen to see if we could create a game distribution kind of like Steam rights management and in-game items using a blockchain back-end so basically here's a strawman example you have your blockchain and then you basically issue non fungible assets and those can be items then when you buy a game you get it did that you register with it did is a decentralized identifier so we could use prism for a system like this and then you can do your digital rights management based on that you own a copy and that didst there and then you can actually purchase special assets items other things as a micro transaction and then those can be connected to your profile and used imported into the game it would be really cool to see if we can create something like that because this actually can work in both ways you also could create a game marketplace where people could create their own things and they could sell those things in the marketplace so just by you playing the game if you get tired of it maybe you have a lot of really cool things you can transfer ownership from one did to another dead so it'd be super cool to see if we can explore a system like this and build something into the game itself and we can create a whole economic player to the game that is seldom there so why Africa well Rwanda in particular is a very attractive place because they're actually trying to build a Silicon Valley there and so there's great subsidies and I think in the price points it's cool really nicely and it'd be super cool to train up a bunch of people like we did in obeah get them really keen with functional programming and people are super passionate about game development and bring them there yeah so this is kind of a road map for where I'm gonna take this project it's kind of a side project it's something that I'll be dealing on and off or if the coming years and by no means that actually take a lot of time it's usually in fact the I've been haggling for over a year and a half about this acquisition and it was just you send an email you get an email these types of things it's the same situation here you negotiate a scope of work for disassembly and what you want for forensics and send the Secretary to go talk to a few people and then you wait a few weeks you get some answers back and you learn a few things and you keep going through so it's not really gonna interfere or disrupt anything and I'm doing this personally not I ohk as for the enhanced edition I'm still deciding whether I'm gonna actually charge for that or give it away for free as an open source project it would be really cool to make it an open source project cuz I'd like as many people as possible to play this game it brought a lot of joy to me when I was a kid and it would be really cool to see if I can bring a lot of joy to other people it's hard these days to make an entertaining nice game and back then we didn't have a lot of options in 1992 for amazing 3d engaging worlds and so you had to use a lot of your own imagination and sadly children today don't really have much imagination it's all spoon fit to them but yeah that's that's what I'm gonna be doing here so I figured I'd make a video about it to kind of talk about these things it certainly is going to be fun to do some code archaeology and gonna be really fun to to build something like a map system and a quest log and these other UI elements we take a lot of these things for granted you know but actually --ml over 30 years of iterative knowledge that's been gained the camera system for games where you put the camera is a third-person is it first-person how you adjust that camera it's actually quite a difficult thing in games that get it wrong it's incredibly frustrating if you actually can't see your character or you can't get an optimal view you know also what was really cool about legends of Valar is that it actually had a random like dialogue system randomized dialogue so whenever you talked to somebody they would randomly be generated so you just have this person and then it would automatically assign them a name and a religion and other characteristics and attributes and also a friendliness score and basically based on your interaction with them you could actually ask them what is your name what is your religion and these other things in the dialogue tree and as you went through the tree if you actually get all kinds of answers and those were actually randomly selected from a finite set that existed so they had some sort of name dictionary religion dictionary and so forth and they put all these things in and that was unpredictable so 1992 this was a major deal you know everything was scripted back then and suddenly can actually have these random events there was actually a day/night cycle as well that was a big innovation for that game and I really enjoyed that and actually during the night time was the only time you'd see monks vampires and werewolves and you could even talk to the vampires werewolves you've run into them the vampires kind of looked like Ferengi I guess they were basing the model on nostril rot too but it'd look more like hork werewolves actually I get a little picture of him here yeah yeah here was the werewolf and you literally could talk to the werewolf and it would say grrrrrr they couldn't actually speak to you but they say grrrrrr so that was pretty cool so and you can see these little guys here and this button right here where you have the mouth that's how you'd hail somebody and when they come up to you you'd be actually be able to talk to them let's see if they have an example of the dialogue no they don't have a dialogue screen shot okay that's sad but yeah that was that was really cool stuff so it'll be a lot of fun to explore how to enhance this randomization feature there's a Carnegie Mellon University project called scepter and scepter is something like that and scepter is basically a different way of going about randomizing dialogue in so that'll be really cool to be cool to actually create a proper resting system and get a better day night setup I to really explore these things death in the game was permanent so if you died you're dead it would say r.i.p rest in peace with a gravestone example of the draconian Old Testament game rules from 1992 however there was an option to buy insurance and true to form insurance was only sold by monks at night and there was one cat a quest in the temple upset guild level five were they would actually just give you some insurance but basically if you die it will resurrect you however there was a chance that the insurance you bought was bogus so you have no idea if it was real or not or if and you just kind of rolled the dice and so I think there was three different types of insurance and some of it didn't work and it was variable from 22 I think ten to forty gold pieces the insurance this is also a system was law enforcement one of the most frustrating and fun mechanics of the game was that guards would just randomly arrest you for your particular reason I don't know why but they would just be like you're under arrest for excessive snooping or you're under arrest for acting suspiciously or you know some other crime and if you pick pocketed people they'd arrest you for attempted robbery if you failed the pickpocket attempt although you could kill anybody in the city without any kind quinces and you'd never get arrested for it so you know it's weird you get arrested for random things but committing murder in front of a card at new prop at all thank you 1992 game mechanics so that was a really cool mechanism and if he couldn't pay the fine he'd actually thrown into one of several prisons the turret the brake the gallows and so forth so it was a really revolutionary game because they had a fully working legal system but not a particularly good one in that respect so I really enjoyed that yeah I guess a broader point is never forget your passions I've waited over 20 years to try to find a way to fix something that I wanted to fix you know it's really frustrating when you truly love something as a kid and it didn't quite end the way you wanted it to and then you somehow as you get a little older in life get an opportunity to fix it so never lose your passion and never give up on things and really do enjoy things you know life only comes at you once and how you live it's up to you I and it can't always be about hardcore coding and protocols and science and writing papers you have to have different ways of expressing creativity and even something as simple as a game can do that and along the way you can blend where you've gone before like most people they just set up a game studio where they live of Colorado or whatever why don't we go do something in Africa and see what we can do most people would write games in C++ or C sharp or some language like that let's see what we can do with closure in the Arcadia project that's really cool stuff and because we're not crazy connected to unity because it uses close your CLR so it's a closure port Jeanette runs mono so that's pretty cool stuff and then along the way you can make a lot of friends and learn a lot of things and if you guys have some cool ideas about how we could add game mechanics which are blockchain based or do a blockchain based DRM that's a bit more fair than the DRM s that we have today do give it a thought and it'd be fun when the time comes to explore that be also a really good way of testing our non fungible asset standard on card on o so this won't happen for quite some time because I'm super busy and it's a passion project and if I was willing to wait 20 years just to get the game it may take another 10 to make it so that's a fair warning there but occasionally from time to time infrequently but occasionally I will give you guys some updates on where or legends of Valar is at and if we're really lucky I'll even be able to give you eventually a launch date for the enhanced edition and hopefully we'll have better time with those deadlines than the ones in the past all right so that's all I wanted to say thanks for listening keep the passion going and until next time have a nice day [Music]
