I'm Jeff Mullen, a 55-year-old sufferer of Crohn's disease who hasn't been able to work for a couple of years. It's time to see if that's changing.
I'm a moron with a Mensa card. I do a lot of things--especially now that I have some time on my hands. Back in the day, I was a pretty good C and C++ hacker, so it should surprise no one that I am picking up Java and looking into the cert racket to see if I can get back into the field.
I'm an amateur voice actor. I've even done a couple of fallout mods. I was the villain who was so incompetent that he strapped the hero to a nuclear missile and let the guy live through it. It was a campy mod, and the voice I used for that did it proud. I change the pitch and timbre of my voice and vary my accent. For one tryout, the character spoke both English and an artificial language that the writer made up for the world of the story (been there, done that, I give him credit)--and I was the only one who tried out who had his character speak both languages with the same accent. The showrunner was so busy looking for a deep, Shakespearean voice that he didn't even notice. Life is like that.
Like every middle-aged disabled guy, I'm working on my novel. Just trying to find a use for my 30,000-word vocabulary (think "Shakespeare"). It's a sort of Dungeons & Dragons meets Beverly Hills Cop deal--an action comedy set in an idyllic medieval dutchy, with swords, sorcery and the like. It's the story of a demon from the Abyss turning from evil to good--and the languages I made up are ostensibly spoken by demons.
I fix computers. Sometimes people give them to me and sometimes I acquire them by more conventional means. At this point, there are four laptops sitting next to the desk I'm typing this post on that I found or bought on eBay ("Not Working. For Parts or Repair.") and got working with parts I had lying around. The HPDV9500's are the funniest. They are notorious for overheating Graphics Processing Units--but after I put a little heat transfer paste in the right place, they only overheat when I'm installing the drivers (and the drivers still install anyway).
In the mid 80's, I played the original 4X game, "Reach for the Stars," on my Commodore 64. The 4 X's stand for "explore, expand, exploit and exterminate." Examples of 4X games include "Civilization" and "Minecraft." My favorite game now is "Space Empires II" from Malfadoro Machinations, even though I think it's abandonware. That's how I know that "Rimworld," at its heart, is a close cousin to a 4X. In "Rimworld," the 4th X just stands for "excape."
4X games usually operate on the production center/big map model. "Rimworld" differs from this in that it operates on the level of individual characters and forces the player to micromanage. Yet, for all they ballyhoo its resource management aspects, there it is, right in front of you, a modified 4X. You establish a colony (explore phase), make it better than self-sufficient establishing trade (expand phase), research technologies and gather resources (exploit phase) and somewhere in there the raids and the caravans start in (if this was for turf control, it would be an extermination phase, but if you win your offensive battles, you just rip off the vanquished and leave).
They don't say that in the wiki, the forums or anywhere else--in fact, it seems to me that they're careful to avoid saying it. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
I'd like to write to point this out for a wiki--give a description of the way they wrote the standard game to be played (establish colony, research parts for starship, use long-range mineral scanner to find resources on nearby global map tiles, use caravans to gather resources, build starship, launch). I'm not sure I'd be allowed. There seems to be some conspiracy of silence going on--the information is right there, but no one is directly stating it--not that I can find, anyway.
So there you have it. Hope you made it all the way through this. Maybe I can get an opinion or two on whether to add that thing to the wiki.
