Obscure origins of my DJ career [mostly some gaming stuff]

It's been roughly 20 years since I first bought my first DJ gear. I wrote a rather long-ish Facebook status update on this in which I also listed most of the places I've played in, asking my followers, friends and promoters etc for pictures and memories for my autobiography I've been writing for the last few months or so.

Well, it's a rather long story but I'll try to explain it here. I was big into MMORPG in my teens. The server was in a funk and people were only posting on the forums, waiting for it to go down permanently. At the time I was no longer even playing, mostly goofing around doing graphics etc and I had just landed my first summer job. I remember posting on the forums about changing hobbies and switching to DJing.

You might think that someone coming from a MMORPG wouldn't make that great of a DJ. Well, now that I look back it could be one of the reasons my career didn't take off or that I didn't succeed, but it sure does explain the odd RPG dungeon crawler game in my webstore. It too has a background story and that is, while I was trying to conceptualize the DJ-karaoke thing on djforums.com I had an idea of implementing a novelty telnet MUD for people in queue so I decided to program one.

I think people were mostly into metal and stuff in the realm of RPGs at the time. I wasn't big into electronic dance music either, I just sort of picked it up on the way while searching for information. This brings us to a topic I was pondering one morning while looking at the misty riverbank, which is whether our ability to search the web and other sources has become worse due to social media.

I noticed this when I was reading Reddit for some inspiration for game development. I stumbled across a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) subreddit and people told me much of the rules and concepts are already available at D&D Beyond online. Had I done this research back in the late-2000's it would've been a walk in the park. Maybe I just had more time back then, who knows.

Well, anyway, this RPG thing is by no means a coincidence. I used to play a fantasy trading card game called Magic: The Gathering when I was 12 or so. I'll also try to list some games I used to play before the internet became huge, which include Diablo II, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Baldur's Gate 1&2 and Planescape Torment.

In case you didn't know Baldur's Gate 1 is D&D whereas Planescape Torment and BG2 are AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). I'm still not sure about the core concept differences between the two but as you might have guessed AD&D is more complex. Also, while visiting a LGS (local game store) and asking one of the employees they told me there's a D&D Tarot version available. I had bought a deck before for ideas and implemented it in the dungeon crawler.

A traditional Arcana Tarot deck

I had this weird conversation (or more precisely, held a monologue) about studying in general and wonder how those thoughts came into my mind. It was mostly about me being too old for tertiary education and what is in my opinion wrong or twisted about the current educational and political system.

The core concept was that I'm either too old or uneducated, or in worst case both. Other than that the field of study wasn't my cup of tea either (game development) as I have been pursuing a career in music for the last two decades. The point was that in the educational system, one should be taught skills for and of life. Such school doesn't unfortunately exist so I have a theory and it is very complicated and interesting.

So the theory goes that if you master a subject in whatever field you may acquire the knowledge of how to live a prosperous and exciting, sometimes dull but nevertheless something-to-write-home-about life. So it doesn't really matter which subject to pick to specialize in. It may sound rather arrogant and demanding but I firmly believe this is the case, or at least the level of education should make it possible.

As some religions teach us the path to enlightenment or ascension (whatever it is called) can be found through prayers, meditation or yoga, to name a few, this could be well applied to subjects of science, art and all fields of life. To point out an example, a buddhist monk was once taken to a rave party. He watched the people and listened to the music for a moment, and then replied "this is meditation". He had simply found the link between innate human nature and repetitive dance music.

This leads us to a rather controversial subject and that is technoshamanism, but I won't go in depth about it here. Basically it takes the very early human concept of shamanism and puts it in the context of todays music, as shamans were people who possessed the ability to "heal" people through music, words, mantras, gestures and dance.

I never really thought about this and it doesn't have much to do with the subject that is RPGs but they could have been or still are part of the process of understanding life and it's complexities. To supplement this theory, the keys to life might be in life itself so knowing a person who has seen life and the ups and downs, educated or not, is a treasure.

Anyway, this turned out a lengthy post. But in the meantime I've been working on some code:

The loot system drops random cards

I added the TCG mechanic to my dungeon crawler's upcoming patch. I tried to explain the system in one of my earlier posts, but basically a card name is derived from a number and those numbers are converted to a PvP damage modifier.

The TCG marketplace on the right hand side of the GUI

Also implemented is a marketplace for searching the TCG market. You can add to and buy from marketplace for IG currency, as well as search what others are bartering. Unfortunately if a player is offline the transaction is lost from the receiving player as there's no saving, yet, but I'm looking to implement it if I can work around the codebase which has become somewhat cumbersome to maintain.

PvP (in terminal)

So here's what the PvP looks like. First it calculates all the modifiers like dice rolls, dexterity and finally the trading card. It should bring a whole another level of depth to the game, and I'm looking to release the patch this week.

Until then, have a pleasant week!

For Endor,

-ef