Legends of Valour and Other Stuff (Not Cardano)

Opens saying this episode is about Legends of Valour, not Cardano at all, after posting an Illinois Department of Health video on how coronavirus deaths are counted.

An asymptomatic covid case hit by a bus would count as a covid death, and that Italy's toll was mostly people with serious comorbidities.

Covid became political rather than scientific, with Elon Musk reopening his Colorado factory in defiance, then pivots to gaming while noting Cardano pioneers enjoy the Lovelace Trail.

Reveals he bought the 1992 game Legends of Valour and is the only person working on it, with the IP transfer in paperwork and the original source code lost.

A King Tut's tomb curse where many developers died, but he found an old developer named Ian who may have the source code and is meeting disassembly experts for code archaeology.

Booted DOSBox to run the game for the first time in eight years, finding a fixed first-person camera, a tiny 640 by 400 resolution, and a broken map system.

He reached out to the PureScript and Babylon.js communities, since PureScript is a Haskell-like functional language that compiles to JavaScript and Babylon.js is a JS graphics framework for the browser and VR.

Lays out a two-phase plan starting with an enhanced edition like Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, faithful but playable, since a modern kid would find the original like descending into Mordor.

The enhanced edition adds Babylon.js physics, a possible VR version, an updated map and journal, and a reworked combat system that was just swipe, cut, or jab.

The game lacked any class or experience system, weighing Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved D20 variant or a classless system like Steve Jackson's GURPS, which Interplay almost licensed for Fallout.

Considers an experience system tied to actions like Morrowind's, where running and alchemy build skills, or tied to the in-game economy via paid skill trainers.

A class system is a major endeavor since currently you can complete every quest and join every guild yet stay at starting power.

The primitive magic system with divine temples of Freya, Set, and Odin and an arcane fireball, all forgotten on leaving a temple, needing a full rework tied to skills.

Details the Thieves and Warriors guilds, a burglary skill to peer into and enter windows, and pickpocketing, all lost on quitting a guild, which must be redesigned.

Recalls DOS-era sound limits with Sound Blaster ISA cards, and floats porting IOHK's Haskell music library Euterpe to PureScript for algorithmic generative music with an unlimited soundtrack.

With only 50 to 60 unique sounds to modernize, weighs algorithmic music against hiring a composer like Ramin Djawadi of Game of Thrones and Westworld or Trent Reznor.

Praises the game's revolutionary 1992 random NPC generation, which assigned names, professions, and religions on the fly, and says it must be preserved so PC and NPC generation share a system.

Cites Oblivion's Radiant AI giving NPCs real jobs like a smith going to the forge, and Hitman Absolution's empathetic NPC dialogue, as models for interaction.

Praises Troika Games' Arcanum, where beauty and intelligence changed NPC reactions, and wants both NPC-to-NPC and NPC-to-PC interactions.

Gripes that games break immersion when you lead a guild yet random guards arrest you, or Skyrim legionnaires ignore your rank, so NPC generation must account for race, class, and guild.

Imagines magic influencing reactions and the two magic guilds, the evil Brotherhood of Loki lending illusion magic and the good Fellowship.

Praises clever 1992 mechanics: vampires restoring health from blood mead, a disease system, and a poverty system where cheap slum hostels risk robbery and disease.

Wants player influence on the world like the Fable series, with long-term consequences that darken the graphics and spawn poverty when you kill prominent figures.

The game had crude time and no seasonality or weather, so adding a time component would let actions create cascading world memory.

The game is set during a plague with no effect, unlike Neverwinter Nights' magic plague, and asks whether to make the plague a real Black-Death-level mechanic.

The plague also conveniently confines the player, whose key driver is finding cousin Sven who became a vampire, and weighs a faithful edition against a spiritual successor, praising Jon Van Caneghem of Might and Magic.

Wants visual and narrative Easter eggs like Arcanum's Stillwater Rabbit, a rare Bigfoot event he stumbled onto that had its own dialogue tree rewarding the player.

Considers constructed in-game languages like Skyrim's dragon shouts and building deeper lore for Middle Dwarf, which drew on English, Scandinavian, and Irish sources.

Wants to extend the Norse mythology, done well in God of War, noting Norse elves and dwarves differ from Tolkien's.

The simplistic evil-king narrative needs depth, since games like Dishonored, Half-Life 2, and Deus Ex show why a government is evil, and recommends the Wisecrack YouTube channel.

Wisecrack analyzes games and shows like Westworld and Rick and Morty through philosophers like Camus, and that good storytelling makes right and wrong debatable.

Weighs an alignment system from Fable's horns and halos to Dungeons and Dragons' nine alignments and fallen paladins, plus a karma or corruption mechanic like Dawn of War II's.

Building a game world makes you a philosopher taking a position on utilitarianism, deontology, or moral absolutism and on justice, echoing real coronavirus arrests and malleable constitutional rights.

Proposes regulating magic like guns, citing Baldur's Gate 2's Cowled Wizards who license magic use, and asking who regulates it and where you buy the license.

Wants to explore racism through species physiology, noting the Black Death led to pogroms against Jews, so a plague could make the dominant class scapegoat dwarves or elves, rewarding two playthroughs.

Notes the game had no crafting system, now standard, and says he loves a living biome where you harvest plants and extract troll blood into crafting and enchantment systems.

Hates NPCs doing what a player cannot, and warns crafting can wreck the economy, as Morrowind's stacking potions and Might and Magic's enchant-and-resell exploits allowed infinite money.

Laments that the Elder Scrolls series stripped custom spells from Morrowind to Skyrim, and plans code archaeology with periodic blog updates and a suggestion form for fans.

It will likely ship PC-only via Babylon.js in the browser, leaning toward an open-source enhanced edition and a paid remaster with a cryptocurrency component, kept in the functional PureScript space.

Closes that games matter because humans are wired for storytelling on which society, religion, and governments were built, and that Legends of Valour taught the 7-year-old him that everything is malleable, inspiring his work on voting systems and currencies.

Dreams of open-source game tech: algorithmically generated music, a set-theoretic algebra for magic, bioluminescent plants he may fund a company to engineer, and the constructed logical language Lojban.

Hopes a fantasy setting can teach empathy for the other side, breaking the social-media loop where disagreement means you are a monster, calling it a passion project he will return to over years.