Games

Broken Poker

Some friends and I have played a friendly, low-stakes Texas Hold ‘Em poker game for years. One player wanted to play a night of silly, rule-breaking poker for his birthday.

House Rules

I really enjoy playing board games with friends, as you can probably guess from my media reviews. Over the last ~25 years of playing we’ve evolved a couple house rules that are worth formalizing and sharing.

Economics Doesn't Believe in Magic

On a writing forum an author asked for users to think of what societies would do with the magic system he designed. Here’s a short rewrite of his setup:

Ironwood, a Roguelike Game in 7 Days

Ironwood is a roguelike game developed for the 2014 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. “Roguelike” is a pretty poorly defined genre, but generally speaking it’s a turn-based game with generated environments, emergent gameplay from simulationism, and a steep learning curve. (For more, see an informal definition, a formal attempt, or a current take on its broad use.)

CTF Liveblog

Friday

Random The Flag

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FTL: Simulationism Lost

All weekend I’ve been captaining a series of (mostly doomed) Trek-like starships in FTL, a new indie game. The gameplay is mostly derived from time management and roguelike games (more on that later), as you juggle crew between tasks, shift power between systems (straight up “more power to the engines and target their shields!”), and balance exploring the galaxy with fleeing from an ever-advancing plot device that’s too boring to describe.

Timing

Luke, who writes backwards like DaVinci did some more game design with help from #bbg (on irc.freenode.net - anyone’s welcome to drop by to talk browser game development, it’s a great place). Reading his note photo, it looks like he’s breaking cards down into Settings, Characters, and Monsters. There’s not a lot more info, just that he’s spending his hours planning out his game.

Breakdowns

When Jim asked me how many hours I could put to So Play We All this week, I said “Negative three”. That turned out to be pretty accurate, as I managed to drop on the floor all but the three most important things for my week. Unfortunately, Oaqn didn’t make that top three so I sent $20 each to Jim and Luke. So, let’s look at what I funded this week.

Keeping Jim Busy

Oops, got totally distracted by flying back to Chicago and forgot to write my So Play We All response post on time, so there’s $10 each to Luke and Jim. Late but not lost, here’s that response. (Luke didn’t post an update this week, so I’m only responding to Jim.)

Rewriting My Competitors

It’s really clear that the polls So Play We All are measuring progress. When we have a quiet week, there’s a lot fewer votes. This week, there were 4, evenly split between Luke and I. The SPWA site doesn’t have code to handle ties so it highligted me as winning, which I guess means the bugfix is not my problem. :)

Two Turnarounds

I was really impressed by Luke in week five of So Play We All. He built a playtestable game fast and, more importantly, he learned from it. He’s decided to completely rework his gameplay. Player interaction wasn’t what he wanted and he realized it would be a huge amount of work to write. It’s not easy to decide you’ve spent time building the wrong thing, and that maturity impressed me.

Small Steps

In Week 5 of So Play We All, things were pretty quiet. I bugfixed and laid groundwork. Luke... uh... did something. I read his post and it sounds like he added some helpers but otherwise mostly just rewrote his story. It’s more enjoyable now (seriously, play it), but it doesn’t really feel structurally any different. There’s no added mechanics that I can see. I’m curious where he’s going, though.

SPWA Week 2: Funding and Forms

So Play We All is partly a motivation hack, with teammates/competitors and penalties to make sure we each put in time towards our games. Luke’s job sent him to a conference for almost all of the week, so he didn’t get to do any of his hours. He’s paying us both $20. To keep anyone from falling behind, we’ve tweaked the rules to say that anyone who pays the penalty for missed hours can make them up when they have the time.

SPWA Week 1 Response: Code Hassles and Kittens

This week in So Play We All our topic was “Signup” and our budget was 4 hours. I originally pushed for more time, but I ended up glad that it was short as I hacked things out on the last day. I don’t need to belabor that, let’s look at how Luke and Jim did with their games.

SPWA Week 0 Response: A Strong Start

As mentioned in the rules for So Play We All, we’re required to respond to each other’s progress update. I’m going to be doing the Oaqn progress updates on that blog but the feedback here, mostly to keep that blog focused.

Grind Without Progression in Die2Nite

I’ve been playing the game Die2Nite with a few friends, and I’m fascinated that it has no character advancement — no levels, no skills, no upgrades — but it has a terrible grind.

Social Pastimes

In a previous post I wrote:

Yomi vs. Nash Equilibria

I was rereading David Sirlin’s World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things as part of a conversation with a friend and I got to pondering his concept of yomi. I’ve previously mentioned it as having an influence on my game designs, so I’ll just quote his short definition:

Competition and Bluffing

Direct competition is when a game is decided by how the opponents interact, how well they stop each other from succeeding. Indirect competition is when opponents can’t influence each others’ successes, like in a sprint.

Game Influences (7/6): Warstorm

I thought I’d finished the six post series on games that influenced Athenge, but I soon saw a game that changed my plans. This post is about how I analyze games by verbs, decision timing, and business concerns.

Athenge Ops Playtested

Over the weekend Snarky dropped by for some ribs and playtesting. I think of early playtesting as scientific experimentation and had a specific question I wanted the session to answer: is the design of the core gameplay, op combat, any fun?

City of Heroes as a Pastime

Last month NCSoft added Mission Architect to City of Heroes, a tool for players to build and share missions that become part of the game. Opening the doors to player-created content — especially that gives an in-game benefit — is a huge risk that I think the world of them for taking. Muds have struggled with this for years and I’ve only seen the muds without strong advancement and power mechanics (usually none at all) allowing players to build areas.

Karma, Farming and Play Styles

The Karma effect and self-scaling universes applies the old management saying (and game design maxim) “You get what you measure” to MMORPG leaderboards:

Feedback and WeeWar's Game Design

I talked about positive feedback loops in the farming genre post but I was in rant mode and sort of glossed over the definition:

Technology Trees

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

Game Influences (6/6): Kongai

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

Game Influences (5/6): X-Com

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

Game Influences (3/6): Tactics Ogre

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

The Farming Genre

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

Game Influences (2/6): WeeWar

This is part two in a series on games that influenced my design for a web game.

Game Influence (1/6): Ikariam

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

The Game Industry

This is a game for 2 - 2,000,000 players of all ages. It should last anywhere from here to eternity (average one hour).

A Spine of Trust

I first got the idea for the web game I’ll be working on when I was at a company that was an unhealthy environment:

Finally, Sweet Success

The sun has come out from behind the clouds, and the world is beautiful again. Now birds sing in the trees and now animals frolic in the long grass. The spring breeze has never been this sweet, nor has the river run so clear.

These Elves are People

It’s important for journalism address virtual worlds because they’ve become the “third place” after Home and Work that Starbucks has been trying to fill for the last decade and change. Adults go online to hang out instead of the bar; teenagers go online to try on new personalities instead of the mall.

Flash Gaming

Hey, it’s Friday. Stop being productive. Here’s the games I’ve been consistently returning to the last few weeks.

Compressing Sudoku

⊕ At least a few times a week I see someone playing Sudoku while commuting on the L, and it’s always annoyed me. The problem is that Sudoku is a small 9x9 grid with 10-20 numbers on it, and a book is a chunk of dead tree. How inefficient! There’s a tiny amount of very compressable data in a large, uncompressable phsyical object. I can’t do anything about the book, but I could imagine one with a grid on the back, a dry-erase marker in the spine, and two dozen puzzles per page in some kind of notation. I’m not going to start publishing specialty books, but I’d like to know what that notation will be.