Page: News.News201610060901PM - Last Modified : Fri, 07 Oct 16 - 1194 Visits

The big news I start I stated school again ... again in computer science. I am doing 2 class per semester and most of the content is "Déjà Vu" so it should not be so hard. But it demand me time and work I would have spent on board game design and programming. Still, the ideas always keep comming, it's not something I can prevent from happening.

Board games project

For board gaming, I am trying to focus on 4S (Simple, small, short, Social) games and mostly single player or 2 player games. One idea I really like is that I wanted to make a Master of magic micro game similar to Microcosm. I managed to build a working system where each player have 2 packs of 9 cards ( a wizard and a race) to play with plus 9 neutral cards shared by the players (stuff to conquer). The idea is pretty neat and compact, but now I would need to design cards and see if the possibility space is big enough to handle 10 different wizards and races.

I had an idea for a solitaire ninja game where you spend time as a resource to perform actions or risk doing it faster. There are interesting ideas, but the core mechanics is still lacking. I recently got many games on a math trade, I did not have a chance to play most of them. I had an idea to design a solitaire wizardry dice game using dungeon roll dice. But it's not a priority right now. I realized that there were a lot of ambiguity in some of the rules for Eldritch Express, so eventually I'll have to rework on the art and fix the rule book. But still have not time for that.

Somebody asked me if I could do a Mansion of Madness express board game. I took a look at the 2nd edition and the app that came with it. Unfortunately, the game is too expansive for me, but the idea is interesting but nothing came up for now, as this game is very story based, and without story elements, it would just be a dungeon crawler.

Speaking of dungeon crawler, I discovered a user on board game geek that converted heroquest adventure book as a Game-master-less adventure book. Which gave me the idea of making a solo herobook style dungeon quest where you play the wizards only. The idea is to experiment designing a game where the player is weak and have limited resource. I would push further by adding interaction with the furniture and other features of the room. Allowing players to interact with the room. The results could be interesting for designing another Mansion of Madness style game, or another dungeon crawler. The main issue is the AI which I'll have to take a look at "Castle Ravenloft" for insight.

Video games project

For video games, now that the summer heat is gone, I could start programming again, or almost. Somebody contacted me today about the Wizardry Legacy source code and it gave me the idea to put the code on Github since the game is open source anyway. I might try that in order to learn how to use Github, not sure I would actually work on the code since I wanted to design an adventure the last time I paused the project. If I have the time and motivation, it could be indeed easier to do than coding.

For pixel board, If I had more time, I would have loved working again on it, but it's really hard to get back in the project. I am surprised that I made that much coding as I have a hard time figuring out how my project worked. Projects are so vast that it's like running a multi department company by yourself. It seems everything needs to be freshed into your memory to be able to work actively on it.

One thing that I realized is that I might not make the game designable from the in-game interface for now. As the interface are very complex, and requires a lot of details. I might try to design instead a game using the engine and insert data from outside the game. I might have a greater sense of progress this way as I am accomplishing something toward a goal (finish a game). While the designer interface will always require new features.

Now which game I intend to make, well I though that the first game I design should containt an hex maps. I have a lot of ideas that use hex maps, better start with that. The game would be Erician (also available in the board game section) which is basically a tactical modern military war game (inspired on Advance Wars or Dai Senryaku). So there will only be a hex map with units tokens and combat resolution dialog. So it should not require much unique interface.

Else the other option was a card game, but most of my game have unique ability which requires more intensive scripting. So this is it for now, well see how things evolves.