Well holy mackerel, 2012 has hit and we’re already 12.5% of the way through. I’ve hit the ground running and am chugging away at my projects. I thought it might be a good time to tell everyone what I’m up to.
Recently I’ve been working on The Day After, my board-game that became a board-game themed PC game. Primarily I’ve been writing the scripting language for it so I can start sewing in game mechanics and messing around with things. I’m using a scripting language because you can iterate (and debug) quicker that way. Anyway, working on the general gameplay model lead me to working on the scripting language, which lead me to nailing down some of the concepts I had floating around. One of them is Roles and balancing them for gameplay. I thought I might chat about that.
I’ve been working away at my board-game-now-a-video-game game, with the working title “The Day After”. I’m starting to get some art and a website together, so I need to fix upon a final name. I was okay with the working title, though other people think it’s a little weak, which I concede. My girlfriend suggested the name “Aftermath”. I’ve been toying about with variants on that – “The Aftermath”, “<adjective> Aftermath”… “The Day Aftermath” 
In case you didn’t know, I’m working on a multiplayer video game (with a board game aesthetic). The city has fallen into chaos after citizens go on an inexplicable homicidal rampage. You are one of a band of survivors who need to cooperate in order to survive until being rescued, potentially exploiting the situation for your own gain or perhaps uncovering the truth behind this disaster. I’m aiming for a survivalist horror feel somewhere in the ballpark of zombie films, natural disaster films and The Day of the Triffids.
This is where you come in. I need to decide on the name for the game. Have your say via the poll, or suggest alternatives in the comments!
Loading ...At the risk of eliciting cries of “Oh ya mug!” I’ve made a change to my projects. Whereas before I was steaming away on Kung Fu Chronicles (aka Kung Fu Legends aka that-Kung-fu-game-you’re-making), I’ve shifted projects and priorities around. I’ve discussed before some of the game engine stuff I had been working on. As a proof of the ontological argument (or Omnipotence paradox), I had created parts of my game engine that were so awesome and featureful that even I had no idea how to use them. 
So I was stuck.
I have also mentioned before that I was working on a board game called The Day After. Brief synopsis: You’re part of a band of survivors after a weird cataclysmic event, and should co-operate so that you all get to rescue… but is co-operation always in your best self-interest? The idea of The Day After was to make something in the vague genre that Arkham Horror lives in, but do it better. My main criticism with Arkham Horror is that with all the tokens, characters and special rules, it’d be better realized as a video game. Anyway, I’ve done most of the alpha design for The Day After, but was finding it slow to put things onto even prototype cards and get it all working as a cheap-ass board game to foist upon my unsuspecting friends. I wasn’t sure about a bunch of rules, or any of the numbers, amongst other concerns. Prototyping it for quick trial play was taking longer and a lot more work than I expected.
Late last year when I was brainstorming ideas, I tripped over the idea of testing some of the game elements by programming a dumb Monte Carlo simulation of the rules and run millions of test games to see what needed balancing. It was a great idea, but I realised to properly simulate it, I needed to put in certain AI routines. For example, to be rescued you need to achieve some goal (eg, restore power), signal the rescue (eg, with a radio) and get to the rescue spot. To get virtual characters to jump through these hoops they needed some basic planning or pathfinding, which sounded like too much work for just testing.
Anyway, I was talking about these issues with my mate Alex who floated the idea of programming it up as a game for prototyping, focussing on having debug capabilities to rewind games, tweak numbers and continue. Due to the way he phrased it I had the brilliant idea to make The Day After into an actual video game. It was a simpler project than Kung Fu Chronicles, but would provide me with a simple framework for testing out game engine ideas. I think I’m okay at general game design, but my game engine design experience is almost non-existent. By programming something simple, I could bootstrap my way up to smashing the block I had with Kung Fu Chronicles. Plus it could serve as a nice fundraiser for my other projects. I still would like to turn it into a physical board game, but that can be later along when the rules are more refined. Plus I can give the video game a board game aesthetic (like Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble!) which simplifies and unifies graphic design.
I’m doing much better with this as my primary project. Already I have a better events system, game loop and general approach to objects. When my girlfriend goes on holiday for a while I’m going all-out on my projects. Hopefully I can get The Day After and my long-suffering novel Breathe into much better states. I’ll keep you guys posted on how it goes.
Work on my projects has been quiet lately, not because I haven’t been doing anything, but more because I have. I’ve got a good foundation down for the game/simulation side of Kung Fu Chronicles in terms of game objects and the supporting framework. I’m now in a weird position in that I’m really happy with that framework but don’t have the experience with such a thing to dive right in, even though I designed it. I tend to learn by iterated imitation until I feel confident I’ve mastered it. But since the game engine is so new to me and so specialized to the task it needs to do, I’m a little hesitant. Dumb, I know, but that’s how it is.
I’ve been a little entranced with Kingdom of Loathing recently, and had an idea for a cyberpunk, conspiracy-theory-laden browser-based game. The chief gimmick was that you’re a hacker and your base measure of power is your aggregate MIPS across all your computers, electronic devices and “borrowed” machines. I even had a good name for it (Synaptic) with a few hooks and ideas. But I need another game project like I need a punch in the groin. I wrote down all my ideas and I might revisit them in a few years’ time.
My board game The Day After is coming along nicely. If you weren’t sure what this was about, it’s a board game about a city recently struck with a terrible catastrophe. People have gone insane and are killing each other left, right and center. You are part of a band of Survivors who need to survive in the city until rescue comes. Survivors have their own hidden agendas, so survival isn’t just about combat – it’s about compromise.
Early in development The Day After felt like a sack of misshapen cogs and sprockets, but now the different components are slotting together and everything feels much tighter. I still need to iterate the card design to get the right balance of information on cards and rules. I’m finding the different mechanics work best when a hard strategy has a soft counter (kinda how they balanced Team Fortress 2). For example, the base goal for a team is to be rescued. This requires certain tasks to be fulfilled in a coordinated manner, and you need all the people you can get. But some characters can have success conditions if they set up shelter, skip the rescue and try to live out the apocalypse. Both have their risks, but there’s a strong asymmetry in how you try to achieve them.
Another one that I really like but I’m having a little trouble getting perfect is The Truth. The apocalypse didn’t just happen. Perhaps an enemy superpower launched a bioweapon into the city. Perhaps a meteorite hit and brought an alien virus. Perhaps it’s a government conspiracy gone awry. If you’re the Hacker character, you have to try to uncover The Truth. If you’re the Spy character, you have to try your best to suppress The Truth getting out… using any means necessary.
I’m pretty sure that I’ll try to get the game printed and published through The Game Crafter. While they suck for international shipping, they are pretty awesome for everything else. By the way, if you or someone you know is a good artist and would like to make some money doing some artwork for the game, let me know.
Structure is a funny thing. In my mind’s eye, when I think of “structure” I think of buildings whether I mean structure in an architectural way, an algebraic/mathematical way, or a game mechanics way. A sprawling structure is something like The Winchester House – rooms and corridors going in all directions, linking to each other in innumerable ways. Those with a mathematical background might want to think of the tree of elements of the free group on a few elements.
Structures collapse when bits of the structure coincide with other bits (quite literally when a building collapses!) In algebra we collapse structures by saying a bunch of things that we previously considered separate are the same thing. Recently I’ve experienced a bit of game mechanic structures collapsing and thought it might be interesting to explore. Don’t worry, I won’t bring up any more architecture or algebra.
