New CCG POD - the link

Here's a link to the announcement from SuperiorPOD I commented on in my earlier post.

New CCG POD possibilities

The game print-on-demand company SuperiorPOD has announced the ability to create card packs with random frequencies, such as would be required to make a collectible card game (CCG) like Magic or Pokemon.  There are tons of independent designers who have ideas for this kind of game, but it's been very hard to get them made because of the high cost of printing.  Having this capability in a print-on-demand service is great for those folks, and it's been an often-requested and so far unfulfilled wish in the forums at The GameCrafter.

I'm a little dubious that you could get an indy CCG off the ground.  Even with this potential printing solution, it's going to be hard to get enough of an audience that they'll be willing to send lots of money away just for a chance at getting a rare card, especially when there are lots of CCGs already saturating the market.  But I don't know that market well - none of that kind of game ever did much for me.  Card-based combat and the interrelationships of abilities I like, but the idea that you'd do better if you spent more on cards always killed it for me.

Art for space game

Here's a sample play board (one of a 2x2 grid) for my new unnamed space game that I'm submitting for TheGameCrafter.com's vehicle game design contest, due in about a week.  In the game, players control ships and trade resources from planet to planet while completing missions and building ship upgrades.

The game board background image is NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day from June 30, 2011, seen here:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110630.html
It is of Star Factory Messier 17, taken by the European Southern Observatory's VLT survey telescope's OmegaCam.

The planets are textures from http://www.mayang.com/textures/ that I altered, recolored, and mapped to spheres.

The green grid I created in Adobe Illustrator, with shadows added in GIMP.  The wormhole art is a GIMP plasma rendering with a bunch of effects.  The pirate icon is clip art from the Open Clip Art Library (http://openclipart.org).  The starlanes (blue paths) are a path trace in GIMP with some gradient filling and border effects.  The text and disks around the planets I made in PowerPoint 2007.

Dueling D6's: Combat Odds for 6-sided dice

I've been working on a design recently in which I am thinking of using a pretty standard style of dice-based combat resolution. I first saw it in the game Mystic Wood, then in Talisman, and in a similar pirate-themed game called Sword and Skull.  Each player rolls a die and adds a bonus to it; high roll wins.  I did the math (not hard math) to figure out what a 1-point or 2-point advantage is worth in this scenario. I knew it wouldn't be linear, but I was curious how it looked.  The zone for ties gets smaller as your advantage increases, and a +4 isn't too different from a +5 in terms of results except that you can actually lose a +4 battle a fraction of the time. Anyway, here are the results.