Showing posts with label Computer Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computer Games. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Anagrams Galore, or Aroma Rage Slang

Getting working on Scryptix again, after an 8-month hiatus.  I need to get some more puzzles made, which is tricky, since they need to start with interesting phrases with words of equal length that convert into anagrams that contain the same number of words with the same length, with an understandable clue.

I've made about 160 of these.  At my best, I can make 10-20 an hour or so, but I burn out after that - it's a bit tedious to look for anagrams, and you run out of ideas.  To get the game to work as I envision it, with a daily puzzle, I'm going to need to have a good number of puzzles banked up, so I can take an hour here or there every couple of weeks to make new puzzles.

At some point, I'd like to crowd-source it, and let people submit their own puzzles, but I'd have to write a submission interface for that, which takes a while, and my time is currently better spent getting the game running better.  I also have no idea if people would actually enjoy submitting puzzles and would do it in enough numbers to support the game and make it worth my while to program the interface.

Anyway, though, exciting to get the project going again.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Lucky Train

The company my brother works for, A Bit Lucky, has produced a social Facebook game called Lucky Train, in which you build a small town and then send the population around on trains to your Facebook friends.  The game is still in beta, and they're adding more features every week.

It's interesting - although I've played it a ton, I've found myself not quite as addicted to it as some of the other, stupider Facebook games, like Dragon Wars and Mobsters II, where you develop a character over time by doing little meaningless quests over and over.  The gameplay is actually far more interesting in Lucky Train, but I think the thing that's missing is that the plot doesn't shift or reset - you end up in an apex state, where you have a bunch of trains and a fully-developed town, and then there's not so much more to do other than the same thing over and over again.

I'm sure they know this, and are planning on adding that kind of thing when they shift out of beta.  I think when they do, they'll have a real hit on their hands - the graphics, sounds, and gameplay are far more fun than the other games like this, and the social aspect is fun, seeing all your friends on your train routes and sending trains back and forth.  It just doesn't yet have an addiction that lasts past where your town is mature, which in the current beta state takes about a month or so of play, compared to Mafia Wars and its ilk, where they keep giving you missions and levels until you burn out (for me, after about 6 months).

Anyway, check it out - it's fun!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Slay

About a year ago, my brother turned me onto a great computer game called Slay (available here) by Sean O'Connor.  The game is basically a territory-capture game with different ranked units and an underlying economics system.  It's got a set of rules that are very much like boardgame rules, and it plays out on a hex map.  Although it has a boardgame feel, I think it works much better on a computer than it would on a board because of the underlying mathematics involved - the math isn't so hard that you couldn't figure it out, and you can actually do the calculations if you need to for a critical decision, but mostly it's more fun just to let the computer do the math and focus on the strategic parts.

And the strategy is fun - you've got ranked units that can capture territory or block others from capturing, and buildings that merely block capture. You do much better with bigger connected areas of territory, so the idea is to consolidate from small dispersed areas into a large area whose edges you can defend.  Each separate territory you control has its own economy, so small areas can't afford very powerful units, while with bigger areas, you can get some of the more powerful units that can defeat lesser units and take out the buildings.  Also, your guys can move to and attack from any space in a connected territory, so units fly around the board if you've got a big connected realm.  The catch is that you have to support the units (but not the buildings), so you need to have enough squares under your control to pay all your guys each turn.  If you don't they ALL die, not just the ones you can't afford, and your territory is up for grabs unless you've got buildings in place.  The unit costs go up exponentially for the higher ranked units, so they can be dangerous.  Any spare income you don't use is banked, so you can save up over the course of several turns, but your reserves are lost if your area capital is conquered.

Further complicating the game are plants that grow into spaces and cancel the income you receive from them.  There are two kinds, one of which is a pine tree, which grows slowly at apparently random intervals, while the other looks like palm trees (although when I'm playing I think of them more as weeds).  The palm trees spread each turn to an open space, so you can rapidly lose territory to a weed infestations.  You can clear a square with any unit, but that counts as the unit's attack for the turn.  When units die from lack of support, they often turn into weeds (conquered buildings sometimes go to pine trees), so a bad economic defeat can cripple a whole area and then bleed over into neighboring territories.

The strategy is interesting - you want to try to expand and connect your areas, but you also need to defend, particularly when you've got a narrow strip of territory that could be easily severed.  Often, late in the game, you can pull dramatic moves, sending a string of guys across a big area to divide it into two, which can cause somebody's whole army to die all at once.  But doing that can leave you unprotected, so somebody can do it to you right back.

You can play online with others, but the network interface is pretty old-school, so I've mostly just played against computer opponents, who are quite competent and fun.  The graphics hearken back to simpler 8-bit times, and it's clearly a one-man operation, which I'm quite familiar with through my experience writing and selling Snood. The game costs $20 for Windows and Mac, $4 for iPhone, and it's well worth the investment.


Image above borrowed from the Slay homepage.

Starcraft II

I've been playing some of this over the last couple of weeks.  It took a while, but I've really started enjoying the single-player campaign games.  They've got a difficulty tuning problem, I think - the "normal" setting is very easy, and the "hard" setting is often extremely difficult.  Except when it's not.  It's a little frustrating to play some levels and feel completely unchallenged, and then to bump up one difficulty level and feel like there's no way anyone could ever prevail. With the tech upgrades you can keep buying, the "hard" level is becoming easier, too, which is odd.

The games against actual humans seem not to have too much depth compared to other RTS games I've played, although I've heard that this gets better the better you get. For me, it mostly seems like whoever makes a bigger wad of guys earlier nearly always wins - it's a very rush-intensive game, and there aren't very many strong defensive buildings or siege weapons, although some races have more than others.  That means most of the fights are chaotic close-quarters kinds of things, and there's less of the strategic stuff going on - there are so many units, and they're sooo rock-paper-scissors, where one is terrific against some units and horrible against others, that it's hard to come up with a good strategy other than guessing what your opponent will do.

Again, I may find it to be more tuned the longer I play, but for now, multiplayer is not so much fun - lots of work for one fight about 10 minutes in that determines the whole game.  Makes me miss Age of Empires II, which was a favorite, and appreciate Company of Heroes, which allows the use of cover and defensive structures and positions in interesting ways.

Monday, August 16, 2010

New puzzle game concept art

While waiting for art for Diggity, I've been thinking about a puzzle game.  I was playing some Snoodoku, and trying to figure out what made that fun, and came up with a new idea.  It's going to be a logic puzzle game, played on a computer, details still a bit fuzzy, but I've been working on some icons (see below).  Also learning Illustrator, which is a bit tricky for me.





Friday, July 2, 2010

New Facebook game - LuckyTrain

The company my brother works for just released their first product, a Facebook-based social game called LuckyTrain.  It's a pretty clever thing - not a single-player quest game like all of the MafiaWars clones and their ilk.  They've got some interesting ways to use the social networking built into Facebook.  I'll be interested to see how it does; I've been in on the beta testing, and I enjoyed it.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Mr. Watson, come here, I need you

Interesting flash game up here at the NY Times - you can play Jeopardy against a computer opponent, Watson, created by IBM. They've stacked the deck some in the human's favor - you get to go first, and play or pass on each question. I ended up winning 65-6 (yay, recall of useless trivia), although I deserved two more points (I didn't know how precisely to phrase the answer to the Before and After questions, so I mis-answered the first one).

It often seemed like the program was doing little more than a Google search on the question terms, although I'd guess there's a good bit more to it than that. A lot of the questions had some misleading or extraneous language, and that sometimes threw the computer off the scent. It has to be processing commonalities pretty well, and it's understanding the language well enough (most times) to discern the question. It did quite well at the "before and after" questions, too, and I'd think those would be the hardest, algorithmically.

Anyway, a fun diversion. It's going to be a while before we have to worry about Skynet terminating us in front of Alex Trebek, though. Something like this could be turned into an interesting one-player trivia game, though, and that's a difficult thing to make.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Two tech tools

Both from PurplePawn.com.

Not cool:  Yoyn - There is nothing in this demo that shows me how a game can be played better on this platform than with cardboard pieces.  Rolling the die to roll a virtual die is strangely cool, but also pointless.  There has to be a better way to use all this technology.  And the background music for the video is maddening.

Cool: Lego Robot Chess - ironically, still mostly pointless, but makes up for it in style points.  The pathfinding algorithms must have been a bear to write.  My favorite parts:  1) The pieces going diagonal and backing out of the way to allow a piece to move diagonally through them; 2) the reveal, midway through, of the scale of the board, and 3) the animated parts of the mega-pieces, like the knight's rearing horse with animated forelegs, and the queen thumping her checkmate challenge at the end.

Both of these have an insanely low effort-to-utility ratio, but the lego chess is cool on a number of levels, maybe even for this low ratio.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Grid Game

Eric Martin at Boardgame News links to a flash game called "Grid Game" (located here).  It's a fairly hypnotic thing to try once or twice, and it's interesting how it creates order out of randomness based on only a few simple rules.  Very elegant.

I don't think it has a lot of game value, though.  Like Bejeweled and a variety of other recent games, you make a single play that triggers others, and your eventual score depends on how all the triggering events stack up.  I suppose if you were some kind of Rain Man you could look at the board and see how your move would cascade through the playfield, but I doubt most folks can do that.

In Bejeweled, a whole bunch of your score comes directly from the random number generator - what jewels get created and fall onto your board.  That's always frustrated me with Bejeweled and similar games. This Grid Game is more deterministic than that - you have all of the information you need to predict what will happen, but the complexity of how it plays out is beyond the scope of what people can reasonably imagine.  Your score just happens to you - you don't earn it.

Assuming I wanted to turn this into a game, rather than a toy, how would I improve it?  If you reduced the board to a much smaller size, say 5x5, then it would become more reasonably predictable, and there could be some skill to playing it.  Designing some pre-set scenarios with specified maximum scores would be fun, too - you'd need to puzzle out what move gives you the best score.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Small World for iPad

Brett over at BrettSpiel has a detailed review of the game Small World implemented for iPad.  I'd discussed the iPad as a game platform earlier here and here.  I haven't played this game yet, either in its traditional cardboard form or on the iPad, although it's been highly recommended by my brother and others.  It sounds like they've done a pretty good job of implementing it, and that it's a good match for a computer-based platform (e.g. little hidden info, not much luck, benefits from the graphics, animations, sounds, and computational power).  I'd be curious to have a look for myself.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

iPad Scrabble

Following up on my earlier post on using the iPad for board games, via the Death of Monopoly blog comes a video look at Scrabble for the iPad.  It looks cool from a gee-whiz standpoint, but the gameplay doesn't seem to be vastly improved over playing with wooden tiles.  The only features that look better are maybe the automatic score calculation (which isn't a big deal for me) and the dictionary available on the phone.  Otherwise, I'd rather play with the wooden pieces - the screen looks tiny, and the tiles hard to move around on it.

And that second player should really have played RIVETED with the D making GORED - that was bugging me.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

The iPad for boardgames

I got a chance to see an iPad today - a student brought one in and was really excited about it.  It was a neat gizmo, as are most Apple products.  I'd been reading in several places about how people expected it to be useful as a boardgame platform.  My suspicion was that it would be awkward in the same way computers normally are, for two reasons:
  1. Computer screens are small.  It's hard to see what you're doing, and when you have multiple players, not everybody can get a good look.
  2. It's hard to have hidden information unless you make people look away or take turns. 
  3. Some of the fun in playing boardgames is moving the little bits around, holding cards, and rolling dice.
I made a number of wargames or boardgames in my youth as I explored computer programming (good old BASICA run from a 5.25" floppy on our IBM PC with the green and black monitor - those were the days), and they were always fairly unworkable.  Any functionality or bonus to gameplay you gain from the computer is overshadowed by the annoyance of having to trade seats or look away while the other person plays his/her turn.

So, will the iPad work?  Maybe.  For problem #1 above, display size and visibility, the iPad has a big enough screen that you can show more of the board, and the fullscreen touchscreen will make for some neat interaction/interface possibilities.  The fact you can zoom or slide easily will probably help too.  I think really great computer-assisted boardgaming will probably require a larger thing like the iPad, something like the touchscreen tabletop here.

For problem #2, the problem of hidden information, some of the designs I've seen have people using iPhones or iTouches to store their hidden information while the community info is on the iPad.  Pretty neat, and this allows for games with lots of hidden info to work face to face. But by the time you've bought an iPad for $500 and four iPhones or iTouches for a couple hundred each, you're investing a thousand bucks to play a tiny little boardgame.  I think dedicated games that run on TVs (like this one) will be more economical (but maybe less neat-o) for this kind of thing for the next few years at least.

For problem #3, the hindrance factor of the interface, that's a tough call.  If the games designed for the iPad are just rehashes of traditional boardgames, then you're not really gaining anything by playing them on the iPad, and you lose something.  My first version of computer Monopoly  back in 1985 used ASCII art and colored text to show the board.  I worked really hard to get the whole game included, with trades, the Chance and Community Chest cards and their effects, and a bunch of other features.  And in the end, it was deathly dull.  You hit the space bar to roll, and your little character moved around the board with little bleeping noises, and stuff happened that you only rarely had control over.  Other than the trades, which are rare, the only decisions were whether to buy or not, when to buy houses, and whether to pay to get out of jail or not.  That's something that a well-designed iPad game could get around, but you'll probably have to start with something suited to the platform rather than just porting a real-life game to it.

So, the iPad is neat, and there is certainly potential for it to be a cool boardgame platform, but I don't think we've quite reached the face-to-face electronic boardgame experience everybody is hoping for.  The closest I've come recently is places like SpielByWeb.com, where most of the solution is the Internet.  You get to look at your own screen, your info stays hidden, and the game is fun.  The only part that's lacking is the face-to-face experience of a real game night.  It may be hard to get all of those ingredients together.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Gamers of ill repute

Via Penny Arcade I learned of a new service called GameCrush, where interested game players can connect with opponents for online gaming of both the traditional computer and console variety and also for implemented boardgames (they have an image of a game of Battleship on their website, seen here).

That sounds tame enough. Who doesn't want to find a willing opponent to play with? But it's not quite so tame. If you sign up for this service, you are actually using it to hire an opponent. Weird, but still not skeezy, right? Some folks might really want to play, and be challenged in the friend department.

But wait - the opponent you hire is called a PlayDate, so there's the idea that you're actually paying for somebody of your desired gender to have a semi-romantic interlude with you. So, it's essentially an escort service. The PlayDates get rated (I can't imagine there's not going to be a PlayDate of the Month, right?), and can command bigger fees if they, uh, perform well. And you get the choice of choosing a "flirty" or "dirty" opponent. Depends on how badly you want to go from player to playa, I guess.

It's a little hard to imagine this working as a business model, although I suppose those toll numbers they advertise on late night TV must attract some kind of customer base. I kind of think you're trying to scratch too many itches at once here. When I try to imagine how pathetic you'd be staring at a monitor, wearing a headset microphone, and playing some weird kind of dirty Battleship with a person you're paying $6.60 per ten minutes to "date," I really can't even get my head around it.

And that says something, because believe me, I know pathetic - pathetic and I go way back.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Mass Effect II

I'm currently enjoying Mass Effect II for XBox - I'm about 15 hours into it. It's kind of funny, though, that nearly every character you meet has some connection to your earlier life in Mass Effect I. It's like there are only about 100 people in the galaxy, and you met them all the first time, and they were just waiting for you to come back. Also, everybody in the galaxy treats you either as some kind of living god or with haughty disdain - no middle ground. Just once, I'd like to meet somebody who doesn't care much about me.

It's a fun game, though, and an engaging universe they've set it in. The world you walk around in is actually much more fun than the game part, which is mostly a simplified first-person shooter with a couple of dry minigames tacked on. The decision-making character interaction parts are also thoroughly enjoyable, although I'm too much of a namby-pamby to choose most of the renegade actions. They've done a good job of giving you a chance to explore your moral code as well. A fun experience - even better than the first one, I'd say so far, although the ending of the first one was pretty awesome.

Is this a "game" in the sense I've been discussing in earlier posts here? Not really at all - it's more of a puzzle, or actually just an interactive story. But we've conflated all of these cinematic computer experiences as "games," based on the initial arcade-game offerings (which were actually much closer to true games or sports) so I guess I'll stick with the vernacular.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Little Green Guys with Guns

For those of you looking for a boardgame-like experience online, I'd recommend Little Green Guys with Guns (at lggwg.com). I'll admit to some potential bias here, because the game's author is my brother, but the game is really fun. It's a play-by-e-mail (PBEM) turn-based tactical combat game. You have a team of little green guys trying who are usually trying to kill the other teams run by other players (although there are some cooperative maps, solo maps, and alliance team maps). Each turn, you plan out moves and attacks for your team, and then they execute your orders. They do this literally - which means your moves and attacks can get messed up if somebody steps in front of you or destroys nearby terrain, often leading to comical and tragic results.

The game is quite mature, having been in development for over five years. There are six different kinds of units with different range, strength, armor, damage, and attack type. There's lots of variety in map design, unit selection and capabilities, and terrain types, and the maps are scriptable, so the user community frequently comes up with new innovations. There are over 130 different maps to play on, and more being created all the time. The player community is open and supportive, with a hotly contested player ranking list. Even better, the game is free to try (donations to support are currently optional, but there may be a small subscription involved in the future).