tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50784799878834040522024-03-12T18:48:03.276-07:00Rick's Café AméricainBoardgames, comic strips, computers, fencing, fiction, music.<br>
<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/rholzgrafe">rholzgrafe on BoardGameGeek</a>Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.comBlogger98125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-70436628494526827192016-03-03T17:36:00.000-08:002016-03-03T17:36:43.942-08:00Villages of Valeria KickstarterRe-reading my last post about <a href="https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/180040/villages-valeria">Villages of Valeria</a> aka Deckville, I see that I promised to post here when the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dailymagicgames/villages-of-valeria">Kickstarter campaign</a> started. I <i>completely</i> forgot to do that!<br />
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The campaign ended just a couple of days ago, and I'm delighted to report that it was a huge success. We needed just $8,000 to fund the project, and wound up with over $200,000! We will be shipping over 7,000 copies to backers, before the game even hits the store shelves. Here are the final results:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjujkuVI6sddrxrO_4uUbzDjUYbdMr_n7fSRZsD4Da2D1b9Ecim1y5_8d-9yvoHVj8NnEc8n_Ri08fi9SOSsHzAFdsw-0ihXzRIAiD0m_I3kGRXSarQU-jgzblivkrbBkfvDUtPaj7ALQ/s1600/VoVFinalKickTraq.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjujkuVI6sddrxrO_4uUbzDjUYbdMr_n7fSRZsD4Da2D1b9Ecim1y5_8d-9yvoHVj8NnEc8n_Ri08fi9SOSsHzAFdsw-0ihXzRIAiD0m_I3kGRXSarQU-jgzblivkrbBkfvDUtPaj7ALQ/s320/VoVFinalKickTraq.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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We never expected the campaign to be <i>this</i> successful. We had to scurry in mid-campaign to find new stretch goals to offer. Each new goal seemed to be achieved almost the instant we put it up. By the halfway mark, we couldn't offer anything more because the game box was full and within a flea's weight of being too heavy to ship for the pledge amounts we were asking.<br />
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<a href="http://www.dailymagicgames.com/">Daily Magic Games</a> is nothing if not resourceful. A new pledge level was announced that would get its backers a "Deluxe Box", with room for still more content. The necessarily higher price compensated for the increased shipping price, and of course all backers were notified and allowed to upgrade their pledge to the Deluxe Box if they wished to do so. And then more goals were set, allowing us to put even more content into that bigger box.<br />
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In the end, backers got their choice of the standard or Deluxe box, each with lots of extra Building and Adventurer cards from stretch goals. There are three new 12-card expansions (one was a Kickstarter exclusive), and two new mechanisms (Events and Monuments) were added to the game as part of the expansions. Cards were upgraded to top-quality stock, coins were upgraded from cardboard to printed wood. And all backers will be able to download a high-quality digital art book, containing artist Mihajlo Dimitrievski's wonderful artwork without the game's text and iconography blocking the view. (I'm excited about that one myself; the art in this game is fabulous.)<br />
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As I write this, we are putting the finishing touches on the artwork and the rules. The goal now is to deliver the product to backers in September 2016, and to retailers a few weeks after that.<br />
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I have to give a tremendous shout-out to Daily Magic Games. DMG did a simply amazing job: helping improve the basic design, adding theme, engaging a wonderful artist, promoting the game to reviewers, working the social media, and using their previous successful <a href="https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/170561/valeria-card-kingdoms">Valeria: Card Kingdoms</a> campaign as a springboard for the Villages of Valeria campaign.<br />
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And I also have to give my profuse thanks to my enthusiastic playtesters. A lot of people kindly tried out this untried game when it was still incomplete, but I am particularly grateful to two groups. One is Helen's and my old gaming group down in San Jose: we miss you guys! The other is our new gaming group up here in Oregon: the gang at <a href="http://www.offthechartsgames.com/">Off the Charts Games</a>, and its amazingly welcoming owners Lynn and Ron Brown. Off the Charts is a great place; you should definitely stop in if you're in the area.<br />
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What a ride this has been!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-75876841084197070482015-11-17T16:20:00.000-08:002015-11-17T16:20:26.037-08:00Villages of ValeriaSometimes you get good news, but it's not the right time to make noise about it. And then when it is time, you're busy and you don't get around to it. That happened to me this year with this bit of news: I sold a card game design, which we hope will be published in (probably) 2017!<br />
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<b>Deckville...</b><br />
That design was called Deckville: City of Cards, and you can read about my early design work on it <a href="http://rixjoint.blogspot.com/search/label/deckville">here</a>. In March 2015, I went to the excellent <a href="http://www.gamestorm.org/">GameStorm</a> convention in nearby Vancouver, and showed off three of my designs in their Game Lab area, which is dedicated to as-yet-unpublished games. There were few publishers in attendance that year, but I got lucky: Deckville was noticed by <a href="http://www.dailymagicgames.com/">Daily Magic Games</a>. They were looking for card games to publish, and thought that Deckville was a good candidate. I gave them a copy to take home and try out, and soon after we had a deal.<br />
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Since then, I've been working with Isaias Vallejo, an experienced designer and founder of Daily Magic Games, to get the game ready for publication. We've made a lot of changes to my original design in order to make the game more suitable for their target audience: they want games that are easy to learn and quick to play. I was a little reluctant at first, thinking that they wanted non-strategic games with little to think about, but happily I was wrong about that. We've worked over the design until its play time is significantly shortened, but it still offers plenty to think about in under an hour of play. It's been a pleasure working with Isaias on this project; it's definitely been a joint effort, and we will both be listed as designers when the game is published.<br />
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<b>...is now Villages of Valeria</b><br />
We also gave the game a new theme (which I admit it desperately needed!) and a new name. It is now Villages of Valeria, with a fantasy theme to match their first-published card game. That game, <a href="http://www.dailymagicgames.com/valeria-card-kingdoms">Valeria: Card Kingdoms</a>, will be available in stores in early 2016. It's a fun, light-weight game featuring wonderful artwork by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, who is also doing the art for Villages of Valeria. Here's a sample, the artwork for the "Witch's Hut" card:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoN2QG6c89bzCIoJlVtnDzQ1jH5ssIzJGOabKRP50i9PkftzGTbf1KrV3WFhONbMi3GLh0OZO2PRpRWeItEmcNg5f5LS811qqvzJaASL6pfQB4uIRq0UAAEiLRCbn1IY600x29ebhXbA/s1600/WITCHES+HUT.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoN2QG6c89bzCIoJlVtnDzQ1jH5ssIzJGOabKRP50i9PkftzGTbf1KrV3WFhONbMi3GLh0OZO2PRpRWeItEmcNg5f5LS811qqvzJaASL6pfQB4uIRq0UAAEiLRCbn1IY600x29ebhXbA/s320/WITCHES+HUT.png" width="237" /></a></div>
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<b>Kickstarter and Print-and-Play</b><br />
We hope to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Villages of Valeria in early 2016. I'll post here when the Kickstarter is up. In the meantime, a print-and-play version of the game is available now on BoardGameGeek: <a href="https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1471768/blind-playtest-discussion">click here</a> if you're interested, try the game, and send us your feedback!<br />
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<b>Related Games</b><br />
Another of Daily Magic's games is now in the last days of its Kickstarter campaign. <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dailymagicgames/manasurge">Check out Mana Surge on Kickstarter</a>!<br />
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Isaias Vallejo is also the designer of the board game <a href="https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/97357/sunrise-city">Sunrise City</a>, which is a nicely designed game that's a lot of fun. I recommend it.<br />
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<br />Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-54273203415156939052015-11-17T15:10:00.000-08:002015-11-17T15:10:11.024-08:00Press GangI have a new boardgame design under development. Its name is “Press Gang”. It got its start several years ago, when I thought up a mechanism for players to select tiles from an array of tiles on the table, by “walking” a pawn from tile to tile to reach the one you want. The cost of acquiring a tile would be the sum of the cost of walking your pawn and the cost of the tile itself. I wrote up a page of notes and thoughts about this mechanism. Here’s a quote from that page:
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Players must balance the perceived value of a tile against the expense of acquiring it; and every move will change that equation for the next turn by putting the pawn in a different neighborhood. This sounds like a reasonably rich set of choices.</span></i></blockquote>
I filed my write-up, and forgot about it.
<br /><br />In late January of 2015 I was browsing old files out of boredom. I found my page of notes and starting thinking about it. In fairly short order I had the outline of a complete game, got excited, and started developing it.
<br /><br />Tile collection immediately suggests set collection as a goal: there would be different classes of tiles, and different individuals among those classes. Players would score by collecting appropriate sets of tiles.
<br /><br />Variety is important. Without it there is no compelling reason to walk an expensive distance to get a tile over there, instead of grabbing a cheap one nearby. Reiner Knizia’s amazing game Ra was my model for this: scoring would be different for each class of tile, giving players some difficult choices in deciding which tile might be best to acquire on any given turn.
<br /><br />Budget management usually adds interest to a game. I decided that there would be money, which could be spent to gain extra actions and get more done, or saved to be worth points at end of game. (Money is also a nice balancing system: if a choice is so obviously good that it’s a no-brainer, make it cost some money and tune the amount until it becomes a tough choice.)
<br /><br />A lesson learned from the games Ra and Coloretto, among others: it’s good to have “poison pills” in set-collection games. A poison pill is anything that reduces the value of your collection, but that you have to take anyway as part of collecting something good. Poison pills make players balance conflicting goals. Do I want this <i>really good thing</i> even though it comes with this <i>really bad thing</i>, or do I want that lesser good thing that comes with a lesser penalty?
<br /><br />When I’d reached this point in my thinking, I found a good theme for the game. I’m a fan of C. S. Forester’s wonderful novels of Horatio Hornblower, the fictional captain in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Recruiting a crew for a ship of the line was not an easy business. A captain needed a variety of experienced officers, but he also needed deckhands, which as often as not came from the press gangs.
<br /><br />This gave me thematic classes: each tile was a crewman, who might be a Lieutenant, a Midshipman, a Petty Officer, or a deckhand. And deckhands provided a great poison pill: you must have them, but you must get them from the Press Gang. They are landsmen who know nothing of the sea, and who must be trained in order to become useful.
<br /><br />Each class needed some feature to make it different from the others. For example: I felt that if the entire game were merely a matter of walking around and picking up tiles to fill your collection, it would not be sufficiently interesting. So when your recruit a Midshipman, you get another choice: you can keep the tile for scoring at the end of the game, or immediately sacrifice its score to get a benefit called the Privilege. There are several different Privileges: they can help you move your pawn more quickly, get you money, recruit another officer, change your end-game scoring, and so on. The decision you must make is whether the benefit will eventually be worth more points than the Midshipman’s basic score.
<br /><br />Within a couple of weeks (which is remarkably quick compared to my usual rate of progress), I had a perfectly playable game on my hands. Since then I have been tuning the game: adjusting the costs and values of things, and trying to streamline the rules. I think it’s getting close to done, but it’s not there yet. But more than one knowledgeable person has told me it’s my best design yet, so that’s encouraging!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-72304932420514674082014-11-06T12:21:00.000-08:002014-11-06T12:21:15.179-08:00Finally, Solitaire Till DawnA while back, when I realized that most followers of this blog were more interested in the progress of Solitaire Till Dawn rather than anything in my personal life, I created a <a href="http://solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com/">new blog for my solitaire development</a> and stopped posting about Solitaire Till Dawn here. Since then, nothing very noteworthy has happened to me other than solitaire development, so I haven't been posting here at all!<br />
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I'm going to break that rule now, because <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/solitaire-till-dawn/id929845489?mt=12">Solitaire Till Dawn is finally available in the App Store</a>, and this is a personal achievement for me. It is the culmination of over five years of work, rewriting Solitaire Till Dawn from the ground up for modern Macs. Apple released the Lion version of OS X in 2011, and until yesterday that meant that you couldn't run Solitaire Till Dawn on any Mac with an up-to-date OS. Now you can: the new release is good for any Mac OS from Snow Leopard (10.6) up through the latest Yosemite (10.10).<br />
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It's been a long grind. The previous version of Solitaire Till Dawn was the result of 15 years of steady development; you can't re-create something like that in a weekend. And I was slowed at first by the requirements of my day job, and later by the exigencies of moving house to a new state. But for the past year or more I've been able to give it lots of attention, and we've finally reached the big milestone: the release of version 1.0.<br />
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The first version of Solitaire Till Dawn was released in 1991, at about the same time that the Internet was being created. It ran on the Mac Plus, as well as the Mac II (the first Mac with a color monitor). If you're interested, I put an article about the app's history on the <a href="http://www.semicolon.com/">Semicolon LLC</a> website: <a href="https://www.semicolon.com/stdhistory.html">The History of Solitaire Till Dawn</a>. (I've also completely redesigned the website. <a href="http://www.semicolon.com/">Go admire it</a>!)<br />
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In one way, I feel as though I'm owed a vacation now. But it doesn't really work like that, and anyway I don't want one. Once the dust from the initial release has settled, I will be adding new features and fixing any bugs that turn up, and putting out upgrades. And I hope to begin work on an iPad version soon, although I'm making no promises about that for now!<br />
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I'll make one plea here: if you decide to buy a copy, please leave an honest review and rating at the App Store. That will help sales if the review is good, and help me make improvements if it isn't. Thanks!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-5075788477591859322014-06-19T23:02:00.000-07:002014-06-19T23:02:50.162-07:00More DeckVilleIf you read <a href="http://rixjoint.blogspot.com/2014/04/deckville.html">my previous post</a> from two months ago, you know that DeckVille is a euro-style card game that I've been designing in which players compete to build the best districts of a city. Unlike most of my designs, DeckVille seemed to basically work right from the start. But there's a lot of distance between a good start and a finished game, so I've been working on improving that first-cut design.<br />
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Since that post, DeckVille has been through several revisions (and I now have an impressively tall stack of obsolete prototype cards that I am using as a scratchpad). For example, one important change has been the addition of "special powers": some cards provide a special power that improves the player's ability to get things done. These give the cards more variety, and give the players more to think about. The list of actions you can take on your turn has also been evolving, and the game now offers some interesting ways to manage your hand.<br />
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I took a prototype to the KublaCon game convention, where it got a lot of play and I got a lot of interesting, useful feedback. Because of that, the latest revision is now much better balanced and I think provides more interesting gameplay. (I was listening, guys!)<br />
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I still intend to make the game available via <a href="https://www.thegamecrafter.com/">TheGameCrafter.com</a> when I think it's ready, but it's certainly not ready yet. Just this afternoon I added two new special powers to the deck, and made some improvements to the iconography. But I may make a print-and-play version available in a few weeks, when I stop feeling the urge to make significant changes after every other play (assuming that ever happens).<br />
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In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at a diagram from the rulebook, showing the elements of a card:<br />
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<br />Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-46911569233063066862014-04-20T20:31:00.000-07:002014-06-19T23:01:13.431-07:00DeckVilleI'm really not keeping up this blog very well, I see. Well, I've been busy, and my other blog over at <a href="http://solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com/">solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com</a> gets more attention—which is as it should be. But I can't spend every waking moment on solitaire programming, and I've been able to find time for some table-game design lately.<br />
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First a glance back: last post, I was talking about recent changes to my Spatial Delivery boardgame. After a lot of playtesting, I'm now pretty satisfied with that design. I think it's done, and I don't expect to do anything more with it. (No publishers in sight, but the market is pretty crowded these days, so I'm not holding my breath.)<br />
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And now I'm working on a new design called "DeckVille".<br />
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A while back <a href="http://dicehatemegames.com/" target="_blank">Dice Hate Me Games</a> held a contest for game designers. Entrants were to design games that could be played with only a pack of 54 standard-size cards. I was too busy moving to think about it at the time, and the contest is long over. (You can see a number of the winners on Kickstarter at <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dicehateme/big-games-for-small-pockets-dice-hate-mes-54-card" target="_blank">Big Game for Small Pockets</a>.) But the idea stuck in my head, so I recently set myself a challenge.<br />
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I have wanted to create a card game in the style of the kind of board game that Helen and I like best: an "economic builder". Simply put, this is a strategy game where you spend the early part of the game building things that make you efficient, and the late part building things that will make you points.<br />
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I wanted this design experience partly for fun, and partly in hopes of getting a compact, portable, playable game out of it. But mainly it's meant as a learning tool. I thought that this exercise in minimalism might give me useful insight into this kind of game.<br />
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I didn't worry about coming up with anything original. I happily stole ideas from quite a few different successful games by published designers: <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68448/7-wonders" target="_blank">7 Wonders</a>, <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8217/san-juan" target="_blank">San Juan</a>, <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/123260/suburbia" target="_blank">Suburbia</a>, and <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-to-ride" target="_blank">Ticket to Ride</a>, along with a number of others.<br />
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In nearly all games of this type, the player is to jump through some kind of hoops to get <something> that is spendable, and later jump through more hoops to spend the <something> on <something else> that will provide victory points. I decided that DeckVille would be about building a city; that the spendable stuff would be several different kinds of <i>resources</i> (e.g. wood, brick, steel, etc.), and that the victory points would be provided by <i>facilities</i>: residences, shops, businesses, public buildings, and so on.<br />
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San Juan provided a crucial notion, one I've also seen in many other games: every card can be used for two or three different purposes, all useful; but in every case you must choose <i>one</i> use per card, and forgo the other possibilities. This gives the players decisions to make. The decisions should be significant (that is, they will affect the outcome of the game), amenable to reason (that is, their effects are somewhat calculable), but not obvious. (Sometimes these are called <i><a href="http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/GameTheory3.shtml" target="_blank">agonizing decisions</a></i>.) In DeckVille, a card can be used as a resource or as a facility, but not both. The cost to build a resource is to discard some number of other cards from your hand (another notion from San Juan), while the cost to build a facility is paid by having previously built all the resources that the facility needs (7 Wonders).<br />
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Interest and variety come from making every card different, and by making the scoring value of cards interdependent. Every facility has a type, out of eight different types (public, housing, shopping, dining, etc.). The scoring value of a facility might be absolute ("2 points") or conditional ("1 point per public facility you have built"). This kind of variety can be found in quite a few games, but I took most of my inspiration here from Ted Alspach's Suburbia.<br />
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Given that basic framework, what's needed for a good game is <i>balanced paths to victory</i>. There should be a number of ways to achieve victory: for example, you might build a lot of business facilities, capping them with a facility whose score depends on that. Or you might build the right combination of public and infrastructure facilities; or a mix of housing and shopping. If the game is balanced, there will be quite a few good ways to make lots of points, none of which are overwhelmingly better than the others, but all of which will be difficult to achieve in the face of intelligent opposition.<br />
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I found that the original goal of a 54-card game worked, but only for two players. After some thought, I added a second deck of 54 more cards, with half of that deck marked for "three players" and the rest for "four players". You can still play the two-player game with just the original deck.<br />
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It needs more work, probably lots more work. But it actually plays quite nicely, even now, which is encouraging. I think I will eventually spruce up the artwork and post it for print-on-demand at <a href="https://www.thegamecrafter.com/" target="_blank">TheGameCrafter</a>, when I'm done with it.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-7485900139908789362013-12-15T15:18:00.002-08:002013-12-15T15:18:23.306-08:00Spatial Delivery: New Cards in the WorksRecent changes to my boardgame design-in-progress "Spatial Delivery" seem to be working out. Last Thursday, over at <a href="http://www.rainy-day-games.com/" target="_blank">Rainy Day Games</a>, three kind people gave it a near-blind playtest. They had a good time (I was watching) and they "got" the game, making the right kind of plays and doing the right kind of thinking. Most of their feedback had to do with ways to make the game more accessible on the first play: quicker setup, better player aids, improvements to the rulebook, and so on. (I screwed up and brought a somewhat out-of-date rulebook, so I had to intercede occasionally to answer questions and make corrections.) The actual rules and gameplay went over well.<br />
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Given that, Helen and I decided that it's time to re-think the physical bits, with an eye toward first-time players. We may eventually rework the hex tiles, perhaps eliminating them in favor of an actual board; we're still discussing that. But the urgent priority is a new card deck.<br />
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Older versions of the game had very simple cards. Artwork aside, each card just had a color: red, yellow, green, or blue. But when I added the new Card Powers feature (see <a href="http://rixjoint.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-bit-of-game-design.html">A Bit of Game Design</a>), the cards became more complex. Each card now has one of nine different Card Powers, each of which can be used only at certain times in the game. Initially I'd hand-scribbled some rough icons for the various powers on my old cards, with explanations in the rulebook. That got us through our recent playtests; but the players always had trouble learning what the powers were and exactly when each one could be used.<br />
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So Helen and I are now brainstorming iconography and card layouts, trying to make the cards and their effects as easy to understand as possible.<br />
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In general I like to avoid text on cards if possible, because it makes international editions of a game more expensive to produce. But the various card powers are complex enough to need one to three sentences of explanation each. We want new players to be able to understand each power without having to constantly look them up in the rulebook. A separate player aid would be a reasonable compromise, but for our prototypes we've decided to put some text on each card, in addition to the iconography. If the game is ever published, the publisher can decide whether to keep the text or not: the icons are sufficient for players who are already familiar with the game.<br />
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We've decided to try a smaller card size, to reduce the area needed for the game on the table. While the card displays aren't the biggest offender, the game does take up a lot of table space so we're trying to minimize that without impacting ease of play.<br />
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Even though the cards are smaller, some elements of the card design still have to be reasonably large, because they must be visible from a couple of feet away when the card is lying face-up on the table. At the same time, compact iconography is needed along the left edge of each card (the "index column"), so that players can fan their hands and easily see what they've got. I was originally fixated on point symmetry, which would mean an index column along both sides; but that was taking up too much space. Helen broke my fixation by showing me that an asymmetrical design gave us enough room for a nice layout.<br />
<br />
Here's a mockup of the new design. The actual size is a bit bigger than shown here, and of course the printed cards will have finer resolution. We've printed some proofs to be certain that the text will be readable.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWS6lxhoJglch0hv0uyYV4hLVo67I-vewZmOWo9ddadii0LUMw38tCNxkTlU9fHGiVqajixAmq-NeufT6dMEIhkSgh3TE7Nk2iozswLsA9y1SwpXBK4VoS267IJVCVo0wDwLyyI7q1HQ/s1600/Small+Card+Callouts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWS6lxhoJglch0hv0uyYV4hLVo67I-vewZmOWo9ddadii0LUMw38tCNxkTlU9fHGiVqajixAmq-NeufT6dMEIhkSgh3TE7Nk2iozswLsA9y1SwpXBK4VoS267IJVCVo0wDwLyyI7q1HQ/s320/Small+Card+Callouts.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The new card layout</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Anybody got any suggestions for improvements?<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-12287202877178976192013-12-08T20:36:00.000-08:002013-12-08T20:36:28.300-08:00Whitish ChristmasIt's not Christmas yet, but if the weather keeps on like this, Christmas might well be white when it gets here. That will be a novelty for us. We're already enjoying the novelty of having a little bit of snow, right in our very own yard. It's not much, just a dusting; but it comes with several days (and counting) of day-long freezing temperatures. We are used to San Jose, where we counted ourselves lucky if it even bothered to rain in the winter. (There was one really cold winter during my 30ish years there, where icy winds drove snow from higher airs down to the ground in our yard; but even then, none of it stuck.)<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidrCCJm2KbtHR4zZ5JxRMUkN1otqiAHurMv6ee_8Jw2QJmUkuc1nyQjGP3-leA5WqXrFhH6efKYIajUfRfeQe6My3IPaakdhiBrpro7WADgwKOkq4nxvBNS82FXohKap2lHCIgqvj2lA/s1600/IMG_0791.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidrCCJm2KbtHR4zZ5JxRMUkN1otqiAHurMv6ee_8Jw2QJmUkuc1nyQjGP3-leA5WqXrFhH6efKYIajUfRfeQe6My3IPaakdhiBrpro7WADgwKOkq4nxvBNS82FXohKap2lHCIgqvj2lA/s320/IMG_0791.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The view from our deck.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
We've just returned from the grocery store: a shopping trip at 25°F. Helen figured we should stock up the larder in advance of the snow forecast for tomorrow. While we don't expect the snow to be deep, we do live halfway up a small mountain; there's no route to our home that doesn't involve some really steep climbs. If those roads ice up, we may have to cocoon for a bit.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4VHsgEkvTaRG19zZQf4gDSRTqaKhUEKF8mepHwiAl5ikCYGwShSE2dl6NY6zxAExZOneWFQQMS_LrxGKXc2SX6UL1hTFF6QFTgTAC08khZd3nWvE9-41MFK-miAoKfhUzLjxGqS7Gw/s1600/IMG_0792.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS4VHsgEkvTaRG19zZQf4gDSRTqaKhUEKF8mepHwiAl5ikCYGwShSE2dl6NY6zxAExZOneWFQQMS_LrxGKXc2SX6UL1hTFF6QFTgTAC08khZd3nWvE9-41MFK-miAoKfhUzLjxGqS7Gw/s320/IMG_0792.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A neighbor's fountain, after several days' freeze.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Most of the rest of the country is having a terrible winter, according to the TV news. We're having a "just right" winter: enough cold and snow to be interesting, not enough to cause trouble. So all the rest of you, stay warm and stay safe, and don't worry about us. We're having a good time!</div>
Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-50403193422017752942013-11-09T19:36:00.000-08:002013-11-09T19:36:59.414-08:00A Bit of Game DesignIt seems ages since I've spent any serious time on any of my own game designs. What with the day job (followed, after retirement, by the exigencies of moving to another state), the two expansions I helped design for Railways of the World, my musical activities, and the need to work hard on <a href="http://solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Solitaire Till Dawn</a>, my own designs have been given short shrift for the past few years.<br />
<br />
But I'm retired now, and we finished moving in a while back, so that's over with. Solitaire Till Dawn isn't done yet and is still getting most of my alert-and-working attention; but all work and no play makes Jack want to stay in bed instead of getting up in the morning. So I've given myself a few evenings and weekends off recently, and put some time in on one of my oldest and best designs.<br />
<br />
I started work on Spatial Delivery in 2007, and it won the Game Design Contest at KublaCon in May 2008. At that time I thought it was pretty much done, but it wasn't. Experienced game designers know that you have to playtest a game a lot to discover its warts and inadequacies. Like a software product, a game design must be tested, evaluated, fixed, and refined many times before you can be sure it's done. (Just the other day I saw a major, successful game designer apologizing for a "bug" in one of his new games: he and his testers hadn't found it, but the people who bought the game did. He's working on a fix.)<br />
<br />
In the years since that KublaCon, I've revisited Spatial Delivery a number of times. I've been aware of a number of flaws in the design, and searching for ways to fix them. I think I've made some solid progress. I hope to take the game out of the house and have some strangers play it in the next few weeks, after a bit more in-house polish and maybe the making of a revised card deck.<br />
<br />
To reach this state I had to make a painful decision: I had to throw out the one really original mechanism in the design. That mechanism wasn't a completely awful idea and I may be able to use it in some other design; but it wasn't a good fit in Spatial Delivery. It had to do with how players acquired cards ("Goods") for delivery to worlds in outer space, and that phase of the game was plagued with a variety of problems. I can't count how many solutions I've looked at for that process; but I'm hoping my new design will stand up.<br />
<br />
Without going into too much detail, there had been four different types of Goods (red, green, blue, yellow—they have thematic names and icons, but never mind that). No form of random and semi-random distribution or drafting was working: it was always too easy for a player to get screwed over by an unfortunate shuffle, and there was little challenge or interest in choosing which cards to draft. My nifty mechanism that let players challenge each other over card selections didn't make it any better. I had to throw out the whole notion of shuffling all the Goods cards together.<br />
<br />
Instead, I separated them into decks by type, and I invented a bunch of "Card Powers" and gave one power to each card. So now you shuffle just the red Goods cards together in one deck, and the blues in another, and so on. When players draft cards, they can always see one face-up card in each color, and choose any one of them. That way, every player gets the color mix he wants. But the Card Powers come up randomly, because they're scattered evenly among the Goods types.<br />
<br />
This gives the players more to think about, even while allowing them easy access to the colors they want. The Card Powers give them new options during the next phase of the game, when they play the cards they've drafted.<br />
<br />
This opened the door to a good solution for another of the game's nagging problems: turn order. Turn order is fairly important; it's an advantage to be able to play before anyone else. That means that the turn order needs to change, every round. But the game only lasts for a small and odd number of rounds (too bad, but otherwise the game is too short or too long) so simply rotating the turn order every round isn't really fair. I solved this (I hope) by inventing a Card Power that affects the turn order for the next round. Players can now decide for themselves how important it is to go first rather than last, and do something about it if they're willing to pay the price by grabbing and playing a Turn Order card instead of a different one.<br />
<br />
It's surprising how hard it can be to let go of an old design feature. Another change I made recently was to make it cheaper to travel longer distances as your spaceship goes to visit planets in outer space. Originally I felt that it was important to keep travel distances short; I can't even remember why. I had a somewhat cumbersome rule that allowed long-distance travel at a nearly-ruinous price. I've now realized that this was dumb. The price of travel is high enough anyway, and the incentive to make frequent stops is strong. The fancy rule wasn't needed and I threw it out. The game is now easier to understand <i>and</i> more interesting, because long-range travel is now easier to do when a player has good reason to do it.<br />
<br />
There's a wonderful company called <a href="https://www.thegamecrafter.com/" target="_blank">The Game Crafter</a> that can print and ship single copies of games on demand. It allows new designers to self-publish pretty easily, and it can be a great way to manufacture just a few copies of a game under development. When they started out their offerings were fairly limited, but they've been expanding. I see that I could now self-publish Spatial Delivery there, if I ever decide that it's ready for that. I'd like to license the design to a real game publisher someday, but in the meantime The Game Crafter is a good solution for turning out a few copies for playtests and publisher submissions. I won't do this until the design is a lot more finalized, though, and I'll have to drum up a few bits of artwork that I can legally use for symbols and icons on the cards and such.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-26378714534524767772013-06-17T13:51:00.000-07:002013-06-17T13:51:29.431-07:00After the FloodNo, there hasn't been a flood; I'm just being hyperbolic in my post title. The process of selling and buying a house, and moving the family, the cats, and all our stuff to a new state has felt kind of Noachian at times. (I just read a book in which I learned a new word, "Noachian", and I've been dying to use it somewhere. You like it?)<br />
<br />
But we did it! We are <i>here</i>, in our new-to-us home, and it really was worth all the effort and misery of getting here. We are loving the house, the neighborhood, and the Oregonian scenery and culture. We are well settled in (a few things to do yet, but not much and the urgency is gone), and even the cats are happy.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvk6kEDIE0I6C-aI4UMidNq01BROZ_axt8R8ozYiP7VFaObIpZoFrv0tkMCYGZL6T4pwm38X0jgat1VvxelXchGPgUGjGXpYxhTpP6hv87ZBDYvtYUSyz5lPGl8nVMHTcg8utOR1qDoA/s1600/DSCN4381.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvk6kEDIE0I6C-aI4UMidNq01BROZ_axt8R8ozYiP7VFaObIpZoFrv0tkMCYGZL6T4pwm38X0jgat1VvxelXchGPgUGjGXpYxhTpP6hv87ZBDYvtYUSyz5lPGl8nVMHTcg8utOR1qDoA/s320/DSCN4381.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Part of the view from our deck.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I didn't expect to have much time for anything fun until we reached this point in the unpacking-and-settling-in process, and to a large degree I was right. There've been a lot of seven-day-weeks of 14 hours a day of hard work: building and moving furniture, shifting boxes around, and all the rest. (Factoid: we bought something like 20 bookshelves for the library, the game collection, and our offices! We let Ikea build most of them but we built a fair number ourselves.) But we did make time at least for "scheduled events", like seeing Helen's folks on a fairly regular basis, hosting Nat when he could come up from UCSC, and going to boardgame nights at the Lucky Labrador in Portland.<br />
<br />
And also music. This was a surprise, and a very pleasant and rather heady one. I was sad (and still am) to leave all my friends in the Bay Area jazz circles, and I was worried about finding places to play up here. I thought I might find myself a bit stranded, since nobody here would know me. But quite a few of my Bay Area friends <i>are</i> known up here, and they did an absolutely amazing job of introducing me to the Portland, Salem, and Eugene trad jazz scenes. Within a week of the move I had made some friends and had a place to go and jam every Tuesday night (Libbies in Milwaukie, if you're ever in the neighborhood). Three Sundays in every month I can go to one of the monthly jazz club sessions and do more jamming; I did so and made still more friends. These people have been incredibly warm and welcoming, not just about jam sessions but even inviting us to parties and such.<br />
<br />
Within weeks, friends and jamming led to some actual paying gigs. And then I was asked to play a couple of gigs with the excellent <a href="http://www.bscjb.com/">Black Swan Classic Jazz Band</a>, one of the finest groups in Oregon. When those went well, I was accepted as a member of the group, a very happy moment for me. We just played a concert in Tacoma, and I'm looking forward to going with them to the <a href="http://www.pentasticjazz.com/">Pentastic Hot Jazz Festival</a> in Penticton, B.C., Canada in September. So thanks to my friends old and new, my worries about music have been groundless: I'm busier than ever, and having tons of fun.<br />
<br />
All that was leading up to the present, when we are finally finding some time to "do as we please". I've resumed working on Solitaire Till Dawn after an enforced hiatus of half a year, and last night we finally got around to watching <a href="http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/thehobbit/">The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey</a>, which had the ill grace to hit the theatres shortly after we became too busy to even think about going to see it. I've even owned the Blu-ray for weeks, but only now have had the time and the home theatre setup (thanks, Helen!) to watch it.<br />
<br />
In other news, Nat did stop and visit us this past weekend, en route to <a href="http://goo.gl/maps/DUCst">Pune, India</a> where he will be taking a summer course at the <a href="http://www.unipune.ac.in/">University of Pune</a>, the "Oxford of the East"! Pune is near the west coast of India. As I write, Nat's actually in Mumbai, waiting for a bus to take him and the other students in his group to Pune. We're looking forward to hearing about his experiences when he returns in the fall.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-88666887980281836492013-03-21T17:17:00.000-07:002013-03-21T17:17:10.449-07:00Almost ThereI see that I haven't posted since I retired, last November.<br />
<br />
There are two reasons for that. One is that I've been terribly busy since then. The other is that I generally prefer to post upbeat things, but the stuff that's been keeping me busy mostly hasn't been fun.<br />
<br />
Retirement sounds great: a day off from work, in perpetuity. Now I can do whatever I want with my time! Turns out, it's not like that, at least so far. In my darker moments, I worry that it may never be like that.<br />
<br />
Retirement means I can't afford to live in Silicon Valley any more. No problem, we'll move to Oregon, a step we've been thinking about for years anyway. But when I retired, we realized that we had to move <i>immediately</i>, or as close to immediately as we could manage. We were instantly embroiled in complex plans to find a new home, put ours on the market, and rearrange our nest eggs appropriately.<br />
<br />
But it was mid-November then: the start of the holiday season. That slowed things down quite a bit, while doing nothing to relieve the pressure. Then in January, we realized that Helen's knee surgery could <i>not</i> be put off until after we'd moved, which slowed things down even further while adding more pressure. (Now I sound all whiney. See, this is why I usually only post upbeat things.)<br />
<br />
Helen deserves a medal of some kind: she's persevered through all this, often through great pain, and with great success. I do my best to be helpful, but she's the one in charge, and she's amazingly good at it. As I write, we are (in theory, at least) less than 24 hours away from taking possession of our new Oregon home, and everything looks to be on rails—although we'll be watching intently for any signs of last-minute trouble.<br />
<br />
So! Are we done now and can I have some free time at last?<br />
<br />
No, of course not. We haven't moved out of San Jose yet; we haven't moved into the Oregon house yet. There will be <i>months</i> (at least!) of unpacking, furniture rearranging, and furniture shopping, not to mention home improvements: paint this, fix that, replace those appliances, remodel this room. Ugh. (Sorry, more whininess there.)<br />
<br />
Still, I think there's light at the end of the tunnel and cause for optimism. Oregon seems like a great place, and the house does not really need too much spiffing up. Eventually there'll be time to relax. I'm looking forward to that.<br />
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But first, we've gotta move the cats 600 miles. Augh!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-13882303352514067482012-11-23T12:47:00.001-08:002012-11-23T12:54:05.905-08:00Retirement!<span style="background-color: #ffffcc;"><b>Solitaire Till Dawn fans</b>: Please see the new <u><a href="http://solitairetilldawn.blogspot.com/">Solitaire Till Dawn blog</a></u> for news about the game. Posts about Solitaire Till Dawn will now appear exclusively in that blog; I am returning the focus of this blog to matters of interest to myself, my family, and my close friends.</span><br />
<br />
I have retired from my day job! No more 40 hours per week of working on other people's projects; no more way-too-early alarm clocks; no more wasting 8+ hours per week on commuting. Hooray!<br />
<br />
So what now?<br />
<br />
Actually I have lots to do. I expect to be extremely busy, even short on time, through the holidays. Sometime early in the new year things should settle down a bit. When I can get a routine going, I still expect to be busy, but no longer hurried.<br />
<br />
We are going to move house, and fairly soon. That, along with the usual holiday fuss, is what will be keeping us extra-busy for a while: selling the house, finding and buying a new one, preparing to move, settling in to the new place. It will take time, but we expect to really enjoy our new digs and new location once that's done.<br />
<br />
Aside from that, I plan to spend several hours per day (most days) working on Solitaire Till Dawn. This will be more time per week by a factor of ten than I've been able to devote to it for the last few years. That's going to be fun. Most of the rest of the time will go to my more serious hobbies: music, boardgame design, and playing games with Helen, friends, and the kitties.<br />
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I'm looking forward to it!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-90835056447558153062012-08-20T17:15:00.000-07:002012-08-20T17:15:01.264-07:00Solitaire Till Dawn: The Last 90%I am nearly at the end of a three-week "working vacation", time off from my day job which I have spent working full-time on Solitaire Till Dawn instead. It has been both productive and fun, and although Solitaire Till Dawn for Lion (and beyond) is <i>still</i> not done, I've made a lot of progress.<br />
<br />
In these three weeks I've accomplished the following:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Made the animation system sane and well-behaved</li>
<li>Implemented a full preferences system for saving your settings and scores</li>
<li>Created the "Players" feature, so you and your family can keep separate, personal settings and scores</li>
<li>Implemented automatic saving of your game when you quit, and automatic resume when you start again later</li>
<li>"Sandboxed" the app, to obey Apple's new security restrictions</li>
<li>Wrote the code to import your old scores and settings into the new version</li>
<li>Created a half-dozen new cardback images, with high resolution for modern screens</li>
<li>Implemented the Décor panel, so you can choose royalty, cardbacks, and background images</li>
<li>And made loads of miscellaneous bug fixes and user interface spiff-ups.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>So where do we stand?</b><br />
Fair question, especially after all that gloating and bragging. I'm afraid there's still a lot left to do.<br />
<br />
Some wag once observed that the first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time; and then the last 10% of the job takes the other 90% of the time. He was right. At this point, nearly all of Solitaire Till Dawn's major features are basically working. There are a couple of time-consuming items left to do: for example, I still have to implement the "extended statistics", and I have to write all the built-in help pages. But most of what's left is just a whole lot of tedious testing and bug-fixing.<br />
<br />
At this point, I expect some of you are wanting to volunteer to help with the testing. I'm grateful for all the offers, but I'm still not accepting testers (not even a waiting list, so please don't clog my in-box with requests, thanks!). Managing beta testers is itself a big, time-consuming job, and I'm not going to start it while I still have a big list of bugs I've already found and can test myself.<br />
<br />
When testing is complete and I think the product is ready for release, I will submit it to Apple's App Store. This will require getting my descriptive text and screen shots ready and packaged up, which is another task that will take some time. I've never done this before, but from friends I know that acceptance may take weeks, especially if Apple find problems they want me to fix.<br />
<br />
<b>Will there be anything missing in the first release?</b><br />
Yes, a few features from the old version will almost certainly not be in the new version. I am deliberately leaving some things out in order to get the app done as quickly as possible. The list of skipped features <i>may</i> include:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Magnetic Mouse</li>
<li>"Cheat" features</li>
<li>Custom cardbacks from your own photos</li>
<li>The clock timer</li>
<li>"Save Game" and "Open Game" menu items (but your current game will always be auto-saved)</li>
</ul>
<div>
That list is not final. And if one of your favorite features is on it, please don't worry. If it isn't in the first release, I will add it in a later update.</div>
<br />
<br />
<b>Enough, already! We just want to know when it will be done!</b><br />
Sorry, I don't know! Testing, bug-fixing, and submitting to the App Store are all things that will simply take as long as they take, and I can't predict how long that will be.<br />
<br />
My vacation will be over in a couple of days, and I'll be back to having only evenings and weekends for this. I've used these full-time weeks for the "big ticket" items, stuff that really requires hours of uninterrupted concentration and a mind that isn't end-of-the-day exhausted. Those items are now finished, and most of what's left should not require such deep focus. I'm hoping I can be reasonably productive even in those late-night snatched hours. I'll continue to keep you posted on my progress, of course.<br />
<br />
<b>What about Mountain Lion?</b><br />
I won't release Solitaire Till Dawn until it is compatible with both Lion (OS X 10.7) and Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). That won't delay things much, I think.<br />
<br />
I had originally intended to keep this release compatible with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) as well. That may yet happen, but if it looks like it would seriously delay the release, I will abandon that. Snow Leopard is now out of date by two major OS X updates, and the old version does still work in Snow Leopard if you install Rosetta.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-82349919614945049502012-08-02T17:21:00.000-07:002012-08-02T17:21:14.408-07:00Midsummer Fair WindsThe title of this post is kind of lame, but never mind. I was trying to draw a contrast with my previous <a href="http://rixjoint.blogspot.com/2012/07/midsummer-doldrums.html">Midsummer Doldrums</a> post. Very shortly after I posted that, unexpected events changed my situation quite a bit.<br />
<br />
I am now, unexpectedly and suddenly, on vacation (or what I will try to call "vacation" without falling down laughing). It's really just a break from my day job, a couple of weeks off that I will mainly spend working on Solitaire Till Dawn.<br />
<br />
This means that instead of trying to snatch an hour or two in the evenings, when I'm bushed and can't think straight and have a zillion distractions, I can instead work a full eight-hour day on solitaire. While I don't expect to finish the project during this stretch, I do expect to make a metric ton of progress.<br />
<br />
And here's the first fruit: on my first full day I have already finished off that architecture issue I was moaning about! It's another redesign of the animation subsystem (I think this is at least the third time I've done that), and it's working better than it ever did, with much simpler code. Tomorrow I have a bit more cleanup to do on that task, then it's back to real forward progress again.<br />
<br />
P.S. Unhappily, the "unexpected events" I mentioned were not all good for all concerned. That story isn't mine to tell, but I wouldn't want those who know the story to think that my only reaction was unalloyed joy. As for me and mine, we're okay; we're just feeling sympathy for friends and trying to find a silver lining or two amongst the clouds.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-11179462405226282212012-07-29T17:54:00.000-07:002012-07-29T17:54:21.139-07:00Midsummer DoldrumsIt has, once again, been too long since I've posted any kind of an update. I am starting to see signs that some of you are worried that I am dead, or tired of working on Solitaire Till Dawn—that, in short, the project has been abandoned.<br />
<br />
This is not so; I'm still here and still working on it. But it is true that progress has been stalled for some time. This has not been a good year for the general health of my family: nothing life-threatening, but there have been a succession of events that have taken up a good deal of our time and attention, and that have prevented me from focussing on software.<br />
<br />
Also I have been stuck on a design issue. I was dismayed to find, at this late date, that some lingering bugs weren't just a matter of tracking down a minor problem and making a fix. Instead I have had, once again, to re-think some core matters of Solitaire Till Dawn's architecture. I haven't been posting about it because it's not the sort of thing that can be simplified down into a paragraph or two. I haven't known what to say about it; that, plus the general lack of progress, have left me silent for too long.<br />
<br />
I apologize for that silence, and I'll try to do better. I am finally starting to regain the time I need each week to work on this, and I am starting to make progress again on the architectural issue, although it is certainly not done.<br />
<br />
I can only plead with you all, once again, for faith and patience.<br />
<br />
(Nearly forgot: some have been worried that Solitaire Till Dawn, when it is finally released, might support Lion but not Mountain Lion. I don't think that will be an issue.)Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-66163323570319554622012-04-14T21:40:00.000-07:002012-04-14T21:40:15.206-07:00The Mummy's CurseNearly a quarter of a century ago I wrote <a href="http://www.semicolon.com/scarab.html">Scarab of Ra</a>. Scarab was my first Macintosh game program. It was written for the Macintosh Plus, a machine with a very small black and white screen. In it, you become a "lowly undergraduate student in archaeology", and you are exploring the unknown and hazardous interior of the newly-discovered Great Pyramid of Ra.<br />
<br />
Scarab of Ra was fairly advanced for its time. It offered a 3D adventurer's-eye view of the pyramid's interior, complete with some cheesy graphics tricks to make it harder to see details of items in the dim distance. It wasn't animated or realtime, but it kind of felt like it: every time you pressed a key to take a step, a little time would pass and certain hazards including cobras, monkeys, lions, and the horrible Mummy would change position to sneak up on you. The Great Pyramid was laid out as a series of mazes, each one larger as you got deeper in the Pyramid. In every game the mazes and the arrangement of traps and treasures was different.<br />
<br />
I released it as shareware, which made it the very first product of <a href="http://www.semicolon.com/">Semicolon Software</a>. This was all <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web">back before even the World Wide Web</a> (man, that makes me feel old), so Scarab's distribution relied upon the kindness of strangers. People would upload it to their phone-in bulletin boards for others to find and download; they would give copies to their friends (Scarab's copyright notice explicitly allowed this), and Macintosh User Groups would put it on floppy disks along with other sharable programs to hand out to members at their monthly meetings.<br />
<br />
This made for slow distribution and a fairly small audience, especially since there were not many Mac users at all back then. I charged $10 for it and left it to people's honesty to pay me if they liked it. I probably sold a total of a few hundred copies. That was nice, back then: it was just a hobby for me, and the proceeds from Scarab helped pay for new development software and Mac peripherals.<br />
<br />
About three years after introducing Scarab I launched the first release of Solitaire Till Dawn. At first that too sold only slowly. But at about that time the Web appeared I coincidentally gave STD a major facelift, and its sales really took off. As a result, I continued to concentrate my efforts on Solitaire Till Dawn and never got around to updating Scarab. As <a href="http://rixjoint.blogspot.com/2011/04/unplanned-obsolescence.html">chronicled elsewhere</a>, changes in Apple's choice of CPUs and operating systems, coupled with the abandonment of the development software I'd used, left Scarab unable to run on modern Macs. It became "abandonware".<br />
<br />
So you may imagine my surprise when, a few years ago, I began to run into evidence that Scarab of Ra is regarded in some circles as a "classic of Macintosh shareware" and that many people are nostalgically longing for its return. I do get the occasional email asking about it, but that's a trickle compared to the flood I regularly get about STD. But Scarab is featured prominently on web sites about classic Mac OS software, and a few months ago I discovered that it has a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Scarab-of-RA/231215148697">Facebook page of its own</a> with several hundred "likes". Today I dropped in there (a vanity visit, I admit it) and discovered a link to another Facebook page which was an even bigger surprise.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Revive-Scarab-of-RA/321676664517314">Revive Scarab of RA</a> page documents a project to recreate Scarab of Ra. They are writing all-new code in Javascript so that you will someday be able to play Scarab of Ra in your Web browser. This also means that you will be able to play Scarab on any platform: Mac, Windows, Linux. That's pretty cool!<br />
<br />
You might wonder how I feel about this: somebody else "ripping off" my product without so much as a how-d'you-do. I'll admit it makes me feel just a little bit itchy; but I'm going to rise above that and wish this guy and his collaborators all success. For one thing, it's not illegal to clone somebody else's product, so long as you don't violate copyright by stealing or copying the original product's code, graphics, or text. The code is no problem since they're writing theirs from scratch. They have not gotten as far as adding test or images yet, but the page's author has made it plain that he understands the copyright law and intends to provide new images and text, and produce something with an updated look and feel.<br />
<br />
And I have to admit: in the past, a few people have asked me for permission to create new versions of Scarab. I've told all of them that I have no objection so long as they honor my copyright. This fellow (I don't know his name, it's not on the Facebook page) may well have been one of them. And even if he wasn't, I have no reason not to give him the same answer.<br />
<br />
So more power to him! If he brings it off, it will be quite a tour de force—and I will be <i>very</i> stoked.<br />
<br />
I even clicked "Like" on the Facebook page!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-88195321571867198972012-03-20T23:17:00.000-07:002012-03-20T23:17:27.479-07:00Fonts of WisdomPrevious versions of Solitaire Till Dawn have always used carefully-drawn bitmap images to display the indices (the rank and suit of the card, shown in the upper-left corner). I did this because in the old days (you know, when we all used steam-powered computers), pixels were large and screen space was limited. I needed to know <i>exactly</i> where each numeral or letter would be placed, how tall it would be, how wide it would be, and how it aligned vertically and horizontally. I couldn't leave that to the vagaries of a computerized typesetter; if I did, all kinds of things wouldn't be right. The 10's would be absurdly wide; the suit symbols wouldn't line up vertically in columns; the letterforms wouldn't be thick and black enough for instant recognition; the fonts wouldn't look good at tiny sizes... you get the picture.<br />
<br />
But it's a new age, people. I may be slow in realizing it, but I get there eventually. Bitmap images are a bad idea these days, precisely because they don't scale well as screens get larger and pixels get smaller. Using the system's text-display features takes care of that. And it turns out that the Mac's (and for future reference, iOS's) font tools are <i>really flexible</i>. This evening I finished substituting genuine font-drawn letters and numbers for my old bitmap images, and they look great.<br />
<br />
To get the pixel-perfection I demand, I had to do some strange things. These included building tables that yielded the exact font size and baseline height needed for each separate card size; calculating string widths carefully for precise horizontal positioning and then adding offset adjustments for certain characters; and squeezing or widening some characters so their widths wouldn't differ so much. I even played with kerning to adjust the distance between the 1 and the 0 in "10", though in the end I found that I didn't need to do that.<br />
<br />
I'm pleased with the results. The new letters and numbers almost precisely fill the space of the old ones, and are much better-looking. I think you'll like them.<br />
<br />
I haven't done the suits yet. That comes next.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-42369918420323665502012-02-26T21:16:00.002-08:002012-02-26T21:16:54.928-08:00Gettin' Stuff DoneNope, Solitaire Till Dawn is not done yet. But I have made a lot of progress in the last few weeks. Here's a rundown:<br />
<br />
Buttons are now fully implemented and working. These are the buttons that actually appear in the play area. They implement some special functionality that can't be triggered by the usual click-and-drag stuff. Most games don't have or need buttons, but Accordion has a "Deal All" button, Pyramid has a "Discard Pair" button, and Puss in Corner has a "Redeal" button.<br />
<br />
Partial decks are implemented, needed by games like The Wish that don't (ahem) play with a full deck.<br />
<br />
Tight fans, for games like Thirteens and The Wish. Also "anchored" fans: never mind why I call them that, but these make Fortress and its variations playable.<br />
<br />
The deck now shows correct numbers: usually the number of cards remaining in the deck, but for some games it shows the number of deals remaining.<br />
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The displays and messages in the status bar are more complete and correct.<br />
<br />
Keyboard focus is better-behaved, so you don't have to click in the Games Drawer or in the play area in order to use keyboard shortcuts.<br />
<br />
The behavior of the available-card-highlighting feature is much improved (still need some work on the graphics, though). The find-card feature (press '5' to highlight all the visible fives, or '5s' to highlight all the visible fives of Spades) is also working now.<br />
<br />
And lots of little things I won't bother to list individually: stuff I've implemented and/or fixed in the solitaire engine itself.<br />
<br />
I've completed an initial test of all 100 games now. 87 of them seem to be working, while the other 13 still have some issues to be worked out.<br />
<br />
<b>What am I doing now?</b><br />
This week I'm working on supporting different card sizes. Up till now, I've only been using the "normal" size. The game needs to allow selecting card size from a menu, and changing card size to match the window when you change the window's size. This is perhaps half done.<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>What's Left?</b><br />
Lots of stuff, I'm afraid. A partial list:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Several important toolbar buttons, including the Autoplay features and Magnetic Mouse.</li>
<li>The built-in Help and the game rules display.</li>
<li>A number of the preference settings and their implementations.</li>
<li>Sound effects.</li>
<li>A number of graphics effects.</li>
<li>Score and statistics keeping, and display.</li>
<li>New artwork.</li>
<li>Separate scores and preferences for different players on the same machine.</li>
</ul>
<br />
And there's more; those are just some of the highlights.<br />
<br />
I will not be implementing every single feature for the first release. Some of the old version's features will have to wait. I'll get all the really important ones in, and then add the rest over time, in free upgrades.<br />
<br />
There you go: that's the status. I'm working hard; I want this out the door as badly as some of you want it in your hands. We'll get there!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-40888647188795417642012-02-05T21:08:00.000-08:002012-02-05T21:09:36.244-08:00Alive and WellI got an email recently from a fan who was worried because I hadn't posted anything about Solitaire Till Dawn for a while. I did warn y'all that it would take some time! And that's still true, unfortunately. But I <i>am</i> still working on it.<br />
<br />
I haven't posted because I got stalled for a while. Part of that was just the holidays: traveling, visiting family, and doing Christmas stuff. Part of it was the sad loss of our old and well-loved family cat Freddy, and the subsequent addition of a young mom-cat and two kittens to our household. The new kitties are all sweeties, but they kind of turned the place upside-down for a while.<br />
<br />
But the biggest delay was that I got stuck on a nasty bug, something I had to fix before I could move on. There was no progress to report: I've spent the last two or three weeks banging my forehead against my monitor, trying to figure out what was causing the bug and how to fix it. I finally nailed it today, or so I hope. Without going into mind-numbing detail, I'll just say that it was a multi-threading concurrency problem triggered by an intermittent race condition.<br />
<br />
That sort of thing can be very difficult to track down, for two reasons. First, it's not trivially repeatable: it depends on subtle timing issues, and you might work the program for quite a while before seeing it happen. It's like that funny noise your car makes whenever you drive it, but never when it's in the shop. And that's why I had to say "I hope" above. I played hours of solitaire today after installing my fix and didn't see the bug again. So I think I got it, but it's still possible that it's just being coy and will re-surface later on.<br />
<br />
The second reason it's difficult is that this is a class of problem that a friend of mine calls a "Heisenbug", because any attempt to debug it can make it change behavior or vanish altogether (only to reappear when you stop debugging, of course). But I have to admit that in this case, my problem was the opposite: <i>nothing</i> I tried seemed to affect the bug, until today.<br />
<br />
But I got it. (I think.) And that means that I've now tested all the games alphabetically up through Manx. So that's progress, right?<br />
<br />
<br />Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-17539620520472142562011-12-18T17:53:00.000-08:002011-12-18T17:53:45.738-08:00HumbugSo instead of working all day on Solitaire Till Dawn, today I took some time in the afternoon and played a game with the family.<br />
<br />
I know. I'm sorry. I should have been working. It's just that I'm getting really tired of those same three ghosts showing up, every Christmas Eve, year after year, and yelling at me about the whole work ethic thing.<br />
<br />
It's not just that they're strident. ("Listen unto me! Comest thou with me! Lookest thou over there!" Hoo, boy.) But in recent years they've been getting more than a little bit whiney, if you want the truth. Not to mention the increasingly obvious air of desperation.<br />
<br />
So this year I thought I'd throw them a bone, see if maybe they'll cut me some slack. It would be nice to get some sleep on Christmas Eve, for once.<br />
<br />
You might want to do likewise: go play something that's for more than one player. Some day those guys are just going to flat give up on me as a bad job, and then they might be after you next. I'm just sayin'.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I've gotta get back to work now. Happy holidays to you and yours!Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-14551693116410441712011-12-03T23:17:00.001-08:002011-12-03T23:39:30.263-08:00That's the Sound of the Men...I see it's been a while since I've posted anything other than the little updates in the box to the right. That's because I generally save these larger posts for larger subjects or events, and lately there's been nothing of that nature to share. But I also know that Solitaire Till Dawn's amazing legion of fans can get antsy if they don't hear something new once in a while about the progress of the project, and I don't want to leave everyone hanging. This is just a little update post to reassure you all that I haven't forgotten about you.<br />
<br />
And the news is just this: It's not done yet. I don't know when it will be done. But I am still working on it, as hard as I can given my other responsibilities.<br />
<br />
The work I've been doing doesn't lend itself to quick descriptions for the non-programming public, and if I took the time to try to explain, it would be time taken from actually working on the upgrade. I hope you'll accept instead my assurance that I've made some good strides forward lately. I completed a major architecture change recently that brought a great improvement in the program's behavior, and I tracked down and slew a couple of nasty but well-hidden bugs just the other day.<br />
<br />
I know it's been a long wait, and no one (certainly not me!) will be happy as the wait grows longer. But I appreciate your patience, and I'll keep at it.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-23523892595881933452011-10-05T22:17:00.000-07:002011-10-05T22:17:26.597-07:00Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011Steve Jobs is gone.<br />
<br />
I never met Mr. Jobs. Although I worked for Apple (and its spin-off, Taligent) for over ten years, I was there during John Sculley's reign and later, Gil Amelio's. Jobs hired Sculley away from Pepsi after taking him for a walk in the Stanford hills, and asking him a now-legendary question: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"<br />
<br />
But it was always Steve Jobs who changed the world. Like many others, I learned of his death today using a device that would not have existed without him. A few months back I went on a road trip with one of my sons, to visit and tour my alma mater UCLA. I took my iPhone, and on that three-day trip it served as a map, a navigator, a traffic reporter, the yellow pages, a restaurant critic, a tour guide, an email client, an encyclopedia, a newspaper, a camera, a publisher, a UCLA course catalog... oh yeah, and a phone. There would be smart phones today without Steve Jobs, but there wouldn't be iPhones: the one that all the others are trying to imitate and improve upon.<br />
<br />
I've been an Apple fan since about 1986: my first computer was a Mac Plus, at the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend. I have not been without a Mac computer since then: 25 years now. I should own one of those T-shirts that say "I was an Apple fan when Apple was doomed." (I don't, only because I don't wear T-shirts: they don't have a pocket for my glasses.) Followers of this blog know that I have been selling Solitaire Till Dawn for Macintosh computers for over 20 of those years. The smooth Mac interface with its marvelous attention to detail was the inspiration for the attention to detail I've tried to put into Solitaire Till Dawn, and the continuing popularity of the Mac (even through the darker years) kept it selling, and helped my family get along with only one parent working, freeing Helen to stay home and raise the kids.<br />
<br />
One of the downsides to aging, I've found, is the number of times I find myself mourning somebody I never met, somebody who made the world a better place. I remember hearing of the deaths of Louis Armstrong, Walt Kelly, Jim Henson, Isaac Asimov, and many other great creators; and now, Steve Jobs.<br />
<br />
Thank you, Steve. I wish you could have stayed longer.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-13425024468070270552011-09-26T21:11:00.000-07:002011-09-26T21:12:33.864-07:00A Little UI WorkI see it's been over a month since my last post, so I thought I'd put something out to show that I haven't been idle. I've been doing user interface (UI) programming, and I have something new to show.<br />
<br />
Solitaire Till Dawn offers 100 different kinds of solitaire. That makes a bit of a problem: how to present 100 different games to users in a way that makes it easy to find the games they know, yet also easy to find new games they might like. In the pre-Lion version, your "Favorites" are listed in a popup menu in the toolbar, and you only have to select one to start a game. To see all 100 games, you would select "Choose from All Games..." from the same menu, and that would open the Game Chooser window, which was a rather complicated affair.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWaHyiOoUJrxRbz5cpZll1Hdc6Jw_C9VwuZ7765IdmMIZQtqSPlHwElGoeDNfqP_0CeevMMgiXDvOdECKgUPYoLVZ-j8aMABYaeS_uwps7HL9p6Y_klJO9_f5uXREIoCPr74MhhuJVtA/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.31.21+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWaHyiOoUJrxRbz5cpZll1Hdc6Jw_C9VwuZ7765IdmMIZQtqSPlHwElGoeDNfqP_0CeevMMgiXDvOdECKgUPYoLVZ-j8aMABYaeS_uwps7HL9p6Y_klJO9_f5uXREIoCPr74MhhuJVtA/s320/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.31.21+PM.png" width="159" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The left edge of the window</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I've learned that a lot of users didn't realize that "Choose from All Games..." was an option rather than just a label, and I'd get emails asking me where all the other games were hiding. So in this new version, I'm trying to make that more obvious. Here's a screen shot showing part of the left edge of the game window.<br />
<br />
There on the edge, you can see three tabs labeled "My Favorites", "All Games", and "Goodies". These tabs are always visible, but usually take up just that small amount of space on the side. It should be obvious (I hope!) that you can click them to get something interesting to happen.<br />
<br />
If you click any of the buttons, a "drawer" will slide out from the left edge. The next image shows what you might see after clicking the "My Favorites" button.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_dCx2a4XgNPKEaMb-thUdXkTQl3memwTbTvx51-H_MErwV0cP1ikqJQQJL05075zZmzL0wypLg9cTWGl0Ph7A5T-Y4xYkTU6uvR8CLYz-ZM_gf_tO0JdPHRYpN_YYucRPb0QO8sGxKQ/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.37.33+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_dCx2a4XgNPKEaMb-thUdXkTQl3memwTbTvx51-H_MErwV0cP1ikqJQQJL05075zZmzL0wypLg9cTWGl0Ph7A5T-Y4xYkTU6uvR8CLYz-ZM_gf_tO0JdPHRYpN_YYucRPb0QO8sGxKQ/s320/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.37.33+PM.png" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The drawer is open</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
You can see a list of 16 games, which are the ones selected as your favorites out of the full list of 100 games. This is what you'd use to select a game you already know you like.<br />
<br />
You can select a game by clicking with the mouse, or by typing the first few letters of its name. If you double-click your selection, or press Enter or Return, a game of your selected kind will start immediately.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyvn-pdlNPr_OtrlvjO0jq30xPxxEaEvUA6Fy5fD3w1zM_AZP5AI-lOtHM7WN-6_D1fnqaN1YsmUgcmtYOM2ZJ1BWP9uBAn2bOgqRQoItlNxW4aY5yqtgj1xTxKOVPBipbkidA2mmQjg/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.44.49+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyvn-pdlNPr_OtrlvjO0jq30xPxxEaEvUA6Fy5fD3w1zM_AZP5AI-lOtHM7WN-6_D1fnqaN1YsmUgcmtYOM2ZJ1BWP9uBAn2bOgqRQoItlNxW4aY5yqtgj1xTxKOVPBipbkidA2mmQjg/s320/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.44.49+PM.png" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The All Games list, with a game selected</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
Now here's what you get if you click the "All Games" tab: the full list of games, scrollable of course. You can select games and start playing in exactly the same way as in the "Favorites" list.<br />
<br />
In this image, you can see that "Baker's Game" has been selected, and this reveals another new feature: the small green <i>i</i>-in-a-circle that appears by the selected game. In the image below, you can see the Game Info panel that appears when you click the green <i>i</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVa5cPHVORA-x_ZgcrMFvsk0JGkV-ngS5h7SKewTkulvqLMOwEIEk3BrSdY1UP6biz4Pgs67vLQOx4ECvWojvP0mwwghxSDVIR2tE4hI-As3frgUJVDnTjZgEAnb2lxXYIwpSfOTPYww/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.49.56+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="384" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVa5cPHVORA-x_ZgcrMFvsk0JGkV-ngS5h7SKewTkulvqLMOwEIEk3BrSdY1UP6biz4Pgs67vLQOx4ECvWojvP0mwwghxSDVIR2tE4hI-As3frgUJVDnTjZgEAnb2lxXYIwpSfOTPYww/s640/Screen+shot+2011-09-26+at+8.49.56+PM.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Game Info panel</td></tr>
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The Game Info panel shows full information about the selected game, everything but the actual rules; and you can see the rules by clicking the "Show Rules" button near the top-center.<br />
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If you change your selected game, the Game Info window will move to match your selection, and show you info about the newly-selected game.</div>
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Finally, you can dismiss the Game Info window by clicking the small x in the upper-left corner (I'll probably change that to actually say "Close this window"). The whole business including the drawer will disappear back into the left edge if you click the highlighted tab, or click anywhere outside the panel and the drawer.</div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This isn't final</span></b></div>
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I'm sure there'll be changes before this ships. For one, there's nothing in the "Goodies" tab yet, and I'm not sure what might go there; it might vanish altogether.</div>
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Here's a change I'm thinking about right now: I may get rid of the little green <i>i</i> and instead just have the Game Info panel appear whenever you select a game. That's because I'm worried that some people won't realize the green <i>i</i> can be clicked, and they will miss ever seeing the Game Info window. On the other hand, if you know what game you want, you won't need to see that panel, and it would be annoying to have it flash into existence and then instantly disappearing as your new game starts. Perhaps it should appear only after a brief delay?</div>
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I'm not sure yet. What do you think?</div>
Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-9561591079602157302011-08-14T13:18:00.000-07:002011-08-14T13:18:17.779-07:00Solitaire Till Dawn UpdateI get mail—<i>lots</i> of mail—asking me about Solitaire Till Dawn and Lion. Some people seem to be worried that I don't know that the current release won't run under Lion.<br />
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Really, I know. <i>Really</i>. <b>I know!!</b> And I continue to work on a Lion version, when and as I can.<br />
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There are kind of two parts to getting it done. The first and hardest part is rewriting what I call the "solitaire engine" and updating the screen-drawing and animation code. This is rocket science, of a sort. The engine is complex (which is why Solitaire Till Dawn can present so many and such varied games), while animation is an exercise in concurrent programming. If you don't know what that is, never mind: just trust me that it's hard to get it right.<br />
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Today I hit a milestone: the engine and the animation are now working correctly. That's not to say that there isn't more work to do on them; but the really important fundamental stuff is done. (I will now pause, so that those of you who are so inclined may cheer.)<br />
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This means that I can now begin working on application stuff: buttons, controls, prefs window, saving and resuming games, and all the bells and whistles to be found in the menus and toolbar. This stuff is generally easier to do, but there's a lot of it to get through. I will be leaving some of the old features out of the first release, just so I can release a little sooner and get you something that will run under Lion and get you your solitaire fix. Any missing features will likely be added back in later, in updates.<br />
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There is still a lot to do, and I still don't know when it will be done. But take heart: I <i>am</i> working on it, I <i>am</i> making progress!<br />
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(And yes... <i>I know</i> the current version doesn't run under Lion!)Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5078479987883404052.post-82096290762174878192011-06-03T20:32:00.000-07:002011-06-03T20:32:00.197-07:00Continental Rottweiler at Kublacon 2011Helen and I were at Kublacon this Memorial Day weekend, as we have been every year for the past several. It wasn't as good a trip for me this year; I was too tired and sleep-deprived before the con even started. But there were a few high points anyway.<br />
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<b>Continental Railways of the World</b><br />
The highest point for me was certainly the four-and-a-half-hour, five-player Continental Railways of the World session that I hosted on Sunday morning. This playtest was very successful in several ways. First off, everybody seemed to have a good time! The game didn't bog down, and was competitive for its entire duration.<br />
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<b>The Income Trough</b><br />
I've been worried about a phenomenon we've been calling the "income trough". As RotW players will know, your income in the game is tied to your score. For most of a normal, one-board game, income rises as your score rises; but then income first tops out, then actually declines as your score continues to rise. In normal games this isn't much of an issue because by the time it happens, you've usually built most of the track you intend to build, and you don't need much money any more. But in the Continental game, you can find your net income dropping to near, or even below, zero just when the West opens up and you suddenly need to build a lot of track as everyone races west! A player who "bottoms out" at this moment can be seriously handicapped, and as a result will have no fun for the next two hours while he sits hopelessly in last place, cash-strapped and in debt, waiting for the game to end.<br />
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It would be easy to shrug this off and say "well, Player Red, you should have planned ahead." But I'd rather find a solution that allows such a player to take a less fatal hit, while still rewarding the players that did plan their income curve more successfully. I've had a couple of mechanisms in place for this, but they needed tuning. In this session, I think we finally had it tuned about right. Every player has a financial choice to make at the moment the West opens up; in the past, that "choice" has been a no-brainer. In this session, every player had to think it over, and they didn't all choose the same way. Furthermore, I was the player who was mired in the income trough, and sure enough I didn't win; but I was at least able to survive and progress. I think it worked out pretty well.<br />
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<b>Paths to Victory</b><br />
The winning player built a nearly coast-to-coast network, and one of the largest on the board. This was gratifying to me, simply because I love to see that kind of layout. But the same player won an earlier session by staying close to the Eastern board, with only a small extension across to the Western board. I'm pleased to see that there's no single approach to winning the Continental game.<br />
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<b>Rail Baron Cards</b><br />
Another measure of success for playtests is whether you learned anything new. I think I did. I was a bit shocked at the huge effect that the Rail Baron cards had for the more successful players. They were real game-changers.<br />
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I had "scaled up" the bonuses that these cards grant. In a normal game, they're worth (very roughly) 10% of your final score. Because final scores in the Continental game tend to be at least double a typical normal score, I made the Continental Baron bonuses much larger to match. But having seen them in action, I'm inclined to think that this was a mistake. Although the final scores were much larger than in a normal game, the <i>differences</i> between the winning player's score and his nearest competitors were not so much larger. The Baron Cards were overwhelming those differences, more than I think they should.<br />
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I plan to sit down soon and re-think those bonuses. I will likely tone them down to something in between their current values and those in a normal game. In addition, I'm tempted to look into making them incremental: instead of getting a single big all-or-nothing bonus, you'd be able to claim a partial bonus for achieving a portion of the goal. This sort of bonus already exists, for example in the Eastern U.S. Rail Baron card that awards 2 points for every connection you own into Chicago. Your bonus from that card can be 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 points. I may not be able to come up with a full set of such incremental bonuses, but I'll see what I can do.Rick Holzgrafehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12413087277577911601noreply@blogger.com0