My software product Solitaire Till Dawn (STD) has had a long history. It is now 20 years old! During that two-decade history, I have had two processors (the Motorola 68000 and the PowerPC), one development environment (Metrowerks CodeWarrior) and one operating system (classic Mac OS, versions 7.0 through 9.whatever), all shot out from under me.
The First Dead Horse
When Apple switched from the Motorola family of CPUs to the PowerPC family, I didn't have to do anything: Apple was conscientious about backward compatibility, and STD ran nicely under emulation. Most users never knew the difference. I did get a lot of concerned mail from users who did know the difference and wanted a nice "efficient" native version, but the truth was that there was no need. STD did not run slowly, and did not use enough CPU even under emulation to noticeably affect the rest of the system. A couple of years after the switch, everybody forgot about the issue and I stopped getting mail about it.
The Second Dead Horse
Then Apple switched operating systems, from the classic Mac OS to the shiny new OS X. This time, it mattered. Technically you could still run STD unmodified, even though it was compiled for a different CPU and written for a different OS (Apple works very hard at backward compatibility). But in this case, it did run slowly and perform poorly, and it would also crash easily (something it never did under classic Mac OS, I hasten to add). It also looked very old-fashioned. I had to re-write STD for OS X and PowerPC. And, as previously chronicled, I made a mistake. I used the Carbon API instead of going all the way to the fully-modern Cocoa, and I stuck with the good old reliable CodeWarrior development system instead of using Apple's new Xcode.
The Third Dead Horse
Then Metrowerks decided to stop supporting CodeWarrior for the Mac. CodeWarrior still ran, and for a while I was able to continue making changes and updates to STD (now STDX). But as OS X evolved, good old CodeWarrior did not keep up, and over time became more and more "old" and less and less "good".
The Fourth Dead Horse
After that, a new blow: Apple switched processors again, abandoning the PowerPC in favor of the Intel line of CPUs. CodeWarrior could not compile Mac code to Intel-native executable. I was now unable to produce a native version of STDX. (Apple claims that Xcode can import a CodeWarrior project and take it over. I tried this, more than once. I never got it to work.)
But although it was now venerable in "computer years" (kind of like "dog years", they go by fast), the latest version of STDX still worked just fine. When OS X 10.6 came out, the PowerPC compatibility layer (called "Rosetta") was no longer installed by default, but Apple made it easy to install if you needed it, so most STDX users were still good to go.
The Fifth Dead Horse, and a Live Lion
But now OS X 10.7 "Lion" is on the horizon. And although it's not released yet and there's time for changes, it seems almost certain that Lion will not support Rosetta at all. If so, the current-yet-antique STDX simply won't run on Lion. For the first time in 20 years, an up-to-date Mac user won't be able to play Solitaire Till Dawn.
My only recourse now is to rewrite STDX using Xcode. I actually started this project quite a while ago, but it goes slowly: it's a big project (you'd be surprised), and I haven't the spare time (and energy) I used to have. I've learned a lesson about clinging to old standards, so this time I'm trying to make the code base as modern as I can; but that also adds time to the project.
My current goal is to create a (not-so)-quick-and-dirty STDX, fully modern and Intel-native, but not containing all the myriad whistles and bells of the previous versions. That will help me get it out the door faster, the sooner to relieve the withdrawal symptoms of STDX fans on Lion. Then over time I'll add old features back in, along with new ones perhaps, until it is once again at its full glory. (All this for the desktop, with iPad and perhaps iPhone/iPod versions to follow if all goes well.)
I really am working on this, and so is Helen, who has a parallel project taking a different approach. But it really is going slowly. The chances that we'll be ready when Lion is ready are just about nil, so there will be a gap of time. But watch this space, and keep an eye on http://www.semicolon.com for news. It will happen someday, if I can make it happen. In the meantime, your patience and understanding is appreciated.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
The Jaded Gamer
We've been through a number of phases in our career as boardgame hobbyists. It's been an interesting journey. (Well, it's been interesting to us. If you have no love for the love of boardgames, you'd best stop reading now. What follows is the height of geekery.)
When we first discovered modern boardgames, we were delighted but a bit reluctant to start a collection. I remember trying Reiner Knizia's Samurai and really liking it, but we were put off by the $38 price tag it carried. Back then, that felt like a lot of money for "just a boardgame."
Within a year, our attitude had changed. We'd been to a few specialty game stores, we'd discovered BoardGameGeek, and most importantly, we'd played a bunch of games. We realized that a game that costs less than taking the family to a movie, and which can entertain the whole family not just once but over and over again, is actually a pretty good use of our entertainment budget. We started buying games.
At first it was easy. There were lots of great games, and BoardGameGeek and a growing circle of gamer friends clued us in to the good ones. We liked nearly every game we bought, so we kept buying.
But after a while we noticed that we didn't like all of the games we bought, even some of the most highly-rated ones. We realized that there were quite a few different kinds of boardgames, and we liked some kinds better than others. We now know that we mostly don't like party games, wargames, dexterity games, or games with a high luck factor. We do like strategy games (where the strategy is something other or more than maneuvering military units on a map), "economic" games (where you start with a few resources and a little money, and build a big economic empire or engine of some kind), and low-luck card games.
That understanding helped us refine our purchasing habits, and we once again found that we liked nearly every game we bought.
After a few of years of this, we found that we had become collectors. We had so many games that years went by without some of them getting played. This may sound foolish, but in fact it works for us. The reason is that not every game, even the really good ones, are good choices for every occasion. Selecting the right game to play depends on many factors: how many players we have, how willing they are to learn a new game, how long and complex the rules are, how long the game will take to play. Like us, our gaming partners have their own preferences as to what kinds of game they like, and those preferences aren't a perfect overlap with ours. And then there's mood: sometimes we're up for a highly competitive skull-cracker, while other times we want to take it easy. This is the chief reason for having a large collection of games: the desire to have the right game for every occasion.
And now more years have passed, and I think I've reached a new phase (although in this I won't speak for the rest of the family). I've realized that there are some dusty games in our collection that delighted us when we first got them, but that we haven't played for years, and which I haven't missed. They're perfectly good games, but we now have other, better games that fill the same niche in our collection. Why play a lesser game when I can play a better one that scratches the same itch? Simple variety is worth something, but the collection is large enough now that that really isn't a problem.
If it were just me, I think I'd be making a list of games to purge. We have already done some purging, but so far it's been games we don't like. We're not quite ready to take the step of getting rid of games we actually like-but-not-enough. But I'm getting there!
(Getting rid of games is almost a hobby of its own, by the way. We usually trade with other gamers for games we hope to like better, but we have also sold them off at flea markets. eBay is another option. Other gamers somewhere will want and enjoy our cast-offs!)
But in case you're wondering, let me be clear on one point: I'm not done with adding games to our collection. Perish the thought! We are still adding to our collection: new games keep coming out, and we continue to want to acquire the best of them. But I'm now starting to think in terms of improving the collection instead of merely expanding it.
When we first discovered modern boardgames, we were delighted but a bit reluctant to start a collection. I remember trying Reiner Knizia's Samurai and really liking it, but we were put off by the $38 price tag it carried. Back then, that felt like a lot of money for "just a boardgame."
Within a year, our attitude had changed. We'd been to a few specialty game stores, we'd discovered BoardGameGeek, and most importantly, we'd played a bunch of games. We realized that a game that costs less than taking the family to a movie, and which can entertain the whole family not just once but over and over again, is actually a pretty good use of our entertainment budget. We started buying games.
At first it was easy. There were lots of great games, and BoardGameGeek and a growing circle of gamer friends clued us in to the good ones. We liked nearly every game we bought, so we kept buying.
But after a while we noticed that we didn't like all of the games we bought, even some of the most highly-rated ones. We realized that there were quite a few different kinds of boardgames, and we liked some kinds better than others. We now know that we mostly don't like party games, wargames, dexterity games, or games with a high luck factor. We do like strategy games (where the strategy is something other or more than maneuvering military units on a map), "economic" games (where you start with a few resources and a little money, and build a big economic empire or engine of some kind), and low-luck card games.
That understanding helped us refine our purchasing habits, and we once again found that we liked nearly every game we bought.
After a few of years of this, we found that we had become collectors. We had so many games that years went by without some of them getting played. This may sound foolish, but in fact it works for us. The reason is that not every game, even the really good ones, are good choices for every occasion. Selecting the right game to play depends on many factors: how many players we have, how willing they are to learn a new game, how long and complex the rules are, how long the game will take to play. Like us, our gaming partners have their own preferences as to what kinds of game they like, and those preferences aren't a perfect overlap with ours. And then there's mood: sometimes we're up for a highly competitive skull-cracker, while other times we want to take it easy. This is the chief reason for having a large collection of games: the desire to have the right game for every occasion.
And now more years have passed, and I think I've reached a new phase (although in this I won't speak for the rest of the family). I've realized that there are some dusty games in our collection that delighted us when we first got them, but that we haven't played for years, and which I haven't missed. They're perfectly good games, but we now have other, better games that fill the same niche in our collection. Why play a lesser game when I can play a better one that scratches the same itch? Simple variety is worth something, but the collection is large enough now that that really isn't a problem.
If it were just me, I think I'd be making a list of games to purge. We have already done some purging, but so far it's been games we don't like. We're not quite ready to take the step of getting rid of games we actually like-but-not-enough. But I'm getting there!
(Getting rid of games is almost a hobby of its own, by the way. We usually trade with other gamers for games we hope to like better, but we have also sold them off at flea markets. eBay is another option. Other gamers somewhere will want and enjoy our cast-offs!)
But in case you're wondering, let me be clear on one point: I'm not done with adding games to our collection. Perish the thought! We are still adding to our collection: new games keep coming out, and we continue to want to acquire the best of them. But I'm now starting to think in terms of improving the collection instead of merely expanding it.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Screaming Video
In many ways, we're a family on the cutting edge of new technology. In other ways, we're a bit behind the times. We recently and belatedly realized that instead of paying big bucks to our satellite TV provider for a lot of high-end channels we mostly don't watch, we could instead pay $7.99 to Netflix and watch any of bazillions of TV shows and movies, any time we like, on demand. To do this, we needed a new piece of hardware: a "streaming video" box hooked up to our Internet connection and to our TV set. The hardware costs in the neighborhood of $100, depending on what you get; although some brands are more expensive, you can get a very nice unit for that price from a number of vendors.
That sounded like a good deal to us, so all we had to do was decide which brand. I chatted at length with a good friend who had experience with a couple of different models, and we did our research on the Web, looking at specs and reviews. Based on on research and word-of-mouth, it came down to two choices: Apple TV, and Roku.
In most respects there's little to distinguish these products. Our friend told us that both were good and we'd be happy with either, but in his opinion the Apple product had (as you might expect!) a nicer user interface. Both he and a reviewer also thought that Apple provided better picture quality. Pretty much everybody agrees that Roku offers a lot more content than Apple TV, but all we really care about is Netflix, and that's available through both boxes.
We've been an Apple household for over twenty years. Nothing as complex as a computer (or anything with a computer in it) is ever 100% perfect, and we've had some complaints over the years; but in general, Apple has consistently provided great products and we've been very happy with them. That made the decision seem clear: we went down to the Apple store and bought an AppleTV.
If you haven't seen one of these things, they're absurdly small: a little larger (and squarer) than a hockey puck. You plug them into the wall for power, into your household network (wired or wireless) for Internet access, and into your TV set. Power it up, work through a couple of minutes of easy setup, and hey presto! TV on demand... it says here.
And suddenly, we found ourselves in the wide, wide, world of dreadful disappointment. We selected a show, the "I'm busy" spinner appeared, and we had to wait for a few minutes, about enough time to go make microwave popcorn. Then the show started, played for fifteen seconds, then froze. It continued this alternating stop-and-go for the first several minutes of the show. After that, it seemed to settle down, and provided smooth playback and very good picture quality. We were disappointed, but it seemed like something we could live with.
We tried another show. The spinner appeared... and never went away! The show never started. After twenty minutes of increasing disbelief, we reset the machine and tried again. While some shows seemed to play without problems (other than a bit of startup stuttering), most shows would never start. We'd just get that spinner, for as long as our patience held out.
People, it is not "video on demand" if it takes half an hour or more for the show to start!
We got on the Internet again, using search keywords like "slow loading." We quickly found out what none of the reviews had told us: a small but significant number of Apple TV users have been reporting this behavior. It apparently started about three months ago, with Apple's latest software update for the product. To date, Apple has neither acknowledged the problem nor provided a fix.
In over twenty years, this is the first time we've ever had to regard an Apple product as a complete and utter failure. That thing is a $100 doorstop.
Our internet connection is 1.5MB DSL. We are aware that 3.0MB is the recommended minimum for streaming TV. We've signed up for that, and the upgrade should kick in sometime next week. We will keep the Apple TV box until then, and see if the network upgrade helps. If it doesn't we'll return it, with some choice words for the salesman who sold it to us without saying a word about these problems.
Last night, we went out and bought a Roku XD|S at Fry's, for exactly the same price as the Apple box. We brought it home, plugged it in, set it up, and it pretty much worked immediately. The user interface and setup procedures are a bit more cumbersome than Apple's (and the screen display and menus are definitely uglier), but the Roku is not at all difficult to use. We had one setup glitch: you have to tell the Roku to install the Netflix application, which it does by downloading from the network. (Apple TV comes with Netflix pre-installed.) Just like the Apple box, this download showed us its version of "please wait" and stayed that way for twenty minutes until we ran out of patience. We restarted the box, and found that Netflix was now installed and working. We had no further problems: every show we tried started within seconds, played smoothly, and showed good picture quality. (We expect the picture quality to improve once our network upgrade is complete.)
Unless the network upgrade somehow fixes Apple's problem and the Apple TV really does show significantly better picture quality than the Roku, we'll be returning the Apple box and keeping the Roku.
That sounded like a good deal to us, so all we had to do was decide which brand. I chatted at length with a good friend who had experience with a couple of different models, and we did our research on the Web, looking at specs and reviews. Based on on research and word-of-mouth, it came down to two choices: Apple TV, and Roku.
In most respects there's little to distinguish these products. Our friend told us that both were good and we'd be happy with either, but in his opinion the Apple product had (as you might expect!) a nicer user interface. Both he and a reviewer also thought that Apple provided better picture quality. Pretty much everybody agrees that Roku offers a lot more content than Apple TV, but all we really care about is Netflix, and that's available through both boxes.
We've been an Apple household for over twenty years. Nothing as complex as a computer (or anything with a computer in it) is ever 100% perfect, and we've had some complaints over the years; but in general, Apple has consistently provided great products and we've been very happy with them. That made the decision seem clear: we went down to the Apple store and bought an AppleTV.
If you haven't seen one of these things, they're absurdly small: a little larger (and squarer) than a hockey puck. You plug them into the wall for power, into your household network (wired or wireless) for Internet access, and into your TV set. Power it up, work through a couple of minutes of easy setup, and hey presto! TV on demand... it says here.
And suddenly, we found ourselves in the wide, wide, world of dreadful disappointment. We selected a show, the "I'm busy" spinner appeared, and we had to wait for a few minutes, about enough time to go make microwave popcorn. Then the show started, played for fifteen seconds, then froze. It continued this alternating stop-and-go for the first several minutes of the show. After that, it seemed to settle down, and provided smooth playback and very good picture quality. We were disappointed, but it seemed like something we could live with.
We tried another show. The spinner appeared... and never went away! The show never started. After twenty minutes of increasing disbelief, we reset the machine and tried again. While some shows seemed to play without problems (other than a bit of startup stuttering), most shows would never start. We'd just get that spinner, for as long as our patience held out.
People, it is not "video on demand" if it takes half an hour or more for the show to start!
We got on the Internet again, using search keywords like "slow loading." We quickly found out what none of the reviews had told us: a small but significant number of Apple TV users have been reporting this behavior. It apparently started about three months ago, with Apple's latest software update for the product. To date, Apple has neither acknowledged the problem nor provided a fix.
In over twenty years, this is the first time we've ever had to regard an Apple product as a complete and utter failure. That thing is a $100 doorstop.
Our internet connection is 1.5MB DSL. We are aware that 3.0MB is the recommended minimum for streaming TV. We've signed up for that, and the upgrade should kick in sometime next week. We will keep the Apple TV box until then, and see if the network upgrade helps. If it doesn't we'll return it, with some choice words for the salesman who sold it to us without saying a word about these problems.
Last night, we went out and bought a Roku XD|S at Fry's, for exactly the same price as the Apple box. We brought it home, plugged it in, set it up, and it pretty much worked immediately. The user interface and setup procedures are a bit more cumbersome than Apple's (and the screen display and menus are definitely uglier), but the Roku is not at all difficult to use. We had one setup glitch: you have to tell the Roku to install the Netflix application, which it does by downloading from the network. (Apple TV comes with Netflix pre-installed.) Just like the Apple box, this download showed us its version of "please wait" and stayed that way for twenty minutes until we ran out of patience. We restarted the box, and found that Netflix was now installed and working. We had no further problems: every show we tried started within seconds, played smoothly, and showed good picture quality. (We expect the picture quality to improve once our network upgrade is complete.)
Unless the network upgrade somehow fixes Apple's problem and the Apple TV really does show significantly better picture quality than the Roku, we'll be returning the Apple box and keeping the Roku.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
In Stores Now
I think most of the regular readers of this blog already know the following from Facebook and Twitter posts and the like, but since I've chronicled the development of this design here from the beginning, I feel that I should wrap things up here as well.
So here's the news: the Railways of the Western U.S. project (which started life as Hammer & Spike and which was known for a while as Rottweiler) is finally complete, and is available for purchase both online and at your favorite FLGS ("friendly local game store").
I received my copies about a week and a half ago; FRED very kindly sent them to me almost as soon as they had arrived from the printer. I am pleased to report that the production quality is excellent. The map neatly matches up with its Eastern U.S. counterpart. The City Rotor pieces are indeed very cool (see photos by my friend Marlin Deckert here and here). Everything's there that should be there, including the Fuel Depot bits that were missing from the Essen copies. And Helen got her urgent request satisfied: the player aid cards have an image of the Rotor Cities' "rainbow pie chart", so you can see the order of the colors.
My copies came before the product had appeared in stores, so I was surprised and gratified when Marlin showed up at game night a few days later with a copy he'd purchased at our own FLGS, Game Kastle in San Jose. This was, in a manner of speaking, the first copy we'd seen "in the wild". We stopped in there last Friday night ourselves, and sure enough, there were two copies sitting out on the Christmas gift suggestion display table.
I've been trying not to pollute this post with a lot of superfluous exclamation points, but they're here in spirit. It's been most gratifying to see the final product, see that people are buying it, and see the ratings going up on its BoardGameGeek page.
So what's next? I'm not sure. I have about a half-dozen half-baked ideas for new game designs, and there is an excellent chance of another expansion for Railways of the World. When I know, I'll let you know!
So here's the news: the Railways of the Western U.S. project (which started life as Hammer & Spike and which was known for a while as Rottweiler) is finally complete, and is available for purchase both online and at your favorite FLGS ("friendly local game store").
I received my copies about a week and a half ago; FRED very kindly sent them to me almost as soon as they had arrived from the printer. I am pleased to report that the production quality is excellent. The map neatly matches up with its Eastern U.S. counterpart. The City Rotor pieces are indeed very cool (see photos by my friend Marlin Deckert here and here). Everything's there that should be there, including the Fuel Depot bits that were missing from the Essen copies. And Helen got her urgent request satisfied: the player aid cards have an image of the Rotor Cities' "rainbow pie chart", so you can see the order of the colors.
My copies came before the product had appeared in stores, so I was surprised and gratified when Marlin showed up at game night a few days later with a copy he'd purchased at our own FLGS, Game Kastle in San Jose. This was, in a manner of speaking, the first copy we'd seen "in the wild". We stopped in there last Friday night ourselves, and sure enough, there were two copies sitting out on the Christmas gift suggestion display table.
I've been trying not to pollute this post with a lot of superfluous exclamation points, but they're here in spirit. It's been most gratifying to see the final product, see that people are buying it, and see the ratings going up on its BoardGameGeek page.
So what's next? I'm not sure. I have about a half-dozen half-baked ideas for new game designs, and there is an excellent chance of another expansion for Railways of the World. When I know, I'll let you know!
Saturday, October 30, 2010
News from Essen
Spiel Essen, the world's largest and most prestigious game fair, took place in Essen Germany last weekend. I'd been hoping that Railways of the Western U.S. would be ready in time to be shown there, and it was—just barely!
It seems to be standard practice for the initial printing of a new game product to be very small. This gives the publisher a chance to check the finished product for problems before paying to have thousands of copies made; and if there are no serious problems, the publisher has a few advance copies to show off and/or sell. The first shipment of Railways of the Western U.S. arrived in Essen on the morning of the first day of the show, just in time. It was 60 copies, and they immediately opened one copy and set it up to be shown off.
The BoardGameGeek web site (one of my favorite web destinations) had a presence at the show: they were interviewing publishers, and live-streaming video demos of the new games. Keith Blume demoed RotWUS for them on that first day, and if you're interested you can watch the video here. It's quick, only about three minutes.
The game sold out quickly; all 60 copies were gone by the second day of the show.
There was indeed one problem with those first few copies: there were no Fuel Depot tokens in the boxes. Fortunately those are not necessary components; they are used only with an optional rule, and you can play just fine without them. The people who purchased those copies can get replacement Fuel Depot tokens by contacting FRED Distribution customer service. If you are not one of the lucky few who got to go to Essen you won't have to worry about this, because it will be fixed for the first full print run.
The City Rotor tokens, the other new optional feature in the expansion, were included and apparently are pretty cool. I say "apparently" because I haven't seen them myself. Helen and I didn't go to Essen (we talked about going, but couldn't swing it this year) and so now there are some 60 people in the world who have actual copies of Railways of the Western U.S., and I'm not one of them! I've never even seen a copy I didn't make myself. There's something cosmically unfair about this, or so I keep telling myself.
But FRED says that the first real shipment will arrive soon, in just a couple of weeks. Then I should have my own copy at last, and they'll be available in both brick-and-mortar and online stores. Can't wait!
It seems to be standard practice for the initial printing of a new game product to be very small. This gives the publisher a chance to check the finished product for problems before paying to have thousands of copies made; and if there are no serious problems, the publisher has a few advance copies to show off and/or sell. The first shipment of Railways of the Western U.S. arrived in Essen on the morning of the first day of the show, just in time. It was 60 copies, and they immediately opened one copy and set it up to be shown off.
The BoardGameGeek web site (one of my favorite web destinations) had a presence at the show: they were interviewing publishers, and live-streaming video demos of the new games. Keith Blume demoed RotWUS for them on that first day, and if you're interested you can watch the video here. It's quick, only about three minutes.
The game sold out quickly; all 60 copies were gone by the second day of the show.
There was indeed one problem with those first few copies: there were no Fuel Depot tokens in the boxes. Fortunately those are not necessary components; they are used only with an optional rule, and you can play just fine without them. The people who purchased those copies can get replacement Fuel Depot tokens by contacting FRED Distribution customer service. If you are not one of the lucky few who got to go to Essen you won't have to worry about this, because it will be fixed for the first full print run.
The City Rotor tokens, the other new optional feature in the expansion, were included and apparently are pretty cool. I say "apparently" because I haven't seen them myself. Helen and I didn't go to Essen (we talked about going, but couldn't swing it this year) and so now there are some 60 people in the world who have actual copies of Railways of the Western U.S., and I'm not one of them! I've never even seen a copy I didn't make myself. There's something cosmically unfair about this, or so I keep telling myself.
But FRED says that the first real shipment will arrive soon, in just a couple of weeks. Then I should have my own copy at last, and they'll be available in both brick-and-mortar and online stores. Can't wait!
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Suddenly, Spatial Delivery
I haven't had a lot of time for game design work recently. Until a month or so ago, I was finishing up Railways of the Western U.S. (okay, that's game design, but it's still only an expansion and not a complete game!), and since it was sent to the printers other things have taken precedence.
But now Spatial Delivery has reclaimed my attention, after months and years of neglect. It started when we heard of a publisher that might be interested in it. I emphasize might because so far it's as tenuous as a rumor; but from what we've heard, SD might be the kind of game this publisher is looking for. That set me to thinking again about the game's biggest weaknesses, and how they might be addressed. Then yesterday over lunch, Helen and I were kicking this around, and she had a brilliant-sounding idea. Today we tried it out. A little to my surprise, the part that sounded most brilliant didn't get much play, but after some experiments and more discussion, we developed a new set of rules that feel like a great improvement.
The new rules seem to solve several problems. They added tension, competition, and interest to the card draft. They eliminated a complaint of many playtesters who didn't like that drafted cards remained vulnerable until the draft was over. And it helped balance out the turn-order bias that's been a nagging concern for a while.
Like all new rule ideas, it needs more playtest before we can really assess it. Also I will have to rewrite the rulebook and cheat sheets, and design a side-board to hold a score track, player order track, and round counter. This will take a little while to get together.
But I'm encouraged. Cross your fingers!
(Julie Haehn, if you're reading this, I will send you the copy I promised... after the rules have settled down and the new components are ready!)
But now Spatial Delivery has reclaimed my attention, after months and years of neglect. It started when we heard of a publisher that might be interested in it. I emphasize might because so far it's as tenuous as a rumor; but from what we've heard, SD might be the kind of game this publisher is looking for. That set me to thinking again about the game's biggest weaknesses, and how they might be addressed. Then yesterday over lunch, Helen and I were kicking this around, and she had a brilliant-sounding idea. Today we tried it out. A little to my surprise, the part that sounded most brilliant didn't get much play, but after some experiments and more discussion, we developed a new set of rules that feel like a great improvement.
The new rules seem to solve several problems. They added tension, competition, and interest to the card draft. They eliminated a complaint of many playtesters who didn't like that drafted cards remained vulnerable until the draft was over. And it helped balance out the turn-order bias that's been a nagging concern for a while.
Like all new rule ideas, it needs more playtest before we can really assess it. Also I will have to rewrite the rulebook and cheat sheets, and design a side-board to hold a score track, player order track, and round counter. This will take a little while to get together.
But I'm encouraged. Cross your fingers!
(Julie Haehn, if you're reading this, I will send you the copy I promised... after the rules have settled down and the new components are ready!)
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Another progress report
My posts seem to be coming farther and farther apart. I apologize for that. I think there are a couple of reasons for it. One is simply that I've been very busy, and have had little time (and when I have time, little energy) for posting. Another is that I haven't been doing anything worth the waste of bandwidth: nothing to say. But I think I've accumulated enough tidbits to make a new post worthwhile, so here goes.
Railways of the Western U.S.
I haven't had much to say about this because my part in it is nearly done. (There's even a page up at BGG for it: Railways of the Western U.S.) But I can report that we (myself and the folks at Eagle Games) have been proof-reading digital copies of the board, the rules, the cards, and the box art, and it's looking really good. The board has been designed to match the Eastern U.S. board esthetically as well as physically, and I think they'll look great together on the table.
The rules are receiving the last few tweaks. My Fuel Depot rules have been tossed in favor of some different ones that the Eagle Games folks dreamed up, and I agree that theirs are much better. I'm eager to try them out myself, now that I know what they are! I'm hoping to get the game on the table at Pacificon over Labor Day weekend.
And after the digital proof-reading is done, it's back to being patient while it goes through the cycles of printed proofs, final approval, printing, assembling, and shipping. (Still waiting for my instant gratification, here!)
Solitaire Till Dawn X
It's been hard to work on this because I do 8 hours or more of programming at work, five days a week, and I'm often feeling pretty burned out by the time I get home. But I am making progress. Today I got some very insidious bugs out of the BooleanTest class (which is used for things like deciding whether you're stuck, or have won the game), and in the process greatly sped up the program's ability to peer into the future of the game as you play it. That could be very useful—we'll see!
New Game Designs
Yes, I have a couple of new designs! With Rottweiler mostly out the door, I've been able to spend some time thinking about such things.
I actually have three that I'm turning over in my head. All are in very early design stages; only two have even been mocked up to try a solo game on my own, and that has happened only once for each of them. But they each feature one or two newish ideas that interest me.
Without going into a lot of detail, one is centered around buying your resources from a "futures" market: if you think you can wait to get them, you can get them cheaper. Of course, there will be time pressure to get them more quickly, and damn the expense!
A second grew out of an idle notion to make a game with Genghis Khan as a theme. The Great Khan was not just a warrior, and there were some interesting economic things happening in his empire. Instead of a battle game, I began to wonder if there wasn't an interesting area-majority game lurking in there somewhere. Area majority has been done before of course, but for this game I'm hoping to introduce a trading-with-foreigners twist.
The third new design grew out of the second. I was looking for an interesting scoring mechanism for it, and thought of one so interesting that it turned into a whole new game. This is the one that has my attention at the moment, and it has been developed more than the other two (not that that's saying much). It is also an area-majority game, with twists in both the area-majority mechanism and in the scoring.
I always have high hopes for any new design, and they usually turn out somewhere between rather dull and utter garbage. We'll see about these.
Railways of the Western U.S.
I haven't had much to say about this because my part in it is nearly done. (There's even a page up at BGG for it: Railways of the Western U.S.) But I can report that we (myself and the folks at Eagle Games) have been proof-reading digital copies of the board, the rules, the cards, and the box art, and it's looking really good. The board has been designed to match the Eastern U.S. board esthetically as well as physically, and I think they'll look great together on the table.
The rules are receiving the last few tweaks. My Fuel Depot rules have been tossed in favor of some different ones that the Eagle Games folks dreamed up, and I agree that theirs are much better. I'm eager to try them out myself, now that I know what they are! I'm hoping to get the game on the table at Pacificon over Labor Day weekend.
And after the digital proof-reading is done, it's back to being patient while it goes through the cycles of printed proofs, final approval, printing, assembling, and shipping. (Still waiting for my instant gratification, here!)
Solitaire Till Dawn X
It's been hard to work on this because I do 8 hours or more of programming at work, five days a week, and I'm often feeling pretty burned out by the time I get home. But I am making progress. Today I got some very insidious bugs out of the BooleanTest class (which is used for things like deciding whether you're stuck, or have won the game), and in the process greatly sped up the program's ability to peer into the future of the game as you play it. That could be very useful—we'll see!
New Game Designs
Yes, I have a couple of new designs! With Rottweiler mostly out the door, I've been able to spend some time thinking about such things.
I actually have three that I'm turning over in my head. All are in very early design stages; only two have even been mocked up to try a solo game on my own, and that has happened only once for each of them. But they each feature one or two newish ideas that interest me.
Without going into a lot of detail, one is centered around buying your resources from a "futures" market: if you think you can wait to get them, you can get them cheaper. Of course, there will be time pressure to get them more quickly, and damn the expense!
A second grew out of an idle notion to make a game with Genghis Khan as a theme. The Great Khan was not just a warrior, and there were some interesting economic things happening in his empire. Instead of a battle game, I began to wonder if there wasn't an interesting area-majority game lurking in there somewhere. Area majority has been done before of course, but for this game I'm hoping to introduce a trading-with-foreigners twist.
The third new design grew out of the second. I was looking for an interesting scoring mechanism for it, and thought of one so interesting that it turned into a whole new game. This is the one that has my attention at the moment, and it has been developed more than the other two (not that that's saying much). It is also an area-majority game, with twists in both the area-majority mechanism and in the scoring.
I always have high hopes for any new design, and they usually turn out somewhere between rather dull and utter garbage. We'll see about these.
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