Just updated DSD.com to the newest version of WordPress and finally installed Askimet spam filtering.  Things should be much nicer around here now.

Over at my number-one hangout, RPG.net, someone asked an interesting question: “Should you be able to resell your game PDFs?” The discussion has your typical bouts of back and forth on the issue, my response ended up being a little dramatically long. I thought it would make a good post for this site, so here you go.

The problem is that digital media really is new: it’s not a product, nor is it a service. If it were a product, it would be tangible and limited. It’s like a product, in that it is a unit, but there really is not physical object and there is no limit to how many copies you can make without repercussion to the product. The certificate idea posted earlier attempts to rectify the “non-physical” aspect, making it a true product. DRM attempts to make it a limited resource, like most physical goods are. Neither idea works out too well, history shows. (more…)

It’s a fun consequence of game design that when you get into a mood to do some theorizing, you rapidly find several theories that seem to circle a point in your own mind. That hurricane of ideas generates into a renewed view of the object of your analysis. The case under examination: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix. *breath*

So recently I was blabbing away about Skill Atoms, and Danc even saw fit to set me straight on a few points. In the meanwhile, I’ve been finally reading Playing to Win over at David Sirlin’s site. When you get into competetive Street Fighter, Sirlin is kind of Sun Tzu of fighting games. Since he’s also the designer who rebalanced HD Remix, one has to think his insights might be helpful. So here’s what happens when you combine this stuff. (more…)

I found my way to an article by Dan Cook (The Chemistry of Game Design) where he discusses something called a Skill Atom. (Danc, funny enough, is the guy who made the free sprites I’m using in Armada.) The article is a good read, but I find myself questioning a lot of the ideas. That’s probably a good thing, ideas need to be questioned.

I think my biggest problem is that Skill Atoms seem like a clever way to modeling the verbs used in a game, but the analysis doesn’t go deep enough into “how does knowing this make my game fun.” It misses too many ideas that the model simply thinks of as “red herrings.” To use an economics metaphor, it doesn’t internalize the externalities and those can make a big difference. (more…)

Today I did something I haven’t done on my own before: set up an SVN repository.  It’s part of my continuing efforts to 1) get the most out of my webspace (which includes the hosting of this blog) and 2) to get some programming done.

So Armada is now up and happily safe in source control.  This also means I can work on my game from the desktop or the laptop, which is very convenient for me.

On the game itself, work continues at a slow but solid progression.  I got a working window today with properly cleared buffers, so my canvas is set.  That’s great news, since I mostly have the hard-but-uninteresting foundation code done and can soon move into getting the game logic written.  It’s also really nice to see the fruits of labor start to show through.

Next time, I’ll try to post up some more detailed design on the how game will play and some shots of the sprites I’m using in the game right now.

With my current abundance of free time, I’ve decided to push my way back into some video game work.  What better place to start than Flash games?  If I can get something fun made that way, it will be easy to show it to lots of people (through Kongregate) and it will demonstrate an understanding of the principles of game design.

And it will keep me busy doing something programming, so I don’t get rusty.

The current idea is Armada.  Players control a mothership which can produce a few other ships to act as defenders against the oncoming waves of enemy ships.  I’m aiming for a mix of vertical space shooter and tower defense.  More as the design starts coming together.  Right now, I’m just getting the plumbing in place with help from some great tutorials at Brighthub.

From tomorrow through yesterday, I have found myself in the boiling pot situation of forced education.  Job searching must naturally lead to a desire for self-improvment, so that a person can feel more qualified to the positions they aspire.  My top choice right now has asked for a code sample, which I do not have.  Thus I am set upon to relearn .NET and develop new skills in it all while writing up this sample application.

It is at times like these I really despise my degree and my job experience.  True, where I come from has created the necessary environment to learn.  Just the same, I’d rather have blooming flowers than fertalized dirt.

In the course of my new education, I’ve learned about ASP.NET Master Pages, the very nifty login and security options in .NET 3.5, and I’ve rediscovered Brian’s Editable Domain Objects model.  I’ve done a lot of reading today, with lots more to come, but I can’t say I don’t feel accomplished with what I’ve done so far.  I’d post the app for all to see, but here is the supreme irony: my blog is hosted on an all Linux server with no ASP.NET support.

Yeah, as usual my professional life is the exact opposite of my personal doings.  Still, if there’s any interest in these parts for .NET discussions I shall gladly expound upon my musings of this day.

The Lab is for game designs in progress, where I talk about what challenges I’m hitting in a design, or some particularly interesting bit that I thought would be good to talk about.

Some of the fine folks of RPG.net are doing another “Tabletop Roleplaying Open Challenge,” as we call our little game design contest.  Last time I judged it (a few months back) and this time I get to participate as a contestant.  As fate would have it, I actually had an idea before the ingredients were posted (we follow a loose Game Chef style format) that matched the ingredients prety well.

My idea, still coagulating in my brain, is Mexican-style luchadores battling evil spirits and undead and other such monsters, while participating in tournaments and title matches in the downtime.  Think Exalted or Weapons of the Gods, but with wrestling instead of kung fu.

My real challenge right now is trying to get the system nailed down, because I have a pretty good idea of what kind oc content I want.  The issue is one I’ve been considering a lot lately, due to another little game idea worming in my head.  I really enjoy tactile gaming.

What is that?  Tactile gaming is almost the opposite of immersive gaming.  An immersive gamer wants the system to fade away and become unobtrusive.  A tactile gamer wants to really feel the system, and wants it to help promote the feeling of the shared fiction.  A simple example would be Exalted.  The more power (from magic and raw ability) that a character is putting into an effort, the more dice the player rolls.  In a very direct sense, the player can use the amount of dice in play as a guage of how powerful the scene is.  When people break out the minis for D&D, that’s tactile gaming: getting your hands onto the situation in a way that makes it more real for you.

That’s my self-set challenge with Lucha Mazmorra! I could use a simple system (like d20+stats or d6 dice pool) to handle it, and one of those may be the core, but I want players strategically involved in the gameplay.  I want the player to be the wrestler, the character is just a body.

“The Vault” is what I call my projects folder.  Lots of little ideas get stuffed into it as I think of them, few have escaped so far.  In these segments, I’ll elaborate on some aspect of one of these forgotten seeds.  If you enjoy what you read, speak up and I’ll focus on that project idea more.

I would like to tell you what a wonderful future humanity found in the stars. About the pride of an entire species at seeing their first colony arks ply into the astral waters and set on their journey towards a bright new world. I could tell you all about the beautiful destiny of mankind, spread across the universe. I would tell all those stories, but they wouldn’t be true.

An unknown time into the future, in a solar system far from our own, the death of humanity still play out.  It is fought with giant striding war machines from colony to colony, in a seemingly endless war.  Such things progress in more or less stalemate until the discovery of alien devices left by the mysterious “Gardeners” who tereformed the worlds of this system, then seemingly vanished mere decades at most before humans arrived.

Intended as a campaign setting for Arc Dream’s Armour Soldier game (due out sooner or later), “The Thousand Sons” is a military sci-fi setting about all out wars fought with 12 foot tall mechanized power suits.  There’s some cliche (spooky alien artifacts!) but some things I hoped  would be nice twists (like the aliens just left!)  Mainly, I want to capture the grit and terror of the World Wars, but with whole moons and planets as the front lines and an emphasis on special forces units.

The main mechanical gimmick would be buying and customizing mechs as modular chunks, instead of building them like traditional characters.  It was also intended to have a larger wargame meta-element, such that players would control their own characters and the strategy of their army as a whole.

Thus comes my first in personae post for this blog.  I have a lot of goals, things that need to get done, and I’m taking an early new year to make my resolve.  I vow to write more, first and foremost.  There’s game ideas, book ideas, and article ideas aplenty left afloat in this cavernous cranium of mine.  Time to get them out, “for reals.”

Beyond that, there’s coding to be done and opportunities to seek out and people to reestablish connection with.  But it all starts with finding my willpower to work again.  It all starts with a blank page and a spilling of words to them.

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