Testing 3 Card Games

These are three card games I'm working on, all featuring the Fantasy Strike characters. Every Fantasy Strike game is a competitive game allowing the player to choose from among 10 (balanced!) characters. No Fantasy Strike game will ever be sold using a rip-off scheme where you buy packs of unknown cards with random rares. Flash Duel and Puzzle Strike are complete games in a box, while Yomi consists of 10 different character decks and you will be able to buy just one and play with a friend, or buy all 10 if you like.

I'm finally working on online versions of these games, but that isn't ready for you to play yet. In the meantime, you could playtest these games using the general purpose card software called Lackey. Or for Flash Duel, you could play it pretty easily with just a couple decks of playing cards and a print out of the quick reference sheet.

Flash Duel is a really simple, fast game. If you're looking for Magic: the Gathering, this is not it. It's a card duel that takes place on an 18-space linear track, and whoever scores a single hit wins the round. A game is best 3 of 5 rounds. Info on playing Flash Duel here.

Puzzle Strike is a game where you build your deck *as* you play, similar to the card game called Dominion. The gameplay itself is quite a bit different from Dominion though, because the win condition mirrors the back-and-forth play seen in puzzle games (not to mention different mechanics for buying cards and the ability to start the game with any of 10 different characters). Because this type of game requires so much shuffling, I chose the form-factor of poker chips rather than cards. Shaking your bag of chips around is a whole lot easier to shuffle than real cards, and because of how damn often you have to shuffle, it really is more fun that way. Unfortunately, this is the only game of three that I know of no way to manufacture on my own. This one might need a real publisher...(anyone?)

Here's the Puzzle Strike forum (here's info on getting the plugin for playing the game on Lackey).

Then there's Yomi, which you probably have heard of by now because

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My Interview with Edge

This interview with Edge took place at the Montreal International Game Summit. It's my usual controversial stuff that should not be even the slightest bit controversial.

Here's the link.

MIGS: Ken Rolston

Ken Rolston: Old guy you should listen to.I'm a few weeks late on this report from the Montreal International Game Summit, so let's see what we can do from memory only and no notes!

I found Ken Rolston's presentation to be accidentally highly self-referential. Before explaining that, let's look at his ridiculous summary of what is presentation was about:

The road to success as a narrative designer is long and arduous. But you don't want to hear that. So Ken Rolston, Internationally Celebrated Lead Designer of Oblivion, Morrowind, and other light classics, will reveal the carefully hoarded treasury of cheap tricks and short cuts that enable him to avoid Real Work. In this fast-paced and charming presentation, Rolston delivers the box of tools, lavishly illustrates their use in the production of Rolston's Great Works, and teaches you how to project a shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft of narrative game design.

I read that and thought, "wait, he's kidding right?" He avoids real work, he's charming, he's Internationally Celebrated with capital letters, and he will teach us to project a "shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft"? Ha!

I can't convey the actual content of his presentation because there was way too much. In fact, he started the presentation by explaining the "spew principle." If he spews so much information at us that we can't process it all, we'll have the warm feeling of discovery (of all the tools and principles he will spew), but no time to be critical. This will cause us to enjoy the talk and to like him, he said.

If you want a taste of the actual content, you can check out his terribly designed PowerPoint slides here. But I'd rather give you a sense of his tone. Ken mentions here and there how great he is, and we all know it's a joke (because we are not idiots from the internet, possibly?). He tells us how he manipulates his employees, players, and even us in the audience--and we laugh, but he's kind of not kidding. He's just on the edge of whether he's kidding or not, so you can't really be offended, but he sneaks in the sad truth.

The self-reference comes from these two pieces of advice Rolston gave us about narrative: 1) recognize that you have a distinctive voice, and that you should express it in game-narrative and 2) you probably want your world to be serious so it feels more real, but you also want to have the player and designer wink at each other, too.

I don't think it was really on purpose that Rolston's presentation embodied these two ideas: it's just how he is. He has a unique voice and he can't help but express it in a presentation. Also, his presentation is ultimately serious in that he explained many principles of narrative design, but he also seems to be delivering deadpan humor half the time, too. Take this example. Rolston explained that the type of game he makes involves having a big team of developers so a big part of his job is explaining his ideas to everyone. He showed a few simple techniques for this (making a clickable map of the game made of simple symbols, each location giving info from the point of view of the locals who live there), but he also had some management tips for us....

Bad Chemicals

He said he brings a giant box of donuts to work in the morning. They are the most sugary ones he can find and filled with "bad chemicals." He says

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Brenda Brathwaite, again

Brenda contacted me, and seemed not too offended about my write-up about her talk, ha. She did offer several clarifications though.

First, she says that there is only 1 copy of Train, not 6 copies. The number 6 referred to the number of games in the series of games she's making of which Train is just 1. Mexican Kitchen Workers is another of the 6 games, I think.

She had this to say about the rules of Train:

Regarding the rules of Train, think of them as the rules of Wizardry combat. At some point, I need user input or the game just becomes a simulation. Train requires these user inputs at very specific times. It also takes advantage of the  tendency I have seen in Euro rules - if it is not expressly prohibited by the rules, then it may be allowed by the rules. 

I must have a different impression of Euro games though, because to me they are games with extremely iron-clad rules, as opposed to games that leave parts of the rules up to the players. Anyway, she also commented on why she hasn't made the rules available on the net: she doesn't want a computerized version of the game created, she says.

Next, my statement that none of the players ever say "Oh it's the Holocaust" was not right. Many players said that, she says. What she meant was that during an actual session of the game, if one player discovers this mid-way through, he or she never seems to share this information with other players who haven't figured it out yet. Fascinating behavior, says Brenda (I agree). This is what I meant in the first place, by the way, that DURING a play session no one tends to ruin the revelation for others, but my previous post might have been unclear on that.

Finally, I asked Brenda if she had played Ayiti, because it's an example of a replayable game with well-defined rules that aims to make players really feel something. I personally think that game is very successful at its goal (as is Train, by the way), and that maybe its methods are something we should be trying to replicate. Brenda of course knows of the game, but said:

I am holding off on playing Ayiti until I've completed my own game that deals with the same geographical area. I'd like not to be influenced by that. 

Thanks for the follow-up, Brenda!

MIGS: Chris Hecker

Chris HeckerChris Hecker always seems like the smartest guy in the room. Even when the room is big and full of lots of people, he still seems like the smartest guy in the room. He's a hardcore programmer who fights crime at night and can fly. Here's a sample of his everyday conversations:

We use a 4th order polynomial in the squared distance from the sample point to the center of the given metaball for the implicit surface, similar to Triquet, Meseure, and Chaillou. They use a 2nd order polynomial, but we square the main term again to get more continuous derivatives to avoid lighting discontinuities. The actual equation is:
c_i is the metaball center position, R_i is the metaball radius (the function is defined to be 0 outside this radius), and s_i is the scale factor for the metaball, affecting its goopiness.

Anyway, he often talks about non-programmery stuff at conferences so that the rest of us can learn something from him, too. At the Montreal International Game Summit, he talked about the game industry as a whole. He looked at a lot of data and I'm not able to pass that on to you because I don't have it, so instead I'll cover more holistically what his point was.

The Game Industry Is Bigger Than Movies

Hecker started by showing several stats that show the game industry is bigger than the movie industry. We make more revenue per year, our biggest blockbusters pull in as much or more cash than movie blockbusters in the opening weeks, and so on. Even though there's lots of convincing figures that support this overall claim, Hecker says that it's all basically bullshit.

The Game Industry Isn't Bigger Than Movies

Hecker told us about the Sultan of Brunei, a man who owns 6,000 cars

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