Buy One, Get One Free on XBLA

This offer is only for today, Monday June 15th 2009. Take advantage of it if you can though, because you get something free out of it. If you buy either Puzzle Fighter, UNO, or Street Fighter HF (not SF HD Remix unfortunately) on Xbox Live, then you get a second download code for free that you can give to a friend so you can play together. Neat. Remember to act fast.

Here's the link

Yomi Card Game Playtest to be at Evolution Tournament

(Larger version)

After years of the development, the Yomi card game is approaching its final form...slowly. At this point, I'm just waiting for Udon to complete the rest of the art (and waiting...and waiting...), though there is still time for minor balance tweaking in the meantime. This is a strangely familiar situation for me.

The deck boxes for the two main characters are pictured above, along with some of the cards. Looking good?

If you're going to this year's Evolution fighting game tournament in Las Vegas (www.evo2k.com), you'll get to see the game in-person, and playtest all 10 decks (not an official event, I just mean while you're waiting around). I won't actually be selling decks there--again, not all the art is there even though the gameplay is--but if you're going to attend the event and you're really intent on buying some decks rather than printing them out yourself, check out this thread.

Incidentally, you can print out playtest versions of all 10 decks yourself (currently one version out of date, but update coming within a week!) and find more information about Yomi at www.sirlin.net/yomi or just download the rules here.

Yomi: Fighting Card game is a simple card game that simulates the mindgames that occur during a fighting game. It's a fixed-deck game, so all you need is one deck and an opponent with one deck to play. There's no rip-off scheme of selling you rare cards in random packs. There will be 10 decks in the initial release, then 6 boss decks in a (much) later release. Each deck represents one character and can also double as deck of regular playing cards. The characters are from my Fantasy-Strike world, and they seem ripe to be in a fighting game someday.

If you are publisher/distributor and are interested in Yomi, or if you are would like to make a connection for me with publisher or distributor, use the contact form.

Stanford Seminar on Gaming

Today I was was a speaker/panelist at a Stanford University event called How They Got Game put on by Professor Henry Lowood of the Libraries and Academic Information Resources department. The theme was professional gaming, examined from several angles. We looked at the perspective of players and how they prepare for events, the challenges of managing teams and entire gaming leagues, and how to take professional gaming to the next level in North America.

Annie "Exstasy" Leung talked about the gaming competitions she's been involved in for the last four years, including Unreal Tournament 3 and Guitar Hero. She emphasized that practicing long hours was vitally important, and that playing games at home is quite a different matter than playing them at a competition with all the noise and distractions. She said she tried to create distractions at home while practicing to simulate this, and at events sometimes wears those big helicopter pilot earphones with tons of noise-canceling.

A professional Fifa player (his name isn't on the schedule, I'll add if when I find out his name) talked about the frustrations of having to learn different versions of a game. Fifa on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are very similar, one is a port of the other. But the PC version is substantially different, with different ball physics(!) so playing that is like playing a totally different game. Ball physics and lots of other things also changed between Fifa 08 and Fifa 09, so he said there is really no way to be good at a game with different physics than to practice it endlessly, even if you are already a master of the 08 version. He mentioned one ridiculous tournament where the organizers required the players play the game using a different camera angle for television purposes, but this of course throws out their months (or years) of practice and is clearly unacceptable. Luckily, the later rounds were played using the standard camera angle because the organizers did find a way to broadcast with the camera angle they wanted while the players played using the standard view.

A top European Quake player joined us via video conferencing

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UC Berkeley StarCraft Class, Week 14 (Final Week)

In the last class of the semester for UC Berkeley's StarCraft class, several students gave their presentations.

Zergling Rush

The first student's topic was the Zergling Rush. The point of this strategy is to take advantage of Zerg's window of dominance at the very beginning of the game. Zerglings are weak, but you can get them out so early that your opponents might very well have little or nothing to defend with.

There are two main varieties of the zergling rush: the 4-pool and the 6-pool. 4-pool means that you only have four drones (resource collectors) when you build your spawning pool (the building that lets you produce zerglings). So you start the game by gathering resources for a bit, not building any drones, and going straight to spawning pool and zerglings. This is an "all in" strategy though. If you don't win with it, you are so severely behind economically, that you will probably lose. The reason to choose this strategy over a slightly more conservative 6-pool rush is if you think getting the zerglings to the opponent a few seconds faster will allow you to win the game on the spot.

The 6-pool strategy is still risky (putting you behind economically if you fail), but you can recover from it if things don't go as planned. The build order is to first build two drones (getting you to six total), then mine a bit, then build a spawning pool as soon as you can, then build another drone to replace the one that you just turned into a spawning pool, then build an overlord. If you do this correctly, these things will happen simultaneously: 1) your overlord finishes building, 2) you have all three larva ready to build units, 3) you have 150 minerals, the exact cost of building 6 zerglings from your 3 larva.

The student said the first goal of a zergling rush is to end the game immediately if you can. As soon as you arrive at their base, you probably have a good idea if this is even possible. If it's not, your next goal is to disrupt their economy. Remember that your economy is already disrupted by you doing a zergling rush (rather than building up your own economy) so you'll have to disrupt theirs just to stay even. If you can't disrupt their economy much, the next priority would be to at least force them to change their strategy or force them into a certain strategy. For example, they might have to build sunken colonies or bunkers right away to survive. And failing all that, at the very least you should harass with your zerglings and force the enemy to spend a lot of clicks to deal with you. The student also pointed out that there is some value in getting the opponent angry or flustered here, too. Zergling rushes are considered "cheesy" by some, so that's great to

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Malcolm Gladwell and Playing to Win

Gladwell strikes again. He's wonderful at summarizing a field of research, often pulling from boring sources that he makes interesting by synthesizing an overall picture of what's going on. Normally, I would have great appreciation for this, but he tends to do it for fields that I myself have researched, then beats me to the punch, which I find highly annoying. This is of course that's no fault of Gladwell's, only mine. This time though, he covers ground that I have written about for years (sirlin.net/ptw), summarizing it in this skillfully written New Yorker article:

How David Beats Goliath

He is talking about the "playing to win" mindset, familiar ground for me. I summarize the mindset this way:

If you want to win, then you should do whatever gives you the best chance of winning...within the rules of the game.

Ten years ago, when people first read my articles about playing to win, many objected that the message was just too obvious to write down. The huge popularity of those articles and enormous amount of debate they spawned show that it's not so obvious after all. Gladwell's article does the same. In basketball, stock market software, war, and computer simulations of battle, Gladwell shows that most people are appalled at playing to win. I mean it's just not done that way! There are social conventions you know, and even though what you're suggesting isn't against any rule, and even though it is highly effective...it's just not done!

That idiocy shows up in pretty much every "game" you can think of. It's amazing how bad people are at figuring out that if you want to win, you do what gives you the best chance of winning (within the rules). Gladwell's examples show basketball coaches who reject this because it leads to not learning "basketball skills." Funny, I thought winning was a basketball skill. If your "basketball skills" aren't letting you win against my team's "non-skills," then the last thing you should be doing as a coach is throwing chairs and getting mad at me. Try playing to win instead.

Even more pathetic are the participants in Gladwell's example of the military simulation game. A tournament gave each player $1 trillion to buy fictional military equipment, pitted against the equipment of other payers in a mock battle. One player discovered a very unusual strategy that's "socially horrifying" in the real world, but is highly effective given the rules of the game. Predictably, the people involved are not able to grasp the simple concept of playing to win here. Players are outraged at the winner because the way he played does not fit with their social conventions, even though all agree that he broke no rules. Then the judges chime in with that familiar cry of the scoundrel: "but it broke the spirit of the game!" They said they would not hold the tournament anymore if that player was going to keep entering with outlandish strategies.

These people have managed to misunderstand not only the "playing to win" mindset, but also the concept of game design. If the rules of your game allow players to play in game-breaking ways that make the game less interesting strategically, or that make the game simply feel terrible or unfun, then you should seek to design better rules. Blaming the players for making legal moves that help them win is lunacy. They should have thanked this unusual player for exposing the flaws of their game design so they can create a better ruleset. (Sidenote: thanks to all the SF HD Remix testers and Yomi card game testers who discovered game-breaking stuff that I was able to fix.)

Enjoy Gladwell's article on this subject of playing to win, and remember how difficult it is for people to understand:

If you want to win, then you should do whatever gives you the best chance of winning...within the rules of the game.