hexgrid

As an indie developer myself, part of the fascination of 3MA is getting to hear from other developers. Our industry can be quite insular.

It was a good episode. I was kind of amused at the deflection of the "people are worried small games can be mathematically solved" criticism; I'd have thought that one could be outright answered, but it seemed to me like he dodged it. I would have thought a game that put significant weight on a deck of cards wouldn't be any more mathematically solvable than euchre; there are better and worse strategies, perhaps, but unless the designer completely missed the mark there shouldn't be a guaranteed win for either side.

I'm far more intrigued by this game than I was an hour ago.

Has anyone tried the recent iterations of Harpoon? I had a lot of fun with it in the mid 90s, but I'm not sure I want to throw $66 worth of dice to see if the new one is good; the screenshots make it look like it hasn't really been updated since win98.

It's actually a 7 part series made for the National Film Board of Canada in 1983. Wikipedia will tell you it has 8 parts, but I think Wikipedia is wrong in this instance. I watched this on TV Ontario back when it was new, and it stuck with me. It was a pretty amazing contrast to the sorts of things that were showing up on TV at the time; it came out a year before Red Dawn, for example, and also the year before Reagan's "bomb Russia" joke. At the point where it was filmed, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and none of the forces that brought it down were really apparent yet. Yet there was this guy, pointing out the absurdity of it all without making it anyone's fault. And the access he got to do that was amazing. Amongst other things, he managed to score interviews with senior Warsaw Pact staff, which IIRC was unheard-of. Probably being Canadian helped; Dyer is from Newfoundland. I find the documentary fascinating at least in part because he looks at war as a systemic problem, rather than something you can hang on the head of a particular group of people. It's also reminder of the mood and setting of the times. Watch the whole series if you can.

I really wish Gwynne Dyer's "War" series was available somewhere online. The book is available from Amazon and presumably elsewhere, but I remember the TV series being amazing. It was a "how did we get here, and where do we go from here, assuming we survive" analysis of the cold war. You can watch a low-fi version of it on youtube. Part 1:

The question of designing scenarios, and how to avoid making them simple puzzles came up. My experience in that regard is that it all comes down to how many useful options the player has at their disposal; Bruce was more or less on the money when he said that you have to work harder to make something a puzzle. A puzzle scenario is one in which you have *apparent* decisions to make, but each decision has only one right choice. It's a spectrum, obviously; but the fewer "right" decisions the player can make, the more a scenario becomes a puzzle rather than a strategic challenge. Tomislav's point contained two ways of moving things away from the puzzle end of the spectrum; increased complexity, and instability with some randomness. Instability with randomness means that sometimes what would have been the right answer normally wasn't the right answer this time, or what ought to have been totally wrong (I think it was Julian who's been known to say "Sometimes Pickett's charge has to work, if the dice come up just right." or something to that effect) happens to be right this time. There was a whole 3MA episode about luck in games, IIRC. Increased complexity is a classic way of shifting a scenario away from the puzzle end of of the spectrum; more moving parts means more options for the players (including the AI), and as long as multiple options are viable at any given time, the scenario won't feel like a puzzle. "Take the bridge." is far more of a puzzle at the brigade level than it is at the platoon or section level. If you want to make a scenario into a puzzle, you have to find and eliminate options. If there are two bridges, one of them has to be impassable or a trap. You need to add apparent options that are lethal, either immediately or by taking something from the player that they will need later in order to win (perhaps time if it's a timed scenario, perhaps bogging down a crucial unit, or perhaps giving the enemy time to perform some action). You probably want to add a honeypot or two; something the player will *want* to capture, but which will wind up squandering enough resources that they can't beat the scenario if they take the honeypot. Setting up a scenario in which there is a a single path to victory that isn't obvious takes significantly more effort than just building a scenario.

I stumbled on Wildman cold, and thought it was a DOTA clone. I don't remember what it was, but something about the pitch screamed M.O.B.A., (which I've punctuated there to see if I can get around the forum rewrite rules; it seems to work). Once I watched the video it became obvious that they weren't going totally M.O.B.A., but it still had a lot of that flavor. The original intro text from the pitch, IIRC, which was shoved down in a later update: "Imagine a game where you control a single hero—the “Wildman”—dropped into the middle of a War Zone. The battle starts. Your own army begins to engage the approaching enemy. You support your troops with your own combat abilities and skills. You shape-shift into new forms that grant you new abilities. You upgrade your armies with new technology. You construct defenses. Your opponent switches tactics; you reconfigure your army to counter. You push the enemy back to their citadel, their home base. You face your opponent’s champion. You each rally your troops for support. You execute your special abilities with precision. Your opponent is devastated. You survey the battlefield: the bodies strewn on the ground, the trees burned down and smoldering, the buildings turned to rubble. You collect your rewards. You evolve. Victory is yours. For now." I read that, I think M.O.B.A.

The kickstarter just got cancelled. I really hope things work out for GPG; this would be a sad end for them. I can't say I was hugely enthusiastic about the idea of Wildman per se, but given who was making it I was prepared to give it a shot, and I backed it. I hope we have some good news from them soon, or at least a new kickstarter with a more realistic target. As it stands, if they'd asked for half a million (and designed a game they could make at that budget), they'd be over their target today.

I should also mention Terminus on Indiegogo. It looks like kind of a city builder, but it's a pretty neat idea. Science fiction, the world is going to end in a couple of decades due to a Massive Space Cataclysm, and you're in charge of strip-mining the earth to try to build the best bailing-wire-and-twine colony ship you can throw together to save as much of the population as possible.

I have to admit, my first reaction to WIldman was "Oh, god, another Lords Management. Do Not Want.", followed by "Damn, it's a Lords Management by Chris Taylor, kind of wish I wanted since I like his stuff, but... Lords Management.", and eventually "Maybe it's not completely Lords Management? And it's Chris Taylor..." and eventually I talked myself into backing it. I love strategy games, but the Lords Management stuff leaves me largely cold. Odd. I used M followed by O, B and A, and somehow it became "Lords Management" all through the post. Makes me wonder how it would respond to fnord.

I'm backing it. It's worth noting that there has been a fair amount of action in Kickstarter for 4X games lately; Predestination, Beyond Beyaan, Starbase Orion, arguably Maia and Limit Theory, M.O.R.E, Empires of Sorcery, and maybe others I've missed. That's just Kickstarter; I imagine Indiegogo has some too...

http://bionite.tumblr.com/ is basically an attempt to make a modern Battlezone.

Nobody's mentioned "Psi 5 Trading Company" yet. It's a similar concept, in many ways, though less episodic. The contrast between the two games is illuminating, and both are lots of fun. It's worth hunting down a C64 emulator and trying Psi 5 if you like FTL.

Speaking from the developer point of view (well, ok, *a* developer point of view), you tend to get campaign games rather than single battle games for two main reasons. Obviously, campaigns are expected, which does drive what developers tend to make; if you're pitching a game to a publisher, any way that game deviates from the expected formula is assumed by the publisher to cost sales. The other reason you don't tend to get single-scenario games (and I believe this to be the larger reason) is that building a scenario is far cheaper and less time consuming than building the engine it runs in. Once the engine is built, there's a strong temptation as the developer to increase the apparent value of the game by adding scenarios, and once you're adding scenarios it becomes nearly inevitable that they will be strung into a narrative structure of some sort.

It's worth noting the varying quality of the pitches for games on Kickstarter. I've been keeping an eye on things there for a while (since we may well take a poke at it at some point for our games), and you can usually tell immediately that some pitches are doomed. Some pitches are doomed because they don't describe the game, or because they're coming from nobody you've ever heard of and don't have anything more than concept art. Some are doomed because they're obviously rank amateurs and the odds of them successfully completing the project are miniscule. Some are doomed because the idea is just stupid, or because they're asking for too much money. Many are doomed because they're asking for $10K to make a rich, story driven MMO. Personally, I look at kickstarter et al as a way of helping to create things that publishers would never touch. In many ways, the big hope for Kickstarter is that it will start to reverse the recent trend of genre death. The publishers are getting more and more conservative, and it's getting harder and harder to get anything green-lit that isn't one of a small and shrinking set of established genres. Any publisher-backed title failing in a major genre becomes a declaration of that genre's death. Kickstarter and indie successes, as rare as they may be, will hopefully prevent the industry from distilling down to CoD clones.

I'm inclined to think customization works fine in moderation. The problem comes when the game throws you a heap of nearly indistinguishable components and tells you to construct a fighting force, and then forces you to revisit it periodically as new research comes in. See the old DOS game "Stellar Crusade" for an example of how to do it right. The Stellar Crusade model is as follows: - a ship is just its components - with a couple of exceptions, components are unit size; a ship can be from 1 to 15 units in size - each component has 1 hit point, ship health is the sum of those hit points - damaged components don't function until they get their hit point back (ie: repair) - there are four types of weapon -- long range normal - one shot, lots of damage, a missile, essentially, becomes "damaged" when fired -- long range i-space - as per long-range normal but hits ships in i-space -- short range normal - a gun turret -- short range i-space - a gun turret that hits ships in i-space - two defenses -- point defense intercepts attacks against this ship -- area defense intercepts attacks against the whole fleet - two cargo types -- regular, can carry almost everything, but can't be used in assault drops (except with special forces) -- assault, can be used as dropships - special modules -- command module - has sensors, allows a commander to take charge of the fleet -- sensors -- i-space drive; this beast takes 13 units of space, but lets the ship enter i-space -- maybe something else? I can't recall You didn't need to specify the structure or layout of the ship. If you added a component, the ship had that component. No new components were ever added to the component list; research in the game boosted a multiplier called "efficiency", and when a ship is designed it's baked with the efficiency that the player had when the design was finished, so updating designs is trivial and for the most part unnecessary. The simplicity also means it's pretty easy to see what needs to be done. Want to take a colony to a new world? Well, colonists are a 15 unit cargo, and you can't split cargo between ships, so your colony ship is 15 units of cargo space. You can't put more than 15 units on a ship, so the design is done. Want a space submarine for commerce raiding? The i-space drive is 13 units, so you've got 2 units to spend on weaponry; that could be a missile (making it a single-torpedo submarine, since long range weapons take two units of space) or two guns. Want a cruiser? Well, now we're into some choices about weapon and sensor mixes, but it's still pretty simple to suss out. Find a DOS emulator and go play Stellar Crusade. I think it's up on Underdogs. Ignore the EGA graphics, put up with the learning curve, and there's an excellent game hiding in there. There's no reason that model can't be abstracted to cover other situations. The core of the idea is to give you simple rules with enough capability to construct units to suit tactical needs (trading off speed, attack, defense and range along with terrain considerations) without bogging you down in the details or forcing you to tweak your designs constantly. That way, if the player decides they really need some sort of cavalry analog (fast, hits hard, then gets out of the way for the heavies), it's easy for them to whip that up. Going to higher levels of abstraction is the key. I've got a design on the back burner for a game that uses a similar ship construction and research mechanism, though it has some twists that I think will add to the appeal. I may revisit it after Rob's comment about German vs. British fleet design; I think there actually is room there for a game where you play the research department of a government at war.

There was some discussion about the location being "Ransai". It's worth noting that Kansai is the region of Japan containing Kyoto, which was the imperial capitol for most of recorded Japanese history. I presume they chose a modified name partly to be cute, and partly as shorthand for "we're making no attempt at historical or geographic accuracy here".