Bitter

Posted on February 23, 2009 by tehdiplomat

Well, it’s cold outside in the New York area and I think I’m done with winter. Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate actually having seasons unlike some areas, that don’t have any besides rain and not rain. But no matter, I’ll soon be on vacation in the caribbean and the warmth and ocean waters will be a great change of pace. I have some things at work to finish up before I disappear for a week, and I would also like to get some stuff done on one of the projects I’m working on here.

I think at this point, I’m considering my major projects to be Global Skirmish (obviously) which has had it’s ups and downs. If I can get it to the point where people will be playing it and providing feedback, I think that would really bring the final push I need. We’ll see what happens. Maybe one of these weekends instead of getting sucked into an activity, I’ll devote the time to really fleshing out work. I think one of the things I actually need is a little note like a have at work telling me how many work items I currently have to do. Knowing is half the battle right?

The other major project, which I haven’t really started yet besides the idea, is a game show based XNA game. I’m not sure where the Eureka for that came from, but I really want to do an XNA project, and I already did a quick sample game for a “board”-ish game with simple rules, with the idea to have fast paced game play. The game isn’t really fun or anything, I was just experimenting with XNA. My graphics work needs a prayer and maybe an artist, but I’ll worry about that in the fit and finish time.

So that’s that, and we’ll see how it goes. I do want GSkirm to see the light of day, and if I get it running well enough, I may consider porting it to XNA as well, but at this juncture, I think it’s best to flesh out the GMaps game to high potential before moving forward. One of the biggest items is a client-server protocol, which I’ve been saying is daunting for a while, but yknow. Maybe I just need to man up and do it.

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Brewing

Posted on January 25, 2009 by tehdiplomat

Well I got a Mr Beer for Christmas, which is kinda is the beer brewing equivilant of web programming with Frontpage. But no matter. I’m putting wort and water and yeast into a little jug and in a few weeks I’m going to have my own beer. And I’m sure it’ll taste decent enough. Hopefully it doesn’t spoil or anything like that. I’ll let you guys know. I’m a big hophead so I did the wheat beer first to get all the kinks out. And I’ll do an IPA next. It should be pretty fun.

On the accounts of games, I decided to buy Mount and Blade from steam for 7.50$. I love buying indie games and I had thought about getting the demo for M&B for a while, but this was a great excuse to try it out and purchase it. I may have to get Maw too, but we’ll see about that. I’m glad that quality of these games are high and even though the gameplay of M&B is repetitive it’s the type of game play I enjoy. I used to play a game back in the mid-90s called Legion. It was a turn-based strategy. Moving troops around Europe and playing the different empires who all had different expansions and troop trees. M&B reminds me of this along with a thicker RPG element, and I played it today for hours without complaint. We’ll see how long I’m addicted to this one, but for 7.50 I’ve already had more entertainment than how much it cost me to see The Wrestler earlier this afternoon (which was splendid as well).

Oh well, maybe next week we’ll be back to programming.

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Mid-month updates

Posted on January 18, 2009 by tehdiplomat

So I’m currently trying to post blog updates right around the pay period. For me that’s the 15th and 30th, so I’ll just call that twice a month and go for there.

I won’t always have game related updates every 2 weeks, but I’ve been much better in the last few weeks with updating a few things, and have had my will rekindled on this project. I’ve recently added some setup for badges, the reward system for taking over regions. Most games have such a reward system, in Risk it’s cards, in Axis and Allies it’s more money to spend, and in Global Skirmish it’s badges. Your question might be: hey tehdip, what’s the difference between the card system of Risk and teh badge system of GSkirm. And I’ll just have to say that it’s quite different. The main similarity is you can only get one of each a turn. The system isn’t in place yet, but I have it all written out. I’ll try to decern it’s affect on the balance of the game, but I’m quite pleased with the idea of them. This along with the technology will be the crux of repopulating energy and combat.

Another change I just did last night had to do with Obelisks. I’ve had this idea of the Obelisks for a while now, and the whole point was great risks and great rewards type thing. If you want to use the Obelisks during the game that’s all well and good, but just be careful. If you leave your resources on one, it can be bad. As resource regeneration is a bit slower, this can be a painful blow. Now the additional part was to cause some collateral damage. I’ve added this as defaulted on option. If some energy is on an obelisk at the beginning of the turn, at the end of the turn the Obelisk will “surge.”  Originally, this just meant all the energy was wasted. But, now this has changed to dealing collateral damage. I haven’t quite filled in how much damage, but the surrounding regions will take some relative amount of damage, and then that Obelisk will be “smoldering” for a round, and be unoccupiable.

Well, those are some good updates for now I think. I’m definitely chugging through some of the stuff I want to. And have a good two computer system setup. So I’ll aim to have another updated after the Super Bowl.

Speaking of which, congrats to the Cards and the Steelers.

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