Friday, August 02, 2013

| Dev Food For Thought - Episode 1

UPDATE:  Rather than clutter this place up, I'm moving my dev dumps to a separate blog.

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When inspired with a crazy game mechanic, system, or general game idea, I'm going to jot it down here so I don't lose it either in my brain or on a piece of paper.  Feel free to ignore, or comment, or add, but don't feel like you need to acknowledge or discuss any of these.

Threat Mechanic

When a player does damage to an enemy, the card played should have a damage amount listed and a threat value, the card is then attached to the enemy.  If another player does damage to the same target, the threat value is compared to the current attached threat:

 -  if it's higher, the enemy shifts its focus to the new player (effectively the player just 'pulled' the enemy)

 -  if it is lower, the enemy maintains it's focus on the current player.

Tank roles would of course have abilities that could either immediately pull enemies, or their attacks would have a higher threat to damage value rating (likely healing classes, too).  Damage classes could also have lower threat to damage attacks.

Enemy AoE Abilities

AoE abilities affect all players, unless they have a card in play that states they are out of AoE range.  This would then allow them to only play ranged attacks or equivalent abilities/spells/etc.  Reaction cards ("Dodge!") could cancel or avoid AoE effects.

| durrr-itos

I'm good for either day, Star Wars action! If this week doesn't work, a future week is fine. But Monday/Tuesdays/Saturdays are best for me in general. I'm painting the "office"/nursery this weekend, so if it becomes a drawn out affair (this is my first time painting anything) then I'll have to play via the iPad. That worked super well last time! :) (I think the google house party app is better these days anyways)

PS: I picked up the iOS game Tiny Thief. It's super fun! It's from Rovio Stars which is Rovio (Angry Birds people) publishing games by other "indie" developers. This game is pretty fun, if kinda easy. It's on sale for 99 cents from 2.99. You play a thief and each level is a sort of stealth-based puzzle. SUPER cool animations and art. Nothing has stumped me yet, but it's just a lot of fun to play through. That will only coast you 1/3rd of a Doritos Taco! I had one before and was somehow surprised that it tastes exactly how you'd expect - Doritos for a shell.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

| Rise of the Runelords, tell me about it

I'm intrigued! Are you doing the subscription thing? What's the advantage of that -- promo cards or something? How much is shipping? Is it a deckbuilder?

Sentinels was a lot of fun. The art didn't bother me so much -- but I certainly have lower/different standards along those lines -- but can definitely see room for improvement. I love how it seems like a pretty well-balanced game that just works and was very thematic, although it's definitely a little more complex than I thought, since you do need to track when cards come out in order to resolve timing. I LOVE the idea of the LCGs/CCGs though. Tell Sven to work on his LotR deck, or ship out!

What Aeryk didn't mention was that his visit was also the occasion to resolve an obsession of mine and go get a Doritos-flavored taco from Taco Hell. The wife had actually said she'd be willing to try it but there is no way I would submit my unborn child to such a thing. The Cool Ranch taco itself was pretty w/e, but everything tasted exactly like I remember the countless other Mexican pizzas and bean burritos I sucked down in high school/college.

OK guys, who is down for some Star Wars action next week!?? Would either Monday or Tuesday work for an online get-together, say from 8:00-10:00??? Stop me before I run out the world's supply of punctuation marks!!??

| Card Manifesto

Got the game and have started breaking down the heroes to see if there is any pattern that jumps out at me and screams "this is the formula!".

I've done two and after looking at the spreadsheet I'm creating I have no idea if I'll do more....  Uuuuugly.  But until all the data is there, I won't know what I'm looking at, so I must persevere! I must be a Sentinel of our Multiverse or the blood will be on my hands!!!

I LOVE the idea of being able to create and craft a story via a game like this.  I mean who doesn't want to see Ro, Fared, Brother Simon, or (insert forgotten character name here) as a player in an actual game?
That's way better thought out than any of my game ideas! Run with it! Find a cool genre to stamp on top of it. Something different. Something fun like the Time Bandits - something cool where you can have wildly different types of monsters and heroes.

I think I mentioned this before, but watch Beach Party on Netflix. It's the first of those 60's Frankie and Annette beach movies. The first surfing scene, about 10 minutes in is ridiculous! There's shots of like 20 people all catching the same wave, hahaha. It's way rad. Plus greaser-looking Dick Dale's all over it lip syncing songs which is pretty rockin.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

| Sentinels of the Multi-Pass

***Warning, nerdy game design brain dump follows***

So Enoto and I had a small games day yesterday in WC and we played the hot new game, Sentinels of the Multiverse!  The players each play a pre-built superhero deck and fight against a single AI/Big Bad deck.  It was a lot of fun once we got into it.  I liked it so much I picked up a copy from Amazon today!

The success of the separate, static decks for the superheroes, but the wonky 1 - 2 player rules (should have 3 heroes, so with less that 3 players you need to play multiple hero decks), and my less than enthusiastic response to the artwork and theme, made me re-imagine a video game 'instance' as a card game where all the roles would need to be included, but could be scaled from 1 - 5 players.  I'm thinking Sentinels for the static decks and AI driven enemy deck, LotR for the concept of 'pulling' enemies (maybe with some threat mechanic to keep those enemies), and the Star Wars LCG for the deck customization that uses groups of cards, rather than single cards, for customization that would sort of emulate 'specs' or 'focus' of different roles, e.g. DPS crowd control, vs. ranged, vs, melee would all have a different potential bundle of cards to be added/removed depending on the style of play each player wanted.

So each role would need to be in play, but each character would have cards with numbers 1 -5 on them to show which should be included in the deck depending on the number of players.  If you have 1 player, all the 1 cards from all 5 roles would be added to one deck and then the one player would play all the roles at once.  Those cards would probably be the most straight forward, and possibly powerful cards from the different roles since playing 5 roles but with one turn to do so would require more 'bang for the buck' each turn.  If you are playing with 2 players, you just divvy the roles between the two players and have at it, etc.

I'm pretty sure there is some formula for creating the Sentinel character decks, so I'm going to spend some time deconstructing each one and trying to find what makes each tick and maybe better understand what keeps them relatively balanced.  Then I'll proceed to step 3, and the by the 4th step - PROFIT!

/brain dump over

*Whew*  Now that I've said that, you will never hear about it from me again because by the time I post this I will likely be tired and not have the energy or drive to follow-through.