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rbandrewsI spent this weekend doing nerdy things.
On Friday, I went to Aaron's and played games for a little while. Galaxy Trucker twice (which I think we're both bad at, I'm just slightly worse at), and then Race for the Galaxy (which I got a high score at but still got trounced), and To Court the King (normally my go-to "I want to win something" game, but I still lost twice! What the hell!).
Saturday I spent the whole day in New Braunfels with Kevin.
I brought my SNES and VGA adapter, with the intent to play Zelda on one monitor while Kevin played Fallout on the other, and we talked about nerd things. Kevin's big monitor (which I have one of, too) didn't talk to the VGA adapter for some reason, though, so that was out. He ended up bringing his computer into the living room and we hooked stuff to his parents' TV.
I got through another dungeon-and-a-half of Zelda. Part of why I like it is that dungeons are bite-sized, about an hour of fun gaming for each one, and then there's a convenient stopping place for you to go do something else. I finished a dungeon I had done some of before (Death Mountain, the pendant of wisdom) and then did some stuff in the overworld (got the master sword, talked to some people in town, bought some minor items I'll need later), then did the castle and got dumped into the dark world.
After that, we went into town, got some frozen custard, and went to Best Buy. We gawked at the $90 HDMI cables (and the $50 ethernet cables next to them), got an adapter to plug his computer into the TV, and I got an Xbox 360 controller. Then we proceeded to play Trine until midnight. It's kinda like Lost Vikings with a physics engine. I think it would be better if it were all 2D, but I think that of everything.
Why did I buy an Xbox 360 controller, though, you might ask? Because they are USB. They work fine on computers, including Macs, and I've been wanting a gamepad for a while anyway. It's a comfortable, good controller with analog sticks that's compatible with most games.
Anyway, some rambling about dice:
I really like To Court the King. It's like Yahtzee set in 17th-century France. I think the basic mechanism of "roll some dice, use powers to manipulate them, lock at least one, repeat until you're out of dice" can be used for a fun single-player game.
Here's my idea: you run a construction company. You get a sequence of contracts to build things, like first you build a barn, then a farmhouse, then a manor house, and eventually there's the castle, or cathedral, or whatever the hardest thing to build in medieval Christendom would have been.
Every contract has a number of turns that the buyer is willing to wait. Blow the schedule and you lose. Every turn is like To Court in that you roll some dice and claim something.
The things you claim fall into three categories:
Building parts are what you need to fulfill the contract. These have dependencies, like "you must build all the walls before the roof". So a barn might have four wooden walls and a thatched roof, while a cathedral might have four stone walls, a stone roof, roof frescoes, stained-glass windows, a bell tower, a bell, an altar, catacombs, etc.
Tools are cards you can claim that let you manipulate dice. "Change a die to match another already-locked die" could be a tool, or "add one pip to up to three dice". Tools can be used either once per turn or once per contract.
Workers give you extra dice to roll. They're fairly easy to claim ("bring in a four as an active die" might take a pair of 4s to claim, for example) but they leave at the end of the contract. The only thing you can carry to your next job is your tools.
Unlike To Court the King, I think that you should be able to claim more than one thing in a turn; one thing from each category.
I was originally going to write a computer game out of this to make it easier to tweak the cards and such, but instead I think it might be easier to just make a real card game and then port it to the computer later. It would also be an ideal game to run over Toast, since it's single-player and turn-based.
On Friday, I went to Aaron's and played games for a little while. Galaxy Trucker twice (which I think we're both bad at, I'm just slightly worse at), and then Race for the Galaxy (which I got a high score at but still got trounced), and To Court the King (normally my go-to "I want to win something" game, but I still lost twice! What the hell!).
Saturday I spent the whole day in New Braunfels with Kevin.
I brought my SNES and VGA adapter, with the intent to play Zelda on one monitor while Kevin played Fallout on the other, and we talked about nerd things. Kevin's big monitor (which I have one of, too) didn't talk to the VGA adapter for some reason, though, so that was out. He ended up bringing his computer into the living room and we hooked stuff to his parents' TV.
I got through another dungeon-and-a-half of Zelda. Part of why I like it is that dungeons are bite-sized, about an hour of fun gaming for each one, and then there's a convenient stopping place for you to go do something else. I finished a dungeon I had done some of before (Death Mountain, the pendant of wisdom) and then did some stuff in the overworld (got the master sword, talked to some people in town, bought some minor items I'll need later), then did the castle and got dumped into the dark world.
After that, we went into town, got some frozen custard, and went to Best Buy. We gawked at the $90 HDMI cables (and the $50 ethernet cables next to them), got an adapter to plug his computer into the TV, and I got an Xbox 360 controller. Then we proceeded to play Trine until midnight. It's kinda like Lost Vikings with a physics engine. I think it would be better if it were all 2D, but I think that of everything.
Why did I buy an Xbox 360 controller, though, you might ask? Because they are USB. They work fine on computers, including Macs, and I've been wanting a gamepad for a while anyway. It's a comfortable, good controller with analog sticks that's compatible with most games.
Anyway, some rambling about dice:
I really like To Court the King. It's like Yahtzee set in 17th-century France. I think the basic mechanism of "roll some dice, use powers to manipulate them, lock at least one, repeat until you're out of dice" can be used for a fun single-player game.
Here's my idea: you run a construction company. You get a sequence of contracts to build things, like first you build a barn, then a farmhouse, then a manor house, and eventually there's the castle, or cathedral, or whatever the hardest thing to build in medieval Christendom would have been.
Every contract has a number of turns that the buyer is willing to wait. Blow the schedule and you lose. Every turn is like To Court in that you roll some dice and claim something.
The things you claim fall into three categories:
Building parts are what you need to fulfill the contract. These have dependencies, like "you must build all the walls before the roof". So a barn might have four wooden walls and a thatched roof, while a cathedral might have four stone walls, a stone roof, roof frescoes, stained-glass windows, a bell tower, a bell, an altar, catacombs, etc.
Tools are cards you can claim that let you manipulate dice. "Change a die to match another already-locked die" could be a tool, or "add one pip to up to three dice". Tools can be used either once per turn or once per contract.
Workers give you extra dice to roll. They're fairly easy to claim ("bring in a four as an active die" might take a pair of 4s to claim, for example) but they leave at the end of the contract. The only thing you can carry to your next job is your tools.
Unlike To Court the King, I think that you should be able to claim more than one thing in a turn; one thing from each category.
I was originally going to write a computer game out of this to make it easier to tweak the cards and such, but instead I think it might be easier to just make a real card game and then port it to the computer later. It would also be an ideal game to run over Toast, since it's single-player and turn-based.
