We googled it at work

Supposedly putting a fish in club soda and then putting the whole mess into the freezer is a way to painlessly euthanize fish.

I find that quite dubious. If I were a fish, I would expect that being dropped in burning fizzy acid with no oxygen and then frozen would hurt like hell, and would be not unlike drowning in liquid fire.

But it does answer the question: if it's a supposed technique of fish euthanasia, then obviously the fish wouldn't survive it.

Game idea: Resource Kingdom

You know that annoying thing where a song gets stuck in your head and you mentally sing sone catchy part of it for days on end to the point where you can't sleep, or even really talk, and you do everything to the rhythm of the tune that only you can hear?¹

Well, some game designs are like that with me. I am phenomenally bad at game design, but once I get one in my head I can't stop going over it and over it. Like this one:

The game is meant as sort of an ultra-casual² riff on a fantasy-empire-management game (does that kind of game even have a name? I mean something like Heroes of Might and Magic or Age of Wonders). Ultra-casual games never have more than one or two verbs, and are usually playable with just one button. Think minesweeper, or Tetris.

The verb for this game is "giving resources to things". You have resource cubes of different types, like wood, iron, stone, gold, mana, and food. Every turn you get one, and get a preview of what the next one will be, like Tetris. Your turns consist of giving that resource to something, which then uses it for some effect. The effect might need a target as well, so you click once on the thing of yours you're giving a resource to, and maybe once on its target. Two clicks, one turn.

Almost all the effects will actually require a combination of resources. Say you have a village. It generates infantry given a gold and two food. The first two times you give it resources, it will just store them, but when you complete the set, then you get to plop an infantry down next to the village. Now you have an infantry. Since it's a thing of yours, you can give it resources. Say that for one of any kind of cube, it will move up to five spaces, and attack anything it lands on.

That's generally how your stuff works, now we need a goal, some antagonist that you're working against. There are a couple of ways we could go here.

One way is to make random enemies that wander around, and evil towns that spawn them. You send armies to fight them and capture the towns, and when you're the only person with things left, you win. I think this is sort of dull though, for a couple reasons: it lends itself to having to hunt down that one last goblin, and it lends itself to the usual grind of turtle, build a big army, grab one town, turtle, repeat. With just unorganized creeps fighting you, then you aren't in any real danger, and if they are organized, then the game gets a lot harder to make (hard AI, or multiplayer hassles). I am aiming for a challenging but light single player game here.

Another possibility is that you're hunting for some mystical artifact hidden on the map. This also lends itself to turtling, but we can fix that! Suppose you have only a limited number of resources and then you're done. Now you have to spend your cubes wisely, and while we'll tell you how many you are going to get total of each type, we won't tell you what order they'll come in.

Except, this makes the armies sort of useless. What point is there in building a big army if the game is won or lost by finding a magic item? Build a couple cheap guys and them dump every cube into searching for it.

So, just having the treasure is bad. What if we take the armies off the map entirely? Well, then why have a map, so, we leave just one guy on there, your hero. Whenever you build an army, he automatically gets it, it doesn't appear on the map. So now what good are armies? Well, maybe there's one big fight at the end. And if we have one big fight, then why have an artifact? Just have the Big Bad that you're fighting.

Now we're getting somewhere. We have your stuff, your hero, the enemy's citadel, and the enemy's creeps, all on the map. Each one of your cities builds units or some other effect when given cubes. Your hero moves around when given one of any cube, searching for stuff.

The enemy can raid things with his creeps. If a creep lands on one of your buildings, then all the (unspent) cubes in that building get converted into more enemy creeps. If your hero lands on a creep then it is destroyed automatically (creeps are crappy, your hero is a legendary swordsman). There would also be towers that can shoot magic at any creep in range.

Also on the map are random goodies that will do one-shot cool effects, like maybe scrolls that show you the current location of every creep, or something that gives you ten random extra cubes, or something.

So the game ends when either your hero walks on to the enemy citadel, or you run out of cubes. Either way, there is one big battle, all the enemy's remaining creeps versus all the soldiers you've made. I see this as sort of a watch-it-happen sort of battle; by this point there isn't too much game left and it should be obvious how well you did. So define some sort of order and some sort of quick rock-paper-scissors mechanism, like ranged units kill infantry kill monsters/magicians kill ranged units, with a little tiny bit of random thrown in.

Afterward, if you won, your score is determined by how many cubes you didn't use and the cube value of the soldiers you have left alive.

¹ Carbon Leaf's Any Given Day was the worst thing this ever happened to me with.

² I hate the term "Mass-Market Ultra-Casual" since it sounds stupid, but also since I hate the idea of mass-market anything.

The books I buy in a year, part II

4. Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim & Jesse Hamm (graphic novel)

5. Software Tools by Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger

6. The Final Cut by Michael Dobbs