Making a board game with my brother
Prayer by Petra
Hi all. It's been another fairly ordinary month for me. My family had a get-together that lumped together Father's Day, my birthday, and my niece's birthday. I got mainly cash for buying new Switch games, which is fine by me. ;) I picked up Metroid Dread and New Pokemon Snap, although I haven't actually tried them yet -- I'm still letting my brother keep my Switch until Splatoon 3 comes out in September.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I finally got back to an area of the game I'd had on the back-burner for a long time: reimplementing the monster map event movements system in DynRPG. It was held up because I'd run into a bug in the experimental DynRPG moveEvents function, and after informing the creator of the unofficial DynRPG expansion branch about it, I was waiting for him to get around to make a fix. Well, I finally poked him about it, and after some back and forth of me trying to fix it myself after he pointed me to the GitHub where he keeps the code, he went ahead and made the needed change. Ironically, I still haven't managed to make compiling the new version of DynRPG and applying it to my project work. X) However, I did find a workaround that negated the bug in DynRPG, which is what I'm using now.
So, I finished the monster movements system, and I implemented the movements for all the monsters currently in the game. In the case of deku babas, I even improved it: deku babas now lunge outward a space when snapping at the hero. I also added 'tells' in battle for all the existing monsters, so that they have a chance of giving a textual hint about what their next action is and whom they're targeting.
I've also gotten things going a little bit in a project my brother wanted to do with me: making a board game based on a silly little role-playing universe our brother-in-law invented called Crooked Space. He said he had something in mind similar to the game FTL: Faster Than Light, in which you have crew members running about your ship to work on various systems. That aspect of the game is pretty vaguely defined for the moment, but I came up with an interesting idea inspired by the name Crooked Space: what if there were anomalies in the space between the combating ships which bend the path of any missiles going between them? My brother really liked the idea once I showed it to him in Tabletop Simulator, although we're finding it's a little tricky to find ways to make effective use of it from a design perspective. It's just too easy to redirect any missile which comes close to your ship if you can plunk down an anomaly every turn. Maybe if they were just one of many plays you could make, with limits on how often you can do it...so yeah, we're at a very hazy stage of design here and neither of us is especially experienced at designing board games. X)
In this month's Ninja Burger mission, the team had to deliver an after-race celebration meal for the Mario Kart crew. When they arrived at Funky Stadium, they found the only way to get access to the racer's lounge was to qualify for the Mario Kart league themselves. So they participated in tryouts against a team of shy guys, in a Funky Stadium recreation which took me most of that day to build in Tabletop Simulator. X) There were fireballs, bob-ombs, and shells flying fast and thick, and even a rare blue spiked shell, though strangely nobody ended up getting any banana peels. e.ea
On Zelda RPG, Tommy, Lexa, and Nabooru made it to an island where Nabooru knew there was a good spot to fish for voltfin trout. When they got there, though, they found it had been fished out, likely by the local monster population. Nabooru remarked that it looks like they'll have to steal the fish back, and Tommy was seemingly vindicated in his belief that this whole task was a test in disguise from the Mistress of Thieves to her protoge. ;9 So they set off following the trail in the sand leading away from the fishing hole.
Another scene has been progressing rather slowly regarding the resolution of the flooding plot. Irina and Revali went to Lake Hylia (or at least, the part of the ocean that used to be Lake Hylia) to investigate the place from which the great waters sprang, and Fallon has been spoofing circumstances there. Fallon mentioned she'd been trying to get more folks involved for the finale, so I tossed in Aubrey, who arrived on his loftwing in time to witness a big ol' whale breaching the surface. 8o Irina, who went diving, has been caught by currents and sucked toward the bottom. As a magic user with water affinity, she's able to hold her breath down there longer than most, but she's still no Zora. c.c;
Slay the Spire:
Yet another Humble Bundle title. This one is a deck-building mildly-randomized RPG (I say mildly because the possible encounters are pre-designed and the main question is which ones you'll run into on a given run, although there are other elements, particularly which cards you'll find, that are much more chaotic). It looks as though it was built with mobile devices primarily in mind, but it works fine on PC. For those who may not be familiar with deck-building games, the basic idea is that you start with a small set of cards, usually with very simple and not-very-powerful capabilities, and use them to acquire more cards which are added into your deck. This in turn hopefully makes you more effective as you acquire more powerful cards. Often certain cards are more effective in tandem with certain other cards -- for example, a card that requires you to discard another card from your current hand could be considered a downside, but if you have other cards that give bonuses if you've discarded something this turn, that could turn it around. So you have to give some thought to the overall synergy of your deck so far when deciding which new cards to add, and occasionally it might even be a better idea to forego new cards entirely so that the stuff you have that already works comes up more often.
In the case of Slay the Spire, the deck-building aspect is sort of just one half of things. The enemies you face aren't using decks themselves, they're more of traditional CRPG monsters that have their own abilities and choose between them through some semi-random process (although those abilities do often have some effect on your own ability to play cards). There are also mechanics that would've been quite difficult to implement in a physical card game, like effects that modify specific cards (usually just for the current combat or even the current hand, but there are a few cases of permanent change). You pick up relics as you go along that give little bonuses (and sometimes downsides as well), further complicating matters.
As for story, it's pretty light and mostly inferred as you go through events. Apparently there's this living tower of evil, the titular Spire, and the characters you can play as have varying motivations for wanting to climb and slay it. The denizens of the tower are mostly fell beasts, rogues, and cultists, although you do run into the occasional semi-friendly entity -- games like this have to have shopkeepers at least, after all. ;) Eventually, assuming you survive, you reach the Heart of the Spire (literally a giant hanging heart), and unleash your mightiest blow! But though you inflict damage (and the game gives you an update on just how much damage you and all players have given it), it beats on! A strange sense of deja vu envelops you as you lose consciousness...and the Rogue-like cycle begins anew. Until, that is, you get that far with all of the three main characters, and unlock the opportunity to reach the game's true final challenge. +.+
Bottom line? A nice little popcorn game, especially if you like card games. Pick it up if you want something strategic to while away some time, especially on a mobile device.
Click to viewHi all. It's been another fairly ordinary month for me. My family had a get-together that lumped together Father's Day, my birthday, and my niece's birthday. I got mainly cash for buying new Switch games, which is fine by me. ;) I picked up Metroid Dread and New Pokemon Snap, although I haven't actually tried them yet -- I'm still letting my brother keep my Switch until Splatoon 3 comes out in September.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I finally got back to an area of the game I'd had on the back-burner for a long time: reimplementing the monster map event movements system in DynRPG. It was held up because I'd run into a bug in the experimental DynRPG moveEvents function, and after informing the creator of the unofficial DynRPG expansion branch about it, I was waiting for him to get around to make a fix. Well, I finally poked him about it, and after some back and forth of me trying to fix it myself after he pointed me to the GitHub where he keeps the code, he went ahead and made the needed change. Ironically, I still haven't managed to make compiling the new version of DynRPG and applying it to my project work. X) However, I did find a workaround that negated the bug in DynRPG, which is what I'm using now.
So, I finished the monster movements system, and I implemented the movements for all the monsters currently in the game. In the case of deku babas, I even improved it: deku babas now lunge outward a space when snapping at the hero. I also added 'tells' in battle for all the existing monsters, so that they have a chance of giving a textual hint about what their next action is and whom they're targeting.
I've also gotten things going a little bit in a project my brother wanted to do with me: making a board game based on a silly little role-playing universe our brother-in-law invented called Crooked Space. He said he had something in mind similar to the game FTL: Faster Than Light, in which you have crew members running about your ship to work on various systems. That aspect of the game is pretty vaguely defined for the moment, but I came up with an interesting idea inspired by the name Crooked Space: what if there were anomalies in the space between the combating ships which bend the path of any missiles going between them? My brother really liked the idea once I showed it to him in Tabletop Simulator, although we're finding it's a little tricky to find ways to make effective use of it from a design perspective. It's just too easy to redirect any missile which comes close to your ship if you can plunk down an anomaly every turn. Maybe if they were just one of many plays you could make, with limits on how often you can do it...so yeah, we're at a very hazy stage of design here and neither of us is especially experienced at designing board games. X)
In this month's Ninja Burger mission, the team had to deliver an after-race celebration meal for the Mario Kart crew. When they arrived at Funky Stadium, they found the only way to get access to the racer's lounge was to qualify for the Mario Kart league themselves. So they participated in tryouts against a team of shy guys, in a Funky Stadium recreation which took me most of that day to build in Tabletop Simulator. X) There were fireballs, bob-ombs, and shells flying fast and thick, and even a rare blue spiked shell, though strangely nobody ended up getting any banana peels. e.ea
On Zelda RPG, Tommy, Lexa, and Nabooru made it to an island where Nabooru knew there was a good spot to fish for voltfin trout. When they got there, though, they found it had been fished out, likely by the local monster population. Nabooru remarked that it looks like they'll have to steal the fish back, and Tommy was seemingly vindicated in his belief that this whole task was a test in disguise from the Mistress of Thieves to her protoge. ;9 So they set off following the trail in the sand leading away from the fishing hole.
Another scene has been progressing rather slowly regarding the resolution of the flooding plot. Irina and Revali went to Lake Hylia (or at least, the part of the ocean that used to be Lake Hylia) to investigate the place from which the great waters sprang, and Fallon has been spoofing circumstances there. Fallon mentioned she'd been trying to get more folks involved for the finale, so I tossed in Aubrey, who arrived on his loftwing in time to witness a big ol' whale breaching the surface. 8o Irina, who went diving, has been caught by currents and sucked toward the bottom. As a magic user with water affinity, she's able to hold her breath down there longer than most, but she's still no Zora. c.c;
Slay the Spire:
Yet another Humble Bundle title. This one is a deck-building mildly-randomized RPG (I say mildly because the possible encounters are pre-designed and the main question is which ones you'll run into on a given run, although there are other elements, particularly which cards you'll find, that are much more chaotic). It looks as though it was built with mobile devices primarily in mind, but it works fine on PC. For those who may not be familiar with deck-building games, the basic idea is that you start with a small set of cards, usually with very simple and not-very-powerful capabilities, and use them to acquire more cards which are added into your deck. This in turn hopefully makes you more effective as you acquire more powerful cards. Often certain cards are more effective in tandem with certain other cards -- for example, a card that requires you to discard another card from your current hand could be considered a downside, but if you have other cards that give bonuses if you've discarded something this turn, that could turn it around. So you have to give some thought to the overall synergy of your deck so far when deciding which new cards to add, and occasionally it might even be a better idea to forego new cards entirely so that the stuff you have that already works comes up more often.
In the case of Slay the Spire, the deck-building aspect is sort of just one half of things. The enemies you face aren't using decks themselves, they're more of traditional CRPG monsters that have their own abilities and choose between them through some semi-random process (although those abilities do often have some effect on your own ability to play cards). There are also mechanics that would've been quite difficult to implement in a physical card game, like effects that modify specific cards (usually just for the current combat or even the current hand, but there are a few cases of permanent change). You pick up relics as you go along that give little bonuses (and sometimes downsides as well), further complicating matters.
As for story, it's pretty light and mostly inferred as you go through events. Apparently there's this living tower of evil, the titular Spire, and the characters you can play as have varying motivations for wanting to climb and slay it. The denizens of the tower are mostly fell beasts, rogues, and cultists, although you do run into the occasional semi-friendly entity -- games like this have to have shopkeepers at least, after all. ;) Eventually, assuming you survive, you reach the Heart of the Spire (literally a giant hanging heart), and unleash your mightiest blow! But though you inflict damage (and the game gives you an update on just how much damage you and all players have given it), it beats on! A strange sense of deja vu envelops you as you lose consciousness...and the Rogue-like cycle begins anew. Until, that is, you get that far with all of the three main characters, and unlock the opportunity to reach the game's true final challenge. +.+
Bottom line? A nice little popcorn game, especially if you like card games. Pick it up if you want something strategic to while away some time, especially on a mobile device.