Chesstris

What kickstarter could teach Apple about app discovery

Martin — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:46:01 +0000

A few weeks ago, Kickstarter fairly quietly launched the ability to “follow” other Kickstarter users. I can’t find a blog post to link to, though the feature is mentioned in their “This week in kickstarter” post just before they had their 3rd anniversary post. I’m fairly certain I noticed it, but didn’t think much of it until they called out the “friend finder” they had also created (with some kind of notification in the site’s header).

The long and the short of it is that I linked-up my facebook account and now receive an email when certain of my friends back a project on kickstarter. So far, sometimes this is just noise, but sometimes, as with the AmplifiEar project a couple of days ago, I find a new project that a friend is backing that I’ve never even heard about.

Obviously, the conclusion here is that I want this feature for the app store. Apple already put “social” into iTunes with Ping, and I’m a bit worried that they’re going to say that experiment failed, and not carry it forward into the app store. On the other hand, they bought Chomp recently, presumably acknowledging that they have a problem with app discovery.

Maybe the correct place for this type of thing is in Game Center, where we already have game recommendations. (Although there is no indication why those games are recommended.) Of course we also have a friends list there. You can even see what games they own, and the ones they’ve played most recently! Why not add the option to get notified when they actually buy these games? Ideally, I want this in email form, because I’m not going to remember to open up the Game Center app with any real regularity. (And a push notification is just silly, for this, I think.)

While I’m requesting Game Center features. (Don’t get me started.) I sure wish I could embed my Game Center profile in this blog post. (I’ll just include a screenshot here instead.)

App Release: Fez Translator

Martin — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:07:08 +0000

Here’s the description for my latest app in the app store, the fez translator:

******** SPOILER ALERT ********

This is a fan-made app to help with the translation tasks that take place in the game Fez for the Xbox. If you want to figure it all out for yourself, read no further!

Essentially, this is meant to help with the task of translating the various glyphs found in Fez. I found it useful, maybe you will too!

I’ll fully admit that the idea was not mine, (my co-worker @breon gets that dubious honor) but all the implementation choices and decisions around those were mine. I basically spent about 2 hours on this app. The first hour was creating pretty much everything but the delete and back buttons, and then the second hour (a day or two later) was spent implementing the back and delete buttons, and submitting to the app store.

I hope some folks like it. I spent a few hours playing fez with it in my hand. It sure beats trying to do the translations in my head (with nothing but an image to reference in my photos application).

Man the Player

Martin — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:39:02 +0000

Here’s an interesting quote from Masters of Doom, by David Kushner:

…Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play…is a significant function…which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton…Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture…The games of a people reveal a great deal about them…[They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.”

I didn’t want to lose track of this.

App Store Submission Process using Unity or UDK

Martin — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:10:46 +0000

I responded to a mobile twin cities thread about developing for iPhone without owning a Mac with the assertion that you still needed a mac to submit to the app store with either Unity or the Unreal Development Kit. It bugged me that I hadn’t verified the information, so a couple of quick google searches later, and I confirmed that I had been correct. Both the unreal submission process and submission process for the UDK require an apple machine at some point for code signing.

Ecstasy of Awesome

Martin — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:48:32 +0000

I saw the movie Ecstacy Of Order: The Tetris Masters tonight, a documentary about the first “Classic Tetris World Championship” held in (I believe) 2010. Like Word Wars (2004, about Scrabble) and King of Kong (2007 about Donkey Kong) before it, we learn something about the lives of specific characters who take part in this tournament of experts, in this case expert game players of the classic (original) version of Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Also like it’s spiritual predecessors, the documentary mostly succeeds because of the intriguing nature of those characters.

I can’t really recommend this movie highly enough. It far outstripped my expectations, (which admittedly were pretty low), and actually made me want to evangelize the movie, as well as, of course, go home and play some Tetris.

Pit Chess / Recent Addictions

Martin — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:59:31 +0000

On Friday, my game designer friend Patrick alerted me to a post over at Play This Thing about Pit Chess. You can play Pit Chess on Kongregate, and it’s essentially a cross between chess and Drop 7. In case you’re not familiar, Drop 7 is a game where pieces with numbers drop from the top of the screen. You have to match up the numbers with positions on the gameboard to remove them from the board and score points. Pit Chess takes the pieces-drop-from-the-top mechanic and adds chess pieces and movement to the whole thing. Pieces drop whenever you make a move that doesn’t capture a pawn. As long as you continue to capture pawns, the screen empties, and you play cleanup for a while. When you inevitably run out of pawns to capture, you go back to capturing other pieces. The game emphasizes alternating between these two modes of gameplay by giving you a point multiplier that goes up as long as you capture pieces that aren’t pawns. There are Kongregate high score tables for highest multiplier, as well as highest scores in the two gameplay modes. I really dig this game, and sort of wish I’d thought of it. (It would have made a great Action Chess game mode!) Then again, I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve worked on for ActionChess that hasn’t (yet!) seen the light of day.

I’m going to go back to playing fez now. I tweeted about this already, but there are Tetris shaped constellations in the night sky in Fez! I’m not even a fan of platform games usually, (although I played a fair bit of Mario III, and certainly Mario 64 back in the day), but Fez is just appealing to me on so many levels. I was pretty hyped up about it after seeing Renaud Bédard talk about the tech behind Fez at GDC earlier this year, and it’s definitely lived up to my high expectations so far. As an aside, we all have our indie developer crushes. One of mine is definitely Renaud. Check out this list of games he’s worked on!

Global Game Jam Board Game Rundown

Martin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:48:44 +0000

After joining my fellow twin cities IGDA members at the global game jam a few weekends ago, I was all fired up about the board games that were made that weekend. In fact, I spent a good chunk of the following weekend going through all one hundred and two “non-digital” games in the Global Game Jam database from 2012. With the exception of a few that I skipped over categorically (mostly roll-and-moves, but I apologize if I missed any cool ones), this post contains my paring down of those hundred-plus games to just the English ones that are ready for print-and-play. Keep in mind that I would guess at least one-in-four had absolutely nothing on the game page at all other than a name and sometimes a description. There were also probably between three and ten that were just totally miss-categorized, as well as a similar number that weren’t written in English.

After doing all that research, I meant to post my thoughts on all these playable games ASAP, but it took me until tonight to find the time to sit down and actually do it. So without further ado, here is a list of all the games that, at the time of my research, had all the files and instructions necessary to play them available on the Global Game Jam website, along with some (brief) thoughts on each one.

First, there were ~~five~~four games I managed to get to a playable state by our IGDA meetup:

Eat Thyself – (printing requires color) – I would of course be remiss if I did not put my own project first. My friend and fellow board game designer August Brown did an absolutely fantastic job on the artwork for this, (and he wasn’t even signed up for the Game Jam!) I’m very excited to mount the board I’ve printed to posterboard sometime in the not-so-distant future. It’s an abstract strategy that plays 2 or 3 players in probably around ten minutes. I’m calling it a “light” abstract because there’s not a whole lot of brain burning. The game admittedly has some problems when played with 3 players, but I’ve got some ideas for fixing it, I just haven’t tested them yet, or posted them anywhere.
Saprobiont – (requires color) – The artwork on this one is absolutely fantastic. It only plays with exactly four players, and each player has variable player abilities, and also score victory points (called biomass) in subtly different ways. It’s lightly war-game-ish, but with such simple (and balanced) combat that it feels more like an abstract strategy game. This game pretty much dominated our IGDA recap night, and was played at least five times in the course of the evening. I had someone ask me for advice about making their own copy a few days later. At least one of the creators is active on Board Game Geek, and has created an entry for Saprobiont there as well.
Aion: A Game of Serpents – (requires color) – This two-player tile-laying game has extremely well designed rules, with lots of illustrations and examples. I am sad I didn’t get a chance to play the version I made for our meetup. I’m not even sure that anyone played it!
Ouroboros – (B&W is probably fine) – This was actually the first of the GGJBGs that I played. Sunday afternoon, I was hanging around the Game Jam, watching everyone else frantically finish up while I wrote blog posts and read twitter. Eventually I got bored of that, and started surfing games on the Game Jam website that looked ready to play. This one jumped out at me because it was one of the only other games tagged “Abstract Strategy”. It was also playable with a pile of lego pieces (which I had on hand), and on a 6×6 gameboard I was able to draw in 10 seconds. I convinced another Jammer to play with me, and we were both quite impressed. Lots of thinking, and the game didn’t turn out at all the way we’d thought it was headed, so surprise twists at the end of the game are possible (not something I look for in an abstract, but it was refreshing at the time).
Cult Wars – (B&W) – looks to be an interesting card game for 2 to 4 players, and it has absolutely fantastic black and white artwork. Unfortunately, I got the cards all printed and cut, and had everything ready to go before I really started looking into the rules. I think there is some clarification needed on some pretty major points. (For example, which cards do you start with, and which do you draw in the course of playing?) The rules need some major work, IMHO, and unfortunately, the game is not really “ready” to play without making some stuff up as you go.

Other games I believe are ready to play but that just didn’t make the cut in my first pass:

Alpha & Omega – (requires color) – A tile laying game with player pawns that need to be positioned optimally for scoring at the end of the game. The rules PDF has some formatting issues, but I’m still interested, and would love to try it out sometime.
destination earth – (B&W) – 2-player card game with science fiction theme. The hand-drawn art is pretty cool, but the cards look fairly dull to me. I really have no idea how it plays.
Escape from Infinity – (requires color) – I noticed this game also has a BGG page now. This is a racing game… the innovation here is that before anyone moves, you choose a card for each player, and on your turn, you chose one of those players to move the number of spaces your card represents. Seems like there’s ample opportunity for screwage as well as nail biting as you hope so-and-so doesn’t screw up your card choices. When all the cards have moved, the round is over, and it all starts over again.
floatsam – (B&W) – I didn’t quite understand the rules here at first pass. They probably deserve another look, but it’s somehow a “competitive maze game of skill and luck for 2-4 players”.
The Frightening Temple Of Set – (requires color) – This game has a sweet looking hand-drawn gameboard. It’s a roll-and-move, but with some rather complex rules that might make it fun for a certain kind of person.
Lines of Nazca – (requires color & Legos!) – I actually think this looks awesome. You construct a secret puzzle goal out of three lego pieces that you hide from everyone else and are trying to duplicate as you play the game. Meanwhile, you are also moving a pawn on the gameboard by playing lego pieces.
Magnum Opus – (requires color) – Looks like another tile-laying game. I’d need to “dig in” before I truly understood this one, I think.
Moebius slider – (B&W) – This incredibly simple dexterity game should have made “the cut”, but I just didn’t remember to make it at the very last minute.
OUROBOTOS – (requires color) – You are assembling some kind of giant robot. How much cooler than that is even possible!?! Apparently there is resource management. I haven’t fully examined this one yet.
Rapush – (technically not B&W, but looks to be okay with it) – This appears to be a pretty straight-forward abstract strategy game with the “pushing other people’s pieces” mechanic.
Stranded – (B&W) – Interesting seeming card game with rather lackluster art. The game’s setup could use some additional explaining.
tailbiter – (B&W) – I can’t quite tell if the very minimalist rule-set would be enough to grok this game. It sounds almost war-like.
Your Genre Sucks – (technically needs color, but would probably work without – requires standard deck of cards) – Fairly interesting story-telling game where everyone plays with a different genre and must keep pulling the story back into their type of story.

Bonus Game!!!

Obsolescence – (requires color) – This game wasn’t available when I did my earlier research, but I noticed it tonight, and am intrigued. Here’s the description the designers gave it: “Tile Laying game in which players develop, upgrade, and recycle successive generations of Apple gadgets by laying tiles representing components on a circuit board, connector edge to connector edge in order to form closed loops consisting of newly laid and previously laid components.” Sounds right up my alley, doesn’t it? I’ll have to try this out sometime soon.

Honorable mentions list #1 (Games that would be cool, but look too hard to construct):

Entagon
pandemonium
Sugar Crush

Honorable Mentions list #2: (Not all files are available, but would possibly be really cool if they were!):

Cowroboros
Blue Print
Centrix
Gaeon
Goons & Guns

My Global Game Jam Recap Presentation

Martin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:51:39 +0000

I put together these slides to talk about my Global Game Jam entry, Eat Thyself.

…I also printed the following games for playing at our IGDATC meeting. (Where I did this presentation.)

Shibumi Game Design

Martin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:23:07 +0000

In the past month or so, I’ve quite enjoyed designing and then entering at least one game (ok, technically two) into the Shibumi Game Design Challenge. Shibumi is a board game “system” that uses spherical balls of three different colors that stack into a 4x4x4 pyramid. Partly as a result of this challenge, there are now lots of games for the system. I made my own set out of some marbles I bought online. I made a gameboard out of posterboard that looked like this:

Eventually I replaced that by buying a copy of the excellent abstract Pylos (which is also a game played with spheres on a 4×4 grid). My marbles work great on the Pylos gameboard, so I’ve basically just scrapped my original posterboard now.

My first game for Shibumi was called Spice, (all games need to start with “sp”, standing for “square pyramidal”). It was actually just a port of Nick Bentley’s interesting abstract Ketchup. So I guess there really wasn’t much design there.

I spent quite a few weeks thinking (obsessing) about Shibumi, and one of my other ideas was to remove “tetris shapes” from the gameboard after you (or your opponent) make them. I called it Spolyominos, mostly just because someone had already called their game Spetris earlier in the competition.

Additionally, I had some other ideas for Shibumi game mechanics that I never really turned into a game. One idea was moving the pieces like chess pieces. I was imagining all red pieces move like knights, all white like bishops, and all black move like rooks. I even made some images to show how the pieces could move:

The goal with this was wanting to create gameplay that “feels like” the great chess variant Tic-Tac-Check, (which plays super fast and is a lot of fun), but in that game, players have pieces of their own color, (and they’re trying to connect 4 of them on the gameboard). I didn’t really figure out a way to have the three colors correspond to the three types of chess pieces, and also have pieces that are either one player’s or the other’s.

Partly as a result of my Shibumi game design obsession, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about modern abstract game design. And as a result, I really wanted to play more modern abstracts. I decided to set up a board game meetup to play some of the abstract games I own, but hadn’t gotten a chance to play, and it went really well! We played a ton of Shibumi games, as well as many of the GIPF project games that I rarely get a chance to put on the table. I also got to play Ketchup for the first time (not on a website). The next minneapolis abstract strategy game day is scheduled for a week from today, and I’m hoping it’ll be equally entertaining.

Word Puzzle Mashups

Martin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:02:58 +0000

My friend Jason clued me in to this match-3 like word game that was featured by apple this week: W.E.L.D.E.R.

Then a scant day later I stumbled onto an interview with Zach Gage, who recently launched SpellTower, a tetris-attack style word game. The interview is pretty cool, and he says a lot of stuff I feel about missing the innovation present in the early days of the app store. I’m a bit disappointed that SpellTower is iPad only, but I may still pick it up to check it out.

I thought it funny that (in the same week) there were two new word game hybrids to add to my list of interesting word games. (Bookworm, Imangi, WordSolitaire, Word Jong, WordFu, AlphaBattle, and Wooords are all the previous ones I’ve played with any regularity, I think.)

UPDATE (1/28/2012): I would be remiss if I didn’t add a link to my latest puzzle obsession, PuzzleJuice, which is an absolutely fantastic tetris-word-game-mashup. Pieces fall with varying color parts, and when three or more parts of the same color touch at the bottom of the gameboard, you can touch them to switch them to letters. (When a whole “row” is made, ala tetris, those also change to letters.) Then you drag/draw a word from the letters to remove them from the board. Draw a large enough word, and other pieces around them will also be removed. Good stuff!