The Unnamed Trilogy

So, one day "Unnamed" will be a place name that I will use as a fictional locale for some resource management/city building game ideas I've had. For the time being it remains unnamed and so below you will find a blurb for the yet unnamed Unnamed Trilogy.

I've listed the game ideas in the order in which they came to me. They are, all three, pretty different from one another but all have a central development theme.

The first is a fairly straight forward resource management building game with a mechanism by which your expansion causes resources to become more scarce. The second combines worker placement and a card game wherein cards players play become buildings everyone can send workers to. And the final one is a more abstract tile placement game with three different ways to score.

In this article I'm going to talk about idea number 3. I know, it's weird to start with the last one, but it's the most fleshed out. So here goes.

So you want to make wall tiles?

Back when I was working on Babo:Invasion at Play Brains one of the coders and I had to come up with all the variations of wall models we were going to have to construct in order to allow any arbitrary shape of wall to be created within our tile based levels. As we figured out possibility after possibility it quickly became clear that the task was going to be just too great. In order to accomodate all maner of possible combination of wall tile we would have needed to model 41 different unique models. We came up with a way of reducing that to 4. Read on to find out how.

Tweaking Game Values Using Recorded Game Data

I want to talk about a revelation I had. Ok, a revelation that was bestowed upon me by someone much more clever then I in one of my game groups and a tester on Shake Out!, Tom Barclay of Polyhedral Fury.

If you are like me, it has probably occurred to you to record data on play test sessions when developing a new game. If you are like me AND you've tried this, then you know that the real challenge isn't in figuring what data to record but what to do with it once you have it. What Tom did for me was so simple but so huge toward helping me balance the scores in Shake Out! that it's actually changed how I think about value tweaking. What he made me realize is that I didn't have to replay the game to see how scoring changes could affect outcome, I could play the games first and figure out the scores after... sort of, let me explain.