Melodic Thursday: Melodrama

This one is rather simplistic. I really should learn how to fine tune the instruments... the cut off sounds so unnatural.



I think I'll likely start writing HTML5 code snippets on Tuesday. They'll not be as as fancy as the stuff from the other days, but it's one of the many things that I should start practicing on.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P11

This has been a bad week for keeping the blog up so far... Writing a self contained story within a few hours using a predefined set of time travel rules had proved to be much more frustrating than I imagined.

Today, we suffer a case of "people looking right" and "actual backgrounds" (i.e. I'm terrible at drawing those). Also, holy walls of text, batman:

I'm not sure if I even want to make up for the missing Tuesday content. It's so damn hot over here...

Design Diary Monday: A Different Kind of Design

No game design happened today...

I've spent the day learning about how the original Flash Duel player track came to be instead, on the Flash Duel forums. The site seems to be down at the moment, I'd have to recheck the link to see if it works later.

Art Weekend: Flash Duel Board Replacement

It's done:

The custom board is meant to be a replacement for the original board from Flash Duel, which looks like this:

Given that their second edition character cards look gorgeous, I was kind of surprised that the kind of blah player track remain unchanged. I do admit that visually the new board is a bit more noisy, but I really think the nicer background makes it an overall better package. You do have to be aware that square 9 and 10 are dark squares though.

Here is the artwork without the score track on top:

(Nuts, I forgot to put the shadow underneath the stone lantern! I knew I forgot to do something...)

Dream Journal: Rules for Time Travelling

If anyone ever bother to read far enough back, this blog used to be a dream journal before I've decided to use the space to practice my craft. I've deleted most of the uninteresting or too personal posts, but once every blue moon there's still dreams that are interesting enough in and of itself that I want to write things down.

This is definitely one of them.

The dream itself might have been all over the place, but the rules for time travelling is pretty explicit:

1. You can only travel back in time, never forward.
2. A time traveler can, at any moment in time, produce a time ticket. A machine owned by the time traveler can remotely print them.
3. The time ticket looks like a movie/concert ticket, recording the time and location the ticket was created.
4. Once retrieved from the machine that prints the ticket, it can be used any time by reciting lines printed on the ticket and tearing it. Holding on to the stub, the time traveler instantly returns to the moment in time the ticket was produced. Everything is the same except that the time traveler maintains all memories before making the trip.

That's pretty much it. It's not particularly scientific or unique, but the idea of the moments saved being tickets have a particularly interesting ring to it. I can probably write a short story this coming Tuesday based on the idea.

Melodic Thursday: Deploy (The Troops)

I wanted to write a piece as a background music for a Tactical RPG, so I started with a militaristic drum beat and ended with this.



I was going to congratulate myself on a not-totally-crappy bass line when I realized that I've just copied from the key segment of Mind Heist (better known as the Inception Trailer Music). Oh well, at least this bit is just a practice piece, so I can get away with it... but I swear, once these unforgettable melodies get stuck in your head, you just unconsciously start writing them back down.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P10

Boo, rush page is rushed~

I have to keep some of the "off" expressions in the middle panels because I 'm short on time. Only the last two panels have more or less the face I'm looking for.

DIY Tuesday: $2.99 Dice Tray

Dice Trays. They're certainly a luxury for board gamers, and a simple search on amazon says a run of the mill dice tray is going to cost you like $20 or more. Well, screw that, that's too rich for me. I mean, there's certainly cheaper solutions out there, and that brings us to:

This lovely $3 Dice Tray, with bonus dry erase surface!

All you need is an IKEA RIBBA frame (pick your color!) for $1.99 and a cheap dry erase board combo thing from Staples for $1. You don't really have to get the dry erase board, but I like the bottom of the tray to have a slightly softer surface and I'm used to the sound of dice hitting cardboard from tossing dice into board game boxes. The softness of that cardboard feels just right.

The instructions are dead simple: disassemble the picture frame. Use the paper with the bar code to measure out the size of the frame on the cardboard.

Use scissors to cut around the cardboard. Remove the magnet from the back of the board and reveal the stick side of the tape. Flip that paper with the barcode over and tape it onto the cardboard to cover the ugliness. Reassemble the frame with plexiglass at the bottom and the dry erase board on top. Originally the dry erase board would be the drawing surface on the other end, but somehow the plexiglass actually leaves fewer marks when it's being erased. Tape the dry erase marker's velcro sticker to the frame's side, and you're done!

To use the dry erase side, flip the tray over. Not only do you get a (mostly) practical dice tray, you get a dry erase board for writing down score and stuff for free!

Sensible people would probably try to pimp this up by lining a felt surface on top and inserting softer foam (mouse pad foam) at the bottom, but it does kind of defeat the cheap and dirty spirit of this dice tray. You can also try one of the larger RIBBA frames, but the cost kind of scales up in an unpleasant way also. And if it turns out that the dice tray is pretty useless... I'll get back to you on that.

Time for some Elder Sign.

Design Diary Monday: From Pirates to Bar Fights in Less Than Seven Days

Before I move on from Pirates to Bar Fights, let me finish explaining how the revised pirates duel work. The trinity (Strike, Parry, Focus) forms the core of the system. Because focus is not an attack but a bonus to another action, I added another card that'd benefit directly from focus and adds a little randomness to the game, hence Unload. Since Strike at this point would have advantage over two cards (Focus and Unload), I've added one final card that's sort of a bigger counter to Strike - and that's how Brutalize came about.

Staggering as a status was added to the game to resolve some of the hard counters between cards. Focus was added to shift the attributes of the cards so the counters would work differently from one turn to the next. This is all nice and well, except... well, it isn't. The web of cause and effect gets fairly difficult to explain, and ultimately the complexity counteracts the attempt to reduce a sense of randomness to the card choice - between the focus buff and the stagger debuff, there's way too many combinations of resolutions for any normal player to keep track of.

And then there's the multiplayer version of this game, where you choose an attack and aim it at another player, then they still simultaneously resolve by order of priority... it's just chaos from that point on. Honestly, I would still like to run a small test with these rules just to see how chaotic the attack guessing game goes, but I never got a chance over last week, and I felt like the premise should stay, but I should stop trying to make the game so deterministic.

Let's introduce some chaos into the game.

I watched a rerun of Dead Man's Chest again over the weekend (is TNT just showing this movie every other week?), and the bar fight scene gave me an idea. Let's remove focus and brutalize and start fresh with a new trinity:

Now, let's change Unload into some form of liquor. "Unloading" now means smashing the bottle on someone's head. We'll also untangle all the priorities and simultaneous resolution so besides parrying to counter, all the actions are played one card at a time. We've untangled the game completely and now we're just playing a basic "take that" game (every turn a player toss a damage dealing card, some cards are there to block attacks, etc).

But the liquor part of the game can get interesting. Suppose there's a running tab on the amount of liquor smashed and consumed, wouldn't it make sense that the guys who lose the fight would have to pay the tab somehow? What if the liquor can be consumed to strengthen strikes? We arrive at the following rules:

• There are three main types of cards, punch, block, and liquor.
• Liquor can be consumed or smashed onto other people.
• if you drink it, you play it in front of you and the cost adds to your personal tab, but your punches becomes stronger and you draw more cards based on the cost of the liquor, gaining a significant advantage.
• if you smash it, you use the card as an attack on another player. The discarded bottle adds to a growing pool of damage tab that someone will have to pay.
• Punch card deals direct damage. Every drink you have makes your punch stronger.
• Blocks reduce or deflect damage, and are played as reactions to other players' attacks.
• If a player sustains X damage, he or she is knocked out and must pay for everything in the damage tab.
• A player can also play a card to try and walk out of the bar fight. If he or she is attacked that turn, that player can't block and the attempt to walk out also fails. If the player does walk out of a fight:
• if multiple players walk out on the same turn, they share whatever has to be paid off that turn.
• if there's still players left, add up the personal tabs of the players leaving and each player pays an even share.
• otherwise, you'll have to pay an even share for the damages as well.
• When there's only unconscious players left in the bar, all unconscious players must pay an even share of everything that's not paid for.
• To give the player who is most invested in the fight an advantage, whoever is the most drunk (with the biggest personal tab) can go first.

If the numbers work out right, there should be an escalation of cost built into the game that'd make it interesting for players to decide when to stay and when to quit. There's a much bigger factor of randomness, but I think the new design is "light" enough that more randomness might actually make the game better.

And now, back to assigning numbers. I hate this part.

Weekend Art WIP: Replacement art for Flash Duel

I talked about Flash Duel last Tuesday. There's a lot to like about the game - it's unique, it's fast, it's cerebral but not overwhelmingly so, there are times when you'll have to take a chance and win or lose, the next game takes like no time to set up.

The game is in its second iteration - there's a pedestrian version and a deluxe version of the first edition of the game, where one is a bit too bare bone and the other too expensive (laser etching everything probably costed a lot of money)... so with the second edition release, the card art got updated, a lot of the deluxe components are replaced with less durable but much better looking printed cardboard, except for one thing.

The track that the duelists walk on. It's so pedestrian. Compared to all the character art, the track is a relic that really, really needs to get an upgrade. And I thought, I don't do enough background/landscape pieces (I haven't done a single piece this last two months...), this is two birds with one stone!

Then the heat wave hits SoCal. God it's too hot in here. This is as far as I got with the times of day that's not melting my face off:

You can see the original layout underneath the new one. What I've drawn up is obviously a sketch and color test, but I like what I have over what was there already. It'd be best if I can plan it so the landscape would naturally have dark and light spaces (required as part of the game mechanics), but if not artificially darkening spots still doesn't look too bad.

I blame the heat

I really do. now I can actually start doing something other than lounging around and complaining about the heat...

Melodic Thursday: Playing With Live Mixing New Instruments

No big revelation in terms of composing better melodies, but I've been playing around with a bunch of new instruments... who would have known that there's actually free orchestral samples (from the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra) and you don't have to fork over a bazillion bucks to get the professional ones (I'm sure they sound a bazillion times better, but for my purpose...).


Also, who would have known that jumpy melody is played by a specific violin technique. The more you know.

Oh, also also... I've played around with recording a live mix of the three tracks by muting sections on and off on the fly while playing. I'm sure there's a way to do it properly inside Renoise but I still haven't found the time to read through the manual yet.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P9

Why oh why didn't I just start some moe-tard story about a few cute girls frolicking around? It'd probably be a lot easier than trying to explain this plot:

I've made an effort to clean up borders and do speech bubble layouts before I darken the penciling. The panel layouts are also less rigid than before. This is slightly better than the previous pages, I think?

Belated Rant Tuesday: The Case for Solitaire Board Games

Blarg, late again, but I'm late this time because of this:

I've beat an AI character, one that operates on cards and written rules instead of some smartphone app or Flash program or Steam app. It's as old fashioned as it can be, and yet... something about it feels good. Like, better than computer games. It's absurd, I know. Here's what I've thought up so far that'd justify this far-fetched idea:

1. Physical feels good. It's the same advantage that you get with normal board games. Holding and moving a pawn, slamming down cards... all these can be easily (and maybe better) simulated on the computer but you just don't get the tactile feel of manipulating stuff.
2. More physical space means more information. With screen real estates plateauing at 1080p and actually shrinking for new laptop consumers (what is this 1336x768 nonsense), having physical space to "display" information actually makes information feel more handy. That discard pile to the right? At this size, it's probably easier for me to just dive through actual cards rather than some sort of on screen search interface - this is especially true if the cards are MtG style unique cards.
3. There are just some things the human brain can compute easier. Special abilities are a pain in the neck to program, but all it takes are a couple of well written words for a human to compute all the interactions. Which usually means with designer board games, you get a lot more text heavy special abilities. That's a good thing. It's variety that you don't normally see in computer games.

... and once in a blue moon, I'd pull out a deck of cards to play (Klondike) solitaire. Blasphemy, I know.

Design Diary Monday: Revising Rock Paper Scissors Since 2012

Human creativity is weird. If you force yourself to think about new solutions to a problem sometimes all you can get are dumb fixes... but if you step away from the problem for days or even weeks, sometimes the solution would hit you on the head like an anvil out of nowhere. After so many previous failures, I'm not so ready to call this the design that solved all the problems, but at least I feel like it's getting somewhere again.

In other news, I've learned that tags can do something other than serve the mysterious SEO gods. I've added a new tag to keep track of all the posted related to this particular game's design progress:

pirates game wip

To more or less reboot the design process, I've decided to take out treasure points, targets of opportunity, and all the other mumbo jumbo that's related to scoring more points... I've reduced the game back down to its basics, a rock-paper-scissors game. I've also mentally sort through all the feedback I've gotten from previous play tests and incorporated a few suggestions:

• Sometimes, randomness is not such a bad thing. While it reduces the deterministic aspect of the game, it creates situations with calculated risk that'd at least give a bad choice some chance to make a comeback.
• Trying to resolve combat from a single card choice was probably a disastrous idea. Without a series of shifting parameters and each card choice giving the same probability to win or lose, the choice becomes completely random even if the decisions are weighted differently - as long as there's exactly one hard counter to each possible choice, players are still forced to consider each choice evenly.
• And building on the previous point, there really needs to be some way to predict player behavior in order for players to decide on an action instead of randomly picking one.

So I've added an additional mechanic to the basic "deal X damage" formula: modifiers that'd affect actions in the next turn. And with that, here's the component dump of the latest pirates card game:

While still themed around pirates, the game is no longer about ship to ship combat with captain and crew - now we're down to fighting over treasures on an individual level. A simplified list of rules is as follows:

1. Each player begins combat with 5 cards.
2. Each player plays a card each round.
3. Higher priority cards are resolved first. If multiple players have cards of the same priority, the player with higher initiative takes precedence.
4. As a player's action is being resolved, grab the highest priority token that's not yet taken.
5. If a condition is applied to a card's action, resolve them in the order they're listed on the card.
6. If a player takes damage and that player's action card has not completely resolved, apply a stagger token to that player's action.
7. If a focus token is available, consume it whether the card has a focus condition bonus or not.
8. A player who takes 3 points of damage or more is knocked out.

Balancing are a-coming, so I'll discuss the cards and the justification for the rule changes in detail next week. In the mean time, here's an example game of how the game works in its current form:

(Oops, I've forgotten to put down stagger tokens completely. Oh well, the player who takes damage is usually staggered...)

Bottom player plays strike and gains initiative. Strike can stagger gun Unloads and make them miss. Strike also deals light damage.

However, strikes can be parried. Parrying deals damage to the aggressor to inflict stagger (and it does resolve, since stagger for strikes resolve after the normal action).

You can unload guns on a player that's standing around ready to parry for a 1 in 3 chance to deal 3 damage (in most circumstances, winning outright). Better yet, you can play focus to gain the focus buff. The buff makes the next gun attack 100% accurate.

However, since focus has lower priority, the bottom player gained initiative that round. In the next round, the players have the same priority, but since the bottom player maintains initiative, the bottom player brutally finishes the top player off by dealing 2 damage. Mmm, this is not exactly what I want to happen... Yup, changes are a-coming.

Next week: Justify your game.

Art Weekend: Card Illustrations

Alright, so maybe Art Friday as a concept isn't exactly working out. Weekends in general are just kind of a leisure time for me, and I'd rather not let my studies get in the way of my pleasure seeking (seems backwards somehow...). As a result, I think I'll just stretch the art stuff to include the entire weekend from now on. That way, I'd have more opportunities to get stuff done and maybe spend more time on a piece instead of rushing everything to completion.

Despite the heat, this weekend ended up being very productive for me. I'm able to go back and start working on the Pirates game (again!), and as a result of that I've drawn a few illustrations to go with the new card designs. They're more of a study than anything for now, but I'm still quite happy with the output:

This is the illustration for "strike", the first study I've done. The foreshortening needs work, and the soon to be cropped parts of the drawing are crude, but I think the pose is effective.

Here is one for "counter". I like the illustration, but it'll probably be scrapped later since the card it describes don't trigger unless the player is under attack. This probably works better as "ripose". Poses involving more than one person is always tough, so at least I'm happy with the characters' layouts.

This is "focus". Pretty simple. The hair and the beard turns out well.

This is "brutalize". Now that I have a second look I guess the poses are a bit wonky... at this point my hands are getting tired but it's also loosening up, so the anatomy looks wrong in several places but the idea behind it feels right. I was wondering why the right arm of the sword guy didn't look right - I think the forearm should be brought to the front.

Finally, one for "unload". Something frilly to finish up the set of illustrations. Man, that right arm looks super short.

After scanning the pictures, I've also messed around with painting one or two of them:

I tried messing with ArtRage's watercolor. I don't know why, but compared to their oil (not that I've actually painted with oil based paint) brushes the watercolor just feels wonky. It looks so cool when it blends right, though. I suppose one of these days I'd finally figure it out. Until then I should mess around with it every now and then.

One in Photoshop, a quickie. I need to find a way to get rid of flat slabs of color since turning on pressure sensitive size and opacity never feel right for me, so I end up having brush strokes with round tips.

Now, to prototype the cards... then I can do another post about the design changes to the game.

Melodic Thursday: Chip Kingdom

The original goal was to do a generic "I'm dungeon crawling" loop. It has a bit of that, but there's a grander vibe that might make it better as an overworld music:

What The Hell, Flash? Ep 1: When String is an Integer, all hell broke loose

There are times when Flash is amazing to you. Things that you thought it's going to screw up, the interpreter would compensate and everything works better than you imagined. Then there's time when one wrong turn and the whole damn thing explodes.

I've been working with Adobe Flash since Flash 4, back when it was called Macromedia Flash. Every iteration since 4 has had its perks and quirks - and as a Flash dev, you learn to live with all of its idiosyncrasies and work around stuff that's actually broken.

One of the many regrets that I have over the past 10 years is that I have not been documenting all the quirky broken stuff that happens with flash - things that I tend to forget after a while and come back to bite me later. Today, I present to you this gem:

static public const MAX_RANKS:String = int = 3;

Alright, I admit that I was being lazy - I used FlashDevelop's code generation to create the constant, which automatically declares it as a string with the same name as the variable. I didn't quite erase the type definition far enough and after wrapping up other sections of the code, I compile and run and...

Blank screen.

I wondered if there's some problems with my resource loading - so I put some debug traces in the document class, compile... blank screen.

Okay, this is getting stupid. I try to launch the file in Flash's debug mode, and it says "you cannot debug this swf because it does not contain actionscript". Right. A few thousand lines of code, they just all conveniently disappeared. The source files are all there, the linkages are there, Flash just refuses to recognize I'm publishing a file that contains any code at all.

Alright, panic time, I pulled out the most recent backup of the project, retrace the changes line by line... and finally, I found this little gem that should have been caught as an innocent syntax error. Well, that's a whole day wasted, whoop-dee-doo.

Lesson of the day: Don't assign types to constants. It'll destroy ActionScript's space-time continuum apparently.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P8

This conversation is going to look awful if I keep it as a "dialog of internal dialog", so I guess I'll have to cheat again...

...and the plot is slowly being rewritten from behind the scenes. It's what happens when you come up with the story as it goes. I can plan general events that occurs in the entire story, but I can't stand detailing all the things that happen in-between before I start writing/drawing.

Design Diary Tuesday: I Hate You, Drawing Board

... but it looks like I'll be going back to it for a bit.

(this is game in progress that's being discussed, just as a refresher)

There's currently a lot of fuzziness involved with how projects are chosen and how players gets rewarded for making progress, completing projects, or exposing other player's incompetence. Based on the results from yesterday's calculations, the deck would also need to be more than 40 cards thick - maybe it'd go all the way up to 60 or even 80, an uncomfortable number to print play decks with.

I'm also being constantly tempted to add complexities to the game. What if when you undertake a project, you can boast or bid how far you can go with it? Go bigger for more funds and reputation, but get more blame for its failure. There should also be rewards for completing the same project before another player to earn extra rewards.

But adding all these things don't change the fundamentals of "cheat" or "not cheat". I really hope I can come up with ways to accomplish different levels of deception, with bigger lies yielding bigger rewards.

(Belated) Design Diary Monday: I Am Not a Wizard With Spreadsheets

One of the many weaknesses I have with game balancing is I have an extremely poor background in statistics, and apparently statistics is all the rage as far as balancing numbers are concerned.

A few weeks ago, a certain reddit topic brought me to the use of hypergeometric distributions. My current work in progress idea surrounding deception will make heavy use of the concept of "BS" style card game and some type of melding card game.

I've started with this google spreadsheet. The only relevant table is the third one at the bottom that shows the probability of the player having N or more cards after drawing X cards from the deck. The one published above uses a standard deck of playing cards, and calculates the probability of having N or more cards of the same suit.

If each project type in my game idea corresponds to a single card suit and the values doesn't matter, then the distribution would show me how many cards a player might need to complete a project on his or her own, using materials (cards) of the appropriate suit.

Just to throw it out there, a 5 card project size seems to be a reasonable number. The distribution tells me that there's a 50% chance I'd have 5 cards of the same suit... after drawing 18 cards? That can't be right.

The percentages are deceptive. The number tells me the percentage of all possible hand of 18 cards... but I've been starting with a hand of 5 cards and consciously made a decision to pursue a suit that I already have - often with 2 cards. Adjusting the starting numbers to a 47 card "deck" (since I've drawn 5 cards already)  and 11 cards that'd yield me the same suit (since I already have 2 in my hand) yields a much more reasonable 50% to get 3 more cards of the same suit at the 11th draw... until I realize that I've already drawn 5 cards in this case so technically I'd get the 50/50 at the 16th card. Replaying a few hands with a real deck of card confirms this - getting that "flush" is actually pretty darn hard.

Interestingly, there's a 62% of having 5 cards or more of the same suit in the beginning of a 4 player game, if each player draws 5 cards to start with. If the game allows trading, the chance of getting those 5 cards would be significantly easier.

These numbers, once I mess around with it some more, can tell me a lot - it sets boundaries for quantities that are within reason, and with these guidelines I can come up with a card mix for my initial test. It's probably a lot harder to look for the fun in those numbers, but I firmly believe that's where the number crunching part of game design stops and the art part begins.

Tomorrow (well, later today): the promised initial numbers for the deception game. This design is going overtime!

Sketch Friday: My Other Clock Says I Have One Minute Left

I really don't want to miss two Fridays in a row.

There's something more elaborate I'm doing on that's still a work in progress. Stuff is happening all around, but hopefully I'd have all Sunday to get it done, and I can consider myself "caught up" to the schedule.

Melodic Thursday: Four Chord Joy

I've always wanted to see what the four chord buzz is all about. And by "four chords" I mean these four...

Being so limited in my musical knowledge means I have to actually look up a different video just to figure out what notes are actually involved, but once I've figured that out, it certainly is easier to write a pleasant tune based on the chord progression:



And I lifted a few bars from Ode to Joy... oh well, I had no time, so I had to lift more materials just to get a start. At the very least, I think I'll write a few more tunes from these pre-baked chord progressions, just to get a feel of how melodic progression generally feels like.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P7

I think this depiction of the neural computer interface is about the only "throw it out the window" level of impractical technology in the story. At the very least, I'd like to keep it that way...