Blog for Dave Myers at GarageGames.com

(Board) Game Day

Dave Myers — 2006-02-26T16:59:40+00:00

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into. </aside>

I admit that I often long for my college days when a group of us in the dorm would gather together for an impromptu day or night of social networking of the old-school sort - board gaming. Sitting around a gaming table, eating chips, drinking soda, and talking trash for hours on end did wonders for my stressed out soul back in those days of tedious coursework, all-night study sessions, and grueling final exams. And I carry those memories with me to this day, all the while coveting them like precious jewels and wishing for those early, simpler days. Today scheduling a day-long gaming session with even one of my close friends, much less three of them, is tough, to say the least.

After much effort and gnashing of teeth, my buddies Bill and Mike, and my younger brother Mark and I finally were able to get together for a day of serious gaming that didn't involve a computer screen or television. And it was glorious. ;)

The first game that we dug into was one that Bill, Mark, and I had played once before at Christmas called Ticket to Ride - Europe. The original Ticket to Ride game was a winner of the German Game of the Year award (the Spiel des Jahres), and deservedly so, as this followup game is simply well-designed and terribly fun.

The board is a map of Europe, with a good number of cities represented and potential train routes between the cities. Each route is made up of one to eight train cars and is of a particular color. In order to lay claim to a route, you must play train cards that match the color and number of the train cars that are shown on the route. Once you claim a route, you score the points for that route, and play proceeds to the next player. You can draw ticket cards during play, also, and these cards show routes which you want to lay claim to if at all possible, as the point value shown on the card will count for your total when it comes time to figuring out who won, and will count against your total if you don't fulfill the route. There are also colorless routes, tunnels, and ferry routes with special rules, along with special train station pieces you can put in play that allow you to use your opponents track to help you fill a ticket card route. All in all, a terrific little game, and terribly inspirational for me personally as I futz around with Duello and Bethellowed.

Now, even though three of the four of us had actually played the game once, that by no means gave us an advantage over Mike. On the contrary, after we reread the rules for the game we quickly found a mistake we had made during the last gaming session which completely changed the game play. In this case the rule read that we must take one of the following four actions during any given turn, when we had read the rule to read you must take as many as possible of the following four actions during any given turn. Er...oops. I had won spectactularly the last time, and managed to lose just as spectactularly this time around. Sonofabitch. I fared much better the second time we played yesterday, however, kicking ass and taking names and winning by a fair margin. No one lays track like I do and I made sure those bastards wouldn't forget it soon. ;)

After a couple games of Ticket to Ride, we decided to try out a variant of Risk that my wife and I gave to my brother as a gift a couple of years ago called Risk - The Lord of the Rings - Trilogy Edition. Now, it would be easy to hear the title of the game and just dismiss it offhand as another example of "the man" slapping some intellectual property on an existing game and shipping it for a fast buck. However, we found that the game was surprisingly different from the Risk game we had grown up playing, not the least of which was the (in my opinion) considerably more interesting and strategic map that is used for the game. I just found it tougher during my admittedly limited exposure to the game to play conservatively, building up my forces until I could pounce. The addition of sea ports allowing distant forces to attack, along with cards you earn during the game that allow you really mess with your opponents, definitely spiced up the game and gave it new life.

Now, having said that, I have a confession to make. I would rather play a less-confrontational multiplayer game such as Ticket to Ride than Risk, and the reason is pretty simple: When I start getting a head of steam and feel like I'm on the verge of a breakthrough, inevitably two or more of my opponents also realize that I'm about to breakthrough and decide to form a coalition with the express intent of putting me back in my place. I know that it makes sense to do so, but that does not stop me from feeling like I'm being victimized. And yesterday's marathon Risk game (five hours - wow) was no different.

I had managed to play conservatively for the first few turns while my three opponents managed to tear each other new one's repeatedly. They were in disarray, and I was slowly, but surely, gathering my forces and pushing northward into elven territory. I was playing as one of the Evil players (note the capital 'E' and I didn't let them forget it the whole game), and nothing we Evil players like more than seeing hobbits and elves on skewers, roasting on an open fire, I can tell you.

Between the three of us, Bill, Mark, and I had managed to pretty much decimate poor Mike's forces. Mike was caught in the middle of a vicious ground war between Mark and Bill, and I kept picking away at his territories on the peripherary as I built up my power base. Actually, I call what Mark and Bill were engaged in a ground war, but really it was more like a pissing contest between two drunken sailors or something. Bill tore Mark up early in the game, and Mark decided from that moment on that his definition of winning the game was preventing Bill from winning the game. Nice. And so it went...until I woke up and took Mike out of the game in about two turns.

Of course, as I mentioned, this is where the inevitable happened, and Mark and Bill decided that they'd put their differences aside long enough to take me out of the game before continuing with their hostilities. Nothing more aggravating than watching your carefully-constructed defenses get taken down in one long, agonizing turn as each of your opponents tear into you with an (in my opinion) undeserved veangance. Luckily, they made the decision to attack me one turn too late in the game to save themselves, as in this variant the One Ring can end the game early by arriving at Mount Doom, and after my turn was over it decided to do just that. Whew. Because if it hadn't ended the game right then and there, I was done.

All in all, it was a great ten hours or so of gaming, joking, drinking, and eating, and I cannot wait until the next time we can put such a session together. I love video gaming, and with the advent of voice-over-internet utilities such as Skype and TeamSpeak, it certainly makes it easier to get together for a play session with friends in far-distant lands. But nothing beats playing with your friends around a game table - nothing.

GarageGames has arrived

Dave Myers — 2006-02-21T05:57:21+00:00

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into. </aside>

I remember vividly the second mention I found of GarageGames online. The first mention, a Blue's News blurb, was largely forgettable and all I can recall from the announcement was that they had a website up or something. But the second time I saw the name, ah yes, now that I remember quite well. Just as I will remember vividly the latest comic by those insane Penny Arcade guys.

Like so many other wannabe game devs out there in the wild, I had tinkered for many years with various software libraries, including some of my own creation, in the hopes of learning how to make those most magical of creations - video games. Prior to becoming aware of GarageGames I was already of the mind that my fellow teammates and I needed to simply latch on to an existing 3D engine and make something, even if it was simply a mod of an existing game such as Unreal or Quake. So we started researching which game would be the easiest to work with and then I found that second blurb:

GarageGames was going to license out the Tribes 2 engine.

I read and reread the announcement, truly with disbelief, I kid you not. I went to GDC that year and sat face-to-face with the GarageGames founders and point-blank asked them the single most important question I had: Do we get source?

The rest is history, of course, because not only did we get source, but we got a full-fledged 3D engine, not just a software library. Gone were thoughts of using Unreal or Quake and making a mod. This was our solution and gawddamned if we weren't the happiest bunch of wannabe game makers you ever laid your eyes on.

Flash forward, what, five years or so now? GarageGames is inching closer and closer to a goal I remember Jay Moore mentioning many moons ago - being a name known to every household. At least, I think he said something close to that. And now here they are with a title on the Xbox360 and the subject on arguably the most popular game geeks comic around. Not too shabby, and I feel very fortunate to have experienced at least some portion of this with GG.

What will happen in the next five years with GG? Personally, I hope that they reach the next level in terms of distribution, on their own terms, and in their own channel. Even so, there's no doubt that GarageGames has arrived.

Gratz GG!

I

Dave Myers — 2006-02-19T02:02:04+00:00

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I finally took some serious time away from game dev. I kept paying lip service to the idea once I sold off my interest in 21-6, but I never really backed away and took some time off until September rolled around. I even missed the IndieGamesCon, that's how serious I was about taking a break. ;) I've been away for a while, but I'm feeling the itch again. To that end I'm in the process of updating both my website (later) and my blog (now). It'll be in a state of flux for a bit while I tweak it to look decent using WordPress.

Although I've been taking a break from game dev, that by no means implies that I've been ignoring what's been going on in the game dev community. For instance, I've been reading Phil Steinmeyer's blog, who recently published his first casual game, Bonnie's Bookstore. I find following Phil interesting because he is essentially doing what I had considered doing with LG.

I also have been following the blog Jeff Tunnell of GarageGames just recently started titled Make It Big In Games. While I actually have heard everything he's had to say to-date on the blog (much in person), it will be fun to watch Jeff continue to build his blog as he has much to contribute to wannabe-game-devs.

I'm still trying to determine what I will do game-dev-wise now. I have an idea for a fun little two-player game I'd like to toy with. At this point I'm not really worried about making money with games, and in fact I'm almost of the opinion that I should just do some game dev work with some folks just for the fun of it now rather than try to design and dev my own stuff. We'll see.

Thursday Jun 9 21:37

Dave Myers — 2005-06-09T21:37:18+00:00

Hiatus coming to a close

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

The hiatus from game dev that I had planned for back in January started in March instead and is now coming to a close. We had settled on the first game for Lumpy earlier this year and actually started prototyping it before my leave of absence. However, my wife (Marlo) and I have recently been revisiting the issue of what game to make first and we came to the conclusion that we should shelve our initial game idea for something more akin to SSX and Think Tanks. Something that almost designs itself (much like how it felt Orbz came together), and that is easy to just jump in and start playing without much explanation. Our initial idea is still cool, and we still want to make it, but we don't think now is the time.

We have come up with what we believe is a pretty cool vehicle-based game idea and we're just now prototyping a little bit of it. The basic theme of the game is more inline with the type of games that I had originally intended Lumpy to make - irreverently humorous games. Hopefully we'll have the physics down sometime soon and once we do we're off to the races.

We're also starting to look around for some office space for Lumpy. Nothing terribly large or expensive, but a solid base of operations for our planned world domination ;). Marlo and I will be working out of the new studio on both contract work and our own games from the get-go, and the plan is to start recruiting others to the cause very soon. In fact, we're looking now for both an artist and a coder for the new game, preferably located near St. Louis so they can work out of the studio with us. The plan is to build a primarily local team, though as needed we'll likely use some remote resources.

Oh, and for your shmucks who insist on skipping text and just looking at pictures in blogs, here's one for ya!

Tuesday Mar 22 22:35

Dave Myers — 2005-03-22T22:35:59+00:00

New website and prototyping bliss

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

Wow, it has been too long since my last entry - one week. I have to get back on the horse with this blogging stuff, I'm letting it slide too much. I've just been crazy busy lately, and with spring coming on I know I soon will be outside many hours getting the lawn and landscaping in shape this year. So, basically, I'm screwed. ;)

Lumpy Games has a new website!

We just put up our website now at Lumpy Games and I'm pretty happy with the result. While I am prototyping game design for our first game and Nic is working on more technical (risky) features for the game, it seemed prudent to put my wife (our resident web guru) to work on the company website. I decided that we should theme the site to correspond with the topic of our first title. If you see anything funky while viewing it please shoot me an email at dave@lumpygames.com - I'd appreciate it.

A company website is one of those tasks that I have a hard time with. On the one hand, we need to focus on prototyping our first game and getting a head of steam. Putting up a website seems really low damned priority in comparison. On the other hand, there are good reasons to put one up. The first one that comes to mind is that it gives a sense of stability, not only for your team but for possible additions to your team. If you don't have a team site and you're talking to strangers about joining you to work for royalties (for instance), it's a tough sell. The second reason is that it is a base of operations for the rest of your efforts. We have a site now that we can direct people to in order to get the latest info on our game, for example.

I'm not sure I'm going to theme Mad Rantz the same as the rest of the site, as it's more of a personal blog than a company or designer blog. I do know that eventually we will have a design diary blog for the site, along with a newsletter. But first we need to knock out our prototype and solidify the game features before talking much publically about it.

Get yer prototyping on

I am very excited about this game idea, as it is deeper than the games I have worked on in the past. Prototyping is my favorite phase of game development, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I like to personally write the code during this phase, or at the very least get in there and tweak the hell out of things and add game features. I love trying out different things in the game and see what strikes me as fun. When I play around with small games like Bethellowed it's very easy to try different mechanics. But when I think of games like SimCity or Civilization, I really wonder how long it too them to get those to a state where they said to themselves "Hey, we might have something here".

I definitely adhere to the philosophy that iterative prototyping is the path to finding the fun in a game. You add in a basic mechanic or two and then layer on things until you get that "a-ha" moment. I imagine that SimCity and its peers were created similarly. As I look at the list of things to put in our prototype I am feeling a bit concerned about the path to the fun and how long it will take. We are shooting for an early May version of a fun, playable prototype with programmer art. That seems a little bit aggressive (see above re: lawn/landscaping), but I know that I personally work better under a deadline. Here's hoping that the fun finds me as soon as possible! ;)

Monday Mar 14 7:01

Dave Myers — 2005-03-14T07:01:59+00:00

Game-in-a-day #10: Bethellowed!

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I accidentally participated in the tenth edition of the GarageGames community event known as Game-in-a-day, or GiD. I say accidentally because I honestly wasn't planning on doing any game dev work this weekend in order to catch up on some chores around the house. Sometime late Saturday night the bug bit me and I couldn't help myself. I ended up putting in about twelve hours on Sunday, so I guess you could call this my Game-in-a-half-day (Gi1/2D). ;)

I really wanted to put in a little bit more time on the bubble popper I was tinkering with recently. So I decided to put a little bit of UI work in (mad programmer art I say) and actually hook up scoring. The end result is a very unrefined version of what I envisioned the final gameplay would resemble, but I still find the click-click-clicking of it a little irrestible. I don't buy bubble poppers usually, but I have to admit I like popping stuff like so many others out there.

Choosing my move

Popping away

Those buggers are coming hard

I need more tokens damnit!

Crap - this is end-game for sure

I didn't get near as much done on this as I would have liked to. First, there's no SFX at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Use your imagination. Second, T2D gives you all these cools particle effects and I managed to use none of that at all.

The most important thing I didn't get working that I really wanted was a nice falling effect when the pieces collapse. I tried my damndest to get it to work, but I'm apparently not using T2D the way it was intended or T2D hates me. I could get it to look pretty good, but occasionally the damned thing would just act funky and I'd end up with pieces not lined up correctly. In the end, I pulled that code and instead just had it jump down all at once, so it's not as smooth as it would have been. Ah well.

At any rate, this was a lot of fun, even though I was all by myself on this one. I'm hoping to involve the team in the next one, maybe with other people out there who are just interested in having some fun.

You can find the game I made right here. Hopefully that's packaged up correctly and doesn't bring down the T2D police on my head for accidentally including the editors or some other wackiness. If you run it and it looks a little funky, try setting the video options to what looks best for you. Enjoy!

Wednesday Mar 9 2:24

Dave Myers — 2005-03-09T02:24:15+00:00

Taking (and setting) direction

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I've been wrestling for a while now with the identity of Lumpy and what types of games we'd like to be known for. I've been talking to people in the community a bit and my poor wife can attest to the amount of time I've spent trying to hammer out which direction to take. I see a game like Zuma by Popcap making unworldly amounts of money, and it's a natural inclination to follow suit and try to make a next-gen clone.

Of course, I know for a fact that there are at least two other such clones coming out in the next six or so months. So, maybe not so smart to go there, eh? But the money that is flowing in the casual game market is terribly sexy to someone who has not worked fulltime for his own studio for two years. And why shouldn't I attempt to compete at that level? Anything I try to accomplish as a studio should be at a high level, right?

I then think about why it is I do this thang that I do. It's because I want to have fun making fun for people. If I'm not enjoying myself, then I'd be better off not trying so hard to make a success out of something as risky as a game studio. Maybe I should buy and sell real estate if that's the case.

I spoke for just a few minutes with Jeff Tunnell last week and I took away one important thing from the conversation. I'm not even sure he was aware of imparting this, but I do thank him for his time. He reminded me that a business like Lumpy or 21-6 or Bravetree or GarageGames is a long-term commitment. You cannot expect to make a quick buck and then do whatever you want from then on. You have to invest yourself in your company and grow it.

I was doing this at 21-6, to be sure, and many of the decisions we made there were looking long-term. So, I'm aware that this is a long-term deal. But sometimes you need a reminder, and that's what is so nice about having good people to talk to in the indie game dev community.

So, what is Lumpy going to do now?

We are going to make games that fill niches that aren't well-served. We are going to make games with some depth.

We are going to make games that I would buy! (And then we're going to sell the hell out of them. ;)

The first game we are currently prototyping is one inspired by the likes of Seven Cities of Gold. It will be a bit more in-depth than that game, similar in scope to the recently-released Pirates! If it turns out to be as much fun as I think it will, we'll move on to full production sometime in April I imagine. And it will very likely be 2D using the T2D engine.

I'm pretty damned excited and I can't wait to have something show now.

Wednesday Mar 2 0:19

Dave Myers — 2005-03-02T00:19:59+00:00

Busy, busy, busy...

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I've been a bit busy these last few days, and my poor blog is paying the price for it. Yesterday I started working for the folks at MVP Online creating some sports games. I spent a bit of the weekend working on getting up to speed with their current codebase. I also spent some time this weekend examining the next steps for Lumpy.

T2D?

The current plan is to prototype a few ideas with the now-released Torque 2D Engine. At the very least this is a nice engine to quickly prototype 2D game ideas. Maybe not as easy to use yet as something like Macromedia's Director product, but then again you get to think like a real programmer using T2D instead of whatever you have to think like to code up something in Director (kidding, kidding - it's a cool product I know). I'm not 100% sure yet if we should ship using T2D, though there are some significant benefits in doing so. However, there are some downsides also, depending on what game we choose to do.

Phil Steinmeyer gives a pretty decent overview in his blog of things to consider if you want to get your game into the casual audience online portals and hit the largest possible audience. In particular having a web-enabled version of our game might prove very beneficial, but with T2D the only real option I see would be to use ActiveX, which is a questionable move (someone correct me if I'm wrong here). I'm also a little (itty-bitty amount) worried about having no fallback software rendering mode. I'm not sure what the stats are nowadays on 3D video cards and casual gamers, but I still wonder how much to be concerned about cutting any piece of the potential audience due to something like hardware requirements.

Of course, some of this concern is predicated on what kind of game we make. If we went for something more for the hardcore gamers, I wouldn't worry about hardware or web versions of the game. But I'm leaning towards the first game being more casual. We'll see.

Help, I need somebody...Help, not just anybody...

The next thing I decided is that I wanted to bring on someone to help code things up sooner rather than later. It would be cool if I could include people in the earlier prototype phase of development if at all possible. So, I pinged fellow GarageGames dev Nicolas Quijano to help out. Now, if I can just get him to sign the darned business forms (again - kidding Nic, kidding), we're going to start prototyping the first game idea hopefully this week. I want to publicly welcome Nic aboard and I'm really looking forward to drinking with him again at IGC...wait, no...developing games with him at Lumpy - yes, that's it. Or both. ;)

Wednesday Feb 23 23:55

Dave Myers — 2005-02-23T23:55:47+00:00

Prototype until it hurts?

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I had an interesting discussion with fellow game dev Paul Dana yesterday that I think I'm going to expand into a full-blown article. It concerned what I would say is a bullet-point list of concerns about the direction of my studio. Of course, a lot of the answers to those questions are entirely dependent on your particular situation, but I think it might still be interesting to interview a few other people out there who already have studios and/or make and sell games and put together a summary. But that's later.

One thing that Paul mentioned that I feel I have to keep foremost in my mind is the concept of prototyping before deciding on what game to make next. In the past I had attacked that decision by putting down a list of ideas on paper and then having everyone pick out one that really seemed like a possible winner. And then just making the game. Which seems terribly questionable, even if you attack the game design in an iterative fashion.

It makes more sense to me to prototype multiple ideas before deciding on which to focus on for a full-blown game. In fact, Paul mentioned prototyping practically until it hurt. For me, I take this to mean don't be afraid to invest time prototyping a good handful of your best ideas before settling. Don't worry about getting everything just right in terms of game mechanics, and certainly don't mess with anything other than programmer art. The key is to get to the heart of the fun as quickly as possible, as purely as possible.

If it is taking too long to prototype and find the fun, take a hard look at what you are trying to do. Maybe it just isn't fun, or maybe it will take a good while to find the fun. As an indie who only has a few hours per week to work on my products, I don't believe I can waste too much time on a game design that doesn't almost immediately reveal its fun.

I also think that just because the very first idea you tried seems like a lot of fun does not necessarily mean you just stop there and go into full-scale production. Who's to say that the third prototype won't be more fun and lend itself much better to marketing and better sales? There is a limit to the prototyping phase, of course - the definition of "where it hurts" will be different for each studio. But taking one idea and settling on it as an indie strikes me as just too little and a tad short-sighted. You are possibly betting a little bit too much on good luck, which might be fine for some but not for me.

One last thing. Once you've decided on a game and are firing away on all cylinders don't be afraid to evaluate the game again, and if it for some reason is not turning out as well as expected, don't rule out the possibility of shelving it. It's your time and resources that you would be "wasting", so that's a painful decision to make, but don't get into the mindset that you absolutely positively MUST finish the game. Because it's possible that it will kill your morale and dedication and passion, and no game is worth that. Beware of not finishing anything, however. That would be almost as bad.

When you finish a game, you should have a host of game ideas not only on paper lying around, but also in some stages of prototype that you can then use for a starting point on the next planning phase. That seems terribly appealing.

Saturday Feb 19 0:18

Dave Myers — 2005-02-19T00:18:30+00:00

A little game design brain dump

<aside>This is mirrored on my blog if that's the sorta thing yer into: www.lumpygames.com/madrantz</aside>

I'm not a big player of bubble-popping games except on my handheld, but I can appreciate the design that goes into them and I enjoy dinking around with them. I spend a lot of time perusing the GarageGames forums and .plans and idling in the GG IRC channel, but I don't see as much discussion about game design as I'd expect - it's predominantly techie-related discussions. Making a game starts with the design, and in my opinion is the most challenging aspect of the entire process. So, I thought it would be fun to write down (a) what my popper is and (b) where my inspiration comes from, and maybe spark up some game-design-related conversation. If you have some ideas after reading my brain dump here, feel free to share. And now I present...Bethellowed! ;)

Basic mechanics

I am using pretty simple stuff, as found in most bubble-popping games. In my case I draw a bit of my mechanic ideas from Othello, especially the basic move and result. In Othello there are only two colors, but in my game there are currently five. Instead of starting with an empty board like Othello, I start you off with a filled board full of random colors like Bejeweled and its ilk. When you place a piece in Bethellowed, you place it on top of an existing piece, essentially replacing it with your new piece. You can only place pieces on the board where there is a legal move. In order for it to be considered a legal move, you must place a piece such that at least one other piece somewhere on the board directly to the north, south, east, or west matches the color of the piece you are playing. This matching piece must have at least one intervening piece that can be of any other color.

As the piece is played, it will "flip over" (in Othello fashion) all of the pieces between it and the matching piece (called a chain), and then will remove all of those pieces from the board, causing the remaining pieces on the board to fill in downwards and other pieces to fall in from offscreen to fill in the vacant spots at the top (again, ala Bejeweled).

The game has levels, and you have to reach a certain point score to get to the next level. If you can survive the end-game scenario long enough, you get a fresh start on the next level.

End-game

The biggest problem I had getting a fun working version of this type of game was determining an interesting end-game scenario. I didn't want to use a timer like Jewel Quest, for instance, though I could have quite easily. Just have the player make a certain number of points before the time expired for the level, otherwise game over. Instead, I wanted an end game scenario that would work either with a timer or (more imporantly) with a turn-based game.

I first looked to Bejeweled for inspiration, but it is sort of like a hand of Solitaire where you don't end up winning, in that no matter how good you play there is eventually an end-game situation that is no fault of your own. I found that it was not easy to create such a situation with my Othello-like mechanics. So, I stole the burning tile concept from Bookworm for my end-game. I admit it and I don't care ;)

You have pieces in the game that appear near the top that I've currently nicknamed 'buggers'. The bugger pieces swap with the piece directly south of itself after every time the player pops a chain (ala Bookworm, who probably stole it from a game from twenty years ago, but I digress). If a bugger gets to the bottom row, the game is over. A bugger can be removed as part of a normal chain, but it cannot be an end-point in a chain, as it matches no color. There are two types of buggers so far: one that gets removed if it is part of a chain that is popped, and one that needs to be part of two different plays (essentially has to be popped twice). If you pop type #2 bugger once, it turns into a type #1 bugger. The type #2 bugger idea came to me while thinking of Gauntlet of all things.

I like this type of end-game because it really forces the player to worry about doing more than just popping normal chains and collecting bonus pieces. The player now has compelling decisions to make during play and much of the end-game scenario is now based on how well you play, not purely random chance. However, there is something about this that I'm not sure I really like. If you pop a north-south chain underneath a bugger, it essentially gets much closer to the end-game scenario very quickly (it falls down). That almost feels like I am punishing you for using north-south chains.

I had also considered allowing you to continue until more than one bugger was on the bottom row. Try something like if you have one (or more) bugger on the bottom row for three turns in a row then it's game over. I haven't tried that yet because so far it works fairly well the way I have it already. If I wanted to change up the board size or something else I might need something like this mechanic in order for it to work well.

Scoring

Scoring right now is simple, but there are some nice things I like about it. You are given 10 points per piece popped in a chain. I drew some inspiration from Scrabble, which has the concept of double letter scoring and double word scoring. In my game if you pop more than one chain at once (say, one to the north, one to the east), then you get a multiplier on both chains. You'll earn more points by popping two short chains at once then one long chain in many cases, for example. This is my version of double word scoring. There are multiplier pieces that are colored like normal pieces, but which give you either x2, x3, or x5 whatever you would normally score for just that chain it is a part of. This is my version of a double letter score.

You are also given extra points for each bugger you pop, and I'm considering giving you a serious bonus if you can manage to pop a lot of buggers at once. The last thing I've added (so far) are star pieces. These too are colored like normal pieces, but your goal is to collect five silver or gold stars. Once you do you are given a hefty bonus and you then start your star counter over.

I don't think I'm done with the types of pieces and scoring, yet, however. I really want to give players stuff to look forward to, and although it appears I have a good list it feels incomplete. There's a bit more I can do with the design that'll make it more strategic and more rewarding to the player. I know that when I play games I like discovering stuff. So, a good example of a piece I'm thinking of adding will be a wildcard piece that when popped will give you some type of bonus or better yet give you something that helps you play more strategically, like a piece that pops all buggers that currently reside on the board. Stuff like that just sounds fun to me.

Conclusion

Well, that's my brain dump. Hopefully someone out there finds it a little interesting. Once I get a T2D-based prototype working, I think I might put it up for download so people can tinker with it and give feedback. I believe I have to wait for GG to release the EA version of T2D first, but once the stars align I think I might very well do it. Maybe we could have a contest of some sort, where you have to keep to a certain set of basic mechanics and see who can come up with the most compelling game play? Sounds cool to me, sorta like a Game-In-A-Day possibility.