Them's Some Good Writin

This guy is talented and I suggest you read some of his entries. Very well written, funny, and in the same vein as myself (if that tells you anything).

What is the real tragedy here? No XML, no RSS. In other words? I'll be lucky if I ever get around to his site again. I just have too much other good, interesting things to be looking in on.

To sum up: Diaryland has an RSS deficiency and needs a quick injection of Clueicillin before it gets NeverUsedAgainitis.

Kibbles and Links

Just a little consolidation of a few things on my mind...

My good bud Christian now has an awesome blog. You should go read it and subscribe. He's a smart, cool guy with differing opinions that I respect. Oh, and you should hear him speak of conspiracies. Its great, and he needs to blog about it (hint-hint) soon.

This made my heart ache. Matt LeBlanc's 11mo old daughter has a rare brain disease that gives her seizures and affects her speech and movement. For those who are keeping track, Abby is almost 11 months old. I can't imagine how my heart would break if I had to go through such an ordeal. Makes me want to go find and hug my kid.

I found a bunch of cool sites via blog-to-blog linking. If there was one goofy little feature I'd like to see in Onfolio (you are using it, aren't you? I should get paid for this...) is a little number in parentheses next to "My Feeds" that tells me just how many feeds there are, not just how many unread posts there are. Current unread post count? 279. Eek!

Anyway, here we go:

- Diary of a Would-be Microsoft Employee. Fascinating.

- Moxie Blog. A hometown indie movie theater is blogged from inception to completion. Right now they're finishing construction and just yesterday I got to chime in on my thoughts about what drinks they should serve.

- Joystiq. Gaming news and whatnot.

- Computer Zen. Interesting stuff.

I would go on, but this is tedious (and I have potentially 279 posts to go through). Go to those sites, get those feeds, and see what those smart peeps read. I'll be adding a few choice sites on my links on the right in a little while.

CCG Tools of the Trade

What makes a good tool? What is a tool in terms of creativity and development? Is it a text file? Is it a certain text editor? Is it a spreadsheet program? Each decision you make now will greatly affect you 3+ months down the road.

Me? I'm trying to work on editing MTG Editor to do what I want with it. With existing templates and image schemas, etc, I should be able to get the program into shape to start adding cards quickly. It is a bit disorienting as the program is very Magic-oriented, but I'm slowly exorcising those demons one config file at a time.

I was running on a long text file, including all of my design ideas etc, but in reality I need a streamlined process for making the actual cards (now that I'm comfortable with my primary design decisions), and I really loved working in MTG Editor. The program actually got quite a bit better when I noticed the themes. The XP theme is excellent and clears up the Ugly Java Interface (UJI) which is prevalent in just about every java program ever made.

It can get a little crashy, and it can get a little buggy. But at the end of the day, I've found nothing as good and as simple as that program.

So now, grunt design work. Constant back-of-the-mind thinking on how to create a good, interesting card. Constant pondering on characters and if my current interaction mechanics are good enough.

Constant doubt and fear that I'm doing this wrong somehow.

Constant pain when I realize how much time this is taking away from my family.

Constant hope that this will all pay off.

Parasite and Host

This letter from 3DO president Trip Hawkins is hilarious. He rips into a Gamepro editor for bashing another shitty 3DO game. Funny, funny.

Amateurization

Amateur is a derived from a French word meaning "Love" (ie, Amore). When someone is an amateur at a particular endeavor, that means that they're doing it for the love.

I know it's slightly gangster in terms of phrasing (do it for the love, the love y'all), but I love card games. Particularly the collectable kind. I love how they feel, how they work, I love how they can evoke flavor and mystery and possibilities. I love how they challenge players, and I love how it invokes what I like best about poker (the bluffing), along with what I like best about all games, the skill involved.

My new CCG was created out of love for the genre. I love different aspects from different CCGs, and I appreciate the work that their game designers did and do put into them to this day. Magic has a very strong and outspoken community, one that obsesses over each new release, one that desperate claws for any information it can get its hands on, and through that passion is excellence.

I hope that through my passion comes excellence.

I created my own CCG as an outlet for everything I wanted to do in a card game. I have looked closely at each game I've played, whether I'm playing it now or later, and try to really point out what I love regarding it. This includes Star Chamber, which as a board game/CCG hybrid, simply feels ahead of its time. The players who get as enamored as I do by it stick around a long time, because they know a good game is hard to find. Particularly one as good as SC.

Of course, the experience differs for each player, but to me the fun of CCGs is that customizability. To hold on to what you feel is powerful and try to build around that. There are 3 types of players, as the old Magic axiom goes, Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Noob, Artist, Cutthroat, in other words. The Lead Magic Designer, Mark Rosewater, feels that he is all three. I feel as if that is a big cop-out, as he certainly doesn't want to pigeonhole himself. I also feel like I'm all three, but who doesn't? Who doesn't like to awe over impressive cards (like Timmy), feel the rush of excitement by trying something new (Johnny), or the thrill of victory (Spike)?

These all add up to design decisions and breakthroughs made by myself, culminating in last night's brainstrom. You see, last night I finally discovered my Secondary Winning Condition. What I feel is truly great about it is that the duality of it fits very well. It is unique to CCGs, yet understood instantly and I feel will be a great asset to the game as development goes forward.

While I am forced to be very cloak and dagger about the design and how the game develops (just because I have parties who are interested in its final result), I will say that I am very happy that I can create a CCG that isn't just Smash Face. Now smashing face is fun (that is to say: using big characters to "kill" the opponent or their assets), but to add another layer to it was my goal and I believe I have something that works just that way.

Now, you could say that every CCG, or almost every one, has these systems in place. This is true. There are all kinds of ways to win and lose in Magic (I can't help but reference it constantly, as its the only CCG most of my readers will be familiar with), including cards that say "You win the game" and cards that say "You lose the game."

But to instill an alternate winning condition, and actually make it a core component of the design, that is my goal. The goal of Magic is to take the other person from 20 life points to 0. Simple as that. You can deck the opponent (get rid of all their cards in their deck, so they lose when they have to draw another), and you can poison them to death. But no matter what, the drive of that game is that life total. The best decks kill you, they don't get creative. It is 20 to 0 or bust. Because if you try anything else, you will most certainly bust.

I want to push the other side of that, the creative side, and hope that players really take to it and appreciate it. Who wants to design what has been designed before anyway?

But no matter what, another milestone has passed, and work on the CCG trudges on. It's right about now that I wish Blogger had sectionalization. I would love to put this into the box of "CCG Design and Notes" but I can't, it must remain here, in the General Store of blogging.

It's also right about now that I contemplate installing a different blogging system. Then I remember how godawful my experiences with that have been, and I think better of it.

Foodporn!

I'm telling you, I'm starting a trend. First Newsporn, now...Food Porn!

Apple makes me feel special

Sometimes, the truth is just too funny.

Congrats Mr. Bailey

Congrats to Mr. Brian Bailey for taking the sole spot in Jeremy Wright's contest to find someone to write a piece for a blog book. No, not that one.

As my faithful readers might know, I had a run in and a resolution with Mr. Bailey. He's a fine writer, class act, and I'm sure it will be a fascinating piece.

Of course, what's really interesting is that Brian gets to choose another person to write a piece in the book...and while I'm sure it won't be me, that doesn't detract from any of the previous flattering comments. The guy has earned em.

Lastly, I'm geekily jealous of his watching the Macworld keynote live while all I got was the silly blog version.

GoDaddy...or GoDon't

One of the Neat Ideas I had in regards to my wife's upcoming birthday on the 28th was that I will purchase a new domain name for her and Get That Woman Blogging. She's smart, interesting, funny and I'm sure that all of these talents will combine into an excellent blog.

So the question is asked: Who to register the domain name with?

Well, I've used 1and1.com (pretty crappy, just because their db access alone is such a unbelievable pain), hostingplex, and some others I can't really recall.

If you want to see something truly hilarious, you should see me when I try to update my domain(s) for whatever reason. I almost always contact old providers I don't use anymore (such as modwest) and end up grilling them for some goofy reason (such as Blogger not being able to use FTP...), and then asking me if I would like to get hosting with them because my account was cancelled six months ago. Then it turns out to be Blogger's problem.

Yea, it's non-stop laughs when it comes to domains around here. I need a simpler solution.

The spark of this idea was the bad mojo talk of GoDaddy.com and their 2.4 million dollar Super Bowl spot. GoDaddy is ran by Bob Parsons who, other than having a very interesting blog (yes, I subscribed), is confident that though they "run a tight ship" (as noted in the Why Is GoDaddy.com So Cheap page) the 2.4 million dollar spot could just as easily fall through and not a soul will react to it. And that's okay.

That ship is so...tight, you know what I'm sayin?

Anyway, GoDaddy.com has far too many haters to let me use them, and I'm now trying to find good hosting wherever its available. I think I found one. I'm paying $13/mo for the hosting I'm using now and that seems reasonable, and this place is cheaper and has no haters on board (yet?). All I want is a good control panel and the few times I will inevitably have to deal with customer support be a tolerable and somewhat unpainful experience.

But in the end I'll probably be registering Ericka's domain name at Network Solutions, even though it certainly isn't the cheapest, because its the simplest and the easiest to manage registration schema for me.

I'm not kidding about that forgetting the hoster thing. I've seriously bugged people until they finally type something like this in their "Live Chat" box: "Dude, you don't even use us any longer."

"Oh, shit, sorry." *Disconnect*

iPodShuffle and MacMini

Apple is still cool. The big Apple keynote at Macworld was today (I got my live feed here) and they announced two new pieces of hardware (amongst Interesting Software Updates).

The iPodShuffle just makes sense, you know, the little piece of music hardware that just got better. The pricing is a little odd (if not a bit expensive), but hell this is Apple. It is to be expected. People Pay More For Apple. This is why Steve Jobs is rich.

The MacMini looks so cool and accessible it makes me want one instantly. While I don't really like macs, I still appreciate the nice interface and the unix (ie, BSD) core. All I got to say is, it generates raw sexy like no other computer hardware company can match. It's plastic elegance, its a metal menagerie. It gives even the jaded geek wood, or at least it should. Yes, that rhymed.

MC master Evan, in the house.

Eureka!

Last night, fleshing out design ideas with some old shoddy cards, I finally realized how I want the first draft of the resource system in my CCG to work.

All of those little details you forget, all of those little details you simply don't notice when playing a card game, such as how to get started, how many cards in hand, how and when to mulligan...it's quite a task to do so from scratch. I mean, certainly I'm templating certain decisions based on prior experience with other CCGs, but that comes with the territory.

Now there are still some important decisions left, but I really like how things are going right now. My reasoning is: "If it requires a design decision, make it simple." In order to hook players on a game, you want it to be simple but fun. Complex but easy to learn. Simple brings Foundation, and Foundation bridges toward Design Possibilities, particularly in the case of expansions.

Nevertheless, I am very excited that I can now move forward and focus on game changing effects and character development. I believe for a world to truly come alive you'll need to do your research and flesh it out completely, so part of the next few weeks is to create the pieces to make that work. This will be a challenge and an ever-evolving one, as playtesting will quickly show what sucks, what works, and will certainly bring the question of "What the fuck was I thinking" before its over, I'm sure.

Lastly I'm thinking of doing incremental updates from now on, instead of the one-post-per-day rule for me. While it is quite a bit simpler, I run into little stuff all the time and would like to show it to you as well as comment on it. Look for some of these later today or tomorrow.

Why I hate Location/Mission-Based CCGs

Aside: Brian Bailey has struck again in the blogosphere! He's living high on the tsunami of hits that followed a 9.0 strike via Scoble (god help the metaphors), and part of me wishes I could write something as insightful. But I digress. I'm going to stick with that I know and trudge on. I've got plenty of RSS subscribers, so as long as those people are happy, so am I.

Anyway, today I want to speak of Location-Based Combat and Character Missions as a CCG Winning Condition. This can get pretty intricate and nasty, so I'll try my best to keep it simple.

While the title of this post could give it away, I simply hate the fact that many games have winning conditions based on mutually shared Locations and/or mutually shared "Plot" elements that impact the game and drive it toward a certain degree.

Part of me still hates the Spyrcraft CCG for having such goddamn worthless presenters at last year's Origins show, but even with the best of hosts, the game would still be terrible. Take a look at this card:

No here comes the part where Blogger fucks up my text and the words are scrunched together. But nevertheless, these cards are one way to win the game. There are numbers everywhere, there are far too many keywords (Intrigue? Private? Transport?), there are even more for the attacker and defender,and the art is just awful.

The sins of Spycraft should be obvious and apparently this guy hates it too. And for good reason. It's a stupid, confusing game, and with absolutely no fan support (even VS. has half a dozen sites around the web) this game will be dead shortly after "Spycraft 2.0!" ships. Mark my words.

But today's write-up has more to do with Win Conditions than anything. Quite simply, Magic has cast such a long shadow over the rest of the industry you can't help to try and get away from it. For instance, everyone has their version of "Tap" (ie, turn sideways). Sometimes they turn them over ("Stun", via VS. System), and everyone has their "Graveyard" (ie, Discard Pile).

You also have "Life Points" or Integrity Points or Missions Points, etc. And the designers base the win on some magical number of whatever keyword they choose. 30 Mission Points = win? Okay, then there's a goal. Life Points is different. Life Points is a total you must keep in the positive. While Magic has hence went against its own rules and recanted the whole "You can go below 0 Life if only for a minute" thing (you now die instantly), others such as VS. System let you drop below 0, and the person that is the MOST below 0 at the end of turn loses. Weird, huh? "I'm at -10." "Yeah, well I'm at -8! I win!"

Most CCGs design a primary win condition (Missions, get the other person to zero life) and then include at least 1-2 more conditions beyond that. Magic has, for example, the semi-abandoned "poison" mechanic, where if you get 10 poison counters you lose automatically. Now this was all great and flavorful when it debuted in Arabian Nights, but in today's times (and beyond the Ice Age block of cards), it was all but forgotten yet has been looming over the Magic design team for awhile now.

I see winning conditions as superflous to the game itself (hear me out, hear me out). While 2-3 winning conditions is fine, if you can't get the core mechanics down in terms of act/react, then the game will fall apart.

Another example of a fine mechanic that unfortunately relies on Location-based gameplay: the Shadow Pool in the Lord of the Rings CCG. Just brilliant. The more you play, the more I can play. Each good character adds tokens to the pool, tokens that the other player uses (ie, subtracts out of the pool) to play their own bad cahracters. Very cool. What I'm not thrilled about is that the game is won by either killing the ring-bearer, or making it turn Location #9 without having your party die. So there is LOTR's win conditions.

My favorite win condition and/or winning mechanic came from Legend of the 5 Rings. In that game you have 4 Provinces that you must defend. Each round of combat you try and get your army through the other player's defenses and if you do so successfully, then that "Province" is destroyed and now they have only 3 Provinces. Get them down to zero Provinces and they're dead. Those Provinces are represented by 4 face-down cards which are flipped up and played during your turn. There is also an "Honor" mechanic where if you have a certain number or fall below a certain number you lose. One of the races in the game cannot lose or gain Honor and are pretty evil. Etc.

Some games decide they'd rather have winning conditions in specific cards themselves. These are cards which include the text "You win the game." I'm not certain that these originated with Magic, but nevertheless there are plenty of cards such as Test of Endurance which says something along the lines of "At the beginning of your upkeep, if you have 50 or more Life, you win the game." VS. System has a few of these cards, including Xavier's Dream and another called Rigged Elections. I really like the flavor of cards that give you alternate winning conditions, as they basically create a new strategy all on their own, if the designers considered the themes of the game as a whole and can support it.

*Note - Exhast = Tap

For example, Rigged Elections is based on the Arkham Inmates team affiliation. All of these characters are awful. Almost every other team is better than them. But the idea of Rigged Elections is that you do not attack, you simply tap an untapped Arkham Inmates character (after your opponent has smashed face with their own behemoths) to put a counter on it. I believe some decks actually have tried (and even a few successfully!) to run this card, but in the end the designers couldn't really make this strategy too viable, as then everyone would just play Rigged Elections decks.

One of the things that is really interesting is that there are plenty of Negation cards (which negate existing effects) in VS, yet this win condition seems silly as there just isn't the design infrastructure to support it. What I'm saying is that if the designers wanted, they could've either made Arkham Inmates characters better or they could've eased up on the restrictions for the card (perhaps tapping any character), but they did not.

So here-in lies the question: How many win conditions should a CCG have? I like the idea of two with a possible third, but more intriguing to me is the idea of having two win conditions that will never change, then design yourself a few cards which let you win the game if you work towards that goal.

Anyway, I've yet to agree on any win condition for my CCG other than the basic Life Points one, and you sure as hell won't see me anywhere near Missions or Locations and God forbid I get drunk on keywords as Spycraft certainly has done. The simpler the better, its just that simple is so hard to find.