Yo.

I’m in for the compo.

A week ago, I was a research scientist with no skills in AS3, pixel art, animation, or music editing. Now I’m, well, still that but less not delusional.

Code:

• AS3
• Flixel
• Flixel Power Tools
• FlashDevelop
• Possibly small snippets from the Nutmeg tutorial, which I’m using as a reference.
• Possibly Octave to rapid prototype, test, and balance game mechanics, but not for production code.
• This incredibly hacky file that is the entirety of my AS3 personal code base. It’s a quick and dirty workaround to the no multi-frame animated button issue that takes in a sprite with animations for mouseovers already stored. One day I might make it less bad.

Art:

• Gimp
• DAME

Music / Sound:

• Probably abundant-music
• Possibly impro-visor
• Anvil
• Midi Converter Studio
• sfxr

The Power Shirley Temple recipe I posted on twitter is an old creation of mine from my bartending days, and it really works. You will be super awake and you’ll feel like a little girl again. And if you ask any bartender for a “<name brand energy drink> Shirley Temple”, he or she will probably be able to guess the recipe. It takes roughly 2x as much grenadine as a ginger ale Shirley Temple, and it really makes the whole energy drink experience more enjoyable.

Power Shirley Temple recipe for #LD48 : Glass of ice, 8.4oz energy drink, .5oz grenadine, optional cherry. Stir and serve with straw. Magic!

— monika (@alternatehamlet) December 12, 2013

Update:

Red Bull Shirley Temple means I’m ready to go.

Okay, I’m going to tell you my working title, and you’re all going to throw tomatoes at me.

Fisticons

The only reason I’m telling you is because my OCD says I need a title and I need to tell people, and the rational part of my brain wants the OCD to shut up and go back to earworming Megadeth songs. I will be changing the title.

Stats: Skill, Flair, Acting Skills.

Setting:  circa 1880s Europe (yes, all of Europe)

Character One is a down-on-his-luck prizefighter who, despite being very skilled, is not a draw, and gets a very small cut of the door even when he wins. His financial outlook is bleak.

Character Two is a con man on the run from the law who wants to raise enough money to bribe a ship’s captain to sneak him to America. He and a friend come up with a plan to fix boxing matches, and recruit Character One to help.

The game will have two main states, which hopefully you will choose to play together in Campaign Mode, but Quick Fight mode and Auto-fight mode will also be available for people who only like one of the two game play types.

Fight Mode will have you performing fake boxing moves on each other with the goal of looking like you are injuring each other while you try to avoid actually injuring each other. You will also attempt to manipulate the audience into betting in ways that make you money, while avoiding raising their suspicions that you guys are working together. This mode will look like a fighting game but will also have elements of a rhythm game.

Campaign Mode will additionally have you traveling Europe conning audiences in different cities, being careful to avoid raising the suspicions of the authorities. You can also train your characters so complex tricks and audience manipulation tactics become easier.

Been working on code but I need to brainstorm a bit the best way to deal with how the rhythm game controls the character actions. Currently doing some music and deciding on dinner.

Going to bed, but going to do some research into circa 1880s bare-knuckle boxing. Posting some stuff here in case I forget it all by morning

From http://www.proboxing-fans.com/boxing-101/history/1880s-the-age-of-the-great-john-l-sullivan/

This is a guy named John Sullivan, who was kind of a big deal. I suspect one of the characters will look sort of like him.

“Of course, it’s important to note that polite society considered boxing barbaric, and held sufficient sway over lawmakers to ensure that matches were illegal in most jurisdictions.  This is why one reads about this or that bout taking place on a barge, hopefully beyond the reach of the long arm of the law.   The alternative was to hold fights surreptitiously, late at night and in secluded locations.  Still, if discovered, the police would break up the matches.  In 1868, for example, the police arrested Joe Coburn before he could face Mike McCool.  The canny “Deckhand Champion of America” then entered the ring in his boxing togs, and was declared champion.”

” In his 1887 bout with Patsy Cardiff, Sullivan broke his left arm in the first round, but nevertheless went on to fight a six-round draw.”

(I like the name Patsy. Maybe I’ll use it.)

From http://historyofbkb.weebly.com/bkb-figureheads.html

“A common practice at the turn of the century was for athletes to have nude portraits taken. The athletic proportion of boxer Peter Jackson’s body is clearly seen; he was six feet in height and weighed fourteen stone two pound.”

“Morrissey became involved in Democratic politics in New York City and a rivalry with William Poole, also known as “Bill the Butcher”. Poole was an enforcer for the Know-Nothing Party, leader of the Bowery Boys, and a boxer. In 1854, Morrissey was hired to prevent Poole and his gang from seizing ballot boxes and rigging an election. As a reward for having stopped the ballot rigging, Morrissey and his gang, the Dead Rabbits, were permitted by Tammany Hall to open a gambling house without police interference.”

No funnies in this one, but it has video from the era, which is awesome. http://www.boxing.com/strong_boy_the_life_and_times_of_john_l._sullivan_americas_first_sports_her.html

This too. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/papr:@field%28NUMBER+@band%28edmp+4015a%29%29

From http://historyofbkb.weebly.com/the-history-of-bkb.html

“The boxing match then did not resemble a match of today. The fighters were stripped to the waist , but did not wear gloves. Kicking , biting and gouging were not allowed , and neither was hitting or grabbing below the waist. But most other thing were. Wrestling was an essential part. The opponent could be knocked or thrown to the ground, either by picking him up around the waist or by a popular move known as cross buttock. Having thrown an opponent to the floor it was allowed to fall on top of him as heavily as possible.”

Okay, time for sleep. See you all tomorrow.

now you can look at my stuff and feel better about yourself

Nothing but placeholders, unless I don’t have time to make non-placeholders, in which case, fuck yeah pepper boxing.

My OCD has been winning most of the battles about where I spend my time, which sucks. It spent way too much time last night trying to fix a glitch in some abundant-music stuff. The rational part of my brain did win a victory today though; the timing indicator on the left is a second png that’s a duplicate of the one on the right, because the first few things I tried to flip it didn’t work, and all the solutions I knew would take a little more work.

For now I’m going to work on getting this thing working in fight mode with one button per character, and then I’ll add in campaign mode, then flesh out the story (I don’t care what you say. That shit’s important, yo.), and then work on making the fighting mode more complex at higher levels. But for the immediate right now, I’m going to work on making this thing less ugly.

3.5 hours were spent drawing faces I didn’t like.

Richie Rich grew up and became a popcorn magnate?

And now I’m going to respond to the time management lecture I’m giving myself in my head.

Yes, 4 hours was a lot of time to spend on drawing a head that’s going to be shrunk down to pixel art. Yes I know there are only 17 hours before I have to get this thing published. Yes I know coding isn’t done.

But you know what? That was all necessary. I had no idea what this game was going to look like before now, and now that I know, the minimum viable art is going to come together very quickly. This look will influence the tone of the game and the feel of the game. This little chibi swirly-haired man man defines the game. And those other 7 or 8 directions I went in and then abandoned? They are useful too. They define what the game isn’t.

(Also, the break from coding gave the coding part of my brain time to figure out how to organize some data structures and stuff. I told it to take a break, but it didn’t want to.) 

While I’m rebooting the computer I was doing graphics on, I’ve got these characters who need, like, names and bios.

Here are the bios.

Meet C1

He is a master prizefighter, but his clinical, precise fighting style and his no-nonsense demeanor don’t win him many fans. His brother-in-law recently died in a train derailment in Russia, and he would like to help support his sister’s six children, but he can’t make enough money in a clean fight. If only he knew how how to excite a crowd…

Meet C2

He’s a confidence man on the run from the law after he accidentally started a war in Sudan. He has a scheme to raise money so he can buy passage (and, more expensively, the captain’s silence) on a boat to the Americas. The only problem is he doesn’t know how to fight.

Now I just need some good late 19th century names for these two gentlemen. And I’ll probably put their names in the game title, so it’s like some sort of killing two things with one thing.

Doing some triage, and I might have to jam this thing for the time extension.

If I do make the compo deadline, here’s some art that’ll probably not be modified much before then:

The crowd of randomly generated head shapes. (Need to make templates for face, hair, hats, and clothing, and I can generate a real crowd.)

The displays for the timing rewards. These actually might not even make it, but this is how they’ll look if they do.

Sprite who has one frame of animation, no features, and a butt that is too big.

I still have a bunch of mechanics to work on before I reach minimum viable product stage. I think I might rather reach that with more time than submit before it’s ready, but maybe not. I’ll have to see how it looks in 3 hours.

Few elements short of a playable version, so I’m going to follow all the compo rules except the time limit and submit it to the jam.

since I apparently haven’t learned my lesson.

Going with the font Baron for at least the title card.  (Using Figa for my logo with the font designer’s blessing.)

Going to have an attract screen for the game. These are the overlays. Haven’t yet sold myself on the subtitle.

Since I was learning the language as I went along, my code is a mess. I’m not going to clean it up for the jam unless there’s time, but I AM going to organize the shit out of it.

I still plan to follow compo rules + extended time, but if I do break more of them, the first thing I’m doing is getting myself some sprite templates. I still have high hopes for my random crowd generator. Fixed the math up a bit and it gives better results. I also have control of the crowd size, and (and this was one of those “too lazy to fix” features), the crowd tiles horizontally.

I keep trying fancy math for the reward functions for the rhythm game, but I really should break down and pre-generate everything manually. The displays I made in gimp look much better than the generated pixel-by-pixel on-the-fly versions in the game. Beta probability distribution function, you have failed me for the last time!

Really looking forward to playing everyone’s games.

No excuses! I didn’t get this shit done and that’s all on me.

Now, an excuse. FlashDevelop crapped out on me this morning, and it took several hours to get it to compile anything again (I’m bad at mornings, which made the problem worse.)

Anyway, I do plan to finish it, polish it up, and stick it up on Kongregate at some point, so in the unlikely even that you want to know the second it gets released, you can, like, pay attention to my twitter feed @alternatehamlet

Things I learned:

For fuck’s sake, don’t let your OCD decide what to do next.

The thing about this is that I would rationally realize exactly what the correct thing to do is, but my OCD would override the decisions and bitch and moan until I did what it wanted. For example:

• My OCD insisted I fix a glitch in the music abundant-music spit out. To be fair, it would have been really annoying to lose 59/64ths of a beat in the music when you’re playing a rhythm game, but it was low priority for the minimum viable release.
• My OCD really wanted to have an infinite scrolling background. I didn’t see an easy way to do this in Flixel (though I was pretty sure there should have been one), so I tried to make my own. I got it almost working with a small glitch, so I kept working on it. In the end, I did get it, but again, it was low priority for the minimum viable release.

If you think a tool would be really useful if it existed, it probably exists.

I found out about Spriter at around noon today, after I’d spent a good part of the night hand-skeletoning my sprite guide file, and a good chunk of this morning (while simultaneously working on fixing FlashDevelop) thinking Miku Miku Dance might be a good option for a pose mannequin for my 2D sprites.

Women bare-knuckle fights were pretty popular in the late 19th century, and just like the men did, the women stripped to the waist to box.

I told you this was a list of things I learned. That’s a thing I learned.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Now, I’ll probably do things differently the next time I attempt to do a game jam, but I still feel that the way I approached this experience was the correct one for me and for this game.  My goal was to get good at ActionScript3 in a week, get passable at a bunch of other skills in the same week, and practice getting off my ass, doing something I find interesting, and making a good faith effort to get shit done.

For over a year, I’ve been working as a research scientist for a small unfunded start-up which I co-founded. Said start-up recently disbanded, and, even if it’s not objectively true, I still felt like I have nothing to show for, well, anything ever. This weekend was cathartic. It really was. I have reached catharsis.

Now, my mom is coming into town tomorrow, so I have to go get non-game shit done.

-monika

*The whole thing is a bug.

Yo. I’m in.

I expect to be working in AS3/Flixel/FlixelPowerTools, but I had a dream last night that I made the game entirely in Google Spreadsheet Scripts, and it made a lot of dream-sense so I’m keeping that option open too. My tools are all the usual suspects.

This is a pre-alpha version of a tactics library I’m working on in Flixel. It is so pre-alpha that a lot of functions do nothing but write to the log that you got to them. It is completely useless to anyone, but on the off-chance I make a tactics game for this Ludum Dare, I’m making what I have available now, and you’ll get a slightly more polished version with my code after the compo. I will be eventually releasing this as an open source tactics library, but it’s not quite at that state yet. (Also included is a slightly modified version of FlxButtonPlus that I made last December when I was first trying Flixel, that I might or might not use.)

Here’s a feedback form / mailing list signup thing in case you are interested in this library once it’s less not done.

So I’m basing my game on Kafka’s short story A Hunger Artist, a story which, on the surface, is about a performance artist and his hype man trying to build and maintain an audience at a time when interest in watching people not eat is starting to flag.

If you haven’t read this story, it’s in the public domain and available here, or if you are for some reason really busy developing a game this weekend or something, librivox has an audiobook version available on youtube.

Here’s what I have so far.

You play as the Hunger Artist (the red rectangle labled “HA”) and are joined by the Impresario (the green rectangle labled “IMP”) in entertaining the spectators (the rectangles of various colors labled “SP”).  Audience members will all have different personality traits that affect their behavior, including, most importantly, whether or not they come back to watch you later, and whether or not they bring friends. You will have 40 days to maximize your ticket sales.

If I have time, I’ll make a campaign mode where you travel around Europe circa 1909-1924 putting on performances until you slowly but surely drive away your only friend and advocate by showing a complete disregard for your own health. There’ll also be an endless play mode set in a circus, where you play until you get lost in the straw and replaced with a panther. I might also make the panther a playable character.

Yo.

As mentioned in my last post, I’m making a tycoon / time management game based on Kafka’s A Hunger Artist. The theme tie-in is that the game only presents the cutesy surface to a deep dark story. I haven’t decided yet how cutesy to make it. I don’t think I can pull off Ikuhara*-level cute to fucked-up ratios, but I might try.

Anyway, it’s too early to code, so here’s an update:

Spectators now have stats and names randomly assigned from a list of Czech names. When you mouse over them, you get a summary including their names, genders, and ages, whether or not they have season passes, and whether they have specific personality traits. Also, unless someone can help me think of a better word, the trait name opposite charismatic is introverted. They describe opposite ends of a stat that affects the likelihood that that spectator drags along friends or moves other spectators to be more or less skeptical.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I replaced all the háčeked characters with their plain versions instead of spending time looking for a font that looked good in Flixel and displayed them correctly.

Ticket Sales are now counted. Units are Austro-Hungarian Krone. People can buy day tickets, season tickets, or child tickets. You cannot currently change ticket prices, but that’s something I might implement later.

Ludum Dare Moment of Victory: I made some effort to calculate the exchange rate between 1908 Krone and 2014 USD so I could get a sense of how much tickets should cost. After a setback in converting 1909 Krone to 1909 French Franc and 1909 French Franc to 2014 Euro, I decided instead to simply base ticket prices on the cost of a newspaper in 1913 Krone.

I had to rethink the way time passes. The story calls for 40-day fasting performances, and that number totally has like symbolism and stuff, so I can’t change that. I was originally thinking each performance would be like a stage in a game – you play it quick, go to the main map, and save, but I was also thinking that the game would move slow enough that you could interact with the audience and do other things that take time. The first number I wrote down when thinking how long a day should last was “5 minutes”. That would make each fast performance last over 3 hours. Even 1 minute a day felt rushed to me. Anyway, I’m making some changes. Most importantly, 1. You can save every day, not every fast performance, and 2. You don’t have to play night hours even though there are night hours in the story.

Oh, and I made some mediocre music last night using abundant-music. I did this thing where I kept everything the same except for the scale seed, which allowed me to make several songs with the same structure and melody shaping but different moods. If I don’t have time to do music properly, I’ll throw something from that set in. If I do have time, I’ll do it again but spend more time getting the song to sound good first. And if I don’t make the Compo and do the Jam, I’ll say “fuck it” and pick some music from the public domain production music you’ll probably recognize from Ren & Stimpy.

To do list – highest priority:

1. Stats and stat display for The Hunger Artist and The Impresario
2. Action controls for The Hunger Artist
3. Day controls
4. Improve Audience Behavior algorithms
5. Tighten up Feedback loop between Audience mood and Hunger Artist mood
6. Background Art
7. Character Art

I leave you now with a drawing by Franz Kafka himself that might resonate with all of you who are working your asses off to make a game this weekend. It’s hard work, but don’t despair. You can do it.

*If you don’t know Ikuhara, imagine David Lynch making shows for Japanese 12-year-old girls.

Edit from the future: I overwrote the demo with the submission build. Sorry about that.

If you’ve missed my other posts, I’m making a tycoon / time management game based on Kafka’s A Hunger Artist.

Here’s what I have so far. It’s incomplete, and also ugly.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23884082/bin/HungerArtist.swf

Hover over any person sprite to see some information about that person.

Hover over an action button to perform that action.

Currently activated debugging features:

• The tab button restores your energy.
• The space button toggles speedrun mode, which is unstable.
• The ` button toggles Flixel’s built in debugger.

Known incomplete features:

• People all wait until the end of the day to leave.
• People just teleport to their seats.
• People who bring their friends don’t sit next to them.
• Talking doesn’t work. The talking button causes you to sing.
• The Impresario is completely unconcerned by anything that is happening.

Bugs reported so far by players like you!:

• People are moved by singing and meditating even after you run out of energy. (Fixed in my local copy but not the demo.)

First off, here’s the game if you are interested.

So this game exists now. That’s amazing. I’m amazed. It still feels weird to me that I managed to do that.

About the game:

This game is based on the Franz Kafka short story A Hunger Artist, which can be read here or listened to here. Wikipedia has an article here. It tells the story of the Hunger Artist, a hunger artist who wants, even needs, to be understood by people who cannot understand him.

In this game, you play as the Hunger Artist during one of his performances, which lasts a maximum of 40 30-second-long game days. During the day, interested people from the town come in, sometimes bringing friends, and watch you not eat. The Impresario will try to keep the crowd interested and maximize your profit, while you do what you can to try to make the audience understand your art.

With the exception of a few buttons mixed in, all of the controls are controlled by hovering. Hover over sprites to see information about the characters. Hover over the action buttons to perform those actions. Audience members are persistent, so do your best to make them want to come back.

Observations and Lessons Learned:

This is the section where I’d put down all the mistakes I made this Ludum Dare and tell you about what those mistakes taught me for next time. I’m surprised at how short this section is, but this weekend went surprisingly smooth.

My only really identifiable mistake?

• I feel I failed to make it cute enough to properly contrast the Kafkaesque story. I would have had an easier time making the game style match the story. As it is, it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Oh, and

• Saturday morning, I discovered that microwave pot pies with chunks of potatoes are really dangerous.
• I ordered way too much sushi on Saturday night, especially since my tongue was still swollen.

As for things that went right,

• I didn’t get stuck working on assets. I did two dresses for the women as proof-of-concept on my random sprite generator, and then I moved on. I generated some mediocre abundant-music music Friday night after I stopped being functional, and experimented with different ways to independently adjust settings on it, and then didn’t use that music in the end, but I didn’t waste good time on it.
• I was fairly reasonable with respect to scheduling. I woke up surprisingly early on Saturday (three hours before my alarm, even) after working late into Friday, so I got tired fairly early Saturday night. I had planned to get the game playable before bed Saturday, but when I started getting too stupid to code right, I didn’t try to force myself.
• I got the scope exactly right. The game as it is is only a small part of of what I imagine the game to be, but I came into this knowing that this was the probably form the game would take.

This type of section is really boring when everything goes right. Sorry.

Things left to do:

• Fix the graphics. The background image is a bunch of colored rectangles. It was supposed to be a bunch of textured rectangles. I never got around to giving the women hair that is not a copy of the men’s hair. I never got around to making a title card with a cutesy Franz Kafka face like I wanted to. And I wanted to make a wall clock. I should probably get an artist.
• Fix the music. At the very least, I should find a sound font I like and spend some time choosing better instruments.
• Add animation, or at least movement. Did you know that the audience members have faces? Well, they don’t, but they do have front-facing sprites with more face skin showing. The relative stillness works with the game’s theme, but the plan was to have audience members walk in and out, and only stand in the general location of their assigned seating. The alert bubbles also only appear for a fraction of the things they are designed to, and sometimes linger after their parent object teleports off the screen.
• Implement talking. One of the best ways to influence the audience is by talking to them. Talk to them when you are too incredulous, and you might say something offensive. Let kids touch your scrawny arms and they’ll tell all their friends. Talk to the Impresario to let him know what you think will be the most useful. Talking was something I was looking forward to implementing.
• Balance the hell out of it. As is, the game is fairly luck-based an allegory on the inability of man to self-actualize. There is some strategy to getting the audience interested, but the main trick is just not doing things to upset the Impresario and hoping the Impresario handles the audience well.
• Add in campaign mode, endless play mode, and play as the panther after you die at the circus mode. A campaign across time and space! Well, across a few decades in the early 20th century Europe. You build your fame, watch the world’s interest in hunger artists wax and wane, drive off the only person who is looking out for you, and shrink until you disappear.
• Add more in-game text. The story it’s based on is in the public domain.

Little observation I like that I would like if people noticed but they won’t so I’ll mention it

Despite the fact that every NPC thinks you’re probably sneaking food, it doesn’t even come as an available action occur to the player character that that would be something to do.

Hi everyone! This LD, I’ve gathered a team. It’s a wholly different experience from the solo jam, and I couldn’t be happier, even when we are, let’s say, vigorously discussing minor plot points in the game’s backstory and other important things. Seriously though, team’s amazing. Our workspace is covered with giant Post-it notes. We’re going by the name Cliché2Play. Our game idea is based on the astrophysical phenomenon of Hot Jupiters – really weird, surprisingly common exoplanets that happen to be really easy for us to detect from Earth. They are Jupiter-sized planets that orbit so close to their suns that they finish a year in like four days. They are so hot that their atmospheres are burning off fast, but so large that they still have a lot of atmosphere to go, and it seems unlikely that they formed in this configuration. Most theories for how they got this way involve them some sort of migration from a configuration that makes more sense to us. Here are some resources if you are curious. A lecture for non-scientists from a Yale professor An astrophysics presentation on possible formation scenarios Wikipedia In our game, you play as an alien civilization that discovers that a large retrograde gas giant is in an unstable orbit and is going to eat up all your system’s planets. You then set about developing your science, industry, and economy in order to either escape from your system or otherwise avoid certain death. You manage resources, grow research trees, and watch in horror as planet after planet gets consumed by a looming renegade gas giant. We’re developing this in Unity, and the teammate with the most Unity experience is doing a super job of making everything amazingly pretty, so that’s good.   As is my tradition, I’m drinking Red Bull Shirley Temples. To make those, you mix the energy drink of your choice and two splashes grenadine in a tall glass of ice. For best results, drink with a straw. Cherry is optional. Back to work. See you all later. -monika

I have some polishing I need to do and some features I want to add, but it’s a complete game with a tutorial and a win condition and everything.

In this game, you play as the leader of a species that just won a space 4x game. You’ve, for some reason, been elected to a political position, and it’s your job to make sure the conditions of the treaty are met.

Here’s the beta

If anyone has a chance to play it, let me know how it goes.  I suspect it is too easy, so I’ll probably make it harder unless I have people telling me it’s well balanced or hard. Let me know if you find any bugs. I know of one I haven’t fixed yet, but there are probably more.

The game is almost entirely made in D3.js, a javascript library developed for data visualizations by Mike Bostock, who does the interactive visualizations for the New York Times. Some of the background stuff is handled in phaser.

Anyway, back to work.

I am making this game in Google Docs. ::nodnod::

Long story.

No, actually, short story. I made a joke about making a game in Google Docs, and was told that I should. So I’m making this game in Google Docs. Documents, Spreadsheets, Forms, that stuff. It’ll be great.

Okay, so the game. In this game, you play as an alien colonist on a planet that also has a human colony. You don’t like humans, so you want them gone, but you’ve signed a treaty saying you won’t hurt them. You decide your best course of action is to annoy the humans off the planet by breeding together local plants with annoying properties.

(Click here to suggest annoying properties!)

This is a massive-ish multiplayer game. It is also a role-playing game where you can create content as the character you are playing as.

Everyone playing the game is playing cooperatively towards the common goal of annoying humans with plants, though there will be rankings over who is the best annoying plant botanist and who is the best journalist of annoying plants and stuff like that.

I am hoping it picks up enough steam that everyone drops in from time to time for several weeks, and collectively create a rich and storied game world. If everything goes according to plans, there will be options for quick casual play, deep idle play, and creative content creation, and even an option for people who don’t want to do anything but get regular updates on the game and vote in quick public opinion surveys.

Here is a draft of the introduction document you would first read as a player. It gives you a bit of character and backstory for the world and presents to you the class options you will have as a player. I plan to let each unique Google login play as one character per class, so you will get an opportunity to try everything.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing what game ideas everyone else implements, and hoping “annoying plants” isn’t an overdone take on the theme

This year, to top my 2nd place in Innovation (Jam) in LD 32 for making a spreadsheet game, I’ve decided to innovate even more and make a video game played entirely with dice and cards and little tokens and – hold on ::hand to ear:: I’m being told that’s called a board game.

So our game this year is called Family Board Game Night: The Board Game. It is a literal board game and will be available in PDF form for people to print out, but I’ll also try to get a browser-based interface up to make testing and judging it easier. I’m developing it with a friend and we should have the mechanics and content under control, but we are looking for an artist, so if you or someone you know is a 2D artist who can knock out a few dozen card-sized doodles for Monday, let me know.

Concept

You are a family of people who don’t really have the whole family harmony thing going on. At the suggestion a magazine article, Can five weeks of board games make your family a happy family?, you are going to try to play board games several times a week. Each week, you get together, try to coordinate your schedules, and try to agree on which game to play. If you can avoid fighting and stick to gaming for five weeks, maybe, just maybe, you might become a happy family.

Gameplay

Before the game starts, players create family members by drawing trait cards and rolling play skill stats, which affect how well you play certain games and what sorts of interactions you can have with your family. Each family member starts with a morale score between 2 and 7, on a scale from 1 to 12. The family’s board game collection is a single basic board game.

The game is divided into five weeks, and each week is divided into three phases – scheduling, playing, and board game shopping.

During scheduling, each player draws a number of scheduling conflicts. Players then try to decide on 1 to 3 days to play games that week, and which games to play. If there are no scheduling conflicts, everyone is happy. If there are conflicts, players will have to make hard decisions.

Family members then play the scheduled games. A typical game will take about 20 seconds to actually play, but may set off any number of events which affect family morale.

At the end of the week, adult characters receive income and child characters can ask for allowance, which the family then uses for board game shopping. An inventory is selected from the deck of games the family doesn’t own, and the family can decide which games to get and whose money to spend.

After five weeks, the family tallies up family member morale to determine if it is a happy family. If it is, everyone gets +1 morale in real life.

Our plan

We’re on track so far. We’ve got the basic rules down and have started creating the lists of cards available for play. We’ve got 21 board game cards, each with unique rules and consequences, and are a good way towards our starter goal of 24 trait cards, 12 secret goal cards, and 30+ event cards. We should be at the in-team play test state some time early afternoon tomorrow, and can get to card layout, balance tweaking, and additional content by tomorrow evening. If we stay on track, the game will be in a submittable state by Sunday morning and we can spend our time having people play test it while we flesh it out and make it pretty.

This is fun. ::nodnod::

Oof, families visiting for the holiday sure got in the way of scoring-period activities.

Oh well…

If you are looking for things to score last minute, I finished a browser port of our board game, Family Board Game Night: The Board Game, last night. It’s more a board simulator than a full video game, since you’ll have to read the rules and cards and figure out what to do, but this way, you don’t have to print everything out.

Here it is.

If anyone has a game that works well on cell phone browsers, let me know in the comments and I’ll score it on my bus ride home.