What you should take away from the confusing title is that Deadshed has changed, so much so it doesn’t resemble Zafehouse at all. It’s a real-time tactical game rather than a simulator, and a lot of the survival horror feel has been stripped away to accommodate the design. It still has zombies, yes, but you won’t be scavenging for supplies or mowing down hordes of undead. Possibly, people who enjoyed Zafehouse won’t warm to Deadshed as much.

But I’m hoping they will.

Still, I’ve decided there’s enough reason to tentatively begin design work on Zafehouse 2, so Deadshed can be all it can be. It’s likely I’ve spent more time talking about Deadshed than coding it, but I think the Zafehouse connection has been a mental roadblock until now.

I want to finish up on the 4e Class Creator – now called the 4e Power Toolkit because of all the functionality it provides – but after that I’ll move 95% onto Deadshed and 5% onto Zafehouse 2.

If you have suggestions for either title, visit the forums and post about it. About 80% of the changes made to Zafehouse after v1.5 have been player-motivated, so there’s a good chance your ideas will be heard and even incorporated.

Posted in Deadshed, Zafehouse

Tags: Deadshed, vb .net, Zafehouse, Zombies

First, the London Olympics logo. Now, it’s a Favicon. Just goes to show that user-created content can be a double-edged sword. A hilariously sharp one in this case.

A little off-topic, but far too classic to pass without a mention.

Posted in General

Tags: bbc, favicon, goatse, humour

Global economic meltdown? Pfft, Aussie gamers don’t care:

The Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) today released figures showing games industry revenue was $1.96 billion in calendar year 2008, an increase of 47 per cent from the previous year.

How did movies fair in ’08?

Box office takings for the same period were up 6 per cent to $946 million, the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia said. Total revenue for movies sold on disc grew 5 per cent to $1.4 billion, the Australian Visual Software Distributors Association (AVSDA) said.

When you think about it, you’d have to see around five movies for every one game you purchase.

I like those odds.

Posted in Industry news

Tags: games, industry, retail, statistics

So you want to generate or level a 4e character, but the mere idea of rolling dice, scribbling numbers, looking up point arrays and jotting down feats and powers makes your hands bleed. Indeed, other than for reasons of sentimentality, performing these tasks electronically is the best way to go.

It also helps that rubbing out stuff doesn’t leave a mark… unless you use white-out on your monitor. If this is the case, generating 4e characters is the least of your concerns.

For those of you who scoff at the idea of using a computer to help with a pen and paper game, sure. I get it. The old school method has an obvious advantage: all you need, at the minimum, is a pencil and a piece of paper. This sort of minimalism appeals to a wide range of people, mostly because it’s cheap. I like cheap. Continue reading ‘Top 5 4th Edition character generators’

Posted in 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, Dungeons and Dragons, Role playing

Tags: 4e, character generators, d&d, tools

Drag, resize, pattern and colour rooms, and attach descriptions, monsters and items to them. Embed URLs to link quickly to information online (or locally), add levels to inject a bit of multi-dimensional flavour and, best of all, export it all to a nice, customisable HTML page with maps of each dungeon floor.

A handsome (and big) screenshot can be found here.

It’s crazy how much I’ve packed into version 2. It’s a rewrite, basically. Oval rooms join the plain old square ones and the resize function is less fiddly. The canvas performance is magnitudes faster, and there’s a semi-real time preview map if you don’t mind a small performance hit. All the program’s windows can now be maximised.

The canvas is now 2048 x 2048 pixels, and you can scroll around it by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the cursor.

The app is smart enough to check for new versions too, so you’ll never be out-of-date.

The HTML templates included with the executable allow you to customise the output. There are special tags embedded in the templates that you can move around to get the pages looking exactly how you want them to. I’ve got a very basic set of templates built into the program, so feel free to tweak.

Version 2 is not compatible with maps made in versions prior to it. If enough people request it, I’ll code an import feature, but you should be able to manage. That, or you’ll explode. Please don’t though!

A few features didn’t make it into this version: room linking being the major one. It’s next on the implementation list, as soon as I figure out a nice way of doing it.

Special thanks to At-Will for providing me with some incentive.

Considering the amount of work that’s gone into this, I’ve got it down as a beta. If you find any bugs or have suggestions, please post them in the CrawlNotes forum.

Download CrawlNotes v2.0

Posted in Advice/Tools, Dungeons and Dragons, Role playing, Tools and utilities

Tags: crawlnotes, d&d, tools, vb .net

A rather thought-tickling post over at Togelius on what the author describes as “automatic game design”. There’s even a paper on the concept that not only goes into further detail, but maps the output of a game (or games, I should say) built on the principle.

Automatic game design is exactly what it sounds like: a game built by an intelligent system iterating through entities and assigning rules to them. Entities can be anything from a power-up, enemy or something inert regardless of their appearance – no assumptions are made. The resultant games are then marked on how easy they are to complete by tracking scores, player/enemy deaths, time played, etc. The system then produces a new game based on what it has learned.

Essentially, it attempts to quantify fun.

Continue reading ‘How to design games without designing them’

Posted in Game design

Tags: ai, automatic game design, Game design, neural nets, rules

They’re not, really.

Posted in General

Tags: cthulhu, hp lovecraft, humour

A small snippet from Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters (Call of Cthulhu). Greywulf’s Lair pointed out this Lovecraft-inspired chart in a recent blog post, and I couldn’t help but draw attention to its excellence.

I’ve always found flowcharts terrifying from a professional standpoint, but now I have a reason to be scared of them in all facets (and realms) of life.

Note: I realise Nyarlethotep doesn’t eat investigators – Cthulhu does. But let’s just run with it.

Best RPG flowchart. Ever. [Greywulf’s Lair]

Posted in Role playing

Tags: books, cthulhu, hp lovecraft, rpg

While it appears Pandemic hasn’t closed down, it has let a number of employees go. And the number sounds like it could be significant.

If you want confirmation, you need go no further than Seven Degrees of Freedom, the blog of (now ex) Pandemic coder Tony Albrecht:

Yes. I have been made redundant. But that’s OK, I feel pretty good about it.

All the best to Tony and Pandemic – very unpleasant news so early in the year.

For those of you that are wondering… [Seven Degrees of Freedom]

Posted in Industry news

Tags: pandemic, tony albrecht

Role-playing blog At-Will has posted a video that steps through the plunderable depths of CrawlNotes. It’s like watching a usability test, which is always an incredibly useful thing as it usually translates into less bad products.

Thankfully, Quinn was handing out props for the most part, which fills me with happy. He puts forward a couple of great suggestions that I’ll look to implement in the next version – specifically the maximise function, better corridors, HTML support for the text boxes and a print button. A suggestion from the CrawlNotes forum – a room-linking function so the app can be used to build dungeon flowcharts – will also get some attention.

Posted in Tools and utilities

Tags: crawlnotes, videos