What can’t be done with a deck of cards, dice and tokens? Yes, you can’t solve world hunger or translate Hungarian, but you can make a game.

I felt an impulse one night to design something using just these elements. Raid Trade was the result. It’s a two player experience that shares a few fundamentals with Steve Jackson’s Munchkin, but the similarities are minor at best. It incorporates gameplay you’d see in Legend of the Five Rings or Magic: The Gathering, minus the deck-building.

I believe the early game needs tweaking, but otherwise it proves interesting in late game. Hand management is perhaps most important, and keeping a stock of both high and low-numbered cards is vital.

Anyway, the rules do a good job of explaining everything. As much as I like repeating myself, I don’t.

Continue reading ‘Raid Trade, a card game designed in one night’

Posted in Game design

Tags: cards, raid trade

Double dose of bad news for Australians on the Playstation 3 front. Not only will we miss out on the limited edition 160GB SKU, but EB Games will no doubt sucker a number of customers with its “60GB for an 80GB” trade-in deal. $600 for something worse? I don’t think so.

Posted in General

Tags: eb games, news, ps3

In games, balance doesn’t always mean equal.

Most people do not play games to be the underdog. We like to succeed at the things we do, and games give us an accessible way to accomplish this feat. With this in mind, we still like to be challenged. Or, at least, feel like it.

Hence, the illusion of balance – making the player believe they’ve done well through their own skills or intelligent use of mechanics, without giving away the fact that this feeling has been ochestrated by the designer. Games after all are about fun, not punishment.

To do this, a game ultimately has to be balanced to favour the player. Consider the following scenario, which you’d find in almost any RPG or MMO:

A player encounters an AI opponent of equal level. Both characters are at maximum health. They begin to fight.

A whack here, a whack there… we get a resolution. Now, which of the following results do you believe is balanced?

Continue reading ‘Why players need to be heroes’

Posted in Game design

Tags: balance, mmo, rpg

I’ve had an idea for a strategy title floating around in my head for a while now – I even went to the trouble of coding a rough prototype of the combat engine in VB .NET, called Swarme. Essentially, it’s a casual-friendly version of Master of Magic, the old Simtex title that makes Puzzle Quest look like Tic-Tac-Toe. That’s a joke, by the way.

Still, Master of Magic was great. I can’t believe I first played it on a holiday in New Zealand when I was 14 or 15. One of my top five games, along with Resident Evil and World of Warcraft. Yes, WoW is good, if addictive.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point here. I just wanted to jot down some thoughts I had about a potential system to handle magic research.

Continue reading ‘Sharde fragments (not a typo)’

Posted in Game design

Tags: ideas, master of magic, sharde

Zafehouse is my pet project. I coded it in VB .NET as part of a feature on Kotaku Australia. The aim was to create a game every seven days.

A noble effort, but eventually real life took over and I stopped at three titles. Zafehouse was my favourite, and proved popular with readers. Yesterday I pumped out a new version, 1.5, which you can download from the site.

Zafehouse: A zombie survival horror simulator

Posted in Zafehouse

Tags: pc, survival horror, vb .net, Zafehouse, Zombies

Atomic recently started uploading its back page editorials to its website. They’re written by me. They’re also supposed to be funny. I laughed, anyway.

If you’d like to check them out (don’t be scared), here they are:

Turok, My Father

Army of Who?

The first is my favourite.

Posted in Opinion

Tags: army of two, atomic magazine, humour, turok

Not that I want to cry, mind you. But it’s definitely not the event it once was.

I was lucky enough to attend E3 2006, what could be considered the last ‘great’ E3. I have to agree with industry sentiments – it was not the best environment to get work done as a journalist. Securing interviews was tricky, finding a quiet space to think was even harder, and actually getting to publisher stands was hellish.

I’m not of the opinion that this year’s reworked version is a step forward. Perhaps the ESA is testing the waters, but apart from Silent Hill 5 and Resident Evil 5, I’ve been mostly snoring my way through the coverage.

Continue reading ‘The new E3 is sad’

Posted in Industry news

Tags: e3, events

My last post contained a description of the map, including the players and their objectives and the physical design. Now, we delve a bit into the guts of gameplay. I present the core aspects in bullet points:

• The heroes can select from a number of characters.
• The Keeper can select a hero as well, evil of course.
• Minions will flow from the top of the map to the bottom, and attempt to destroy the town.
• Players must balance their time between protecting the town and killing bosses.
• The Keeper must balance upgrading his minions to keep them at the same level as the heroes, while making sure his ‘Bag of tricks’, as it were, stays potent as well.
• The Keeper receives gold every 45 or so seconds, the amount determined by the amount of bosses still alive. He also receives gold when one of his minions is killed. The amount of gold received is: Creature Level x 2.
• Heroes receive gold for killing minions. They also receive a small amount of lumber for killing bosses. This lumber, in combination with gold, can be spent on items. The small lumber quantity makes sure the heroes don’t access the more powerful items straight away (a pacing mechanic).

Continue reading ‘More action, just for you’

Posted in Warcraft 3

Tags: blizzard, maps, pc, rts, Warcraft 3

I’m going to dispense with the usual ‘Hello!’ post you see on fresh blogs and get straight into my current project.
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Project: Keeper
Tech: Warcraft 3, Blizzard Entertainment
Tools: World Editor
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Okay, that was surprisingly brief and almost skeletal in regards to information. So here’s a bit more.
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Summary: Keeper is a multiplayer map for Warcraft 3. It requires five players for its optimal playing experience, however, it can be played with as little as two. Basic gameplay is that of a real-time strategy with the traditional top-down perspective.

Continue reading ‘Action!’

Posted in Warcraft 3

Tags: blizzard, maps, pc, rts, Warcraft 3