Category Archives: Gaming

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE TYPE OF GAME!

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Let’s make an RPG part 4: Skill Labors

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“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.“— Lazarus Long

We’ve got some character points.  We’ve bought some stats.  Let’s do something with those stats.

Most tabletop RPGs have some sort of “skill check” system.  The most obvious example is if a thief wants to pick a lock.  This is a fairly complicated action, requiring understanding of lock-picking techniques, as well as the physical dexterity to manipulate lock tumblers into their appropriate positions without the aid of the key originally designed to do so.  Additionally, someone who has some practice in picking locks will, naturally, be better at it than someone who doesn’t, regardless of how smart or dexterous the second person is.

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Let’s Make an RPG Part 3: Balancing Point

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So in my all-fired-up push to get pen to paper, I neglected to mention something VERY KEY to tabletop RPGs, and in fact, gaming in general: Balance.  Specifically, how you balance the overall power level of your characters.

There are a few ways to do this.  D20 and Palladium both promote a dice-rolling system wherein a character’s stats are determined randomly.  That’s fun and all, but let’s be honest, it’s fun for about the first 6 characters you make, after which you realize that the dice aren’t going to turn you into a god every time, or may give you a really awkward stat loadout.  “Well I could use a little extra Wisdom and I don’t need quite that much Dexterity, but all I’ve got here are a bunch of 16s and 11s.”(in D20, stats run from 3 to 18, though it’s incredibly rare to see a character with a single stat below 10, which is average.)

If only there were some way to trade points from one stat into another.  Some sort of… “Point Buy” system.

I said Point Buy, not Best Buy!

I said Point Buy, not Best Buy!

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Let’s make an RPG Part 2: Statistically Speaking

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RPG stands for “Role Playing Game.” It’s a game in which you take on a role of a character, in a world which might be very similar to your own or vastly different. The idea is that your character is participating in a story. A story you get to be a part of.

So we need a character. And we’ll want to describe that character. Is this character young or old? Male or female? Does he tower over members of his acquaintance? Do they tower over him? And most importantly, how many dice do I get to roll for damage when I land a double-critical with my Greatsword of Overwhelming Munchkinism that technically cost more than I told the GM I paid for it?

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Let’s make an RPG: Part 1

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May as well use that Tabletop Gaming category, right?

A noble band of four stalwart heroes

A noble band of four stalwart heroes

This is actually a project I’ve been on for several years.  And yes, like anybody else who has ever tried to make their own Dungeons and Dragons clone, the first draft was as unplayable as it was uninspired.

The second wasn’t much better.

But it’s been a couple of decades since then, I’ve played a few different systems, studied even more, and had a lot of fun in the meantime.  I think I may actually have a solid concept, for a change.

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Clockwork Gremlin plays Kerbal Space Program Part 4: The Last Horizon

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Kerbal Space Program 0.23 is set for release TOMORROW(Tuesday, December 17), and it’s going to completely overhaul a few things, like how SCIENCE! works.  This will be the last update for my 0.22 LP.  Maybe the next one will go better.

Anyway, when we last left our heroes, they had accumulated this much SCIENCE!

Filling out the tech tree rather nicely.

Filling out the tech tree rather nicely.

There are a couple of things that I just unlocked, which are REALLY COOL!

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Clockwork Gremlin plays Kerbal Space Program Part 2: Sub-Orbital

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When we last left our intrepid Kerbals, Jebediah had just gathered me some Science!  Where exactly he got it from is largely irrelevant.

Science to SPEND!

Science to SPEND!

The important part is that we’ve got some science.  So let’s start spending that science.

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Fun with Procedural Images: Back to Square One.

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November 1-3 this year, there was an event called the Colorado Springs Startup Weekend.  It’s not annual, because there were two this year, but this was the second one.  I perhaps was not the kind of person they usually expect to have there, but I attended with plans to learn about starting a company and maybe show off what I could do, and I achieved everything I had initially set out to do.  OK, mostly.

Most notably, I ended up working on a program that had some rudimentary GUI functionality, which meant I had to refine and learn some new portions of how the user interfaces with the computer.  Particularly, a mouse, and panes.  Hey wait, I can do mouse inputs now!  That means no more of this:

The worst way to make pictures

The worst way to make pictures

It’s time for this!

Click here to get it!

Werkkzeug 4, by Farbrausch, who are awesome.

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Fun With Procedural Images part 2

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I’d love to say that the reason I haven’t made any posts for the past week is because I’ve been hard at work on my game engine, but no.  Actually what happened is that I started watching Breaking Bad, and while it wasn’t good enough that I would recommend it to anyone, it wasn’t bad enough for me to abandon it, either.

But that’s unimportant.  This post is in the “Programming” category, which means we’ll be talking about programming!

So as you can probably guess from the incredibly dry and unreadable last post, I’m not terribly happy with parts of my image generation library.  It’s monolithic, messy, disorganized, difficult to maintain, and lacking certain key features.  When faced with a challenge like this, most programmers…

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Dependants and Dependencies

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Well I WAS going to come here and make another post about my procedural image system, which of course requires that I finish putting it back together after trying to make it load files properly.  Unfortunately, I also noticed that there was a new version of the D compiler out, so I decided to go ahead and update to that.

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Day Eight!

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Your usual host is back any day now!  I know I was bad yesterday, but they had me working a closing shift, followed by an opening shift, which was quite lame and taxing.  But good news!  I finally have time to blog!  Bad news, I have nothing to write about today!

Holy Cats

 

“This is totally the face you’d make if I had anything useful to say.  You can make it anyway to humor me.”

I think this weekend I will continue on my journey to make a Charmander (not mine, Nintendo’s) hoody!  I’ll let you know later if it doesn’t totally suck.

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Day Five: What Happened To Day Four?

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Life did.  Life, and work.  I’ve been up to my eyeballs in random calls to come into work on my regularly scheduled days off.  I’m mildly disgruntled, but my paycheck rejoices.  More importantly, I’m feeling a little frazzled and low on energy.  Naturally it’s time for… AN ADVENTURE!!!

What kind of adventure, you ask?  It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s something new.  It occurs to me not everyone knows how to adventure like we do, so I thought I would go through a couple of our adventures for the unlearned, ignorant, or just plain new adventurer out there.

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Fun With Procedural Images

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Screenshot from Farbrausch's "The Product" 64kb demo

Screenshot from Farbrausch’s “The Product” 64kb demo

Many, many years ago, a German group known as Farbrausch created a rather impressive piece of software, known as The Product, a 64-kilobyte executable which produces, without the aid of a network connection or any additional files, a short, real-time rendered music video advertising all of the great things “The Product” can do.

The really cool thing is that at 64 kilobytes, the file itself is almost smaller than the download request, and it’s old enough that virtually every (windows) PC available today can run it flawlessly.

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LASER IS NOT DIFFICULT!

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I was inspired to start here partly because of Shamus Young, owner of the entertaining and informative Twenty-Sided Tale blog.  Seriously, go check him out.

Shamus is a good programmer, and like any good programmer, when he gets bored, he likes to write little experimental coding projects.  Currently he’s working on a game called “Project Good Robot,” which is shaping up into something I would REALLY like to play.  The cool thing about Shamus is that when he does these coding projects, he posts about them.  It’s all very educational, and a lot of fun to read, and Shamus really has a talent for explaining high-level technical stuff in a way that anybody can understand.  Reading through his earlier projects would really be a good way to gain some solid practical knowledge for beginning programmers.  Or anybody who would like to be a beginning programmer.  Or anybody who’s curious about the arcane arts of “Computer Science” and would like a peek behind the curtain.

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