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This is my first blog post in almost a year!  Let me introduce, very briefly the current experimental game I’m working on. This is a card+board+actionfigure game, themed on the italian mafia of the 1920s.  I will remove this paragraph here, when I’ve got a better introductory blog post written.

Last night the cars were functioning like busses or taxis. Public transit, anyway.

The valuable point and planned mechanic is to prevent a game player from attacking too early. In Risk, a player can attack quickly by adding all his/her new bonus armies to a single space and attack during round 2. That often fails so people often bulk up an offensive force, but neighbouring opponents always see that and bulk up their defence of adjacent regions with their own bonus armies.

Likewise in this game, attacking could possibly take place early, but the following idea came up in brainstorming: let’s prevent early attacks by limiting the access to vulnerable opponents too early, by requiring a car for one-or-more associates to travel together, and form a decent attack force.  Thus, is the inclusion of stylish 1920s automobiles. Currently 3D modelled is the Studebaker Erskine.  This restriction of attack rule is applied even if the target location is just across the street, or against a next-door neighbour (same side of street).

The development of the cars was a challenge at first, because of the conditions to check for the appropriateness of the game space it was traveling to. Actually, that’s because of the placement of playable characters was done earlier, and I was using the same logic and UI control for drag-drop, and so I copy-pasted the if-statement conditions.  All conditions for if a character (and/or car) should be put onto a game space were amalgamated into a single gigantic, horrible, unreadable condition:

        if (gamespace.iscontrollable == true &&
            (
            (gamespace.playerturf == this.currentplayer && (gamespace.playerowner == -1 
||gamespace.playerowner == this.currentplayer))
            || (gamespace.buildingtype == building.buildingtype.park && 
(gamespace.playerowner == -1 
|| gamespace.playerowner == this.currentplayer))
            ) &&
    gamespace.associatescount <gamespace.associatesmax
            ) {
             // gamespace is accessible and isn't overloaded and can receive new playable character so do that here
}

I broke up the multi-level nested if-statements early in the car development, to make progress easy and rateable.

During development I’ve disabled the maximum-per-space limit on cars and playable characters, so the following is missing that point.  It eventually came down to this:

1. Is the space controllable? (any home-turf buildings , and parks)
   1. Is this a car being moved?
      1. is this game space within the current player’s home turf?
         1. is this game space owned by no one?
            1. ALL GOOD, not owned by anyone, move the car
         2. is this game space owned by the current player?
            1. ALL GOOD, move the car
         3. is this game space owned by some other player?
            1. BATTLE MODE
      2. is this game space within any other player’s home turf?
         1. is this game space owned by no one?
            1. ALL GOOD, not owned by anyone, move the car
         2. is this game space owned by the current player?
            1. ALL GOOD, move the car
         3. is this game space owned by some other player?
            1. BATTLE MODE
      3. is this a neutral area like a park (the only alternate to home turf regions)?
         1. is this game space owned by no one?
            1. ALL GOOD, not owned by anyone, move the car
         2. is this game space owned by the current player?
            1. ALL GOOD, move the car
         3. is this game space owned by some other player?
            1. BATTLE MODE

The separation of conditions made this so easy to manage, I immediately migrated the code back into the character-movement decision making, to replace the single gigantic, horrible, unreadable condition previously above, but changing the ALL GOOD bits according to the rule restricting game players to move single characters into opponent turf or any other area occupied by an opponent.

All-in-all, it worked out very well.  During construction, it was fun to break rules, find myself driving a car to an opponent game space where an opponent character was standing, and loading that enemy into the car and driving it back to my own home turf, just because the code allowed for it.  Like a taxi rather than a practical game element, it was just a bit of fun messing around with rules during development.

I have lived in several places. The latest arrangement has me living in a nice town house.

And the unfortunate thing about living in this place or anyother townhouse, is the risk of bad neighbors… They are so close by, their quirks are inescapable. So if they like to park extra vehicles all over their yard, when there is perfectly good spare parking 30 second walking distance down the street, or their anklebiter dog barks every 2 seconds for hours straight, every day (no exaggeration), or they play blaring music and their subwoofer sends bass through the wall every day, then you can guess a persons quality of life might drop.

So an idea came to me recently, seems social media may also be taken this way, at times.

I had used Facebook, for the full time I’ve had an account, to spew words that some people would find amusing, but not caring how everyone might take it. And it was more for my own ammusemrnt much of the time. I dare say, mildly narcisistic.

A few months ago, one person on my friends list posted a picture that shocked me. It wasn’t the type of picture that is so totally out of character that forces a person to bring it up, and others probably enjoyed the picture, so I said nothing. But what I did do is reduce my use of the social media for low-quality status posting. And low quality photo sharing.

My interest is shifting more to the career focus, to increase my leverage of these social media to earn more. So like a good neighbour, I won’t cause a big scene if a neighbour is doing something annoying, but carefully, tactfully bring it up so they can choose to correct the situation. And at the same time, I will use the momentum of social betterment to build up more momentum of self-betterment.

One thing d like to bring up: I really like “the good bike project Toronto”. Google search for that, you will find the story of an amazing real-world social improvement social media project.

There is a great conversation in the movie Morning Glory. It is a quick debate about the quality and value of news and information.
Are cold-hard facts more important than candy-coated trivia?

I’m considering a reorganization of this blog, and conversion into more of a discreet page format, rather than a huge blog page greeting any visitor.

First up: Converting the “About” page to a “Contact” page.