Games Posts

  • 08.03.08 Quäsenbö: a new Decktet game (Games)

    I hung out with Ricci this afternoon. I brought along my Decktet, and we tried some of the games, then decided to make up one of our own. I suggested adapting Crazy Eights to this weird double-suited deck; a direct adaptation didn’t do too well on its own (it was too easy to get rid of cards), but Ricci had an idea that worked brilliantly, of incurring penalties for repeating suits.

    Then I came home and wrote down the rules … Give it a try! (Don’t believe a word of the historical background, though! I just made it up, and stole the great nonsense word “quäsenbö” from an old Roz Chast cartoon.)… MORE

  • 08.03.08 That New-Cards Smell (Games)

    My Decktet is a thing of beauty. I even printed & assembled the box (an activity that took me back to my happy childhood days of making paper polyhedra models.)

    The only problem is that the cards still have a faint sickly-sweet stink of toluene and acetone (from the plastic coating) even after I left them spread out on the floor for a few days. It’s quite unpleasant, not like the nice smell of new books, cars or boardgames.

    Is this the papercraft equivalent of “Code Smell”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell?… MORE

  • 08.01.08 I Made A Decktet (Games)

    Sometimes it’s nice to make physical objects. It’s usually messier and more time-consuming than doing it on the computer, but in the end you have something you can actually touch.

    … MORE

  • 07.14.08 Testers Wanted (Me, Games, Computers)

    I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.… MORE

  • 03.07.08 GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready (Games, Computers)

    To encourage development, I’ve started an open source project based on the GeekGameBoard game-development sample code that Apple published last December (which, by a strange coincidence, I wrote.) I hope to have it ready for iPhone game development soon.

    You can browse the Mercurial repository online, or download the current source code. It’s BSD-licensed, and your contributions are of course welcome (emailed patches are preferred.)

    The changes since Apple’s original sample-code release are:

    • It no longer requires garbage collection. I love GC, but it’s not supported on the iPhone, where I am definitely planning to use GGB.
    • I fixed some memory leaks of CoreGraphics objects.
    • I fixed an assertion-failure when kinging a checker.

    What Is GeekGameBoard?

    GeekGameBoard is a small Objective-C framework for implementing the user interface of a board or card game. Many games can be implemented in less than 150 lines of code.

    It also demonstrates generally-useful Core Animation techniques like:

    • Hit testing
    • Dragging CALayers with the mouse
    • Loading images from files and setting them as layer contents
    • 3D “card-flip” animations

    Framework classes include Bit, Piece, PlayingCard, HexGrid and more. It comes with sample games from Klondike solitaire to Checkers and even Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s all ready for you to add AI, network play, new game definitions…

    GeekGameBoard runs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later. iPhone support is coming soon.

    … MORE

  • 12.20.07 GeekGameBoard (Games, Computers)

    Santa has an early Xmas present for all you good Leopard programmers: GeekGameBoard, a new piece of sample code by the anonymous engineer elves at Apple.

    GeekGameBoard is an example of using Core Animation to present the user interface of a board or card game. It implements a small framework for implementing such games, with domain-specific classes like “Grid” and “Piece”, and examples of several game definitions built on top of the framework.
    Some of the … MORE
  • 11.01.07 Review: ZackAndWiki (Social Software, Games, Humor)

    It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting.
    … MORE

  • 08.06.07 The Hero Passes (Fiction, Games)

    We love to play the Hero — exploring dungeons, grabbing treasure, saving the world from evil. But I started wondering about the reasons behind some of the actions in such games, and especially about what my Heroic deeds looked like to the ordinary people of the lands I passed through. (As my wife once put it: “Why isn’t there a Hug button?”) The result is this story.… MORE

  • 05.05.06 Only Known Instance Of Zork Slash (Fiction, Games, Humor)

    My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…… MORE

  • 05.01.06 your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow (Games, Languages)

    I dabbled in Interactive Fiction, aka Text Adventures, long ago—- I played Adventure on my Apple ][ and Dungeon/Zork on a VAX; I wrote a primitive game in BASIC and later in college partially implemented a language for building games in yacc; and then after graduating, my first serious Mac program was a souped-up and nearly finished version of that language. After that I was too busy with “real” jobs, but others kept the … MORE

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