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Stuck Waiting… Well, work has been put to a dramatic halt lately. I actually have developed three more games that are ready for release, but the powers that be aren’t sure of them right now, and so they sit on hold. They may still see the light of day eventually, only time will tell I guess. It’s extraordinarily frustrating to put that much time (and not to mention COST) into developing something for it to end up sitting on a virtual shelf, especially when you have an audience that’s calling out for more games to be added and for some more variety.  I see both sides of the argument, certain groups want to curate to make sure a market doesn’t get saturated in crap, and at the same time, that causes market stagnation with nothing new coming out causing player/user attrition because of that curation. In my opinion it just harms the overall reputation / view of a market. As long as certain requirements are met (keeping the garbage where it belongs), it should be released. Let the players decide to hate it or love it. If you’re going to spend dollars on people overseeing testing and more, and have already spent that money, why not just let it go out and recoup even a tiny amount of the cost, even if sales aren’t the greatest. The downside to this, is several ideas I was going to work on have now been put on hold because I no longer have the confidence that they will be seen as unique titles and not compared to other things that look similar, and I can not sink the time and money into something that may just get rejected. It’s not worth it, especially for someone like me that does this in their spare time. Sure if I was a larger studio with money to spare, it wouldn’t be an issue. But when I sink even $500 into a project that gets rejected, I’m never going to see that money again. It may not seem like a lot of money to some people, but to me that’s a month and half of car payments, so it’s an eye opener and makes you think twice about doing anything else. But this is a rant I could go on for days about, so I’m just going to shut up now. In the meantime I have a ton of ideas but nothing to develop them on. My lovely little alienware laptop I spent a small fortune on is sitting in a dell repair center currently because of constant crashing, lockups and worse problems. I sunk about $600 into it myself trying to correct the issues, new SSD, new ram, nothing was working (but I got some nice upgrades! 8tb of disk space!!!).. When the cpu cores are reaching 212F while sitting at idle, you have issues.. Thankfully it was still fully under warranty. I know they’ve already replaced the motherboard, they won’t tell me yet what else they’ve done. My guess is the overheating caused damage to other components..  Supposedly they should be done with it by the 20th, then shipping time back to me. Hate the waiting game especially when you spend 3k on a device, you kind of expect it to work without issue.  In the meantime, have several new ideas that should be a lot of fun, just have to wait to start development. I did pick up a chromebook with an Intel I3 in it, and got Unity installed on it, but it’s slow and difficult to work with. Maybe if I get really bored in the next week or so I’ll try messing with it. Until then, new stuff is in the works.. Just have to wait…

First off… So first, the Dice Games Megapack was finished and released to QA right before new years eve, so that one is sitting with the QA team awaiting the beta testers. Included are seven different dice games for up to 6 players, with AI players for each one. Shortly thereafter, I saw another game on Amazon.com called Jinx. It involved rolling dice and placing pieces on a grid to line up matches. Cool concept, but it needed something a bit more so that turned into BackLash! I worked a few too many evenings and nights, but I started this one on New Year’s Day and just sent it to QA early this morning. For such a short development cycle, it’s a rich but simple game. The concept remained the same, placing pieces on a grid to make a match, but was amped up with different board spaces that provide boons and penalties. In this game, to further differentiate it, I even added an option to add a third die to the rolls, if you control one of the boards rune spaces. Just to add to the replayability we added a couple of game modes to allow for a shorter game instead of the standard multi-stage playstyle. This one was definitely the quickest work I have done but doesn’t lack in design. All the bells and whistles and polish are there, like I said, I just spent way too many evenings and late nights (a 4am stopping point rings a bell) away from the family to get this one done. It had me excited, it was fun and challenging, and I wanted to finish it so I can share it with the world! Next Up… Next up will be looking at a couple more games to clone, including an interesting strategy game called Quorridor and the ever-popular Phase 10. The table needs these, and I aim to provide!

Debating… Firstly, Gremlins Grotto is a similar type of strategy game, it hit the market mid-September and sales have been a lot lower than I had hoped, netting (after commission) less than $400 in almost 3 months.    It’s enough to pay for the assets within the game, but it’s not enough to recoup any of the time spent on development. In time sales may pick up, one never knows, but I doubt it; it will remain one of those little niche games. There’s nothing wrong with that, I had just hoped it would have performed better. That being said, Rogues is a very similar type of strategy game, and while yes it’s fun at times, it can also be very frustrating at others, combined with the fact that it is not a very fast paced game, it’s lacking something that would make it stick out. I have a ton of ideas and titles on the drawing board, and I’ve come to the conclusion a couple of times over the past year that this is probably one that is just going to get shelved. Maybe someday I’ll come back to it, but I don’t think the market is there for that type of game right now, at least on this platform. So! What do we do instead? MOVE ON! One of my first projects I was going to do for the table was a dungeon board game titled To Delve So Deep. It looked good, played nice, ran like crap on the table, and I moved on to other projects planning to revisit this one someday. Well, that day has come. This platform is aimed at board games and the like, and now is a perfect time to revamp the gameplay entirely, make it more into a board type game with a dungeon theme. Plans are already in the works and being written out of the good ol’ Remarkable tablet already. It’s still a pretty big project so it’s not next on the list. SLOA –  the Secret Life of Aliens is also a board game, and I have a fair majority of its rules and gameplay already written out, and I’m slowly tweaking and adjusting things here and there.  This is also a pretty hefty project (for one person in their spare time) and it needs time to be developed properly, not rushed. Ideally it should take me roughly 6 months at my current pace? Maybe 8… And I want to do it right. What do we do in the meantime? In the long run, it is about making games and making a little money on the side to help keep things moving, buy new assets, training, software etc., so we do smaller fun stuff that should definitely be a hit on the table! I was thinking about doing some dice games and trying to figure out the best way to balance everything. I have to think about everything here, including release schedules, the beta testers, QA, the development, the sales, all of those and more factor in. I had the intention of doing some smaller games and putting them up for .99 or 1.99 each, but right now I have 8 different ones and more in the works. These are all fun, simple to play and easy to develop, but if I did 8 individual games? I’m pretty sure I know a few people who would get really irritated trying to fit in 8 titles into testing, not to mention the release schedule for that.. Then I’d be trying to avoid doing the same UI’s etc. for each one, and even though they are completely different games, they might all end up looking identical and actually end up a detractor from sales. I think the value here lies more in a multi game pack. Easier for everyone from testing (well maybe not, now they test 3-5 games in one) to release, plus it’s better value for the customer. $5.99 and you get like 5 different games, each with its own unique gameplay style and rules: not to mention the variety. Tired of playing Ship Captain Crew? Let’s go play Macao instead! Or how about Triple Chicago, Pig or one of many others! I’m still trying to determine what’s going to be the best value / combo for the cost, but I think it will depend on how many games I include in the bundle. There are tons that can be done, so at least 3 per pack. And if I do 3, I might just aim for a price point around 2.99 or 3.99 which puts each game at roughly one to two dollars each. Then I can release pack 1, 2 and 3, they can stagger the releases or do it all at once and bam. Games that everyone will love (we hope!!) Just have to come up with icons, marketing, titles for the packs.. ugh, it never ends! Don’t ask me to explain how my brain jumps around, I just decided to do this after going to the store the other day, seeing something and going… Yeah.. that’s what we’re going to do! Bonus points because it gives me something to put out while I flesh out and make both Delve and SLOA (among other titles) even better before I release them!

Another lesson in coming back… Another lesson in coming back to code a year later. Over time, no matter what kind of software you’re developing, you almost always get better. Then you go back to finish a project you worked on a year ago and for one reason or another, put on hold. Looking at the code, you wonder what on earth you were thinking?! So Rogues N Riches, a game mostly coded in late 2023, nearly completed and go put on hold for a multitude of reasons. Most of the game was complete, but there were a few minor issues that needed to be addressed still. Some of the effects appeared on top of windows that should be on top, so of the effects obscured things for other players, not to mention how I was handling the games cards, dealing, discarding, just the animations alone. Bandages… Going back and trying to fix some of that has turned out to be a much larger challenge than I thought. Don’t get me wrong, I tried and succeeded on most of it, but I still don’t like how it looks or feels. I’d been thinking about scrapping the gameplay script and scene and starting fresh with some new tricks and assets, but the thought of giving up all that work just didn’t appeal, so I tried to bandage it. Well, bandages only stretch so far and I have definitely come to realize that I need to break down and just rewrite the gameplay. There are just so many enhancements and easier ways of doing things this time around, it’s just getting the courage up to say ‘Hey, I wasted all that time.’ And even then, I guess wasted isn’t really a good word considering the lessons learned and how much easier and quicker it will be the second time around. Next Up? Now the hard part is, do I focus on Rogues or do I move to another project that I think will probably sell better? It’s a fun game, or at least it could be, I just have to fix it and that takes time. But I suppose, better now than never. I have plenty of time to think about and make a decision on it’s fate. Besides, it would be a huge waste to give up the resources already put into it, code and assets included. This will give me a chance to change out the 3d models and tweak the speed. Even for a strategy game, right now it just feels too slow, along with a slew of other changes I want to do but the current setup just wouldn’t allow for it without a lot of trouble.  I still have that itch to start a new project though and scrap this one completely, or once again shelve it until later. Hmmm…. Something to think about this long weekend that will probably keep me from coding anyways…

Amid all the distractions last night, not the least of which was standing in line for several hours to vote, I did manage to get some coding time in and made significant progress on Scratch’n Score, eliminating the issues with the old codebase. It took a couple days to truly get over it and delete the old code completely and rewrite it. I know I’m stubborn, but I backed up the two files thinking to use them as a reference, but the problem came when I kept going to them, trying to just copy and paste to fix it, rather than doing what I had intended, a rewrite. Once I was able to get my brain to cooperate, and after several heated internal arguments with myself, I convinced all those nagging thoughts that a rewrite, from scratch, was the better way to attack this. And the result? A lovely dice rolling simulator, that lets you roll until you scratch, or until you score your points and pass the dice to the next player. I amended the score calculating code to keep track of which dice in a roll were contributing to the score to eliminate players trying to cheat… For example, you roll and 5 of your dice are scoring, but that last one wasn’t. Well, you could cheat the system by just selecting all 6 and then boom, next roll it would think you scored with all 6 and let you reroll 6, instead of one. Not anymore. As a matter of fact, I think it’s going to be a default ‘house rule’ that if you try to include a non-scoring die in your take, it will be an instant scratch.. The rewrite also allowed me to handle some other things that would have been harder with the old code like having wild dice where if you’re lucky you could change one of the die values to anything you want, among other variations. In the long run, this was worth it, but painful. I hate doing a complete rewrite as I feel like I have just wasted all that time, but it was worth it. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get back to the code and finish up the gameplay portion. Time will tell!

So, one of the first things you learn in a learning environment for game design, is the game design document. A sometimes-vital work that gives you all the information and plans for a game, its features, everything about it at a glance. Depending on the game this could be a single page in a notebook or a multi hundred-page document. I hate design documents. Who needs em? My preferred method is to jump into the gameplay, start designing and coding on the fly, more often than not using actual production art. If I can’t see it, I can’t wrap my head around it. Now occasionally I do make up a design doc, but usually only on more complex projects like SLOA or Roll’N Bonez. In the case of Scratch N Score, I did not. I jumped in, started coding gameplay, had a whole thing already done and implemented and working… and then I realized I was wrong. My whole plan and process for each player’s turn was broken and just wasn’t going to work. Then I started a new job, plus I had two games in with the beta testers who kept sneaking bugs into my code… *ahem* Well they did an amazing job finding bugs, which I had to fix, then they found more, which I had to fix. So, the project for this sat dormant on the hard drive, collecting virtual dust until recently when I grabbed the vacuum, cleared the dust away and tried to figure out one burning question. ” WTH was I thinking?! “ Now that I’ve opened it back up, I figure I can re-use about 50% of the existing gameplay code, the rest is a scrub. Now this is a simple game, so we’re only talking a couple hundred lines of code. If it were a larger one like CashFlo was? Then we’d have some issues. I have plans now and have already started reimplementing part of the scoring display, which will lead to reimplementing the other parts of the code I had to scrap. It’s a work in progress but I can at least see now how it should flow and that will make it a lot easier to move forward. Word of advice for anyone who randomly stumbles across this post and reads my ramblings, design your stuff. Even for a simple game, it can save hours of refactoring, sometimes even days or weeks. I guess it depends on how much you value your time! In my case since this is a hobby, no big deal. Had I had a deadline with a publisher tapping their fingers? That would have been a problem!

Welcome! It’s time to roll out the latest version of the website! Easier on the eyes, and definitely easier on me to maintain. I also stripped it down a little bit, removed some stuff like logins, ability to comment, etc. None of that was worth the moderation time since 99.9% of all the signups and comments left were all just spambots anyways. The site worked before, but I never really cared for the layout much. It was cobbled together and yes, it worked but it had issues. Now I love dark mode in most apps normally, but the site felt way to black if that makes sense. So now, we have a brand-new design that will make it much easier to update in the future! Today also marks the release of our latest title for the Infinity Game Table, Roll’n Bonez. This pirate themed dice game is fun for all ages and full of surprises! Roll your dice and let’s just hope the Kraken doesn’t come for your booty!     Click the image above to check it out!