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I listen to a lot of podcasts, because I can listen while making art for the diorama-based game I am working on. I discovered the podcast Imaginary Advice because MetaFilter linked to its episode on the SNES game A Christmas Carol . That’s a game that doesn’t exist – Ross Sutherland just made it up, and then recorded a whole podcast episode about it. The episode doesn’t acknowledge, at any point,…
In 1989, I turned nine. For my birthday, my dad got me a copy of Blue Prince for the Apple //e, which had been released earlier that year. I fell in love with it, spending hours plumbing its secrets. So when the remake was released this year, I decided to try out the new version. On reflection, I think I actually prefer the original. You can see a bit of gameplay that I recorded using RetroArch: A…
Recently, I discussed some mistakes I made working on my game. I still don’t have a Hacker News account, because I still wish to waste less time on the Internet. Fortunately, I have very good friends who post sometimes my blog posts there . The friend who submitted this post, MJD, is looking for a job . He’s brilliant and empathetic and you should hire him. Anyway, here are some responses to the…
I’m still working on my point-and-click puzzle game made from dioramas. Often when you watch videos of people doing crafts on the internet, they’re people who have been doing it for years. They don’t make mistakes, or if they do, they don’t really show them to you. I haven’t been doing any of these crafts for years. So I’ve made lots of mistakes, and I want to show them to you, so you don’t get…
Some people make games using the Unreal Engine. That’s nice, but I wanted something a little different. That’s why I’m using the Real Engine. (OK, I’m not really calling it “Real Engine”; Epic please don’t sue me). What’s the Real Engine? Simple: instead of modeling a space in Blender and then texturing it, I’m building a diorama and taking some pictures of it. Then I import it into the…
Here’s an update on my game Middles . Dominus told me that Bill Gosper was also inspired by …MEOW…, and made a version of this game. His version allows only four-letter substrings, and allows those substrings to occur anywhere in the word (so GULC would be valid). When Dominus mentioned Gosper’s work, I assumed that it was in, like, 1983, since Gosper is fifteen years older than my parents, but it…
I made Middles , a daily word game. A while ago, I worked a company whose initials were TS. This led to some fun times: Accounts that started with TS were assumed to be system accounts, so when a human named Tsutomo (or something) joined the company, his account got treated weirdly. IIRC we renamed his account rather than changing the system. I was working on version control, and we wanted to find…
I don’t want to review the whole game. But I do want to talk about one puzzle that I found infuriating. No, not that one, which could so easily have been improved . A different one. Not because it was hard (it wasn’t). But because it had a bizarre design. I’m going to spoil some minor aspects of the puzzle, but not the interesting part. Here’s the set-up. Actually, here’s the pre-set-up: puzzles…
Have you noticed the turds? Before I begin, let me say that I’m not dissing Generated Adventure or the people who created it. They made a very impressive tech demo in 72 hours, and if you don’t look too closely, it’s rather pretty. They were under tight time pressure, and they were specifically aiming to use only AI tools. They did better than I would have in 72 hours (although as a parent, the…
Deco Deck is my fourth indie game. It’s available today on iOS , Android , and Steam . About the game Deco Deck is a new kind of logic puzzle. If you like KenKen or Two Not Touch, you might like Deco Deck. Here’s what a mini puzzle looks like: Every card has one of five suits, and a number from 1-9. The goal is to link up the cards in connected groups of five, such that each group forms a valid…
Dominus wrote about games played by aliens . He believes (and I agree) that aliens play Go, and something like poker. And he wonders at the paucity of auction games (I should note that they are a bit more common among hobby board games: Reiner Knizia has five, and Dan Luu was just telling me about Fresh Fish , which I’m eager to try). Before I even go into some other game mechanics, I want to…
Game overview I just released a new game! Mosaic River is a mobile solitaire game. You’re an archaeologist, sailing down a river, collecting mosaic tiles, and placing them into a triangular grid to make melds (straights, flushes, etc). Tiles have bonuses randomly assigned at each game. You can try it now: it’s free (ad-supported) on iOS and Android . It’s perhaps easiest to explain by describing…
Previously , I reported on my attempt to use Stable Diffusion. Dan Luu posted it to Hacker News , and there were some comments. Here are some responses: Comments suggesting img2img, masking, and AUTOMATIC1111 : that’s what I was doing, as I think the images in the previous post make clear. Comments suggesting that maybe my prompt was no good: I didn’t put in anything like “oneiric”, or “blurry”,…
I really want to make a game along the line of Myst. I have been collecting puzzles for years, and I have almost enough. I am flexible about the visual style. I’ve considered making sets out of lego, or cardboard , or cut paper. And I’ve considered AI-generated art. I am willing to accept compromises on precision: If the palm tree ends up on the left side instead of the right, that’s OK. It’s even…
The most important thing is that Surfwords now has a demo available. I didn’t start out with a demo, because I was worried that it would cannibalize my sales. I am not worried about that anymore, because to a first approximation, I have had no sales. Surfwords briefly reached #7 on the iOS paid word game chart. This is hilarious, because I’ve sold less than 20 copies of Surfwords on iOS (and less…
Thanks to the success of Semantle , I decided to become a game developer. I’m going to try it for a year, and see if I can make a living at it. At the end of May, I quit my job, and started working on a new game called Surfwords . Now, at the beginning of August, I’m nearly done. As soon as I get this released, it’s on to the next thing (probably an archaeology-themed solitaire card game, although…
This post includes spoilers for: - Perhaps The Stars - Worm - Worth The Candle - The Wave (1981 film) For me, Bridger’s narrative-warping powers destroyed Perhaps The Stars as a novel. I don’t think it was the only flaw – but it was the flaw from which the novel could not recover. The problem with narrative-warping powers is both that it destroys the characters’ agency (even, in Perhaps The Stars…
Since I last wrote, I have moved my pottery practice from Brickhouse to my basement. This saves me a 45-minute commute, but it means that I have to recycle my own clay and fire my own kiln. I also don’t have as many people to bounce ideas off of. I have found a clay body that I like pretty well: Brown Bear from Kentucky Mudworks. On the rare occasions when I throw, it’s smooth and has good legs.…
A friend asked: “Why aren’t you working on the development of a decentralized communications platform?” My answer was that I don’t know how to solve the unwanted communication (spam, brigading, etc) problem. I don’t think anyone else does, and I think most people are unaware of how hard it is. That’s because it’s a problem of mechanism design in addition to being a problem of engineering. And most…
Since last time I wrote, I’ve made a few more pieces. Note: pieces are not in chronological order. A few technical details are at the end. We’ll start with a recent one that I’m proud of: Yep, it’s a vase with rats coming out of it. The black glaze is Marilee’s Lava with 7% Mason 6666 black stain, which I put together myself. I have now manufactured a few glazes, including this; a lichen glaze…
Reiner Knizia is one of my favorite board game designers. One thing I really admire is that he’s willing to noodle on a theme (e.g. his four early tile-laying games) until he’s satisfied with it. He’s gone through a few versions of Lost Cities, including Keltis: Das Kartenspiel (hereinafter, “Keltis” – there are a few other Keltis variants, but this is the one I’ve been playing. First, I’ll…
There’s a really neat technique for doing simple encryption that you can decrypt with your eyes. It goes like this, assuming that your data is a black-and-white image: First, make a new image with the same size as your original image. Fill it in totally randomly. Now, resize your random image to have twice as many pixels in each dimension. Each 2x2 pixel square of the resized image gets one of…
The game of Set is not a strategic game. Nonetheless, there are techniques that good Set players use that new players ought to learn in order to get competitive more quickly. Since I recently taught a few new folks how to play, I thought I would discuss the strategies I use. For background, keep in mind that each pair of cards has a unique third card that makes a set with it. Step one is to just…
Some game designs seem more robust than others. Dominion is a very robust design. They recently reprinted the base game, and replaced six of the original twenty-five cards because they were too underpowered or too situational. What other game could not only survive having nearly a quarter of its components being nearly useless, but manage to sell millions of copies despite this? Maybe we can look…
I made a greebled teapot: I was inspired by nostalgebraist (re)posting this image, entitled “A cube and its greebled version": Of course, mine is more regular (but, being handmade, is also much more irregular). It’s slab-built: first I carved an annular sector and a circle on a slab. Then I cut and rolled the sector (making a truncated cone), and molded the circle over a dome to make the bottom. I…
It’s increasingly popular for variables to be immutable by default. This makes the word “variable” a bit funny. Also, I had a code review recently where a co-worker asked me to change some hard-coded strings to be constants. The strings, in this case, were argument names for a JSON API. So the API took e.g. { "function" : "launchMissiles", "args" : { "target" : "Moscow", "type" : "ICBM", "count" :…
I was talking to my friend C about work benefits, and I mentioned a particular benefit that I had taken advantage of in some job I had ever had. I’m going to be a little vague here, because maybe someone else had the same idea I did, and I don’t want to kill a good thing. Basically, this was a benefit intended for some religious minority that happened to be useful to me as well. It might have been…
I loved Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines . It’s about an alternate history where instead of the civil war, there’s a variant of the Crittenden Compromise . So there’s still slavery in a few states. There was just one problem: a throwaway line about Carolina. That’s the state formed, in this alternate history, by the merger of North and South Carolina. This would never happen. The US political…
I’ve done some development on Git. I’m pretty proud of it, because it’s a tool that powers so much of modern software development. At Practice , I was asked to describe the difference between SVN and Git, and also between Perforce and Git. The answer I gave goes like this: “ A Guide to SF Chronophysics ” describes four types of time travel plots. Type 1 is deterministic – whatever happens, was…
So David Albert wrote a tweetstorm about Plan 9 and about generality. I’ve reassembled some paragraphs for ease of quoting: There is a ton of symmetry between messaging and late binding at the core of OOP, and private name spaces in Plan 9. With messaging in OOP, the decision about what code to run is made dynamically, as late as possible. With private name spaces, each process sees a its own file…
For the Power Broker game design contest, my friend Ed and I designed “Whipsaw!”. It’s a set-collection card game with lying. You can’t have a Robert Moses game without lying. We didn’t win the contest, but we had fun making and playing the game. When I told some folks about this at NYC Playtest, I was told that people who like set-collection games don’t like lying games and visa-versa, so nobody…
One of my favorite games is Set . When I first discovered it, in 1998, I made a Java applet since I couldn’t immediately find the cards. It’s apparently been used as an example in a college course, which is pretty surprising given that it’s undergraduate Java (to be fair, I had hacked on it occasionally since). My applet used to be a fairly accurate representation of the original game, but a few…
I created a totally stupid game called “Word Freq”. It simply asks you which of two randomly chosen n-grams (presently, only 2-grams are included) appears more often in the Google n-gram database. It’s kind of fun tho. Play it here . I’m downloading and processing the 3-grams now, but they’re really big – like several terabytes of data. Then I guess I’ll merge the 1-grams, 2-grams, and 3-grams, so…
My mom emailed me to ask about machine interpretation of laws (i.e. software judges and lawyers). I replied: About fifteen years ago, I got into an argument about this in the context of a video game. The idea was that the game would have guards which would punish you if you did something illegal. The problem was that the game supported building machines, and Turing proved that no computer program…
Last weekend, I attended Feldcon , a one-day board gaming event where we played nothing but Stefan Feld’s games. I had never played a Feld before, but I figured if someone liked him enough to have a whole convention, he must be pretty good. I carefully prepared by reading the rules to Macao and Castles of Burgundy – but I didn’t end up playing either of them. I think Feld is good, but mostly his…
I made a shallot-shaped lamp. I was inspired by a lamp that hangs outside of my favorite ramen joint . I had originally intended to make something much closer to the original, but I wasn’t able to get a satisfying design. So I decided to go with something with more curves. To design the lamp, I wrote a crappy Python program filled with magic numbers. It generated two files: a POV-Ray scene…
