Games Games Games! An Update

Wow! Once again, way too long without an update. Rather than create a separate post each thing going on lately, let’s just talk about it all at once. Here’s what’s happening:

Rum Run

Has been reviewed by Dave for To the Table and Father Geek! Both of them were remarkably thorough and had a ton of awesome things to say, which is incredibly encouraging. Dave made an lovely video which actually does as good a job explaining how to play the game as I ever could, so check it out if you’d like to learn (and hear his thoughts):

Despite some stellar comments, Father Geek couldn’t give the game the ‘official’ seal of approval because of parents’ mixed reactions to the subject matter (interestingly, Rum Run recieved the Child Seal of Approval but not the Parents. What is this, Spongebob Squarepants?). Understandable, but yeah, just make it about rootbeer! Or teach your kids about a very real very problematic period of American History. Anyway, there’s still a review incoming from Gamers Remorse, but I’m so thrilled by what’s been said so far that whatever they say can only be frosting on the cake. Woot! Planning on smoothing out a few event/objective cards I don’t like then finally buying myself a copy 😛

Walkabout

Not doing too much with this right now. Where I left off, I was trying to get the online high-score table to work, which I think I was very close to doing but just ran out of time. I still think it’s a fun game! Loved getting the sky to fall. If nothing else, it serves as a great 2D tutorial and sandbox for me to keep coming back to.

Terra Neo

Here’s my guilty spot. This summer I managed to get Alice Blank into my production of Dystopiapiapia. She’s a phenomenal actor and it was a huge honor. Our last interaction though, was when I asked her if she might make some of the artwork for Terra Neo (this is like a year and a half ago now), and this all came with the promise of me getting her a free copy of the game ASAP to use as a porfolio item. Then I got hung up on the rules or something came up or excuses excuses excuses and I haven’t touched it for months. Here’s the dumb thing– really all that needs to be done is some fine tuning with the color palette and new rules. That’s it. So why the heck don’t I ignore the rules, get myself and Alice a copy, enjoy the freaking’ game, then make the rules later? Doy. Hopefully I can do that soon.

Masterplan

While nothing has been done, I will say that Dan and I are gearing up to take another pass at it and imagine what a Game Crafter version would look like.

Shima

Amazingly, there’s a couple people in my office talking about getting a bunch of my boardgames for Christmas, so I really should be making everything as great as possible. Shima has been looked at by Dan and I a couple times in the past, but he wants to do a genuine overhaul of the entire game. I just want to fine tune a couple things and maybe make the rules more clear. We’ll see.

Oculus Rift DK2

While I haven’t actually made an Oculus Rift game yet, it’s only a matter of time, so I may as well talk about what I am doing with it here. Basics: my office got the DK1 in December of last year and I immediately jumped into learning Unity and Javascript and made some interactive versions of our theaters for XIQU, the Rose Theater, Utah Performing Arts Center, and the Park Avenue Armory’s production of Macbeth. It was great– depth perception and rotational head tracking really helped you feel like you were there. Problem– if you move your head, nothing happens. Well, in a theater, whether you’re trying to look between the heads of the people in front of you,or lean over a balcony rail, there’s plenty of subtle movement affecting sightlines that the DK1 was unable to capture. Enter the DK2– just got it working yesterday with one of our projects, and that took getting a new graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 970), a power adapter (Dell prebuilt computers… yikes to work with). But hey! Higher definition display, and MOTION TRACKING. My boss loves it. There’s a few little judder things I gotta work out, but after that, I’ll start to feel comfortable imagining some much more ‘game-like’ elements to work on, be it for my office or for some crazy new project.

What I’m Playing

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Race for the Galaxy (which Liz usually wins). We also love a new (old) game by Sid Sackson called Acquire. Besides that, we’ve had single games of Dominant Species, Root Word, and Scrabble.

The Future:

I want to make a board game about the meat industry. Here’s two words no one likes to hear together: educational and fun!