Observations of the Fox

Two quick things in this post... First a link to a post on someone else's blog. I read it and instantly thought it might be useful for those people who come here looking for design advice. I agree with the sentiments in this post, I've had game ideas in the first stage that have been sunk through option paralysis when other contributors have had great ideas to contribute, but haven't offered a decent way to integrate them into what has already been defined...and I've had just as many projects sink when other people who claimed early interest simple disappeared when the call for playtesting or constructive feedback was announced. The most important thing when designing a game is to give it your enthusiasm and don't let others demoralise you. My second part to this post... When did Storygames come back online? I've been looking at it once or twice a week for over a month now and have always been getting a page indicating that Storygames is suffering database diffi...

This may be my last post for 2010, it's been a pretty wild ride. Loss of a job that I thought was going well, moving house, declaring bankruptcy, meeting new friends, getting disillusioned by old friends. My thoughts on Vector Theory have been refined somewhat through the posts I've made. The games I've written throughout the year have started receiving some positive attention, and that's always good. My comic is getting ever closer to completion. It's generally been a year where unfinished projects have been worked on and exploration in the left field has proven useful. I had hoped to get a few more projects completed this year, but that just didn't prove to be. Sometimes life just gets in the way...and if you worry about this too much, you forget to live life and just enjoy it while you've got it. Let's see what happens next year.

I've been thinking about the idea of hit points in games. They appear in computer "RPG" games, and they've been a staple in tabletop games since the beginning of the hobby. I've discussed them a few times in old posts, and ways that they might be looked at. Alternate suggestions in other games have included a standardised range of "health levels", or penalty levels incurred for different degrees of damage. But what I'm more interested in today are the alternatives for damage. In a social game you might look at political penalties that make it harder for you to accomplish social activities, or a pool of reputation points that absorb the insults and treachery of your opponents. In a digital "Tron"-style setting, you might have a pool of energy points that fulfill the dual purpose of absorbing incoming effects while being used to fuel attacks of your own (a precedent for this might be blood points in Vampire: the Masquerade/Requiem). I'm t...