Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
LÖVE
If you're the kind of (mainly 2d) graphics programmer that I am, the thing you find most attractive about Processing is the one-click publishing to make a webpage and show people what you've been doing. Everything else after that is a bonus.
If you're not that kind of programmer, and the web isn't your primary concern, then you should definitely check out LÖVE. It looks like they're having a lot of fun over there, and Lua is just nicely mind-bending enough but still familiar if you're coming from Java or Actionscript.
Monopoly Google Map?
Has anyone done a real map for the Monopoly board, in London or elsewhere?
If it must be a Google Maps mashup, it should display house prices, electricity/water rates and rail delays on the appropriate pins. For bonus points, it should show the route from place to place, taking in the nearest water works etc. Creative interpretation of Chance and Community Chest is encouraged. No prize for putting community chest on a Soho strip club, OK? It's not that kind of chest..
Good luck finding Free Parking in London.
Update: the excellent Wayfaring has a London Monopoly Pub Crawl map.
Thing Ladder (designed for cloning and specialisation)
This post will make more sense in the context of Ning Things.
I shamelessly and hastily generalised from here (I need to check more sources of house rules, e.g. this one has a grid not a ladder, and the games must be longer for higher ranked players).
Description
The Thing Ladder is a list of people who all want to play a regular game of Thing, e.g. pool, darts, snooker, chess, draughts, connect 4 etc.
For now, Thing is just a two player game.
Rules
- Any player may challenge another player up to N places above him/her, where N is set by the owner of the Ladder.
- A challenge is determined by a M games of Thing (e.g. best of 3 in pool, 1 game of chess, etc), where M is set by the owner of the Ladder.
- If a challenge is successful, the challenger takes the losers place, the loser and any players in between each move down one.
- If a challenge is unsuccessful, the ladder remains unchanged.
- A draw is to be considered an unsuccessful challenge.
- The cost of the game is to be split between the two players (this is not about betting, or about getting free games of Thing for the best player).
- Any players not on the ladder are considered unranked. New players may challenge the bottom K positions on the ladder, where K is set by the owner of the Ladder.
- K may also be set to vary by availability (e.g. if a challengee declines, K++), or Ladder length.
- Every J days/weeks/months, running scores for the Ladder will be calculated, and the Ladder will be reordered. One possible reordering method is:
- The player at the top will get P points, where P is the number of players on the Ladder.
- The 2nd placed player gets P-1, 3rd gets P-2, and so on.
- The top P/Q players will be drawn at random for the top P/Q places, the next P/Q will be drawn at random for the next P/Q places, and so on. Q is set by the owner of the ladder.
- Refusal of challenges:
- A player may decline a new challenge for D days, but must either play or concede after that time.
- A player may decline a ‘repeat challenge’ (any challenge issued by the same person on the same day as a failed challenge) for 2D days, but must then play or concede after that time.
Bare Minimum Web Implementation
- Do email invites for challenges. With one-click accept/decline links.
- Email nag for results.
- Emailing in of results.
- Nicely printable board.
For Bonus Points
- One page config.
- One page invite.
- Add comments/photos/videos from each game of Thing.
- Add testimonials for each player (from other players).
- Add “ranks” for players to level up. Allow higher ranked players more time to decline (or less).
- Run tournament graph algorithms to work out the dominance relationships between players who never play each other.
- Extend to X-player games (e.g. Scrabble, Monopoly).
- Add betting, for places where it’s legal.
- Add profile photos (link to other apps? Geocode?).
- Add venue data (link to other apps? Geocode?).
- Email digests of results.
- Do RSS feeds for results.
- SMS notification of challenges.
- Accept SMS for results.
- Promote its use in a few pubs, especially if they have wifi and a pool table.
- Seed the app with a night in the The Elbow Room (or favourite pool hall of your choice).
- Add an optional tournament module where seedings are taken from point rankings.
Squashed
Lesson learned from 20 minutes of Shadow of the Colossus: if you're going giant-hunting on horseback to bring your girlfriend back from the dead then you'd better get some practice in, or else you'll rapidly come to a sticky end.
On first impressions it's a worthy successor to Ico, but much harder. It certainly has more of my attention than We Love Katamari, anyway.
More Processing Blogs
Alison Mealy's blog has been added to Processing Blogs.
You might know about Alison from her hugely and deservedly popular Processing-UnrealEd mashup, UnrealArt and despite her initial reluctance I'm looking forward to seeing what else she comes up with. I'm sure you'll agree that the culture of sharing of what she unjustly calls her "pathetic" experiments is actually what makes Processing such a great thing - keep it up Alison!
Spore: Idiom Collision
Watching Will Wright's presentation on Spore (worth registering, and worth the hour), I'm inspired by his dazzling display of old meets new. It's a pile of tried and true idiomatic gaming mechanisms - the pacman bit, the diabolo bit, the populus bit, the sim city bit, the civilisation bit, etc. - but fittingly it's more than the sum of its parts. The ultimate po-mo mish-mash, shamelessly derivative in terms of taking the known good bits from many sources; ripping, mixing and burning and creating something exciting and new. If it's as good as it looks - and I hope it is - then bottom-up game world building is here to stay. I haven't bought a PC game for about 8 years, but Will Wright has me sold on this one.
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