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From an 80's era games developer I say ...

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ddm
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... hello all.

I'm a published computer games developer of the late 70's and 80's having written several titles for the Atari 400/800 and Amiga systems as part owner of Artwork Software Co. Inc. Although the company only really thrived about 12 years with three partners before I got out, it was a great experience.

Now some 30 years later as an old software engineer; I'm soon to retire. When I happened across BGDF a few weeks ago it renewed my interest in games development, but this time board games. I'm interested in the game play technology behind good board games, creating some games for personal use, and most likely coding up simulators of my game ideas.

My thanks to the site master and all of the contributes for a great game design learning center.

Doug

Cogentesque
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Doug! Lovely to meet you and

Doug!

Lovely to meet you and can I say what a wonderful post :)

I think there is (way down under the hood) a lot of similarties between boardgames and properly well crafted computer games. I infact originaly started wanting to develop an "App" game for iPhone or android and decided to do some reserach. In my acres of research about games design where it got its roots from, and the tenants and fundamentlas of "fun" and what a game really means, it drew me further back into history leading onto early windows stuff (trasnport tycoon) then through MUDs, SCHMUPs, then finally onto the atari classics (that I used to play when I was younger: my father fancied himself a bit of a programmer and tried his hand on a few home games as well by the way! His favorite claim to fame is that he designed the shooting mechanics as seen in "Worms" and "Tanks" a few years before the games came out ^^ "I did that first you know?!")
But of course leading even more historically you get to Pong and such like - but of course current games (especially the RTS's) have been Majorly influenced (some would say entirely created) by German Euro Board games! And in my quest to make a game (starting as an App) I felt it right to "do it properly" and found my way here making my game post apocalyptic cardgame AtomPunk.

Have you found some decent other forums and resources? Unbeknownst (sp?) to me there is an absolute mind boggling world out there in the niche boardgame hobby now and if you need any help whatsoever just ask and I (and all of us here at bgdf) shall try our best to help you out :)

Really looking forward to speaking to you more Doug!

Sam

Dralius
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ddm wrote: I'm interested in

ddm wrote:
I'm interested in the game play technology behind good board games

It may be simply a matter of terminology but I don’t understand this statement. Could you clarify what you mean by “game play technology”? Do you literally mean technology like games with electronics in them? Board games as a category are generally low-tech.

Cogentesque
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Game Play technology =

Game Play technology = Mechanics :)

I'm pretty sure at least.

In PC games - game play technology would mean "the ideas and elements that make up the gameplay" (healthcounters, rolling screens, tech trees, weapon upgrades etc) back then, if you wanted to add a new type layer onto your game, you had to literally create it and "advance your games technology" (eg sim city/sim life's first macro scale or Cannon Fodders map exploration)

In boardgames it would mean "The ideas and elements that make up gameplay (roll and move, worker placement, tile exploration, deck building, push your luck, hidden info, auction, drafting etc) :)

ddm
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Re: Cogentesque: Yes -

Re: Cogentesque:

Yes - That's what I meant with the technology comment. My wife and I renewed our interest in board games after the TV made it to the curb with the garbage (for no other reason but that we were not watching it anymore) so we recently started to play board games.

I found the use of 'build a playing deck' type technology in Dominion to be very well done as well as the Action/Buy/Cleanup, especially layers of actions. The 'build a new board' technology of Settlers makes the game fascinating and adventurous, and of course 'build a board and play as you go' Carcassonne is a great technology that is well implemented. I know some of these game play technologies have been around in different forms, but evolving them in a different and effective way is what I would consider a new or novel game technology. Using or evolving a technology effectively is probably what makes some games more popular than others, and these new technologies also 'up the ante' so to speak in that some new games most likely will need to compete with this technology to be competitive.

Let's face it, we've come a long way since Go Fish, but we still draw cards from a deck and challenge other players.

Cogentesque
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Very well put Doug. I do

Very well put Doug.

I do agree with your conclusion here actually. Or as far as product marketing / spin goes about these things - ad agencies get paid to come up with new ways of selling washing powder even after not changing after 100's of years!

Just so you don't get others confused, generally in boardgame terms these would be called Mechanics. Eg: The mechanics of "Deck Building" in Dominion. as demonstrated here, if you call it anything other than mechanics, people may well become confused more easily.

So what kind of ideas have you got in the bubbling pot so far? Any magic "Ahh I know!" moments?

A lot of mechanics have been tried and tested and of course some are more or less popular than others as dictated by the fashion of the moment. I think currently, still one of the major "trends" in mechanics is the deck building that dominion made famous. there are dice version of it (Quarriors) there are them that use poker chips, hundereds of iterations, some that combine it with a RPGish element (Thunderstone). I wonder what the next one will be *ponders*

ddm
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Yes I probably have my terms

Yes I probably have my terms all jumbled up. I think of mechanics as the actual mechanism of implementation, and the technology as a more broad definition. But I'll keep with the accepted mechanics terminology.

Not much in the pot right now, just a few ideas. I've been busy writing base classes; one for a card with multiple attributes and it's clonable, a CardDeck class with various attributes and ability to transfer cards from one deck to another and a Hand class that can draw and discard from and to other hands or decks. I also created a DeckMaster object that can create a deck of cards with any number of card attributes and ratios like 6:3:1 etc.

Now why exactly I'm doing this I don't really know, except I'm having some challenging fun as I've not worked with collections in C# very much. Also, having a basic gaming platform could come in handy for experiments on some game play scenarios without needing real people in the conceptual stage.

As always, I'm just geeking out.

SuperioR
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ddm wrote:I've been busy

ddm wrote:
I've been busy writing base classes; one for a card with multiple attributes and it's clonable, a CardDeck class with various attributes and ability to transfer cards from one deck to another and a Hand class that can draw and discard from and to other hands or decks. I also created a DeckMaster object that can create a deck of cards with any number of card attributes and ratios like 6:3:1 etc.

Now why exactly I'm doing this I don't really know, except I'm having some challenging fun as I've not worked with collections in C# very much. Also, having a basic gaming platform could come in handy for experiments on some game play scenarios without needing real people in the conceptual stage.

I actually did the same thing yesterday, created a Card class & Deck class and added some methods to them (in Python..).

I created them so i would be able to simulate an idea I had in my head, and the result was totally different then I had calculated. Had to double check everything and noticed that my math was off a bit (well hadn't taken all parameters into account) so the simulation really worked as intended.

Really liked how smooth and easy it became to do simulations after you've created all the classes you need :)

Hope you'll also find some use in your code!

ddm
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Very cool. Yes I do believe

Very cool. Yes I do believe simulations are a great tool for testing concepts and theories.

Last night I notice that I either have a bug in my code (how could that ever happen :) or some of my players are throwing cards on the floor because their fixed hand size occasionally gets smaller by one card at a time. Dang players aren't playing by the rules! I hate that.

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