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Introduction and Greetings

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Anonymous

Hello everyone, i'm a first time posted but have been lurking among the forums for a few weeks now. I've been into gaming, on some level, for about 10 years or so now, having started as a child. From pen & paper rpg's, to miniature wargames, PC games (I *fondly* remember my days dailing up BBS'es on my smokin' 386 w/ math coprocessor and 2400 USRobotics brick :P ), and more recently board and non-CCG card games. I've also been quite interested in programming and game design for about as long, starting with QBasic and working my way up to C/C++ and PHP/SQL. Having played a number of great board games, and especially having read the fantastic games and articles/analyses that this community has put together, I have to say i'm hooked, and am already madly formulating ideas of my own.

Thanks for the people and the site, i'm greatly looking forward to learning from and sharing with you all!

larienna
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Introduction and Greetings

So you too are a computer programmer. I also tried many times in my life to make video games. The last thing I learned was the Allegro video game library. I tried to make a remake of wizardry. It took more more than 2 years and it is not finished yet.

I now have an idea for a commercial video game, but the problems with video game is that they unfortunately take a lot of time to make. So I am now seeking board games as an alternative. Less programming and more focus on the game mechanics.

Anonymous
Introduction and Greetings

Larienna wrote:
So you too are a computer programmer. I also tried many times in my life to make video games. The last thing I learned was the Allegro video game library. I tried to make a remake of wizardry. It took more more than 2 years and it is not finished yet.

Allegro is a great library. I spent a lot of time using it and it is a great way to develop games. As easy as Allegro makes the process, making a game will always be hard work; doubly so when you're doing it on your own!

Quote:
I now have an idea for a commercial video game, but the problems with video game is that they unfortunately take a lot of time to make. So I am now seeking board games as an alternative. Less programming and more focus on the game mechanics.

I'm going along a similar path, albeit a slightly different route. I'm greatly interested in producing electronic board and card style games, so as to capitalize on the ease of playing against other people over the internet. One of the biggest troubles I face in playing board games is a lack of people to play with, as not many of my friends are interested in playing, not to mention the drastically reduced cost of production and distirbution!

larienna
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Introduction and Greetings

Quote:
not to mention the drastically reduced cost of production and distirbution!

OK, this I have to argue. There is something I found weird when comparing prices of board and video games.

Let say I make a commercial video game and sell it 10$ US. The game is less likely to sell because high technology games is so cheap that sometimes they can manage to be sold below this cost. So the customer will say, why pay 10$ for a low tech 2D game when I can pay the same price for an average tech 3D game. I don't know how they can make so high tech games at a so low price. Maybe it is because some companies like EA does not pay the overtime of their employees. If a game like "warcraft 3" would have been sold around 120$ US, maybe now we could have a chance to make some competition with our low tech games.

While in board games, if you make a board game and publish it, you are somewhat even with other companies but you must make a risky investment. But it becomes more interesting when you make downloadable board games. Yes it is less popular and lower quality, but you can sell a 10$ game that would normally be sold from 30$ to 100$ US. Of course, the client must pay for some material to do the printing but it will never exceed the marketted price. Second, there is no risky investment to make for selling a downloadable game.

This is why I am now really reconsidering downloadable games as an options instead of making downladable video games.

Anonymous
Introduction and Greetings

Larienna wrote:

This is why I am now really reconsidering downloadable games as an options instead of making downladable video games.

I must admit ignorance in the area of board game sales, i've never really read into the realties of the market. What I do know, however, is video games. While your point about high tech 3d games is correct, I think you aren't considering a fast growing segment of the video game market; the so called 'casual market'.

Case in point, RealArcade. This is a site and service which features 2d games in many formats, Action, Puzzle, Strategy, etc. based around a low price point and targeted at people who dont neccesarily want a game which requires a great amount of time, hardware, money, what have you. Some of the games featured on RealArcade pull in a -lot- of money, especially considering these are projects with fewer than 5 people involved in the production of them. Look at Bejeweled, one of their most successful games. It has sold enough copies to make many 'big league' games blush!

In short, it's largely a matter of your targeted audience. Just because a person can get Warcraft 3 for about 20 bucks now, they may just be more inclined to buy that 10$ puzzle game which costs them less and they may enjoy more. Not to mention, I can't recall the last time I saw a big budget 3d board or card game which was detracting from the board and card games that do exist!

I will concede, however, that it is likely most people would prefer having hard copies of their games, to play with their friends and family. The most successful electronic games of this genre would probably be the ones that do indeed have a hard copy counterpart.

jkopena
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Introduction and Greetings

Quote:
Allegro is a great library. I spent a lot of time using it and it is a great way to develop games. As easy as Allegro makes the process, making a game will always be hard work; doubly so when you're doing it on your own!

Just thought that I'd note that I'm another dedicated Allegro person. Rather, I used to be when I played around with video games. There's totally awesome people involved in that project.

Just to keep this on topic, one thing I think often is that many board games are well suited to new computing environments. For example, you're not going to play Doom3 on your smart phone, but you could probably play Puerto Rico (just to pick a popular game) if the interface was done nicely. Particularly cool would be a networked multi-player version across phones, PDAs, and the Web.

Anonymous
Introduction and Greetings

jkopena wrote:
Quote:
Allegro is a great library. I spent a lot of time using it and it is a great way to develop games. As easy as Allegro makes the process, making a game will always be hard work; doubly so when you're doing it on your own!

Just thought that I'd note that I'm another dedicated Allegro person. Rather, I used to be when I played around with video games. There's totally awesome people involved in that project.

Just to keep this on topic, one thing I think often is that many board games are well suited to new computing environments. For example, you're not going to play Doom3 on your smart phone, but you could probably play Puerto Rico (just to pick a popular game) if the interface was done nicely. Particularly cool would be a networked multi-player version across phones, PDAs, and the Web.

Definately agree here. The thought of web interfacing has been fresh on my mind of late. Being a PHP/SQL developer by trade, I know the capabilities and limitations, and I think one of the most capable avenues for the web format would be Flash and Shockwave. Phones and PDA's however, being currently unable to handle these sorts of multimedia plug-in's, would be better suited to the PHP/SQL route, limited though it may be.

I've actually been considering good candidates for a test run of the viability for such a thing, as several of us here at my office have Pocket PC phones and Sidekicks to test with (I'd really like to use one of the games featured in BGDF's own Designer Showdown's, if anyone has any suggestions).

Pt314
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Introduction and Greetings

Welcome to the site nefariousd! You will find lots of great stuff on game design here.

I consider myself a game designer, but along with designing board games & card games, I also design computer games, I too am a computer game programmer.

I have been a bit frusterated with Windows/DirectX programming lately, what does the Allegro library include?

jkopena
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Introduction and Greetings

At the core it's a 2D graphics, input, & sound library. I think on modern Windows boxes it wraps DirectX. It's also got minimal 3D stuff built in, and people have built support (wrappers) for OpenGL and such. The big thing is that it makes your game cross-platform between a whole slew of OSs & hardware.

Anonymous
Introduction and Greetings

Slightly off-topic, but of late, i've moved from Allegro to the Torque 2D engine. It's got built in physics, particle systems, multiple OS support (Linux, Win, Mac), and all sorts of other goodies. It's located over at http://www.garagegames.com

larienna
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Introduction and Greetings

First for allegro, I would say it is somewhat a dream library. You have more stuff that you can need to make a video game. Video, Bitmap, Fonts, Config files, datafiles, Unicode, GUI, midi, sound, audio stream, 3D polygons, 3D scene rendering, and many more are supported natively by the library which can be ported on DOS, Windows, Linux, Unix, BEos, QNX and macOS. There is plenty of add-ons for mp3, opneGL, mod, ttf support and many more. If you want more info, you can look at the allegro comunity at :

allegro.cc

One thing for sure, it is far more easier to use than the direct X shit. If you wish, I can send you my e-book ( half done ) which explain how to programm video games with allegro. Or read one of the many faq on the web.

Second, to get back in the theme of this forum, you talked about adaptation for cell phones of popular board games,well me and my friend have tough of making a online web adaptation of Stock Ticker. ( A share trading game ). The concept of the game is so extremly simple that it can be done in a week or two. Still we will add a few twist just to make sure it looks more real and that it is not just pure luck.

The idea is to make sure that a player won't login to play more than 10 minutes a days. We don't want to make it an addictive game. You just login from 3 to seven times a week and decide if you want to make some changes to your shares. The stocks of the game would not change really fast, maybe 1 penny an hour just to make sure you don't lose everything in a day. A game could last from 3 to 6 month and then the game is reset.

Pt314
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Introduction and Greetings

Thanks, I think I will take a look at it.

JackDarwid
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Introduction and Greetings

Just an old memories .... :D

I remembered my first (& only) 'big' computer game.
I take the idea from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms and Bandit Kings Of Ancient China from Koei (I think you will remember), makes my university friends as generals (I even do the survey for their STR,INT etc), and use my city map as the game map.
I use Turbo Pascal 7.0, I made everything for the game almost alone (with some pictures-help from my friends), and it took me 3 months to finish the game (including 3 days hospital-rest) :D
At last the game is ready and I give it for free to all my university friends in time (before anyone graduated)

It was very satisfdactory, but I don't have any courage left to start any project. :D

Jack

larienna
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Introduction and Greetings

Ah, Romance of the 3 kingdom. What a good memory. This was the time where strategy game were good. Another koei game that could be cool for either a video game remake or a board game adaptation was "Gem Fire". The theme and story was soo cool ( fantasy world island with a gem wizard in each faction ).

For the board game remake, I tought of using a classic "axis and allies" rule set. But there are so much cool unit in gemfire ( including gem wizard ), that it could be more interesting to have more diversified units. So i'll need to find another type of rule set. The video game used a tactical battle map for the battle but I don't think for a board game it could be a good idea to have more than 1 map.

Azzarc
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Introduction and Greetings

I think that the Warcraft is only $20 because there is online fees.

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