Dungeon Crawls are a really stable design. The “story” idea is that some vast castle was somehow swept away, leaving its dungeons behind. All manner of monsters and creatures live in the down-below, hording gold and gems and trying to eat anyone who ventures down. So it’s a perfect setup – a very restrained environment (doors and walls and passageways) and the opportunity for characters to make the game more difficult (and rewarding) by leveling up (i.e. stair-ing down).

Most of the dungeon games available back then (the few there were) were preprogrammed once-throughs. I hated that. Why would I want to master a game I could only go through once? With that, I came up with a fairly clever idea of random dungeon generation (well, they looked like they had been hewn by drunken dwarven miners but it WAS random) – squares would either be intersections, east-west corridors, north-south corridors or rooms. The area the player was in would be drawn based on their square and the squares around them (i.e. if you were in a passageway and there was a room nearby, a door would be drawn). It was topdown and pretty simple, but fun all the same.

For combat, I coded in Melee (by Steve Jackson games). It was a pretty basic game that gave you abilities and weapons and armor, and was a lot of fun to play.

Six players were permitted to participate (they had to stay in a group). There was no auto-mapping – someone had to draw things out on graph paper as we went along (and there was no more chilling statement from your mapper than “…wait. That can’t be right.”). Overall, it was a really fun game, one that we played from time to time at the Edain, and later it became a staple of Virginia Tech Friday nights.

Outside of Eagles, this game probably got played the most. We hacked and slashed for years with it.

Shark Lark was an interesting  effort. Where Battle for Berlin used some hidden placement, Lark was all about it.

So there is a game grid, something like 10 or 15 on a side, all water with beaches along the east and west edge. At the beginning of the game, you could pick how many players (yes, it was multiplayer in a hot-key sorta way) and how many sharks.

Sharks would cruise at one or two squares a turn, holding a course and only turning when they hit a beach or board edge. If they detected a player, they would charge at three. Half the time, their fin would be visible (the “^” character).  If a shark hit a player, he was dead.

Players could run three squares on sand, swim slowly at one and fast at two. Of course, swimming fast mean sharks could detect a player further away (I don’t remember just what these ranges were). Once a player was detected, up came the fin and the race was on.

This game revealed a funny strategy – it someone tipped off the sharks and they were going for him, that was the time to stroke for it because sharks would not switch targets. Also good for laughs were players getting killed on one turn, then killed again and again as other sharks came in over following turns. Hoo boy.

We actually played this game once or twice at the Edain Wargame Club around 1980 or so – it was fun for ten players to try to get across the straits and maybe one or two make it. But I was learning more about coding and from this foundation, I started what would be one of my most solid games, Pits of Seth!

I bought my Atari 800 for one thing – Star Rangers. But the computer came with Basic (via a cartridge) and a big manual for how to use that language. And since I had a job as a security guard and had nothing to do in the overnight shift save read, I decided to see how programming worked.

I remember sitting on a loading dock at my little presswood desk, the manual in my lap, having an epiphany.

With a computer, you could hide values!

Even better, you could ACCESS those values! And you didn’t even know what those values were!

This was an amazing thought. Back then, games were physical things, with maps and counters and hexagons. The only way you could hide values was to flip a counter upside down (and let’s not talk about the chance of staining the counter with finger oil or ripping the paper backing or anything like that). The moment you had to check that counter’s identity, you knew what it was. The secret was out.

But with a computer, a value could remain secret. In fact, the actual presence of the counter could be hidden. The possibilities (in 1980) were amazing!

Battle For Berlin was my very first working game. Essentially it was nothing more than a three-way battle (between American, German and Russian soldiers) for the 3×3 grid of “Berlin”. You could move or you could shoot. If you saw someone and shot at them, you had so-so chance of killing them. I think some squares had descriptive elements (so you, and others, could figure out your locations). I even seem to recall random artillery coming down, killing players in a given square and moving things right along. As I remember, the point of the game rapidly came down to assembling your little group of randomly placed soldiers back into something like a platoon, so you could pick off individualists.

I remember playing this thing with my brother and his friends and having a pretty good time. And how amazed I was that the computer could act as a dungeon master and referee, hiding things from its players and acting upon circumstances we didn’t even know.  That idea burned in my head, and came to light fully in my next effort, Shark Lark!

I can’t say why I’m writing this, other than the fact that I woke up in the pre-dawn stillness, cat curled under my arm, the world silent outside the open window, with a remembrance of all the games I’d written in my life.

I’m going to list them here, and in future posts, will describe each one in detail.

How many have you played? (and if I forget one, please remind me)

The list (in order of creation)

• Battle for Berlin
• Shark Lark
• Pits of Seth
• ???? of Seth
• Estates of Seth
• Game aids for StarWars, Top Secret, Maatac
• Eagles
• DeathRace
• After the Fall
• CyberTank (and CyberShip)
• Shark Lark
• Iron Mike
• Dispatcher Panel
• Pits of Seth (Excel Version)
• System War One
• Time Tripper
• Pits of Seth 2
• Solar Trader
• Freight Agent

It’s been a long couple of weeks – I released an article about our Dispatcher’s Panel and that resulted in a lot of “favor” coding (I’d like to ask a “favor” if you’d add…). So I had about two or three of these to do (ever look at code you’ve written five years back? Ugh!).

And then there was the delema at the model train club – we use physical cards to forward freight cars between through freights, the yards and various industries. The problem here was that the old dudes were walking off with pocketfuls of cards after their runs. And once you were missing cards (including their lading slips) it was always another trip to Office Max to get more printed. So I took it apon myself to write a switchlist generation program (much harder than it looks, and not for release – see paragraph one for reasons why). And now that’s just about done.

So finally I’m going to get back to ST. We’ve got interceptions by ships neutral and otherwise to work out. So now, when you piss off the mob and jump into your ship and leave that planet behind, they just might have a bounty hunter waiting for you.

Space just got a little more deadly.

Coming soon…

I was listening to NPR today, about the Ted Talks and the idea of natural systems. And then I had an epiphany.

They were talking about the biosphere and things like that, closed systems where everything factors in and these systems adjust to meet the changing situations, automatically.

Think about it in this way, you have a simple biosphere with grass and grasshoppers. The grasshoppers eat the grass. They multiply. But as they do, they eat too much grass. With the grass mostly gone, the grasshoppers die back. The grass, given a chance to grow, comes back. The grasshoppers begin their slow repopulation.

And that’s kinda neat – the ecosystem is in a constant readjustment to meet its balances. And that was my “ah ha” moment – what is a game other than a closed environmental system! Too often, games are simplistic things.  All those 4X games were stupid in that the game played the same, regardless of whether you were small or large. They don’t adjust to meet your size. The challenges remain the same; you just have more resources. Your advantage multiplies. Once you hit that roll, you cannot be stopped.

And that’s where this Gaia-feedback loop should happen. Once your grasshopper nation becomes huge, the game should stack challenges on you. It should get harder and harder until you are hitting a wall (like real life). Nothing can grow infinite.

We’re just starting to think ideas up for our first multiplayer, ATF (After the Fall) but I think I’ll have to not focus on the game as a balance between players, but more as a post-apocalyptic balance that shifts as the situation changes. So we’ll see.

Dynamic universes make for dynamic relationships make for dynamic games, don’t you think?

My co-developer, Jesse, and I love coop games. Playing as a team is far more fun than playing against a game by yourself. If you win, you BOTH win. Nobody loses (unless, of course, you both lose 🙂 ).

Twenty years ago, we did this with Sim City and Railroad Typcoon, sending each other the saved game (via modem) and playing a proscribed lenght of time before sending it back. Nothing like being handed a city to manage where the nuclear plant just cracked open.

Anyway, I had the idea last week to do this with Solar Trader. I’d start the game, go into the spaceport, pick up a cargo (and suffer my little adventures). Then I’d lift ship and make my run. If I made it to port (and didn’t land with the gear up or antenna out or simply just crash), I’d toggle open the hanger bay door and…

Send the game to him.

And then he’d work a cycle and send it back.

I noticed that on Facebook, I have a new entry and a new data file waiting for me. This is great. It’s like live fiction, where what happens happens to you. So tonight I’ll be playing my round.

You can follow our efforts on the GRID SIMS FACEBOOK PAGE. Who knows – if you ask nice, we might even let you coop with us.

And I think our next game (likely After the Fall, will have live coop built in.

After all, a friendship is too good to waste.

Been working on Solar Trader recently. Got all of Jesse’s new location setting code plastered over my adhoc placement routines used for the various space missions. After all, it stands to reason that most astoriod missions will be “beltward” and that if “Christ on a Comet” is going to direct you to one of those icy balls, it will be one they’ve been tracking on its whip around the sun, one coming roughly this way and ready to receive lambs. Also, FedUp missions are better timed, and if you step lively, you can actually run inner system delivery missions now.

Further improvements – there is now a lockable fannypack available (to ward off pickpockets) and reflective longjohns (to lower the deadlyness of rooftop laser-snipers). And since snipers are drawn by your freetrader fame, so will those with cargos that need prompt shipping and “no questions asked”.

We’re going to playtest for about a week (I’ve got one specific bug I’m chasing) and then we’re going to be putting NPC shipping into play. And that, I figure, will make it a whole new solar system.

Keep watching this space for details!

Had an interesting chat with my co-gamer, Jesse, last night.

He was showing me some new prototype work he’s developing, where SQL servers can be used to adminsiter a multiplayer game. That means, when we get started on our next effort, ATF (After The Fall), you will be able to play against other people realtime. Which is really, really cool.

And while he was showing me this, I suddenly realized that Solar Trader was missing something. I’d written some really cool code to allow ships to black out, and that pursueing ships might track a false lead. That was all in an working, and somehow I’d managed to lose it in a versioning fumble. I simply couldn’t believe it.

So there you have it. While Jesse is touching the face of Code Gods, I’m moving backwards in ST.

Merry Christmas everyone! And I know of no better gift than free game software, namely the largest and most complex game Jesse and I have undertaken, Solar Trader.

This one is a tough one – you’ll have to learn how to pilot a ship across our moving solar system, crossing the belt and keeping your ship functioning. Also, you’ll need to learn all the cities on all the planets, locating those traders you need to ship for, and who will make you the FreeTrader king should you survive to move every cargo. It’s hard to do, and you’ll find a lot of ways to die (or worse, end up with an impounded ship, trapped on some planet).

And don’t think you’ll learn a “path” to play through – the cities and cargoes change each game. Even the minor dynamics of the ship (power use, maintenance effects, morale, everything) change slightly.

So, the game is up. It’s all for your enjoyment. But please note that we are in a first release Alpha state. It might do strange things, even crash – we’re still pulling bugs out. Just let us know what you see and we’ll try to fix them. The best place for this is the “Time Tripper” Facebook group. That link and the game are available for download at the link below.

And let me know if you win (or if you die in a funny manner) – I’d love to hear it (post it on FB for everyone’s enjoyment). Meanwhile, Jesse and I are adding all those other ships you’ll see in this very dynamic universe!

>>>Solar Trader Page<<<