Marwwage

For those of you who aren't married, don't expect to have a great deal of free time months before your wedding. I've got about 2 weeks before the big day and I'm grateful that my bride doesn't want to kill me. Of course, this is only one reason for my prolonged silence. The other is that Robot took a brief break. A momentary break. It will be done; that is a promise. Trevor's priorities had a slight shift recently and Robot unfortunately had to shift down a few rungs. Chat Mapper had a rather critical bug, which prevented importing the existing dialog into the engine. Thankfully, things are beginning to calm down for both Trevor and me.

However, do not think that I have been doing nothing in the mean time. I've been working on a digital board game: Ghost. Inspired on the board game "Ghost Stories," Ghost is a 4-player hotseat where players must find and kill a necromancer on a randomly-generated board while battling various ghosts.

Like I said, there are 4 players (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow). Each player has a skill that changes their play style slightly. I tried to link their skills with Bartle's Players: Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, and Killer. By using these types, I think I can more easily accommodate a greater number of players on a psychological level. I will expand on this in a future entry. There are 6 ghosts colors (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Black, White). Ghosts can have 3 powers: on-spawn, on-play, and on-death. The "on-play" power can occur during at any phase during a player's turn. Ghosts also have a toughness from 1 to 4.

A player's turn goes a such:

1. Upkeep: If there are 3 or more ghosts of the player's color (whites count as all colors), then that player takes 1 point of damage and the next phase is skipped.
   
2. Draw: A random ghost is spawned onto an explored tile. When the ghost is spawned, its "on-spawn" power triggers, which could spawn an additional ghost or steal a combat dice from the players.
3. Action: The typically player has 3 Action Points during this phase: explore a new tile (2 AP); visit an explored tile (1 AP); active a Shrine's ability, such as teleport or gain life (1 AP); and engage combat (1 AP). When a player enters combat, he engages all of the ghosts in his room. He rolls typically rolls 3 combat dice. Each die has 1 of 6 colors on each face (associated with each ghost color; whites again are wild). In order to kill a ghost, the player must get number of hits equal to the ghost's toughness. If he cannot, the player can use tokens to purchase hits. Combat is very similar to "Ghost Stories." If a ghost is killed, its "on-death" power is triggered.

For the most part, I have a prototype working in Torque Game Builder with a few things to finish up. And it is all programmer art, so it looks absolutely horrible.