Wow...Really!?

I'm now seeing that it has been quite some time I've written. And here I was hoping that I would write at least once every other week. Who knew that it take time to actually write?

Here's the long and short of it. Seth and I were working diligently on getting those finally elements into Oh! Gnomes!. In fact, Seth had parachutes and the dynamically difficulty working pretty well. And then something tragic happened. Seth updated the Unity package to include my work regarding bushes and his weeks of work disappeared. Ok. So it's not the most tragic event in the world. But I'm sure anybody that has lost that amount of work can attest to, it certainly does take the wind out of one's sails. But we're back and running. I think we're all looking forward to polishing the final bits on Oh! Gnomes! (especially when Unity 3.5 releases).

In the mean time, Karl has been working through the cards for Ghost. They progressively get better and better with each card. I keep joking with him that he'll have to go back and revisit the first couple cards now that he found the art style. But then those cards will be better than the later cards and he'll have to revisit those cards...and he'll be trapped in an infinite loop of making it better. Seriously though, he's only got about 3 more cards to make and then he's onto modeling the players and ghosts.

While he's been doing that, I've been continuing on making the board game solid. I got it to a pretty solid working state and played it with various folk. And the more I played it, the more I realized that it wasn't quite the game that I was intending to design. It played alright, yet it was horribly chaotic (the same way Ghost Stories is chaotic). This forced the lot of us to sit down and reevaluate the player-loop. Needless to say, it received a massive restructuring. We went from an action-point system (different actions had different costs) to a phase-based system. This made the game far more accessible, requiring the player to only think about 1 action at a time. Additionally we introduced room effects making some rooms more or less desirable than others. There are still a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but even in its horribly broken state, it already feels significantly better. Of course, all of the restructuring code have been avoided if I would have just made a paper prototype to start with...sigh...I should know better.

Alright. I think that's it.