PrimeDog Blog

Since the core of Lunchbox revolves around the interactions between different powers, I thought it’d be fun to see if I could describe a turn in which every character was involved.

Some background: There are three kinds of powers: Deliberate powers can only be triggered on your own turn. Optional and Automatic powers can be triggered on other Players’ turns.

BTW, this turn would basically never happen unless the Players were working together to force it. It depends on one Player snagging *all* the Deliberate-powered characters at team selection, and nobody dying prior to this turn. That said, let’s get to it:

I’ve designated this a Bold versus Italics type of thing, and I’ll style the character names so you can see the teams in play. Oh, and some of these names are highly placeholder for now.

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At the start of the turn, ISIS’ healing field automatically heals herself and all characters nearby. Suddenly TIMESLIP appears, stepping out of a time-travel portal to this turn from a previous one. TIMESLIP uses the remains of his temporal acceleration to punch OMA STURM.

TAISHO uses her psychic motivational power to grant an action to every other character on her team.

SHRAPNEL violently explodes, killing off three of the genegineered orangutan MALAYA MATSING’s clones and slightly damaging the rocky GRANITE and the martial artist speedster HYPE-17. LIFELINE absorbs most of the damage with her forcefield belt, and the invulnerable concrete golem REBAR and the intangible spy WRAITH are unaffected by the explosion. SIPHON magically draws health out of REBAR and redirects it to GRANITE, restoring him to full health.

Half-avian AERIE flies over the scene of the explosion but hits the edge of ANTIGRAVITY’s heavy-grav field and crashes to the ground, stunned.

Speedster JACKRABBIT teleports using a combination of NEXUS’ and GATE CRASHER’s portals, and then GATE CRASHER closes his portals.

Technomagical robot MENACE unleashes his fully charged mega-blast. MIRA throws her Psi-Shield in the path of the blast, but it blows right through it, killing NEXUS, MIRA, JACKRABBIT… and the previously invisible WHISPER! As they die, they each leave an Essence behind. GARRA FLOTERIA is also caught in the blast, but her plant-enhanced health allows her to survive.

OMA STURM’s wind pushes MENACE along the path of his blast to pick up the Essences of the killed enemies. As MENACE is blown along, two of TRIPWIRE’s automated turrets blast him, and he’s finished off when he hits one of PLASTIQUE’s hidden mines. On death, he leaves behind 5 Essences: the ones he picked up as well as his own.

PSIKON uses mind-control to force FREE SPIRIT’s astral form to take over BAZOOKA JILL’s body. Against her will, BAZOOKA JILL fires her bazooka blast at the vampiric DARKBLOOD, nearly killing her teammate. The blast also hits AEGIS, who deflects the power towards RELAY, who absorbs the power for later use.

PERMAFROST traps the explosive JUX in a shell of ice.

MEDIUM draws NEXUS’s Essence to herself and manifests NEXUS’ power: all of the world’s Nexus Portals are now active, but only for members of MEDIUM’s team.

MIND-POWER uses his telekinesis to move JYU’DOH into the middle of a crowd of enemies. JYU’DOH uses his inertia-canceling martial arts to throw the enemies all over the place. NAMELESS is thrown at ILLUSIONIST, but it’s only one of ILLUSIONIST’s hologram copies. REAPER is thrown into the pile of Essences left behind by MENACE’s death. REAPER picks up MENACE’s Essence and revives him on an adjacent space. DIVINITY is thrown at one of MEGALITH’s indestructable columns and falls down stunned. RIVET is thrown at PAX, stunning them both. Now PAX’s nullifying power will prevent RIVET from controlling the indestructible robot IRONCLAD.

MOONSHINE uses his advanced shockgun to blast NAMELESS. NAMELESS’ spirit guardian absorbs the damage, but the shockwave throws NAMELESS backwards through three of SERE’s flames. The damage of the three flames overwhelms NAMELESS’ guardian and NAMELESS dies, leaving his Essence behind.

FADEOUT attempts to teleport next to SANCTUARY, but SANCTUARY’s protective shield prevents it, so FADEOUT teleports to a space further away from SANCTUARY.

VELOCITY jets along the ground, bouncing off of DIVINITY and NINE LIVES before passing through one of ILLUSIONIST’s illusions and getting stuck in one of BLOBSTER’s sticky blobs. NINE LIVES is stunned by VELOCITY’s impact.

WILDBEAR attacks NINE LIVES, easily hurting the stunned enemy. Now consumed with battlerage, WILDBEAR continues attacking until NINE LIVES is dead. NINE LIVES reincarnates at her base, looking a bit worse for wear but alive.

HEALING GUN heals OMA STURM back to full health.

Anticipating an attack, HARVESTER shapeshifts from his spare, taloned attack form to his heavily-armored defensive form.

THUNDERHEAD summons up a stormcloud for later use.

SWITCHEROO teleport-exchanges position with PARASITE, who then stuns THUNDERHEAD and copies his storm-controlling powers.

TREMOR slams the ground with his enchanted hammer, and the resulting quake stuns PSIKON, JACKRABBIT, FREE-SPIRIT, HARVESTER, SANCTUARY, JUX, TRIPWIRE, HYPE-17, BAZOOKA JILL and the real ILLUSIONIST and flings them all away from him in every direction.

SHRIEK uses her powerful voice to blast FREE-SPIRIT with concussive force.

With everyone crowded together, EGAN’s electrical zap arcs through every single character and object on the board except for TREMOR, who has just created a safe clearing about him, and WRAITH, who is intangible.

First to die are those who are stunned or already damaged: AERIE, BAZOOKA JILL, DARKBLOOD, DIVINITY, FREE SPIRIT, HYPE-17, ILLUSIONIST, MEGALITH, PAX, PSIKON, RIVET, SANCTUARY, THUNDERHEAD and TRIPWIRE.

Lightly damaged by the zap are ANTIGRAVITY, FADEOUT, GRANITE, HARVESTER, JYU’DOH, MALAYA MATSING, MIND-POWER, OMA STURM, PLASTIQUE, REAPER, SERE, SHRIEK, SWITCHEROO, TREMOR and WILDBEAR.

The protective casing of ice around JUX is smashed by the zap, leaving JUX unharmed.

Heavily damaged and stunned by the zap are GARRA FLOTERIA, GATE CRASHER, HEALING GUN, ISIS, LIFELINE, MEDIUM, MOONSHINE, NINE LIVES, PARASITE, PERMAFROST, SHRAPNEL, SIPHON, TAISHO, TEMPUS, TIMESLIP and VELOCITY. Of these, ISIS, PARASITE, SIPHON and TAISHO are killed by exploding mines and turrets that were destroyed by the zap.

IRONCLAD and REBAR are unaffected by the zap due to their invulnerability. BORROWER borrows REBAR’s invulnerability and is also unharmed. RELAY absorbs the zap harmlessly, replacing the previously absorbed bazooka blast. AEGIS deflects the zap at HEALING GUN, who dies.

BORROWER borrows EGAN’s powers and now uses the electrical attack against her. With less crowded conditions the zap doesn’t propagate as far. Still, HARVESTER, JUX, MOONSHINE, REAPER and TREMOR are heavily hurt and stunned by BORROWER’s zap.

Killed by this second zap are GATE CRASHER, MEDIUM, NINE LIVES, SHRAPNEL and TEMPUS. NINE LIVES reincarnates at her base, looking a bit worse for wear but alive. As TEMPUS dies, her power kicks in, reversing the flow of time all the way back to the beginning of the turn, literally undoing everything that has happened.

At the start of the turn, ISIS’ healing field automatically heals herself and all characters nearby. Suddenly TIMESLIP appears…

Thanks to a dastardly individual who coveted my wallet and its contents enough to try brute-force acquisition, I’m getting around with a cane lately. The first day I used it, it was the only thing that kept me from falling on the floor. I’m not a total pain wuss, but I’m not a rugged mountain man either, and that shit HURT. It wasn’t as bad the next day and for the past few days it’s varied but been manageable. Now that I’ve mostly gotten over my preoccupation with looking absurd and feeling like a fake (I can walk normally, it just hurts more and most likely delays my recovery), I’m noticing something.

It’s nice to slow down.

Now, it’s not to say that I’m the most active guy around. I have a desk job testing games and have several sedentary leisure pursuits (reading, TV, surfing, sleep). All of which contributes to a bit of a thickened middle. But I do try to make the most of my mobility: take the stairs, get off the Skytrain a few stops early and walk the rest, go talk to colleagues instead of relying on email all the time. With the cane, though, not only am I walking less, I’m walking slower. And you know, it’s kinda nice.

Setting out to go to work with “I’ll get there when I get there” makes for a much nicer commute. I’ve noticed birds in the trees lately that I didn’t notice before the injury, especially the woodpeckers that are active right near our townhouse. I don’t know that I’ve ever *heard* woodpeckers before. I think I even enjoy riding the escalator now.

It occurred to me today that after my leg is back to normal I’ll probably go back to my speedier ways. Walking quickly, using my scooter to zip down hills and along sidewalks. Jittering impatently as I wait for a Skytrain car as though it makes it arrive any sooner. Like one of my favourite episodes of “All In The Family” where the power goes out and everyone gets along in the dark, my state of calm perambulation is temporary.

I suppose I should figure out some way to tie this post into game design, and I probably will, eventually.

No rush.

I’ve requested some help refining some power and character names for Lunchbox, and the help was returned in the form of a shared Google Doc. I like it. It’s accessible, seems stable so far, and best of all it allowed us to cooperatively edit it together. The responsiveness of our interaction wasn’t great, any chat app would have beat it, but then if it was a chat app we wouldn’t have been building up the content that way. I guess it sits somewhere between the feedback rate IM and the editable-contentness of a wiki.

Hi world!

A good friend gifted me with a previously-enjoyed laptop last week. It’s not pristine but it’s in good shape for my needs. I’ve been installing things I need and tweaking the ‘experience’ to suit. I figured I’d give some insight as to what I’ve been using in the course of making Lunchbox.

My work is split about 80/20 between writing and drawing, I’d say. For many reasons, Notetab has long been my text editor of choice. Multiple documents open as tabs, a very useful search-and-replace and some robust but comprehensible sorting functions. I always install the Pro version, which has some features enabled on a trial basis, but honestly the all-free standard version does everything I need.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another ‘Hey look, a blog!’ post. As it’s that time of year, let’s look back over the past 12 months and see if we can peer into the future a bit.

This time last year I was just getting into Multimedia Fusion, thinking that it would herald the completion of Lunchbox. I still think it might be possible to do in MMF, but the coding bug was hard to sustain. So many more interesting things glittered for my attention, including the design parts of Lunchbox. Most of that work was a bit tedious but necessary, going through the powers matrix and looking for bad interactions between the powers. That took a while, but was very worth it. Now I have a nice large spreadsheet with interaction data.

A few months after that, I was let go from my QA position, all the QA work having been shipped overseas to China. That stung (still does), but it almost felt like a convenience to have the time to prepare for kid number two (Hi, Hunter!). Work on Lunchbox was still fragmented but never fully stopped.

About 2 or 3 months ago, my good friend (old buddy old pal) Jason Stewart said he wanted to try working on Lunchbox in Python (and/or Pygame). Filled with giggly glee I said ’sure’ as casually as I could (one thing learned from fishing: no matter how bad you want the fish, you have to let the fish set the pace). Since then there’s been some coding progress as we figure out what we’re doing. I’ve always enjoyed working with Jay, and this time is no different. He’s still learning his coding, sure, but he’s quick. He has experience with audio, graphics, animation and QA, and brings a voluminous knowledge of games and gaming. As a bonus, we have vaguely similar ideas about stuff and aren’t afraid to argue out our disagreements amicably. In short (too late) I respect Jay a lot.

While he’s been coding, I’ve been working on getting 10 starter characters ready for production. So far that’s meant doing visual design for them and figuring out some documents to track visual/audio/text/FX assets.

As for the coming year? Honestly I’m really preoccupied with finding regular work. Something to keep us in food and shelter while Lunchbox is under way. But assuming I find a job, what’s to happen with Lunchbox? The next big goal is to get a playable prototype that I can give to people for testing and feedback. We’re going to start with a ‘pawn-level’ game, which has all the common game elements shared by everyone, and no special powers. Kinda the Lunchbox version of checkers or chess. My hope is that people generally like playing around with the game even before the powers are introduced. That would be great. Then we go from there, adding in the 10 starter characters one at a time and checking things out.

More and more I find myself doing Producer-type stuff, like the asset tracking docs. It feels odd not to be buried up to my brain stem in design work, but this shit’s gotta get done by someone and I’m pretty much it. Time will tell how well I do.

All in all, I like the way things are going with Lunchbox, and I can’t wait to see how much progress we can make in 2010.