A not at all brief history of Lunchbox.

Posted on February 28, 2011 by primedog

How far back do I have to go to see the genesis of the project that now bears the moniker of ‘Lunchbox’? Bearing in mind that my memory may be a bit obscured, let’s consider it:

I first decided to refer to the project as ‘Lunchbox’ sometime in  2006. Prior to this point it was ‘Operation: Battlefield’. I changed the name mostly because I was tired of differentiating ‘My Battlefield’ from Electronic Arts’ Battlefield-branded series of games when my game came up in conversation. Having made the decision to change the name, I wanted something more like a code-name. I specifically wanted to pick something that didn’t reference the game’s content or genre in any way; something that I was reasonably confident that I would never be tempted to use once the game was ready to be released. I think it took a week or two before ‘Lunchbox’ just… popped in there. It stuck.

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LunchPawn v0.02

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Prime

As above, so below:

LunchPawn version 0.02 is ready for perusal and is available here: Linky! It is a standalone executable, just download and run it, it doesn`t install anything or mess with your computer.

Improvements over the last version mostly consist of smoothing out the gameflow for the elements that were already there. Previously you could work your way into a dead end with no available actions and no way to end your turn. Hopefully that’s no longer possible!

The combat calculations got fixed as well. Combat now generates the full range of random numbers I want, though I disabled the stun effect of high levels of damage temporarily.

known bugs for this version:
-The red character highlight I use during combat isn’t destroyed/hidden properly when it’s no longer needed.
-Once Hit is used, the End Action button doesn’t work until a target has been selected.
-Once Hit is used, the End Turn button doesn’t work until a target has been selected.
-There is no endgame once a team is defeated. The winning team can do victory laps indefinitely (maybe this is a feature)!

As always please try it out, tell people about it and send me any feedback you have by email, twitter or comments right here.

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Simple, stupid.

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Prime

So I have been working on Lunchbox, as I’ve said before. Well, LunchPawn to be precise. Anyways, I hit a spot of trouble regarding combat a couple of weeks ago. Couldn’t get all the pieces of code to work at the same time. When the Attack and Defense values were properly random, the high-damage-based-stunning wasn’t triggering. When stun worked, death didn’t. When stun and death were working, the tokens weren’t dropping.

I tried having all the combat events in a large block, but I couldn’t follow the state of things in my head when they broke so I split everything into a series of smaller blocks with careful activation/deactivation of blocks. That helped me track down issues but didn’t do anything to stop the issues from happening. I changed the number and ordering of the blocks of events, and the complexity of how they worked. Regardless, it never quite came together. I figured that at some point I’d stop trying to finesse things to get exactly the kinds of output results I wanted and just sort of kitbash things together so that the combat system would just run and let people play, even if it was badly biased towards the attacker or the defender.
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2011

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Prime

After a break of several months, I’m getting back to proper development on Lunchbox. The break, related to the long hours spent with my last employer, was long enough to get me seriously out of the habit of tinkering in MMF. I’ve also gotten a new laptop since my last posting, and I’m surprised at how long it’s taking getting everything to feel just right. However, I’ve resumed development as I said, and I’m trying to inject a touch of formality to my work. I’m setting small sets of goals to limit my tendency to shy away from the size of the project. As I complete things, I mark them done and add notes on any unexpected difficulties or incidental improvements. As of tonight I am also tracking my hours spent to get a feel for my level of commitment.

I expect the blog to change sometime soon, as the version is outdated. When I do the update I will be looking into sprucing the place up a bit, visually.

I’m not going to make any proclamations regarding my progress with Lunchbox this year. I think it helped me last year to a certain degree, but was ultimately the wrong way to motivate myself. this year I want to focus on making the game the way I want to make it. That doesn’t just mean I want the game to turn out as I planned, it also means I intend to find as many ways as possible to enjoy the process.

Jason out.

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Scarcity

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Prime

Hi, welcome back.

Having never taken a live course in game design, I’m always interested in the various print and online resources on the subject. One that I was turned to a while ago is the online “Game Design Concepts” course provided by Ian Schreiber and co-written by Brenda Brathwaite.

I’ve been going through the course in an excessively leisurely pace, and I’m as far as the first ‘homeplay’ (because learning about game design shouldn’t be work). The assignment comes in three levels of challenge:

Basic: The theme must relate to World War I. The primary objective of players cannot be territorial control, or capture/destroy.

Intermediate: You cannot use territorial control or capture/destroy as game dynamics. That is, your game is not allowed to contain the concepts of territory or death in any form.

High: As above, and the players may not engage in direct conflict, only indirect.

I wanted to go for the top challenge level, and since I know very little about the war, it was research time. I figured for a simple assignment Wikipedia was accurate enough to give me enough of an overview for me to get my inspiration from. I didn’t want to just read everything about the war so my game plan was to look into what was happening back home (since I wasn’t to include the warlike terms of territory, capture or destroy, why not just stay away from the war itself). Almost immediately I began to envision an economic game, with players dealing with dwindling or absent supplies as they tried to feed and shelter their families.

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