I received a Kindle for Christmas in 2010. I have really enjoyed the device: It is smaller and lighter than a physical book, hold lots of books/magazines at once, and lets me save clippings and lookup words on the fly. I prefer to read a book on the Kindle, and will even check-out the eBook from the library instead of using the physical copy that I own.
However, it was over two years before I bought an eBook. At first, I got a “New Yorker” magazine subscription. Next I got into reading library books on the Kindle. Lately I have been using the “Send to Kindle” Chrome app to send long-form articles to the Kindle.
The reason that I hadn’t been willing to buy an eBook was the DRM. I don’t feel like I really own the book if I can’t transfer it to another device. The Kindle is a great product, but I don’t want to be locked into that piece of hardware to read my books. If something happens to the Kindle or a competitor comes out with a better reader, I want to be able to switch and not have to re-buy my books.
Recently, TOR books decided to remove DRM from their eBooks. I am sure that it was a hard decision for them. Without the DRM, it is easy for someone to buy one copy and share it with their friends. Of course, DRM doesn’t protect them from a dedicated pirate. All popular titles are already available to someone who is motivated. But DRM does stop casual sharing. Fortunately, TOR hasn’t seen an increase in piracy and the experience has been positive for them. They have no plans to return to DRM.
So my first eBook was “Ender’s Game” from TOR. I hope that other publishers follow suit and provide a product that I can truly own.
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I have been working on a new game for the touch table. It is called Zilch (or Farkle, Greedy Dice or Dice 10000) and it is a “press your luck” style dice game that we often play at the end of a gaming session or while waiting between games. Players roll six dice and can score some or all of their dice. What scores depends on which rules you are playing by; but it at least includes 1s, 5s, and sets of 3+. The scored dice are removed and the player may continue and roll the remaining dice for more points or bank their existing score. If the new dice can’t score anything, the player loses their points and pass the dice. If all the dice score, the player may/must continue and roll all six again.
In my version of the game for the touch table, you can play more than one game at a time so that lots of people are rolling simultaneously. Here 10 players are playing 12 games:
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We went to a surprise 50th birthday party for Brenda in Hutchinson Kansas this weekend. We brought the touch table along and had a good time seeing the family and playing touch games.
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I have been working on the multitouch games these last couple of weeks. I have started creating a new touch game based on the card games Oh Hell, Get Fred and Wizard. These games are trick taking games where you get points for correctly predicting how many tricks you are going to take. The main goal for this game project is to make an HTML based phone interface for displaying the player’s cards. The player will make their bid and select which card to play from their phone or tablet, while the main screen will show the cards played, bids made, running score, etc.
So far I have the game implemented with the player controls on-screen:
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One of the lessons that we learned from PAX is that it is very nice to be able to switch between a human and AI player while playing the game. The only game that had this feature at PAX was Parcheesi. It made people more likely to start a game since they knew that they could be replaced by a computer player if they got bored or had to leave.
So one of our goals is to update the existing games so that you can switch back and forth between a human and computer player during the game instead of just at startup. Most of the games will be fairly easy to adapt to this system. We generally write the computer players in C++ while the rest of the game logic is in torquescript. This separation has meant that we generally pass everything the AI needs to make a decision each time the AI has to play.
Yacht didn’t have an AI at all, so to adapt it to the new system required me to write a computer player for it.
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We went to Boston to demonstrate our touch table games at the Mesa Mundi booth at PAX. We allowed a couple extra days so that we could do some sight seeing around the city. The highlight of the trip was PAX. PAX would have been pretty cool even if we weren’t vendors, but we got a lot of joy and satisfaction from watching people enjoying our games.
You can see all the photos here and I have a separate post for our PAX experience.
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We went to PAX East to represent Machine Code Games at the Mesa Mundi booth. PAX East is held each year at the Boston convention center and draws some 90,000 people.
Machine code games was assigned one of the touch tables at the booth and we ran demos of our software. The booth was very busy and people were playing our games almost all the time. We were very happy with the reactions that we got from people. They seemed to really like the games and were always impressed with the touch hardware. You can see more pictures of the booth during PAX here.
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After completing the AI for Pickomino I wanted to play against it and watch it in action. So I decided to create a version of the game for our touch table. I wont be trying to sell this game since I don’t have the rights from the creator of the board game. So it will just be for our own use.
The game came together pretty quickly. I spent a day or so learning Photoshop and creating graphics. Another couple of days building the game logic and integrating the C++ AI. Another day adding “simultaneous” mode. And a final day to add animations and work out bugs. Here is a screenshot of the final product.
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Pickomino is a dice game where each player takes turn rolling eight, six sided, dice. The player tries to build up a high enough total of dice to capture one of the available tiles from the board or from another player. To build up a die total, the player picks a set of dice all showing the same number to save. The player then re-rolls the remaining dice. Each number can only be saved once. If you can’t pick a new number after a roll, or don’t build up enough points to claim a tile, you scratch and have to return a tile. Full rules are here(PDF).
After playing the game a few times, I began to wonder if this game could be “solved” by a computer. Would it be possible to consider all the possible sets to save and all the possible rolls that would result for all the rounds in one player’s turn to determine their best choice.
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We are headed to PAX East in Boston to join Mesa Mundi’s booth and demonstrate some of MCG’s touch table software. Mesa Mundi is going to have several touch tables setup and our software will be running on one of them.
We are planning to show off the new mini-games, which are on sale now at Mesa Mundi’s site, along with Hansa Teutonica and a new game in development where players can control the action with a web browser on their phone.
D20Pro will also be on hand at Mesa Mundi’s booth to show off their role playing system. It should be an exciting weekend where we can see how people react to the touch tables and our games. Mesa Mundi has a short write up about PAX here.
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