The fun begins when you quit your day job.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I have finished an HTML/javascript version of the fair dice roller. The fair die roller makes a die or dice less random by tweaking the probability of each roll so that the rolls come up in the correct ratios sooner. Check it out here. Or look here for a lot more detail about what this [...]
We integrated a web server with web sockets and a web browser into Torque. The goal is to allow hidden information to be displayed on a phone and to create games where all the player play on a web page whether that is on a phone, computer or at the touch table. For the phones, [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I experimented with using bluetooth to communicate hidden information from a game to a phone held by the players. While the prototype worked, there were issues with client side logic and lack of support for iOS. Another way to achive the goal of displaying hidden information on the phone would [...]
One of the challenges writing games for the touch-table is handling hidden information. So far we have used two solutions: Physical blinds that rest above the sensor and block the view of the other players, and a touch-to-reveal system where the player blocks the view with their hand and touches the screen to reveal their [...]
Battle Home, one of the games that MCG is developing for Mesa Mundi, has a lot of options which dramatically change the rules to the game. For previous games, we have created instructions by making one or more graphics in Powerpoint or Photoshop and displaying that graphic on the screen. For this game, each combination [...]