The Year Beginning
Welcome to 2015 everyone. I hope you’re enjoying your self-lacing shoes and hover boards as much as I am.
I played some great board games with family and friends over the holidays. Some recent favourites that I highly recommend:
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (link)
A cooperative mystery-solving story game. You are given a case to solve, a map of 1888 London, a directory of people and businesses, and the day’s newspaper. You have to choose which leads to follow and solve the case together.
Skull (link)
A deceptively simple bidding game that is always super fun and agonizing.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf (link)
Like the folk-game Werewolf, but with no player elimination and much shorter play times. It also comes with a great iPhone/Android app that acts as the moderator/narrator during the night phase.
The Spaceteam Board Game Beginning
Speaking of board games and Spaceteam, I have some exciting news concerning the future existence of a Spaceteam board game… : the existence will happen!! The game will be produced by Matthew Sisson and his team. He is a “designer of things”, some of which can be seen here http://www.mathewsisson.com/
NOT the Spaceteam board game, but a physical version of the game Werewolf designed by Matthew.
I’m expecting to spend a bit of time consulting and play-testing, but Matthew will be creating the game so I can focus on more games of the digital variety.
Version 1.6 Not-Quite-Beginning-Yet
I’m frustrated at not being able to release Spaceteam 1.6 yet, but Apportable is hard at work fixing the Android issues that are holding us back. The core problem is that Spaceteam was using a pretty old, customized version of the technology that allows it to run on Android, and we needed to upgrade it*. The upgrade was not a painless process, but it will be worth it and we’re also fixing various longstanding Android bugs in the process. I’m immensely grateful to Apportable for making it possible to play Spaceteam on Android at all (and cross-platform too!)
*Specifically, to support Google’s new In-App Billing v3.
New Language Beginnings
While I’m waiting to release 1.6 I’ve reached back out to some volunteers who have been waiting patiently for new Spaceteam translations. Thanks to them we’ll soon be able to play Spaceteam in Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, and maybe a few more!
New languages means new players and I’m also learning some more lessons about designing for flexibility. Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew not only have different words but entirely different character sets (and hence different fonts). And Hebrew text is written right-to-left instead of left-to-right.
Here’s a fun experiment.
Select the line of text below by slowly dragging from left to right:
Set the דפיברילטור to full power!
Office Beginnings
In news that is exciting to me and perhaps no one else, I recently bought myself a standing desk. This is an investment in my health and I’m hoping it will help my posture, encourage me to take more breaks and stretch more. So far, I love it.
I’m also about to start working a few days a week from a new cooperative work space downtown called GamePlaySpace. It’s a non-profit, community-focused space dedicated to indie game developers. It will get me out of the house more and create a better division between “work” and “home”. I’ll have access to new connections/resources/friends. And I’m also hoping to use the space for events like more Spaceteam tournaments.
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In my next post I’m going to share some of the beginnings of my next game: Blabyrinth!