Tom Francis
NOVEMBER 27, 2015
On the latest two Crate and Crowbar podcasts I talk about what I’ve been up to in these two games, and what I think of them. Here are the bits where I do that, Fallout first!
Sirlin
DECEMBER 21, 2015
Puzzle Strike is now available on Steam! It will also be coming to iOS just a few weeks later. (It's already available in physical form.) Puzzle Strike is a deckbuilding puzzle game played amongst Fantasy Strike characters. It's inspired by puzzle games such as Puzzle Fighter. Gems fall into each player's gem pile every turn, and whoever's gem pile fills up first loses.
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Grumpy Gamer
SEPTEMBER 1, 2015
I guess Monkey Island turns 25 this month. It's hard to tell. Unlike today, you didn't push a button and unleash your game to billions of people. It was a slow process of sending "gold master" floppies off to manufacturing, which was often overseas, then waiting for them to be shipped to stores and the first of the teaming masses to buy the game. Of course, when that happened, you rarely heard about it.
Mircosoft Game Dev
JUNE 24, 2015
Running native on the web. Godot has a long story on attempts trying to make it run on the web. We always wanted this to happen, we tried many approaches, it may finally happen. This article will be a small recap of our experiences with this matter. Atmosphir. A long time ago Ariel and I wrote a game named Atmosphir as contractors. It was one of the first voxel games and a Minecraft precursor.
Game Design Advice
OCTOBER 5, 2015
I love Serpentes, a game by Benjamin Soulé that you can buy here , and I want to tell you why. Serpentes is a variant of the classic computer game Snake. It is Snake “with stuff” The stuff in this case is ten different kinds of fruit. Each fruit is worth a different amount of points and also causes different things to happen, some good, some bad: adding or removing segments to your snake, adding obstacles and enemies to the playfield, giving you temporary abilities, extra time, bonus
Interesting Choices
FEBRUARY 25, 2015
I've been fascinated by board games that revolve around drafting for years now, and in early 2011 I wrote a post on the pillars that make these games click. Not long after that I started working on a game (then called City Draft) that would be strongly inspired by a few key influences: 7 Wonders for the mechanics and structure, Carcassonne for the idea of placing tiles in a grid, and SimCity for the theme.
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Tom Francis
NOVEMBER 27, 2015
My summary of where we are after the last ship-generation post would be: The Drunk Snake is probably the best algorithm so far, for generating the amount of branching and length of critical path we want while looking fairly pleasing. But! There’s a lot of room for improvement. But! Improvement is getting harder: we don’t have a huge amount of control with these types of algorithms, so we can’t fine-tune things precisely without a big rewrite.
Tom Francis
NOVEMBER 25, 2015
Last time I covered how I taught Heat Signature to build ships out of sectors , join those sectors together, lock some of those doors, then place keycards in the right places to ensure they’re all openable. I’d got the algorithm generating layouts like this, which is great: But as I said at the end of the post, there might be a problem with this layout.
Sirlin
NOVEMBER 25, 2015
As this holiday season approaches, it's the time for game sales! Starting today, Yomi is part of the Autumn Steam Sale. It's 34% off , and so is Yomi expansion too. Get it now And there's more! The Sirlin Games tabletop store has some specials. Pandante Deluxe (2nd Edition). $125 -> $99. Puzzle Strike Deluxe Bundle (comes with 3rd Edition base set, strategy guide, randomizer cards, and promo chips) $88 -> $69.
Tom Francis
NOVEMBER 14, 2015
I haven’t talked about the way I randomly generate spaceships in Heat Signature since this post – before it even had actual art. That’s partly because I’ve barely touched it since then. I showed the game to developer friends and the press in LA and SF a few weeks ago, and got lots of great input and ideas, but the main thing I came away thinking was: the on-board game needs to be more interesting.
Tom Francis
NOVEMBER 8, 2015
Deus Ex’s appeal is often boiled down to ‘lots of options’, but obviously that doesn’t quite cover it. Right now I’m looking to redesign the ‘sneaking inside spaceships’ part of Heat Signature, so I need more than a vague line about what’s cool about Deus Ex – I need a practical understanding of specifically why it works, and why similar games don’t.
Sirlin
OCTOBER 20, 2015
Patreon has been such an incredible help to me that I'm giving a thank you shout out to the Patreon staff as well as to all my patrons. (My Patreon is here , btw.) Patreon is a way for people to directly support the creative people they want to support. It's not for a specific project like a Kickstarter, but rather for everything that person is doing.
Tom Francis
OCTOBER 4, 2015
No spoilers. The other day I really wanted something to do that would give my eyes a break from focusing on things right in front of them. So I looked for audiobooks, and remembered that I’d been planning to read The Martian – mostly because of this comic and its hover-text: Particularly interesting because that’s XKCD, by Randall Munroe, who used to work at NASA.
Tom Francis
SEPTEMBER 28, 2015
This post is part of a series. I mention abilities and tools but no story spoilers. A lot of the time, MGS V is just a very good stealth game. You have lots of tools to distract, evade or take down your enemies, and they’re all very satisfying to use – just like Deus Ex 3. Its levels are encampments dotted seamlessly around a huge open world – just like Far Cries 2-4.
Tom Francis
SEPTEMBER 24, 2015
In maths, ‘natural numbers’ are the ones you might use to count observable, whole things: eg. there are six people here. Anything that doesn’t work in place of ‘six’ there, like 3.4 or -2, is not natural. They’re kind of ‘numbers you can see’ I’d like to use the term in game design to mean specifically that: numbers you can see.
Sirlin
SEPTEMBER 22, 2015
Pandante 2nd Edition and a new printing of Flash Duel are now generally available. P andante 2nd Edition The new Flash Duel These games were part of my fourth Kickstarter and the rewards have now all been delivered to backers—a MONTH ahead of schedule. Four out of four kickstarters on time! Anyway, you can now get your hands on these games if you missed the kickstarter.
Sirlin
SEPTEMBER 19, 2015
This Friday, September 25 at 10pm Pacific Time is the deadline to sign up for all the physical cards to get early access to Codex. You'll get the base set and all expansions so you can help with the last stage of development of the game. 1) Sign up at as a patron at the $25 level for at least one month on my Patreon. 2) Once you're a patron, you'll see the instructions on Patreon on how to buy the Codex starter set + all 6 factions for $99.99 + shipping. ($165 value, so this is a limited time th
Tom Francis
SEPTEMBER 17, 2015
I definitely waste more of my time than I’d like. Mostly on Twitter, but also just with this mysterious business of general internetting. I’ll sometimes catch myself switching between 7 open browser tabs, each containing something I want or need to do, and doing none of it. And none of the productivity plug-ins or apps I’ve found do quite what I want, because my requirements are incredibly specific.
Sirlin
SEPTEMBER 3, 2015
This is the 3rd in a series of design articles about Codex. In case you missed the first two: #1 Codex Design: Cards and Gold As Resources #2 Codex Design: Heroes and Tech Buildings. Codex is asynchronous. That means someday you’ll be able to play the online version without your opponent having to be online at the same time as you. You can get through your entire turn without having to wait for your opponent, then they can take their turn without you having to be there either.
Sirlin
SEPTEMBER 1, 2015
It’s generally good in a competitive game when there’s a lot of interaction. In other words, if your opponent is up to something, it’s good if you can do something about that. In Codex, your vulnerabilities are on the table and you have to defend them. If you want to cast any spells, you need a hero in play to cast them—and your heroes can be attacked.
Sirlin
AUGUST 28, 2015
Codex is on Kickstarter now. I want to share with you a series of three articles about the design and workings of Codex, followed by a whole bunch of articles about the heroes and their specs. This is the first of three articles about the overall game system. Introduction to Codex Customizable card games usually involve decks that are designed to do one narrow thing really well.
Sirlin
AUGUST 23, 2015
Codex is the customizable card game I've been working on for a very, very long time. It will still be many months before we mass produce it and make it publicly available. In September though, we'll open up just 200 slots for people to get physical copies of the game. These players will be seeing the game way ahead of everyone else, and they can join us in polishing up the last bits.
Sirlin
JULY 22, 2015
Did you hear the news? "Former Street Fighter designer / Evolution staff member / writer of competitive gaming guide is working on a new fighting game focusing on easy execution, great online play, and will be free to play." Which game is it though: Fantasy Strike or Rising Thunder? You actually can't tell from that headline. I was a designer on one version of Street Fighter while Seth Killian assisted with other Street Fighter games.
Sirlin
JUNE 13, 2015
I want to show you some of what I'm working (Codex, Flowchart, and a Fighting game) and tell you about Patreon. Patreon has been the biggest surprise-great-thing to me in the last year. It might remind you of kickstarter, but it's really not like that at all. Instead.it's fun. You can get to my Patreon here. Kickstarter Kickstarter is a great and useful tool to raise money for a project.
Mircosoft Game Dev
JUNE 5, 2015
Waiting for Vulkan. As many of you know, Vulkan will be the next open and multi platform rendering 2D and 3D API. While many claim it will just be an additional API, those of us who have been in the industry for long enough know well that Vulkan will make other APIs obsolete. CAD and 3D DCC applications will most likely continue to using OpenGL, but for anything related to games OpenGL will be no more.
Mircosoft Game Dev
MAY 20, 2015
Brand new 2D engine and more! After many months of hard work (and many more of bug fixing), Godot 1.1 is out!! This release brings a completely new 2D engine and more features (feature list below). At this point Godot is one of the most advanced 2D engines out there. Check out (and share!) this video with the new feature showcase! Full list of features.
Mircosoft Game Dev
MAY 16, 2015
Many more issues were reported issues after RC2 ( changelog ), so we’ll be releasing one more candidate. This time, we’ll raise the bar so if nothing really serious is reported, this should go as 1.1 Stable! New release in the Download section, or at GitHub.
Mircosoft Game Dev
MAY 4, 2015
The second release candidate is out, with a large amount of fixes. Let’s hope this is the last one and becomes stable! It is recommended to migrate to this version if you are using RC1, because a serious bug was fixed when saving animations in xml format that can end up in a corrupted scene.
Sirlin
MAY 4, 2015
The wait is over! Yomi is scheduled to launch on Steam this Friday, May 8th. (It's already on iOS, the web , and in physical form.) Yomi on Steam The full price will be $14.99 but it will be on sale for only $9.99 the first week after launch, and the price includes 10 complete character decks. Read on for all the latest updates in this version of Yomi, or check out this post on Designing Yomi to learn more about the game itself or this post about Game Balance and Yomi to see what goes into balan
Mircosoft Game Dev
APRIL 30, 2015
After 1.1 Beta a month ago, our first release candidate is here. A huge amount of issues were fixed ( full changelog ). If you didn’t report your favorite bugs, this is the time before it’s too late! If you reported them and they were not fixed yet, it’s your chance to pester the developers (just add comments to the issues you want fixed reminding them).
Sirlin
APRIL 30, 2015
The shipping prices at www.sirlingames.com to international customers are now massively cheaper. These shipping prices were calculated automatically through several carriers in order to give you the cheapest shipping price (and there was no markup, just the actual cost of shipping internationally). Something screwy happened over time though and these prices rose to prices much higher than the actual shipping costs.
Sirlin
APRIL 8, 2015
Yomi is coming to Steam in the next few weeks! (It's already on iOS, the web , and in physical form.) Yomi is a fighting game in card form and it's the competitive card game you should be playing. Just like in a fighting game, you have to learn your character's strengths and weaknesses, read your opponents' tendencies, and land combos when you can. Yomi is highly balanced at the expert level, and it expresses the values of a fair competitive game.
Sirlin
APRIL 5, 2015
Pandante is now playable online for free at www.pandante.com. It runs instantly in your broswer and does not require a download. It supports 2-6 players, so try it out with your friends, or join the friendly players already hanging out there. Pandante is a Panda-themed gambling game that's all about lying. Unlike most gambling games though, it's designed to be fun to play even without real money.
Sirlin
APRIL 2, 2015
The Rook & DeGrey decks are now available, both the physical and print-and-play version. You can get them here. Rook the stone golem is the organizer of the Fantasy Strike tournament. He's a powerful grappler, which means he has lots of throws including his devastating (but difficult to land) four Ace super throw. Normally in Yomi, when your opponent blocks your normal attack, you get to draw a card.
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