Game 9: Still Waiting for the First Turn

Life, laziness and work have been getting in the way some but the Noah's ark project is progressing at a deliberate crawl.

The new demo looks a lot more fancy and has interactive cards and action menus which show interface. I have decided on a four pane layout for the various bits of game the simulation involves.
Game state and a 'card state' for a specific action are now stored and can be accessed by the scripts and card validation rules can be set up - so I have a lot of what I need to get started.
I have also redone all the main art work which is now a bit better if not good enough for release.

You can take a look at the latest demo here.

Game 9: Waiting for Rain

I have been making slow but steady progress on my Noah's Ark simulator for the past quiet weeks; I have created a system to display arbitrary simulation spaces which display some aspect of the simulation. These spaces are square and only one can be 'active for interaction' at once. Spaces can contain various elements and currently support condition displays of graphics layers and a full mark down text layout engine.

Some elements in these spaces are linked to action lists which allow the player to open cards - a card is a modal surface containing details on a specific issue and can include controls that can be selected from and manipulated.

So I have a working demo of this technology here with some scrappy art work - it doesn't do very much but you can see the basic ideas are in place from an interface perspective.

Game 9: A Kind of a Sim Thing

Next on the hit list for game genres is a more serious simulation sort of thing - I have a background in business and technical simulations for education and am looking to develop a framework in which such ideas could be rapidly prototyped. In preparation for that long-term project I wanted to do a fun, quick concrete example of such a game as one of my twelve games.

One of my favourite business associates has a game idea around a complex and technical large scale engineering project simulation; her idea also encompasses the social and economic changes and pressures such a project is associated with. That idea is very exciting to me but the part about modelling the process in such a way that people would find it 'realistic' seems really boring.

So I was looking for an engineering project in a fantasy domain that was famous enough that most people would easily grok. So I thought of Noah's ark - it seems to fill all the criteria and some vast portion of the world would know what I was going on about (seems like as much as 50% of peeps are born into Abrahamic traditions). A bit of investigation suggests that the story is much older than our bible and extends to the very earliest written records.

So the plan is to play as Noah as the project manager on the most outrageous project ever (build an ark to save to world from a flood that no one else believes in). Given the inevitable rains the game will be about managing the resources you need to equip for the flood, build the ark and collect the animals.The old testament provides surprising detail as to the technical specification of the ark and the personages involved although fails to list a complete set of of animal species in sufficient detail.

Part of the experiment must be to present this simulation across a broad range of devices using local device storage to save and retrieve simulations.