Witwat.net

It's a dirty, shameful secret. Promise not to tell anyone. The horrible truth is, I really like phase-based turn systems. Just a week ago, I was laughing with Maureen over at Pandemonium about how unplayable StarFleet Battles is and here I am advocating one of their worst-implemented ideas.

While just a rough sketch, I hope this will get the point across.

When logging in to take your turn, the player is presented with a screen that allows them to distribute the power from their powerplant in order to direct their movement. This version adds one extra level of abstraction and I'm not sure if I'm going to go with this rendition or a slightly different version.

As shown in the attachment, there are several sliders which dictate what percentage of power goes to which function.

Easy enough to answer: UFO: Alien Invasion. Despite a few minor issues, it's a great rendition of the classic X-COM series. I've spent far too much time over the past week saying, "Just one more mission..."

Aside from that, however, I've been working a bit on a turn-based racing game. It's yet another campaign-style, web-based, light-weight tactical game designed to be played a few minutes at a time while still giving the players a sense of progression. Currently I'm just referring to it as, "The Show" until I get a better title.

I've been working on a bunch of backburner projects and one's coming to the point where I'm going to be looking for aid in the near future. This is the initial summary of one such idea which I have been working on during some down time.

This is still a work in progress, but below is the guidelines for creating adding elements to an online, turn-based, campaign-style racing league that I'm working on as a side project in my spare time. The following is written specifically towards a few people who might be interested in doing some writing and design of the particulars. As such, some of the following is addressed specifically to an author, rather than a reader. Please try to disregard that.

Here goes:

One of my biggest mandates in working on this was to divide the rules from the theme. I want to create a generic system and an example setting and flavor which can be adapted, modified and replaced by anyone with the time and inclination.

Engine versus Content. Form versus Function. Meat versus Potatoes.

Ok, maybe not that last one. Whatever the case, there's two distinct parts to the development: Making a rule set which can be used for any sort of game desired and making a specific game using that rule set, to serve as an example and to help define and test things to see how well (or poorly) they work.

The ideas being used to create the game mechanics are pretty blatantly lifted from a number of sources. To give an idea of the feel we're going after, I thought I'd list a few below: