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Week 3 Bad Game: Nice Planet. It's Ours Now. |
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Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Week 3: Nice Planet. It's Ours Now. Warning: this game is incredibly geeky even by my standards. You're trying to make circles around planets. The trick is, though, that there are 6 moons around the planet, and you can make a circle along any of the moons, or the planet, or both. Watch the instructions in the game proper, and play a few rounds. They do a much better job of explaining than I could.  Raw flash file is available here. As usual, don't re-name it and sell it on a Korean site somewhere. I made a version of this game in high-school on paper, inspired by a 4-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe variant. In 3 Dimensional tic-tac-toe, you take a 2 Dimensional tic-tac-toe board and just extend it again in one of those two dimensions, usually down. In high-school, I was entranced by a version of 4D Tic-Tac-Toe that simply took that 3d representation, and extended it to the right. It didn't *matter* what it was actually representing, so long as the mechanics worked. And they did, really well. It was actually kind of fun to play a game that wasn't physically possible to visualize. I felt inspired. So for fun I devised a game where you tried to make circles around 3D spheres. Only 1 sphere (3D) seemed boring, so I made 3 full layers of spheres (9D), with 219 possible points to play. Unfortunately, that took forever... I've only encountered 2 people with that much patience, so here it has been simplified down to just 2 spheres (6D). I've also (I hope) simplified the representation of the spheres. Originally it looked kind of like what you'd make for a cardboard cutout of a cube, like this:  Where each circle represents a position, and the "back" position is actually all the way to the right. This is more or less what the full 9-dimensional original board looked like, which took bloody forever to set up before a game:  Even though it only took one and a half weeks of spare time to develop this flash version, it felt like it took bloody forever too. I don't think you'll see a weekly bad game as ambitious as this one for a long time. - Chris 12:23 PM [+] Comments:
UI-related comment: If you could let the 'blue player wins' screen wait there longer, until a click happens, it'd be easier to see how your opponent trounced you.
That said, I won my first game against Easy. Yay me! I actually skip the player through the ending as quickly as possible, in the hopes that they don't notice the game is still going on in the background. Players can still choose new spots to play, etc.
I couldn't think of an elegant way to close out the round without a whole bunch of flags, and I was tired, so I just hacked in the ending that you see. |
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