-+@ The Tree House @+-

sorta like a haunted mansion, no?



Well... not MND cards for a change, but the spoilt cards from the first expansion of the Nightmare Before Christmas TCG that will be released next month or so. Yeah, I'm a few months late for Christmas, but the cards are so cool and I really do like the template.

Ed has been busy with trying to get the engine to work the way he wants it to work... the update patches are coming in droves lately, which is a good sign in my book. Bugs are getting fixed up pretty quickly and it doesn't even have to wait for a major update. I think the players appreciate it too.

Coding wise though... not much is happening there, or so it seems. Tomi seems to be busy in the Doomtrooper tournament and Mark seems quiet on Attack. I haven't heard from Kev about Monkeys and Martin is probably busy getting ready for the next Vampire expansion, Final Nights.

I've been busy fixing up the errors in Final Twilight that Lee Valentine, the president of Veritas Games (and a longtime supporter and critic of the game), has found in the online adaptation. All's good now hopefully.



That's the other thing I did last night for Final Twilight - it's an image for Trinity 2. I'm not too pleased with the shading, but Nate likes it and it will be added to Trinity 2 though. The background was interesting - grain, then texturise then craculature on a dark yellow shade. A final lighting effect to make the top bit darker completes it. Not too shabby there.

The MND tournament is still going on, of course, and the Terrible Twos seems to be going rather well, but then again, it's the beginning of the month and people are flushed with tokens. Dartax has been blogging at MND @ CCGW about his games, which is always a good read. Christoph (Freigabe) asked today in the forums though if they could have competitions for the EF cards. I turned him down though. Well, when they can come up with the images, they can make their own custom cards, I suppose. Mitch offered to take over a month running MND tournaments which was a nice offer, I might take him up on it too.

The reason I am writing today though is that I want to put down my thoughts about "Signature Games" on CCGW. What is a "Signature Game"? Well, I can't clearly define it, but it has elements of the following:

• Game coded (or re-coded) by one person and showcases that person's coding ability
• Game that is the first updated when new stuff becomes available
• Game that owner would advice people to look at when they need examples

Most of the time though, the signature is that person's first game for the engine. However, that's simplifying things a bit though... sometimes, some of the coders will have a "Second Signature Game" which is only slightly below their signature game. Often times though the Second Signature would be in a different category.

Let's consider a few examples:

Tomi's signature game is naturally Doomtrooper. Not only has Doom the most automation for any CCG, it's one of the most developed game on the engine. Although it was originally coded by Ed, I know Tomi (almost) completely recoded the game to include all the bell and whistles that it has now. Drag and discard, card attachments, deck legality checking are some of the things that started off life in Doom.

With almost a score of games under his belt though, he definately has a Second Signature. That game though is Mythos. Although driven by Alex, his subservient minion (or is that demon?), to ever greater heights, a large number of the automations in Mythos are the mastermind of Tomi himself. Playing the investigator automatically from the deck for example... to the floating tool bar, all of these are elements from Mythos.

What about Logan? Well, naturally, Logan's signature is Shadowrun, his first game that he adapted and one that he's most adept in. The hand sorting scripts were developed for Shadowrun, and Shadowrun also has the make change scripts which automatically calculates how many Yen needs to remain after spending some, and will create the necessary tokens.

Picking Logan's secondary is a bit more tricky though - it could either be his board game, Last Man Standing, or his tile game, Crypt: The Pharaoh's Curse. LMS had that amazing movement automation, which Crypt was the first tile game. Based on just that though, I'll call LMS as Logan's secondary, although only time (and Logan) will tell if that's the case or not.

It's easy picking Martin's Signature - Doomtown. The fact that he immediately announced an update to it after finishing VTES shows how much the game means to him. And there are huge elements of Doomtown that are found in many of Martin's games - autopositioning, turn order determination and multiple hands functionality to just name a few. Martin's secondary though is the game that has been taking up much of his coding time for the past year - VTES itself. Due to the nature of the license, it's much more advanced than Doomtown. The reason I didn't pick VTES as Martin's signature is simply that much of what's in it is either from other games, or specifically requested for it.

Tony's signature game though is his only game done from scratch - Fluxx. It's probably the first game to have experience points, and attempts to do a whole lot more than what on the surface. WoT, although it has grown leaps and bounds since he took it over, isn't as greatly developed though as Fluxx seems to be.

And as for my signature? I still think it's B5, which was revolutionary for its time. It was the first game to use dice and markers as buttons, and the first game to attempt to fully automate setup on the engine. Its original scope was modest, but as it and the engine has grown, it's attempting to do a bit more than everyone else. It's probably a bit low tech these days, but the basics of almost anything a CCG could need is in there.

And my secondary? No, not MND. I haven't actually changed much of Ed's code in that game. MND was so excellently coded by Ed originally that the tweaks I added later - creature dice, automated magi energize, etc. all pales by comparison to his genius. For once I'm stumped though. Nothing else stands heads and shoulders above anything else with the exception of B5 though. Suggestions are welcomed though.

One game that isn't really my secondary though is Reversi, complete with its AI and all. That was a collaborative effort between Tomi and myself and the result is a bit inspiring considering the technology (i.e. mainly built for card games) of the engine isn't really geared towards it (at that time). Likewise, I won't consider Portable Adventures my secondary due to the fact that at least 2 other people have worked on it from its inception. I'd like to nominate AvP as my secondary, except that there is nothing special about it... oh well.