The Hobbit Hole

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have had my fair share of projects, and to be bluntly honest, not many of them see the light of day. Those that do are posted here for others to use.

Yes, it seems that I am one of the many in life whose proverbial eyes are bigger than their brains.

So, I’ve abandoned the FIT testing framework before even starting it. That’s a plus for me. I’ve done lots of projects where I spend a month of free time and then abandon it because I come to realize that I’ll never finish it. To abandon something before even starting it means I’m making progress in a weird sort of way.

I do complete some projects. I completed my homebrew NDS tetris game to the criteria I specified. I completed the port of CLSQL to Corman Common Lisp, and lots of others I’m sure I’m not remembering.

But, my list of unaccomplishments sadly outweighs those of accomplishments. You think it would really upset me, but to be honest, it doesn’t. I do complete those that I want to really complete. Those that aren’t finished are always worth something to me, usually in my career later. Just the other day I was having a conversation about database scalability with some colleagues and could offer insight not because I work in SQL Server at Microsoft, but because I have learned Erlang due to one of my many incomplete projects being in Erlang. (That’s actually one I’d like to complete one day.)

So, if you’re one of those who bemoans not getting things finished, know you have company. Incomplete projects can have value, even if they aren’t complete. However, I can’t recommend making it a general practice to abandon projects. I think it a far better practice to only undertake projects that I can and will finish. That is my goal. Let’s see if I can finish that project.

I and my son are participating in the Game Design Concepts course. It kicked off this week with two lessons, almost straight out of the instructor’s book, Game Design Challenges: Non Digital Challenges for Video Game Designers.

Unfortunately, my participation hasn’t been as active as I had hoped. Work has been atrocious and I find myself with little time to devote to the game design. However, it’s been interesting to read the lessons, and I have managed to tinker a bit, even if I haven’t exactly completed the requirements.

I am doing a simple game for lesson 4, and should post it by Monday, July 13. The assignment is to convert a video game into a board game. My son and I kicked around a few ideas, and we finally settled on Rogue.

However, after working on it for a while, it seems less like Rogue and more like Dungeoneer, which is a fine game, but we were going for something different. Actually, the game we’re thinking of so far is more like Talisman than Dungeoneer, or imagine a card based version of Talisman.

We prototyped part of the game yesterday night, and we’ll hopefully finish it off this weekend, if I can find time in between working to meet a Monday deadline. Even if we don’t finish it for the assignment, I’ll probably revisit it. I really like the direction the game is going.

If you have any ideas about it, feel free to contribute. I’m thinking I’ll post a PDF of the rules and pieces after we have it fleshed out more.

Also, I’m hoping to continue this series of blog posts about the game design course and our involvement in it.

I just finished the game. I’ve had it for a while, but RealLife(tm) has interrupted progress on a number of occasions, until tonight, when after finishing up the latest feature on my work project, I decided to play a round of PvZ. Sure enough, with the same irresistibility that Lay’s professes, I couldn’t stop at just one, and I finished it.

Strangely, I feel kind of let down. That was it. It was finished.

Sure, there are lots of minigames and puzzles and there is the zen garden you can play with, but those are side things meant to augment the main playing experience, not really meant to play afterwards.

I did play a few of the mini-games, and I think my favorite was the Beghouled, or a Bejeweled knock off within the game. It’s pretty funny and the match 3 mechanics are easy to wrap your head around.

If I were to rate it, I’d give the game a 8 out of 10.

The presentation is nearly flawless (10 out of 10). The graphics are cute without being nauseating. Also, using zombies avoids the overly cuddly that could have happened if they had perhaps used rabbits vs vegetables or something else.

The difficulty was a little easy. Still, my 7 year old daughter played it to completion, so I can’t complain. A few more difficulty levels would have been nice, but it was nice to actually complete a game too. I would give the difficulty a 7 out of 10.

The gameplay of the main game is a solid 9 out of 10. Tower defense has never been done so well. The variety of the plants is good, and only giving you a certain number of slots forces you to use some strategy. I replayed levels a couple of times just to find out if I could beat it with a different combination of plants.

The minigames feel tacked on to extend play time. I would rate them 7.5 out of 10. The variety is good, but not all of them are fun.

The music and sounds of the game rate also a 9 out of 10. The music video, while technically not part of the game, has become a hit around our house, and the music and sound in the game are almost as catchy.

In short, for $20 you can do far worse. You can do better too, but not much.