Games Designer And UCLan Alumni, Steven Thornton In MCV Interview.

Lead games designer at 'Sperasoft' Steven Thornton, who worked on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Rainbow Six Siege and over ten Lego games, explains how QA is still a route to games design and what he looks for in applicants.

See the interview with Steven at the following link:

Steven has extensive experience in Games Design having worked as Games Director and Lead Level Designer at TTFusion in Wilmslow, prior to moving to his current role as Lead Games Designer at Sperasoft in Russia.

We're very proud of Steven's achievements as we're pleased to say that Steven completed both his MA and BA at Uclan Games Design with First class distinction.

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    Jim Thompson

    Principal Lecturer at University of Central Lancashire

     2014, 

    "Working with Steven was a pleasure from day 1, 

    one of those rare students who not only immersed 

    themselves in their work but challenged me, and 

    always brought positive energy to the group. 

    Steve's questioning nature and drive to develop 

    his skills will always be one of his key attributes. 

    His on-going input to our post graduate students 

    is highly valued and a rare resource. 

    He has a significant knowledge of games and 

    he draws on this in order to generate innovative 

    ideas around all aspects of his work."

    
    
    
    
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  • Quote from Steven

Tech Book Face Off: CoffeeScript Vs. Simplifying JavaScript

I really like this setup for a Tech Book Face Off because it's implicitly asking the question of what can be done to improve the quagmire that is the JavaScript language. Should we try to simplify things and pare down what we use in the language to make it more manageable, or should we ditch it and switch to a language with better syntax that transpiles into JavaScript? For the latter option, I picked one of the few books on the CoffeeScript language, aptly named CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development by Trevor Burnham. Then, for sticking with JavaScript, I went with a recently published book by Joe Morgan titled Simplifying JavaScript: Writing Modern JavaScript with ES5, ES6, and Beyond. It should be interesting to see what can be done to make JavaScript more palatable.

VS.

CoffeeScript

This book was written a few years ago now, in early 2015, but CoffeeScript is still alive and kicking, especially for Ruby on Rails developers as the default front-end language of choice. CoffeeScript is integrated into Rails' asset pipeline, so it gets automatically transpiled to JavaScript and minified as part of the production release process. If you're already comfortable with JavaScript, and even more so if you know Ruby, then CoffeeScript is a breeze to learn.

The ease with which this language can be picked up is exemplified by the book, since it's one of the shortest books I've ever read on a programming language. Over half of the book has more to do with examples, applications, and other stuff tangential to CoffeeScript, rather than the language proper. The book itself is just short of 100 pages while the content on syntax and usage of the language is condensed into the first half of the book.

As all books like this do, the first chapter starts out with how to install the language and configure the environment. It's pretty straightforward stuff. Then, we get into all of the syntax changes that CoffeeScript brings to JavaScript, which essentially defines the language since all of the features are the same as JavaScript's. Chapter 2 shows how function and variable declarations are different, and much shorter. Chapter 3 demonstrates some nice syntactical sugar for arrays in the form of ranges, and iteration can be done more flexibly with for comprehensions. Chapter 4 gets into the syntax features for defining classes and doing inheritance concisely.

Most of the syntax will look quite familiar to Rubyists, including class instance variables denoted with an '@' prefix, the string interpolation notation, unless conditionals, and array ranges. Here's an example from the book showing a number of the syntax features:

class Tribble
  constructor: ->      # class constructor definition
    @isAlive = true    # instance variable definition
    Tribble.count += 1 # class variable access
  
  breed: -> new Tribble if @isAlive
  die: ->
    return unless @isAlive
    Tribble.count -= 1
    @isAlive = false

  @count: 0            # class variable (property)
  @makeTrouble: -> console.log ('Trouble!' for i in [1..@count]).join(' ')

This code would be about twice as many lines in JavaScript, so the compression is pretty great and the code is much cleaner and easier to understand. Burnham proclaims these virtues of CoffeeScript early on in the book:

Shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and, perhaps most critically, easier to change. Gigantic heaps of code tend to lumber along, as any significant modifications require a Herculean effort. But bite-sized pieces of code can be revamped in a few swift keystrokes, encouraging a more agile, iterative development style.

Maybe that's stated a bit more strongly than is warranted, but it's still hard to argue with the improved simplicity and cleanliness of CoffeeScript making developers' lives more pleasant.

The last three chapters of the book delve into different frameworks and packages in the JavaScript universe that can be used with CoffeeScript, and the vehicle for exploring these things is a (heavily) stripped  down version of the Trello app. Chapter 5 goes through how to create the front-end portion of the app with jQuery and Backbone.js. Chapter 6 adds a backend server for the app with Node and Express. Chapter 7 explores how to test the app with Intern. All of the code for the front-end, backend, and tests is written in CoffeeScript, and the transpiling is setup to be managed with Grunt. It's nice to see multiple different examples of how to use CoffeeScript anywhere that JavaScript would normally be used, just to get an idea of how to transition to CoffeeScript in multiple ways.

Throughout the book, Burnham presents everything in a straightforward, no-frills manner. Everything is clear and logical, and his concise descriptions are part of the reason the book is so short. He assumes you already know JavaScript—which is much appreciated—and he doesn't go into extended explanations of JavaScripts features. It's just the facts on how CoffeeScript is different and what the syntax is for the features it compresses. It's awfully hard for me not to recommend this book simply because it's so short and to the point. It only took a few hours to read through, and now I know a better way to code JavaScript. There's not much more I can ask of a programming language book.

Simplifying JavaScript

Every language has those more advanced books that assume you already know the language and instead of covering the basics and syntax, it provides advice on how to write idiomatically in the language. I've read these books for C++, Ruby, and JavaScript and found them to be surprisingly enjoyable to read. That was not the case with this book, but before I get too far into criticisms, I should summarize what this book does well.

Simplifying JavaScript is organized into ten chapters with each chapter broken into a set of tips that total 51 tips in all. These tips each explain one new feature of the JavaScript language from the new ES5, ES6, and ES2017 specifications. Some features, like the spread operator take multiple tips to fully cover. Then, the last chapter covers some features of the JavaScript development environment, like npm, that are not part of the language and have been around a bit longer than these newer specifications.

Most of the new features significantly improve and simplify the language, and they include things like:

• new variable declaration keywords const and let
• string template literals, which look much like Ruby's string interpolation
• the spread operator ... for converting arrays to lists and converting lists of parameters to arrays
• the Map object
• the Set object
• new loop iterators such as map(), filter(), and reduce()
• default parameters
• object destructuring
• unnamed arrow functions
• partially applied functions and currying
• classes
• promises and async/await

The arrow functions, spread operator, loop iterators, and destructuring go a long way in making modern JavaScript much more pleasant to program in. All of these features—and likely more in the newest language specs—make CoffeeScript nearly irrelevant, and likely not worth the effort of going through the step of compiling to JavaScript. The language has really matured in the last few years!

Morgan does a nice job introducing and justifying the new features at times:

We spend so much time thinking and teaching complex concepts, but something as simple as variable declaration will affect your life and the lives of other developers in a much more significant way.

This is so true. The code we're reading and writing every day has hundreds of variable declarations and usages, and being able to indicate intent in those declarations makes code much cleaner and more understandable. Getting better at the fundamentals of the language and having these new declarations available so that the most common code is clear and purposeful will more significantly improve code than all of the complicated, esoteric features that only get used once in a blue moon.

These exciting new features and simple explanations were the good parts, so why did I end up not liking this book much? Mostly, it was because of how long-winded the explanations were. Each tip dragged on for what felt like twice as long as it needed to, and the book could have easily been half as long. CoffeeScript showed how to present language features in a clear, concise way. This book took the opposite approach. Then, to make matters worse, it was written in the second person with the author always referring directly to the reader with you this and you that. Normally I don't mind a few references to you, the reader, every now and then, but this was constant so it became constantly aggravating.

Beyond the writing style, some of the justifications for various features didn't hold much water. For example, when trying to rationalize the new variable declarations, Morgan presented an example of code where the variables are declared at the top, and then there are a hundred lines of code before those variables are used again. Then he says, "Ignore the fact that a block of code shouldn't be 100 lines long; you have a large amount of code where lots of changes are occurring." I don't know about you, but I wouldn't declare a variable and then not use it for a hundred lines. I would declare it right before use. He shouldn't have to contrive a bad example like that to justify the new const and let declarations. The improved ability to relate intent in the code should be reason enough.

In another example for why one must be careful when testing for truthy values in a conditional, he shows some code that would fail because a value of 0 is falsey:

const sections = ['shipping'];

function displayShipping(sections) {
  if (sections.indexOf('shipping')) {
    return true;
  } else {
    return false;
  }
}

Ignoring the fact that I just cringe at code like this that returns a boolean value that should be computed directly instead of selected through an if statement, (don't worry, he corrects that later) there is much more wrong with this code than just the fact that an index of 0 will incorrectly hit the else branch. In fact, that is the only case that hits the else branch. Whenever 'shipping' is missing from sections, indexOf() will return -1, which is truthy! This code is just totally broken, even for an example that's supposed to show a certain kind of bug, which it does almost by accident.

Other explanations were somewhat lacking in clarity. Late in the book, when things start to get complicated with promises, the explanations seem to get much more brief and gloss over how promises actually work mechanically and how the code executes. After having things explained in excruciating detail and in overly simplistic terms, I was surprised at how little explanation was given for promises. A step-by-step walk through of how the code runs when a promise executes would have been quite helpful in understanding that feature better. I figured it out, but through no fault of the book.

Overall, it was a disappointing read, and didn't at all live up to my expectations built up from similar books. The tone of the book was meant more for a beginner while the content was geared toward an intermediate to expert programmer. While learning about the new features of JavaScript was great, and there are plenty of new features to get excited about, there must be a better way to learn about them. At least it was a quick read, and refreshing my memory will be easy by skimming the titles of the tips. I wouldn't recommend Simplifying JavaScript to anyone looking to come up to speed on modern JavaScript. There are better options out there.

DE: Miserable Meat Mountain

Get. Cleaved. Hard.

Today is a special day.  Why?  Because I'm posting about a hypothetical competitive list that I've been working on that features Coven.  The idea of this list came from friends of mine in the competitive 40K circuit that has been actively discussing the validity of Coven.  Personally, I think that Prophets have some of the strongest units in all of the Dark Eldar book.  The 4++ across the entire army is absolutely insane considering all the buffs you can stack.

What you have here is a list that's capable of outputting a dramatic amount of firepower on top of having a huge amount of resilient, melee pressure that can move surprisingly quick across the battlefield.  All Haemonculus units move 7" (Wyches move 8") across the battlefield where Talos can move a surprising 8".  When you consider the fact that Talos can now Fly, you really to question all these massive, resilient meaty things are being thrown into your face in the most ridiculous way possible.

Here's the list, I'll go into detail below:

Miserable Meat Mountain
1993 // 9-11 CP

Black Heart Bat +5 CP

HQ:
Archon, Agonizer, Blaster = 91
Cunning, Living Muse

Archon, Agonizer, Blaster = 91

TROOP:
5x Warriors, Blaster = 47
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, SC = 104
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, SC = 104
10x Warriors, 2x Blaster, SC = 104

PARTY BOATS:
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
Raider, Dark Lance = 85
Raider, Dark Lance = 85

HEAVY:
Ravager, 3x Dissies = 125
Ravager, 3x Dissies = 125
Ravager, 3x Dissies = 125

+++

Prophets Spear +1 CP

HQ:
Urien = 90
Diabolical Soothsayer

ELITE:
10x Grotesques = 350

HEAVY:
Talos, 2x Macro, 2x Haywire = 99
Talos, 2x Macro, 2x Haywire = 99
Talos, 2x Macro, 2x Haywire = 99

>>>

So what you do here is take Alliance of Agony to enable the Diabolic Soothsayer on Urien.  This automatically pays for itself and you can possibly get 2 more CP depending on what you roll.  All in all, this makes your CP count 9-11 depending on hot your dice are on this roll.

Urien himself is pretty amazing.  For 90 points, which is 15 points or so more than a regular Haemonculus, you get +1S and Ld. on top of the +1T for all units within 6" of him.  He's fast enough to keep up with the rest of your army, is T6 because his aura also works on himself, and is incredibly difficult to kill because he halves damage coming into him.  However, what makes him work is the rest of the units he brings along with him as part of your army.  With his +1S/T aura, he makes all the Grotesques shielding him T6, 4++, 4W with FNP.  Each of those beasts has 5 S6 AP-2 1D WS3+ attacks and that's going to do some serious damage to whatever they touch.  The Talos is even more deadly because they are now T7, 4++, 7W with FNP with 6 S8 AP-2 2D WS3+ attacks each with an additional 2D3 Haywire Blaster shots.  Sure, these hit on 4s, but it's still nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're a vehicle.

I can see a deployment strategy for these guys as Grots in front, Urien in the middle, Talos all around Urien.  This gives him a Spear of Meat that he can drive directly into the heart of the enemy, making them shit their pants while your Kabal units do their thing.  What makes a list like this work is that you cannot really ignore the cascading mountain of meat running into your lines.  Sooner or later you'll have to deal with them and they're an absolute pain to deal with.  If 10 Grots get into combat, they're going to throw out 50 high-strength attacks that are going to murder pretty much anything they touch.  They're incredibly difficult to kill and they will beat out most things in combat easily due to sheer attrition and unit preservation.  Unlike most fatty units, Grots don't die easily and so the overall damage of the unit will stay intact much longer.

In short, your opponents are left reeling from the damage that your firebase of Living Muse Ravagers and Raiders are inflicting, but they're too distracted to deal with them because of all the Coven units closing in.  If they focus on the vehicles (and you should play the range-game here at first), they're also making a mistake.  Hopefully, you've played smart enough to reduce as much damage as possible and watch your Coven units smash into his lines untarnished.  This is Tough Decisions 101 and Dark Eldar plays this game much better than most.  When it comes to pure pressure, I think Prophets is the way to go if you want to bring a melee force that can threaten anything from MEQ to Imperial Knights

Yes, I'm going to call this list experimentation Miserable Meat Mountain after the competitive Warmahordes Trolls list.  It's a Black Heart Bat and Prophets Spear, so it's relatively easy to construct.  Now, help me out with this grand experiment and field this list if you're capable of fielding this!

[Hackaday] New Part Day: Battery-Less NFC E-Paper Display

New Part Day: Battery-Less NFC E-Paper Display

The Ultimate Megadungeon

I feel like I fought long and hard for this review...

Battled my inner demons, smoked a peace-pipe with that old serpent until we were both baked into a fever-dream cake with black rainbow frosting, risked my stack by going all-in against a lavender mo-hawked skeever who I knew was bluffing, and so forth!

Endzeitgeist's Cha'alt review!

I knew it wouldn't be easy, that he'd make me pay dearly for every bit of laziness or self-indulgence, every decision carefully considered and weighed as if standing before an exotic gold idol with a pouch full of sand, every creative choice mercilessly judged.

And yet, I came out unscathed... relatively speaking.  I just re-read the damn thing and I'm exhausted.  I don't have the time, energy, or even the inclination to refute his claims, except to say that I really wanted an all-caps GONZO fun-house megadungeon.  If blasters and sleep spells were commonplace, then really weird stuff would have to be way over-the-top.

Also, for a 90 minute online game or 3-hour face-to-face one-shot of D&D, Crimson Dragon Slayer D20 is just about perfect.  It also plays better than it reads.  ;)

Those brave enough to see for themselves are welcome to play in one of my Roll20 games or on January 11th in Madison, WI.

VS

p.s. Yep, still pimping the Cha'alt: Fuchsia Malaise kickstarter - only 5 days left to go!

(205) Download Limbo Full Game Full Version For Pc

(205 MB) Download Limbo Full Game Full Version For Pc

Screenshot

System Requirements of Limbo

• Operating System: Windows XP/ Windows Vista/ Windows 7/ Windows 8 and 8.1
• CPU: Pentium 4 2GHz processor
• RAM: 512MB.
• Hard Disk Space: 185MB.

Bimonthly Progress Report For My Twitch Channel, FuzzyJCats, Sept 2 To November 1

FuzzyJCats Twitch Channel

It's going into December, so as usual, I've been procrastinating because there hasn't been any major changes at the level of no longer caring about viewer numbers. Albeit there are times when I have my neuroses and insecurities about numbers, though I was able to get over it after processing with my best friend, Todd. 

Because that breakthrough was huge, I felt I wasn't making any monumental improvements, except for taking 15 minute breaks after 2 hours of streaming, which helped me to last an extra 2 hours or so, getting in the much needed practice without fatigue.

I didn't think about taking breaks because I see my streamer friends stream 12 hours straight without any breaks. And the meme in Twitch is stream until you drop to gain viewers. I would stream until I couldn't focus any longer (normally around 2 hours) and stop. 

I stopped typing my streamer friends' link as I noted the emotional issues and stress it was causing me. It's so easy to forget to shout someone out that if you don't do so, you're concerned if the person felt slighted. Therefore, I'm only shouting out when being hosted and raided. Further, having excessive shoutouts made the chat harder to read, and I wanted a cleaner interface.

Since this progress report was long overdue and it was in the back of my mind, I was wondering what else can I do in the meantime to take streams to the next level? The answer has to go back to the basics - what do I want to achieve in streaming? Because if I know what I want, I can find out ways to accomplish that goal. Clearly, to "git gud" but specifically what is that? 

This is where the cliches of two heads are better than one, and how you can achieve anything with friends ring true, even as it makes everyone cringe when they hear that.

I kept asking the smotpoker887 extraordinaire how can I improve over and over again, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to accomplish in streaming. After hearing my neurotic rant, Smot merely asked, "why not be the best friend you can possibly be" from streaming.

That is what I wanted to accomplish! This is not too hard because you easily get to know your viewers - by remembering the past stream chats and talking to them through any of the social media messaging - so that when they show up, you can ask how is their house coming along (only if they mentioned that publicly to respect privacy).

Because I don't have photographic memory and we miss a lot of chat while streaming, I've been using Chatty to review the chat logs - this helps remind me of what was said in stream so I can get to know my new viewers better. Thanks to Smot, he explained how I can upload these logs to Google drive since it was hard to read on the potato PC. I can then read these logs anywhere I have access to internet.

Because I was working on being more friendly and engaging, I didn't have as much gameplay (this will improve through practice). As soon as I notice, I say hi as soon as a viewer shows up, but I forgot how I was to focus on then going back to what I was talking about, which takes a lot of mental focus.

I wasn't conscious of using that strat last month. Writing this progress report is quite helpful to concretely remind myself to be less tangential - which is why I want to be more timely in these bimonthly progress reports.

The discussion with Smot occurred maybe 2 months ago, and I got lulled into complacency as we all do as I focused on being more engaging with viewers.

However, recently, I wanted to see how I can be more entertaining: being a friend, but being an entertaining friend, which I think will take streaming to the next level, especially as it's an entertainment media.

After having two sleepless nights, I then talked with my best friend Todd who helped me to be more specific in what I mean by being entertaining. I told him that I wanted to be socially engaging. However, he mentioned the eye-opening reality that hearing another person's conversation may not be entertaining. Saying hello to viewers one after the other is not the most riveting or compelling conversation after all and most likely, only interesting to the person you're addressing.

After clarifying what I wanted, he mentioned the radio broadcasting 101 basics. This was rather shocking considering when you search how to be an entertaining Twitch streamer, no one wrote about this, but this is the most basic thing to do as an entertainer! In other words, that is how behind Twitch is compared to other forms of entertainment. 

Todd mentioned that I can write down the stories I want to tell and rehearse before each stream. After he said that, my immediate thought was "wow, that's so basic!" even as I didn't think about rehearsing. Because we all hear about how much entertainers rehearse out loud, spending hours a day honing their skills.

I noticed that when I have ideas to say while streaming, I even rehearse it in my mind, but when the time comes, I'm too inhibited to actualize how I envisioned it, and it didn't come out as colorful as I wanted it to and falls flat. I also noticed that I wanted to expand on conversational threads, but I hold back for fear of burdening the listener (growing up in the New England area, children were treated as to be seen but not heard). I know exactly why I do these things, but knowing is the easy part, changing is the challenge.s

Therefore, I have to do "inner work", accepting myself and not caring about "acting the fool" on stream for fear of viewers thinking negatively of me. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) here can work, because what's the worse that can happen if I'm able to rehearse and then act the way I envision the story, uninhibited? The absolute worse is that the viewers think I'm stupid or a loser or bad at acting (which I already know that I am), but who cares? If someone actually writes that and means it (i.e. a true troll, my viewers tease me affectionately on stream) during stream, then ban.

I'm also working on self-compassion - accepting yourself unconditionally - so you don't judge yourself (leads to inhibition ) or others (pinched soul).

Writing down a full-fledged "script" and rehearsing it aloud, practicing may help me to be less uninhibited and perform the way I want it to. I can even force Todd to watch. It'll be an exciting adventure to see if these preparations will significantly improve the entertainment value of the stream!

Goals Achieved:

1. 15 minute breaks = longer streams = more practice
2. No more excessive shoutout commands = less stress, cleaner chat
3. Be a friend (first priority) and easier ways of reading chat logs
1. Be more diligent about reading chat logs
4. Realization of rehearsing scripts

Improvements to be made aside from the above:

1. Make sure I work on the bimonthly progress report as it solidifies what I'm supposed to be working on, and forces me to find out what other things I can improve.
2. More gaming action and fluency as per usual.

The How of Happiness Review

Missed Classic: Trinity - Is This The 50S? Or 1999?

Written by Joe Pranevich

Welcome back! Last time out, I explored the strange mushroom forest that I was dropped into after the end of the world. This "wabe", as I think it is called, is a strange place set in the shadow of a gigantic sundial and includes giant bees, an impossible flower garden, a cottage with game design notes, and a half-dozen mushrooms with little doors. But this isn't The Smurfs: each mushroom appears to have been created by a nuclear detonation. As I closed out last time, I finally worked out how to control the movement of the "sun" overhead to drop shadows on each of the doors. I opened the first door and was dropped back into reality, somewhere and somewhen.

This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I'll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.

Ray Palmer seems like such a nice guy.

When I walked through the mushroom door in my previous post, I arrived in a rickety room filled with equipment that I do not understand. The white door remains open and I can use it to return to the mesa in the wabe, but then it closes immediately after. No amount of resetting the sundial opens the door again so I assume there is no way back. Will I only get one shot at each doorway? Is there a way to know what order I have to take the doors? I hope Mr. Moriarty won't be too evil about this, but I am prepared for a lot of saving and reloading.

The equipment that I stand next to is radioactive and obviously a nuclear bomb, but I'm not positive which bomb it is. Climbing down the scaffolding, I find myself in a large room with aircraft hangar-style doors. They are too heavy to open, but there's a button nearby so it's not much of a puzzle. A second button activates an intercom speaker and a voice informs anyone listening that it is six minutes to detonation. I'd better hurry! I open the doors and head out onto a tropical island. Thanks to the manual's history lesson, I guess that this is the H-Bomb explosion in 1952. The documentation just says a "remote island in the South Pacific" and I was fairly certain that was Bikini Atoll, but a quick Wikipedia search informs me that the first test was actually on nearby Enewetak Atoll.

Focusing on the present, I notice that the tide is coming in. That voice in my ear sniggers that "Gnomon can tether tide or time." Whoever he is, he's less clever than he thinks he is. We start exploring from our vantage point on the south of the island. To the west is a second island with a single coconut tree. Thanks to a mob of attacking crabs, there is no way to get to that island or its lone tree. To the north is an "extension" of wood leading off the island, described as being like a six-foot in diameter drinking straw connecting the facility to someplace offshore. It's too high up to climb and I do not see a way to access it from the hangar shed. While exploring, a shark follows me around the island, but when I reach the eastern shore he reveals himself to actually be a friendly dolphin! That's cute, but… er… he's going to die pretty soon.

R.I.P Flipper. None under sea were smarter than he.

Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much to do here. After a time, I notice that the western island has sunk under the tide and only a single coconut remains floating in the water. There is no obvious way to fetch it but it screams "puzzle" and must be important for something. I eventually work out that the dolphin is actually incredibly intelligent and fetches the coconut for me when I ask. I break it open with my axe but find only coconut milk inside. What did I expect? A priceless gem? The "milk" leaks out quickly and I restore so as not to lose it. Could that be "good enough" for the potion at the cottage? The magpie said that we needed milk, honey, garlic, and a lizard. Surely, this vegan substitute for milk isn't "good enough" for a magic potion, is it? With nothing else to do and the timer ticking down, I leave my paradise to its fate and return through the white door.

I do some fast Googling to learn that the island was called Elugelab; the blast destroyed it utterly, leaving only a 15-story deep crater in the ocean bed where an island once had been. The wooden "straw" led to the nearby Teiter Island which survived the blast. There doesn't seem to be any real-world counterpart to the tiny island with the coconuts; as a tidal island it's not likely to have appeared on any maps and Moriarty may have just made it up.

When I return to the "wabe", I immediately try the coconut milk in the potion and it seems to work! I'm not sure how that counts, but I have three ingredients now. I need to find a lizard.

Princess Peach has seen better.

The Mushroom Kingdom

With my first trip out of the way and the knowledge of how to open the doors, I take stock of the rest of the portal toadstools:

• The first is in the meadow where I started. It doesn't open again now but presumably led to Kensington Gardens.
• The second is the toadstool at the waterfall.
• I cannot find the third. I suspect that it is near the boy blowing bubbles and possibly somewhere I need to fly to if I can work out how to gain altitude. Or perhaps the boy is sitting on it?
• The fourth is the one that I just explored on the mesa.
• The fifth is in the garden behind the magpie's cottage.
• The sixth door is on the moor far to the east of the map.
• I cannot find the seventh, but I expect that it is probably wherever the ferryman takes you.

My guess is that Mr. Moriarty is clever and has made each of the toadstools independent so that you can take them in any order. I therefore try the second one next and am immediately proven wrong: it leads out into Earth orbit with no spacesuit and nearly instant death. Nukes in space? There must be a way to survive there to do whatever I need to do, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the means yet.

The death scene at least offers some hints as we arrive, dead, at the ferryman's river. This time, we have a coin and use it to board the boat to the great beyond. Other than that, I don't glean any further hints how to cross without dying so I restore and try the next mushroom.

As a kid, I visited the Psygnosis offices in Cambridge. It was amazing. By coincidence, I later worked in the exact same office long after they had moved out.

Mother Russia

I take the fifth door next and arrive in what appears to be an elevated shack on the Siberian steppe. It's cold and gray and someone is speaking in Russian on the loudspeaker. Google fails me and has no idea what "dyevianatsat minut" means, but Infocom was likely using either a nonstandard (or simply outdated now) romanization. My guess is that they meant "devyatnadtsat' minut" (девятнадцать минут) or nineteen minutes. Plenty of time, right?

I climb down from the shack and immediately step on a rodent underfoot. In fact, the ground is mobbed by hundreds or thousands of creatures all racing to the northeast. They "look something like hamsters, with long brown fur and beady eyes". Should I follow them? Or see where they came from? I try heading "upstream" against the tide of creatures, but Russian guards kill me so that's not the way. I follow them instead to discover a cliff edge where the rodents are jumping off in apparent mass-suicide. Only then does the game tell me what you already figured out: they are lemmings! Of course, lemmings don't actually jump off of cliffs, right? That's just an urban legend spread by an old (faked) Disney documentary?

At the cliff, I discover a single trapped lemming in a fissure. I rescue it but it quickly bites my hand and disappears into the mass. If I release the magpie, I can grab it and then stick it in the cage. Is that a good trade? Do I need the magpie for anything? Remembering back last week, I did not get any points for it (only for the cage) so maybe not? Also, lemmings are not lizards even if they have the same starting letter, and even if the potion took coconut milk instead of cow's milk, that would be too much of a stretch. I find nothing else of interest on the tundra. I even jump off the cliff once but just drown in the frigid Arctic water. Once there is nothing left to do and the countdown is presumably getting close, I head back through the door.

Doing some real-world research, I learn that I wasn't on the Russian steppe after all: the Soviets did their nuclear testing at a site in Kazakhstan. I was close enough though since that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and Moriarty would likely not have seen it as a separate country. The test site was 100 miles west of Semipalatinsk (now called Semey) and the region sees many health problems thanks to all of the tests performed there. There doesn't seem to be any real-world analogue to the cliffs as the nearest bodies of water I can find to the test site are frozen lakes around 25 miles to the northeast according to Google Earth. Am I looking too deeply at this? Absolutely. I'm procrastinating writing the next section.

A spoonful of sugar helps the deep existential dread go down?

Hiroshima

The sixth door is my only remaining choice, located on the moor just north of the ferryman's river. Stepping through, we find ourselves in midair and falling fast. Unlike in the space section, we have a few turns to experiment before we land with a splat and I have an idea what to do: open the umbrella! Doing so slows our descent enough that we land safely in a children's sandbox. Writing this section is choking me up, so I'm going to pause by just giving you the room description:

Playground, in a sandpile

A set of children's swings move back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child's sandpile. In the pile, you see an umbrella, an axe, and a birdcage.

We know what's about to happen and it's devastating. I gather together my things and discover that I can really only move east towards the shelter without being caught. Inside is a disgusting and rough hewn bomb shelter, filthy and smelling of urine from the people that had to relieve themselves while waiting out the terror outside. It's an awful thought. There's a spade on the ground which I pick up, but otherwise there's nothing else to do.

I leave and discover that a girl is now playing in the sandpit. She spots me and nearly runs to her teacher, but then she spots my umbrella and her curiosity gets the best of her. I can tell that she wants it, so I hand it to her and she runs off into the shelter to play. Could she be the scarred woman in London? Do I even want to consider that?

There is still nowhere else that I can go safely, but seeing folded paper cranes in a nearby school window gives me a thought. I follow her into the shelter and hand the girl my unfolded origami crane from the beginning of the game, the one that gave me the message to go to the Long Water by 4 PM. She folds it back into its original crane shape and I gain three points. It glows with a strange energy. I return outside and the crane grows into a giant living paper bird. I climb on its back and it takes me up to just outside the white door, still suspended in midair, where I can leap off and through. Whew!

From a game perspective, that was an interesting segment and very much "on rails". If I had not brought the paper or umbrella with me, I could not have progressed, plus it was really only two rooms that I had to move back and forth between to advance story segments. More than any other section of the game except perhaps the first near-future in London, this paints a human face on the misery of the bomb. Honestly, this section wrecked me and I needed to take some time off from the game. I'm really not cut out for reviewing this type of emotional experience. This game hurts. I don't even care that I don't know if that was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I'm done and need to move on.

"You can either look at things in a brutal, truthful way that's depressing, or you can screw around and have fun." - David Spade

Calling a Spade, a Spade

With no more toadstool doors to explore-- I haven't found the third or seventh and the second one kills me immediately-- I resolve find places in the wabe where my new items might be useful. I still have up a spade, a lemming, and an open coconut. It takes some experimentation, but I'll skip my failures and move straight to the good part: I can open the crypt in the cemetery!

Using the spade, we pry off the lid to see the corpse of the "Wabewalker" (me?). This was well-hinted since I was told earlier that I needed more "leverage" to move the lid and a spade is certainly leverage. I had hoped the grave would be empty, but instead I look down at a "great missionary or explorer" in his final rest. I hope this game does not go all Infidel on me. The corpse is wearing a burial shroud, a bandage around his head, and two strangely colored boots: one red and one green. Like any good tomb raider, I strip the corpse and take all of his stuff. His mouth hangs open once the bandage is removed and I discover a silver coin inside. Fare for the ferryman? The boots each have a strange (but empty) recess at the tip of the toes. Do I have to hide something in them? With the corpse thoroughly desecrated, I'm nearly halfway through the game: 49 points!

While exploring, I also get the brilliant idea to float the Bubble Boy's bubble out through the "space" doorway. Amazingly, it fits! The bubble immediately freezes to create a protective shell and that somehow keeps us from dying in the cold vacuum of space. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the bubble and the white door drifts rapidly away from us. After a time, a satellite comes closer and then departs again without letting us do whatever we are supposed to do. There is briefly a Star Wars-style laser destruction of a missile, but nothing to do except wait it out and die. There are still things that I am missing before I can conquer outer space.

What happened to the other five stories?

Desert Island Decameron

I wear all of my burial clothes and the ferryman lets me on the boat! He takes the silver coin as payment (but not the London 20p one) and deposits me across the river. There is no entrance to Hades or two-headed dogs, but there is a small island with the expected toadstool on it. When I arrive with the seventh symbol set on the sundial, I emerge into another rickety shack next to a large metal ball covered with wires.

There are voices outside and if I leave prematurely, I am killed-- more on that in a minute. But if I explore the room first the voices eventually leave. I use that time to try to open the bomb via an access panel that I discover on the side, but no dice without a screwdriver. I even try using the London coin, but it doesn't fit. A book sits discarded on the floor, the Desert Island Decameron. Doing some Googling, I discover that it is an "unconventional anthology of humor"... a strange thing to find in a room with a giant bomb, but perhaps one of the guards needed a little light reading while he considered the hellscape that he was potentially helping to create. Inside is a bookmark with a poem on one side and a diagram scrawled on the other. I get four points for reading it so it must be important, but the only part we can "see" in text is the legend: "RD=DET, BL=POS, ST=INF, WH=GND". My guess is that we are looking at a wiring diagram and an explanation on how to defuse the bomb. In any event, it's useless without the panel being opened.

Once the voices are gone, I exit and climb down the ladder. At the bottom is a padlocked box… and our friend the roadrunner! He's finally back in his natural habitat and seems happy to see me. He even drops the ruby at my feet! I pick it up to gain a few more points and from this moment the roadrunner follows me around. I cannot open the padlocked panel, even when I try to smash it with the axe or spade. Letting the lemming go doesn't help either and I do not see any lizards here.

I'm going to pass on delving too deeply into my explorations of the New Mexico desert for now, except to say that we only get a few turns before we die and even with successive restores I do not find much of interest. I suspect that I am here before I am ready; maybe I find a way to slow down time? Maybe by defusing the bomb at the beginning, the test is delayed by a few minutes and I can explore further before dying?

Perhaps more importantly, this is the message that I get when I inevitably die:

All at once, the desert around you disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar hear that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.

The real Trinity test, which I am certain is where this gate has taken us, did not nuke the state of New Mexico. It was relatively modest as far as later bombs were concerned and so something must have happened to change history. Have I finally stumbled on the plot of the game? Did someone or something interfere with the Trinity test to make it even deadlier than before? It's a great twist if that's what happened and I am eager to see how the game continues.

For now however, I am stuck and have a few open problems to solve:

• I have yet to find the third toadstool. I thought it was by the Bubble Boy, but since we use the bubble to go to space I was probably mistaken. I will have to search for it since there's something I missed someplace.
• I do not know what to do with the wight, either to help it or kill it. Could the crypt's skeleton key by the solution to the lock in New Mexico?
• I do not know what to do in space.
• I do not know what to do with the magnetic meteorite.
• I do not know where to find a lizard. It seems most likely to be in New Mexico, but I doubt it given that even if we find a way to reopen the doors, I don't seem to have a path back across the river to the main part of the wabe.

I did manage to get 70 points, but I've reloaded now to before crossing the ferry so I will have to get some of those again.

Time played: 2 hr 15 min
Total time: 7 hr 25 min

Inventory: bag of crumbs, small coin (20p), silver coin, red boot, blue boot, bandage, burial shroud, credit card, wristwatch, birdcage with lemming, broken coconut, and silver axe. (Not all being carried at once.)
Score: 70 of 100

Buds, Blooms, And Thorns Review Of Heroes & Tricks By Pencil First Games

Buds, Blooms, and Thorns Review of Heroes & Tricks by Pencil First Games
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Vitals:
Title: Heroes & Tricks
Designed by: Eduardo Baraf, Jonathan Gilmour
Publisher: Pencil First Games
Year Published: 2017
MSRP: $20
2-6p | 15-25 min | 8+

Introduction:

No matter race, creed, gender, or empire – each child of Gamedor is born with an affinity to one of The Four Suits: Card, Meeple, Die, or Token. In Love and War these suits are absolutely meaningless, but in Game, well, they mean everything. A true leader uses their cards, and any means necessary, to gain the favor of other heroes of the land. Can you best the other Lords of Gamedor and build the biggest party of Heroes?

Gameplay:  The goal of Heroes and Tricks is to be the player to win the most tricks (thereby having the most Heroes) in the game. Each Trick is lead by a Hero card that defines the target suit and color, dramatically changing the play dynamic of typical trick-taking games. Players then play into the trick, but only see the last played card and need to use deduction, item play, and hand management to win the most tricks.

—description from the publisher

Blooms:
Blooms are the game's highlights and features.  Elements that are exceptional.

• The artwork and component quality is great.  Characters and items are fun and comical, the cards and dividers are great quality, and the magnetic box is outstanding.
• The ability to have the game playable without a table is very interesting.
• Trick taking with some additional cards to give powers and abilities is a fun twist.

Buds:
Buds are interesting parts of the game I would like to explore more. 

• I'm curious to know if repeated plays adds a better sense of strategic choice.  
• There is a variant to play more like a traditional trick-taking game, without the box.  This may feel like you have more control of your game.
• The rock-paper-scissors style hierarchy of suits is an interesting way of figuring out the trick winner if nothing matches the hero exactly.

Thorns:
Thorns are a game's shortcomings and any issues I feel are noteworthy.

• Felt like it was mostly luck.  
• Very limited information about what other players had made choices feel very limited and just a shot in the dark.
• The general mechanics seemed straightforward at first, but felt a bit kludgy in practice.
• Though you can play without a table, it's very helpful to have a place to lay down cards as you win tricks.  It's tough to juggle your hand, your won tricks, and the box as it's passed around.
• There are four suits, four colors, and various ranks of cards within each suit and color.  Each color has two suits, each of which it shares with another color.  That's just too much going on and it results in chaos.

Final Thoughts:

Admittedly I didn't play this game much, but what I did play felt like it was mostly luck since there was so little known information about what anyone had and what was played.  You can only see the card that was played before your own turn.  Unfortunately I couldn't ever find anyone interested in exploring the game further.

I do like the idea of games that you can play without needing a table, and you can play this without a table, but that's very cumbersome.  You need a place to put the cards you win.  It also gets tiring to have to pass the box around, open it to see the last card played, pick something from your hand, then place it in the box.  Then resolving tricks requires that everything be emptied, the winner figured out based on suit, color, rank, and if any of that happens to match the hero that started the trick or if any gear cards changed anything up along the way.  It all ends up being very chaotic and fiddly.

There are interesting ideas in Heroes & Tricks, but they don't feel well thought out and aren't implemented very well.  So much has been done and added that the game just feels like a random, chaotic mess.  All you're doing is guessing the whole time.  I think instead of expanding to essentially 8 suits (if you consider each suit/color combination separately), since you can only see the card played previously, reducing the number of suits would have been a better idea.  Then you'd be able to make some deductions based on cards you have in your own hand.

This may be more interesting as a standard trick-taking game, where you can see everything played, but only the first player gets to see the Hero that they are attempting to win.  I could see this played where the first player gets to see the hero.  Then all players play one card, visible to everyone, possibly with a Gear card played secretly behind their played card.  I think that would be a lot more interesting, add some clever player interactions and deduction, and feel much less chaotic.  You'd have to eliminate the box novelty though.

As it is, I can't recommend Heroes & Tricks, which is a shame since it looks great and has some great ideas.  If you are looking for something to play while in line at a convention, or at a restaurant with limited table space, I think there are better games to play.  But if you like the theme, and don't mind a game that's more an activity and exercise in randomness, then you may get some enjoyment out of it.  Be warned though, whether you win or lose will have more to do with chance than any choices you make.

Buds, Blooms, and Thorns Rating:

Thorn!  I can't quite recommend this game,
although you may enjoy it if you like games
like this.  I feel this game has some flaws and
there are areas that it could improve in the
experience it provides.

Pictures:

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GJJ Games Reviews are independent, unpaid reviews of games I, George Jaros, have played with my family and friends.  Some of these games I own, some are owned by friends, some are borrowed, and some were provided by a publisher or designer for my honest feedback and evaluation.  I make every attempt to be both honest and constructively critical in my reviews, and they are all my opinions.  There are four types of reviews on GJJ Games: Full Reviews feature critical reviews based on a rubric and games receive a rating from 0 to 100.  Quick Reviews and Kickstarter Previews are either shorter reviews of published games or detailed preview reviews of crowdfunding games that will receive a rating from 0 to 10 based on my impressions of the game.  Buds, Blooms,and Thorns reviews are shorter reviews of either published or upcoming games that highlight three aspects of a game: Buds are parts of a game I look forward to exploring more, Blooms are outstanding features of a game, and Thorns are shortcomings of a game.  Each BBT review game will receive an overall rating of Thorn, Bud, or Bloom.

Peter Dimitrov Lands Job At MilkyTea Studios!

Great to see our talented graduate @PeteDimitrovArt using his skills on new projects in the
@milkyteastudios.

Peter is a 3D environment artist and games designer and he's just joined the team at MilkyTea in the Baltic Triangle, Liverpool. The company are famous for 'Hyper Brawl Tournament, Coffin Dodgers and Roller Rally.

Huge Congratulations to Peter who has a real passion for art and games design. He created a great portfolio of work and it paid off.

https://www.artstation.com/peterdimitrov

OSR Like A Fucking Boss

I decided to go ahead and fucking do it!  ;)

This is the link.

Hope you enjoy this quick and dirty foray into the OSR, from my perspective, that is.

Definitely spread the news around social media.  Thanks!

VS