Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: RobertCrandall RE: It's a disgrace 7/1/2004 2:24:26 AM

1. I met with 6 plus gamers that identified themselves as World in Flames players and had an in depth talk with each of them. I was looking for the things that engaged them most about the game and what tended to turn them off. I was amazed at how little consensus there was on the former. Three people said that they really liked controlling economic production and there was no real commonality beyond that! I take it as the sign of a superior game that so many different needs were satisfied out of one box.

Three people also wanted Days of Decision thrown in but did not agree on which version they liked best.

In terms of dislikes it was mainly about the sheer physical size of the boardgame and the inability to protect it from pets and family while not in use.

My queries re doing the impulse system by email and AI levels and expectations met with all kinds of different answers and no one theme emerged. Darn, so much for easy short cuts.

2. It is way premature to talk about screen shots yet. Flashpoint Germany is in the pipeline ahead of it but we should finally get it out the door in July and then our art guy can get busy.
Cheers, Rob.

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ORIGINAL: rtamesis

If they can post screenshots of World At War on its website, surely Matrix games can post a few screenshots of World In Flames.

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ORIGINAL: rtamesis

I found this site that talked about computerized World In Flames before it was acquired by Matrix Games. It has a few screenshots as well.

http://www.strategy-gaming.com/previews/world_in_flames/index.shtml

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ORIGINAL: wfzimmerman

I know this may brand me as an eccentric, but I'm personally very happy that you're going to build off Chris M.'s original code base. It was such a labor of love, he deserves to be immortalized.

Personally, I like the way CWIF starts off with the map. I don't feel the need for a bunch of introductory screens. But ok with me if that works better for most people.

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ORIGINAL: wfzimmerman

Bob, first of all, thanks for all your informative posts. Keep day-dreaming!

The 2D art sounds great. Does Robert Armstrong have any other stuff (different projects) that we can look at to get an idea of his style.

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ORIGINAL: RobertCrandall

Check out Rob Armstrong's work at http://www.bullseyegraphics.com.au/home.html

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ORIGINAL: RobertCrandall

It is late on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend and I'm bored stiff with my day job. Naturally my thoughts have turned to MWIF (WIF = the board game, CWIF = Computer WIF by ChrisM, and MWIF = Matrix Ed WIF by yours truly) and I'm leaning back in my chain and visualizing possible sequences of screens as the game begins and ends.

Right now CWIF jumps straight to the main map and you get it going by pulling down the appropriate menu items to start a new game, resume, etc. Matrix with it's other games leads the player more explicitly through various setup screens before arriving at the main map and that is something I would like to do here too. Broadly speaking, MWIF should do the same. Setting up the game state just so can be surprisingly difficult if there are a multitude a different ways of getting there and something that you would expect to be simple can end up being non-trivial in short order. It is fun to figure it out though.... If you have any thoughts yourself on what would be the best logical progression of screens by all means speak up. I could miss something obvious and it is surprisingly hard to change it once it has been done. 'Measure twice, cut once' I always say.

When Matrix took over development of CWIF I noticed that the current beta disappeared pretty quickly from the web. However someone just uploaded it to the Yahoo WIF discussion group so you can join that and download it if you like. Chris did a brilliant job producing it, but we was not a graphic guy by any stretch of the imagination. To be fair, he never said he was and the art that is there was always supposed to be placeholder art until he was close to done. (I just went through the same deal myself with FPG.) Now that we are looking at his game and thinking about what we want to do in terms of art, we find that we want to change rather a lot of the look. An awful lot. Some of it is dead easy - some of it is freeking impossible given the way the code is written. This will definitely be a lot of fun for someone.

We kicked around design ideas in a series of conferences in March and I worked up a prototype of what it all might look like at that time. I am happy to say that it met with resounding approval thanks to the 2D art supplied by one Robert Armstrong. It will be a few months yet before I can show it though - I can't commit to it until I can reprogram the game to accept it and sadly that falls at the harder end of the spectrum. I'm not trying to frustrate you, I'm just trying to be reasonable in what expectations I set! This is an absolutely mammoth project and nothing will be quick or easy about it. The results should be worth it though.

Back to day dreaming, Rob.