August 2024 Newsletter

23 games and expansions? Holy smokes!

I guess once I release that last thing there will be no more updates for the rest of the year. Just kidding! It's been fun this year and I'm proud that I've been able to keep it going. There's always a new mechanic or silly story I want to tell and I'm glad that I'm able to do it through the medium of games. I'm grateful for everyone who has joined, played, downloaded, shared, and all the other things that keep this withered old husk of a human being from disintegrating into a fine mist.

1000+ puzzles for Star Walk!

 I wanted to share briefly on the process of creating the 1000+ puzzles for Star Walk.

One of the things that I told myself was that every puzzle didn't have to have a perfect 10 score outcome. It's like how a game of a solitaire doesn't always have a solution. Some may say this is lazy. I would say you are correct. ¯\(ツ)/¯

The first thing was to create a Python script that would create a board of numbers based on the game's criteria. This was a mix of 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. at different quantities. Shuffle that list and create a two-dimensional array. Then utilize a library that would interpret those numbers as different .pngs I had for the 1s, 2s, 3s, etc and assemble them into a single image.

Generate 1040 of these.

After that, create a Macro in Affinity Photo that would resize that image and edit it so the border of the game board would be placed in the proper position. This was a mix of resizing the image, pasting, nudging, and making sure the transparency was in place. It was also important that I could fit 16 of these onto a Letter sheet of paper.

Now run this Macro against the 1040 images.

The next thing was to create another script that would assemble 16 of these images at a time into a single image and save it.

Whew!

Upcoming Dice Game!

I saw a picture of Boggle the other day and thought to myself, "hey, I should do a dice game where you roll a bunch of dice in a box and it creates a map to navigate through." That's where the initial spark for this upcoming dice game came from!

It's a 16d6 dice game where you'll have to collect as many Coins (i.e. fame) as possible before dying an inconvenient death.

Instead of hand crafting the 16d6 for testing, I decided to invest the time into coding it so I could play test quickly and get a feel for how awful/okay the game would be.

I'm making good progress and do plan on releasing the digital version with cleaned up art along side the physical on this month. This one is a bit of a bigger undertaking as some other of my games (e.g. Race Day, Spooky Forest), so it may be a lighter month for releases.

THWAK! Infinite Forest Steam Page

I know most of you follow my work for physical games so you can get away from the computer, but I would be disingenuous if I didn't also tap into that inner need for creating digital entertainment.

My "forever" game THWAK! Infinite Forest now has a published Steam page! It won't be out for quite a while, but it's up for wishlisting if that's you're sort of thing.

You can do so here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1551270/Thwak_Infinite_Forest/?beta=1

Signing Off!

I guess that's it for the August wrap up. See you in September and I hope to see/hear a lot of dice rolling soon.