Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Volity Treehouse (and other games)

  • FromAndrew Plotkin <erkyrath@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateFri, 10 Feb 2006 11:40:59 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Joshua Kronengold wrote:

Looks pretty good.  Is it in fact intended that Dig can't be used on a
single standing piece?

Yes, as far as I can tell. The icons on Andy's rule sheet make that pretty clear.

(I didn't copy those icons into the game UI. I probably should.)

Speaking of copying stuff, right now we just have a "Designed by Andy Looney" notation on the games -- and hyperlinks back to the game pages on Wunderland.com. Looney folks, let us know if you want additional copyright verbiage.

At this point I'm confident that most Icehouse-style games can be
implemented in Volity in one to two weeks. A game like Aquarius takes
no longer to code, but then you have to draw all the cards. Fluxx and
Zarcana are a pain for both coding *and* art -- no surprise there.

Is it suitable for a more stateful game setup (like a CCG, where you
want players to be able to keep something (decks) between
games)?

Interesting question. The referee code can do anything it wants, including store player data in a local database. We're not currently distributing any code that does that, but you'd just have to load up some Perl or Python modules that handle it.

When I say "referee code", I'm talking about the game-server code which a game developer writes and operates. That's distinct from us, the operators of the Volity network. So there is no need for a new protocol to store player data -- a particular game can do whatever it wants.

(Right now, of course, the people writing games are the same people who are designing the network. We want that to change.)

--Z

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