The Brick Mill Games Blog
“When we last left our intrepid hero, he was elbow deep in PC innards and busily updating his Canvas tools…” Not long after I wrote my last blog post, Virus 4 hit me with a vigor only seen in criminal assault cases. While I was in Seattle at Game ON!, Claire had warned me that…
Continue ReadingAs is my MO, I tend to post things in bursts. The reasons behind this initial blast of radio silence were myriad: Game ON!, a new Mac and other assorted minutiae. For four glorious days, I attended the Game ON! convention in Issaquah, WA. This small convention held outside of Seattle is a comfortable and…
Continue ReadingFor the most part, the storefront site at brickmillgames.com is up and running. There is a lot more to be done, but the meat of our product plans and roadmap is there to behold. In addition to game information, pricing (when we actually ship stuff), photos, blurbs, etc., each game in the catalog will have…
Continue ReadingSome algorithms are more difficult than others. The brute force (obvious) method might work, but it also might take more time than you’re willing to spend, both in development and in the actual running of it. I finally figured out the fast method and the data was indeed well worth the effort. As an alternate…
Continue ReadingThe design and development of Steel & Steam is extremely data-centric. All the stops and spaces have names and latitude and longitude coordinates. All the payoff amounts are based on shortest-path algorithms that take into account the cumulation of track mileage between the lat/long coordinate positions. All the property values are based on their ability…
Continue ReadingMETraps is a Ruby module which contains MarkingEngine traps that I use constantly in my vehicle graphics factory. If you recall, a MarkingEngine trap is a way to dynamically assemble a stream of MarkingEngine instructions dynamically. The first trap is called rdraw, or Radial Draw. This trap is used to create a path that can be…
Continue ReadingInitial work on my library of vehicle and ordnance graphics relied on a mix of SVG and embedded Ruby scripts to dynamically affect the static SVG data. As Ruby supports this type of structure through its erb class, my collection of vehicle graphics consisted of .rsvg files. Over time, I discovered that working with this…
Continue ReadingAnyone who follows me on Facebook knows about my wargame graphics work. Knowing the amount of work I was going to commit to, I decided to forego hiring an artist or relying on someone else’s vehicle and ordnance graphics portfolio. I decided to go ahead and do it myself. I’m glad I did. I’m nowhere…
Continue ReadingFor those few of you who may be tracking this site, the initial flurry of blogging activity has not waned due to disinterest. I’m simply in Japan at the moment, doing day-job things. As I’m not in a position to do any game development while I’m here, I am going to repost some technical posts…
Continue ReadingPaul Chicoine, my long-time friend and gaming and design partner, has accepted my offer to join Brick Mill Games. With Paul’s admission to the fold, Brick Mill Games will add his TOCS (Tactical and Operations Command System) wargame system to the game development pipeline. TOCS is the system that Paul and I have been working…
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