The Brick Mill Games Blog
It is appropriate that this blog be about D-Day (6 June 1944). I’ve been working on the metadata that defines the Utah Beach game module. Where we had left off from before, the module metadata had been framed out but not completed. We still had some map metadata issues to work out, and most of…
Continue ReadingWe reached a point where the Belgian map has been completely framed out, which means that all the hexes are drawn and it is usable for play testing game modules. It still needs additional work to make it production ready, such as the village, town and city names, the names of rivers and hill numbers….
Continue ReadingWe had always planned to extend the TOCS game system to other time periods beyond WWII, such as the Civil War, Napoleonic Era, Franco-Prussian War, Boer War, and WWI. While the TOCS WWII rules cover the time frame from 1935 to 1955, our first attempt to expand this was to port the TOCS WWII rules…
Continue ReadingThis last Sprint (34) we pivoted slightly to bring the third TOCS Game Module “Utah Beach” up to the level of the other two modules (Advance to the Moselle and Operation Market Garden Nijmegen). By focusing all Stories and Tasks on UB, we made significant progress defining the Utah Beach OOB and the GameBox.xml scenario…
Continue ReadingAnother piece in the TOCS-MASL infrastructure is the ability to map battles that occur on the TOCS map into MASL scenarios, and then to map the scenario combat results back into the TOCS game system. Part of this infrastructure was to create the metadata descriptions of the available scenario boards, so that the Board Generation…
Continue ReadingOriginally the TOCS system had been called MASL (Macro-ASL) but we decided to split the system into TOCS (Tactical Operations Command System) and a separate extension to resolve combat as ASL scenarios (called MASL). Part of this was to appeal to a wider audience, and to extend the TOCS concepts to other time periods. This…
Continue ReadingAgain, it seems too long between posts, but I have some news to report, and mightily bored you might be reading about it… but here goes. As mentioned before, we had finished implementing the GameBox metadata that describes the AttM (Advance to the Moselle) and OMGN (Operation Market Garden – Nijmegen) game modules, by defining…
Continue ReadingWe just wrapped up the Agile SCRUM PR (Pull Requests) for the changes made from the last play test of the BtM (Breaching the Moselle) scenario in the AttM (Advance to the Moselle) game module. There is no better way to see if the game system and its rules stand up than to play test…
Continue ReadingNow that we have completed the metadata for the AttM (Advance to the Moselle) TOCS module, we are moving on with the OMG-N module. Based on the work that was done on AttM, this effort ports those concepts into the next game module. Making a game “data driven” is an interesting concept as it allows…
Continue ReadingNow that we are in Sprint-7, I started defining how the TOCS maps will be represented as metadata. The term ‘metadata’ means data that describes data. When a player looks at the hexes on a map, each hex has a lot of ‘data’ that describes it, such as the topography and terrain, as well as…
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