The Brick Mill Games Blog
Once again, Paul and I had to extend one 3-week sprint into the next one due to outside influences. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you’re trying to balance day job needs with trying to get a new company off the ground. Truth be told, we were both trying to burn the candle at both…
Continue ReadingDevelopment Sprints 8-10: Prototypes and Metadata II, finished today. Good riddance. This was a difficult series of sprints in that “outside influences”, aka: our day jobs, required our full attention over those nine weeks. Additionally for me, my previous blitz through GUI container object creation left quite a few bugs behind. My initial attempt at…
Continue ReadingIt’s been a month and a half since my last post. I’d like to say that it is because progress has been excellent and fast-paced, but I’d be lying. Truth be told, one of the challenges of building something with only a two-person team, where both people have day jobs with responsibilities, is that outside…
Continue ReadingDevelopment Sprint #7, codenamed Prototypes and Metadata, finished today. Where the last sprint report talked about partially finished stories, Paul and I were very productive over the last three weeks and completed quite a few stories: Use or Create UI Layout Objects Implement a Layered Window Interface Prototype: Login Window Map Metadata Specification Expand Russian…
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…
Continue ReadingPaul and I attended Nor’easter XXIII two weekends ago in Fairhaven, MA to finish our long-running playtest of Scenario One of our Advance to the Moselle TOCS module. The module covers the US 80th Infantry Division’s attempt to bridge the Moselle River in the area of the city of Nancy, France in September 1944. The…
Continue ReadingKen and I finished a play testing of Scenario 1 of the Advance to the Moselle TOCS Module at the Nor’Easter tournament in Fairhaven MA, during March 21-24. The playtest utilized the VASSAL prototype developed earlier that allowed us to achieve and prove out the double-blind combat system known as TOCS/MASL. This highly interactive game…
Continue ReadingSprint #6: Infrastructure Continues Framing TClient was completed today. Although upwards of 15 or so tasks were completed, no full stories were completed. The primary push continues to be in the realm of software development, namely in the development of UI containers and controls that work in a manner that we want. Here is the…
Continue ReadingSprint #5: Infrastructure Work Continues was completed today, but progress was marred by influenza at Paul’s house. After a lengthy recovery, he’s feeling much better and back on track. Completed stories were: Create Utah Beach module XML meta-data file Create OOB for Ten Days in August Create OOB for ASoC: Western Front Clean up obsolete…
Continue ReadingI have been disappointed with operational-level WWI games for the entirety of my involvement in the wargaming hobby. Contrary to majority opinion, I find that WWI military history is rife with dynamic situations, or, should I say, the possibility of dynamic situations. There are numerous occasions of “what-if” where one side had the possibility of…
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