The Brick Mill Games Blog
On Tuesday, February 19th, Paul and I finished Sprint #4: Gaming Infrastructure – Phase 1. While there were two development stories that we didn’t finish in our three-week time frame, it was still a very successful sprint. Our completed stories were: Implement an Asynchronous Server I/O Comms Queue Implement User Authentication Game Module XML Metadata Definitions Game Module…
Continue ReadingThis is a simple update to show how much progress we’ve been making on TClient. I was going to post a video on YouTube, but the video quality was awful. If I’m going to post videos, I’m going to have to up my game, tools-wise. Screenshots: Update: And… yeah… I see that the Scenario Chooser…
Continue ReadingAfter learning quite a bit about Swift, nibs, xibs, nib-less coding, AppKit, Foundation, NSObjects of various capabilities, and a metric crap-ton of new stuff, TClient 0.1 is up and running. Whew… While there are still quite a few more things to learn, at least I’ve run down enough leads on various websites that my productivity…
Continue ReadingIt’s been a crazy month since my last post. The transition from relying on a well-known language like Ruby to a brand new one in Swift was not without its moments. Couple that with getting back into GUI programming, trying my hand at using XCode, and learning some new day job technologies (SIMD assembly coding…
Continue ReadingRuby/Epoxy is dead. Or, at least, shelved. As projects go, it’s not a bad one. It would give a cross-platform GUI capability to Ruby scripts and would be a nice goal in and of itself. But, that is not our goal. Our goal is to produce a cross-platform application that players can use to play…
Continue ReadingI suppose you are wondering what the differences are between the new TOCS (Tactical Operations Combat System) and the MASL (Macro ASL) system, so I thought I’d spend some time trying to explain a little more about these new systems and what the gaming experience will be like. MASL was initially conceived and developed to…
Continue ReadingWhy play a game that isn’t fun… better yet… why even bother developing it? My approach to game development follows that same approach that I’ve used to map out many professional projects. In the age of agile software development, it requires flexibility to make changes as you go and to be able to refactor or…
Continue ReadingOne of the motivating factors behind the TOCS design and development was a litany of pet peeves that I had with other games that resulted in tactics that were either illogical or close to suicidal. In my opinion, when gaming the system becomes necessary to win, it cheapens the entire experience. Designing a game that…
Continue ReadingInitially the game system was called MASL, but after play testing the new CRT combat system we decided that the game was so much fun by itself that fighting the battles out as scenarios wasn’t mandatory. The decision to split the game rules into TOCS with a MASL rules addendum for WWII modules was the…
Continue ReadingI have been an avid war gamer since I was in the 8th grade and played many tactical, operational and strategic games of all sizes. I’d like to say that had the TOCS (Tactical Operations Command System) and MASL (Macro-ASL) system came during a flash of brilliance, it would be less than truthful. The design…
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