The Brick Mill Games Blog
Yeah, it’s been a little quiet outside the mill. Inside, it’s been anything but. That’s on me. As I’ve stated numerous times before, once I get into a zone, or multiple zones simultaneously, I hunker down and posts like these get infrequent. So, the standard excuse list still applies. Day job pressures and side project…
Continue ReadingThere isn’t much that I can add with regard to 2020 that hasn’t been said to death already across social media and the various airwaves. It’s been challenging to say the least, to use a non-profane word. Its impact on Brick Mill Games was not fatal, but there were quite a few challenges that both…
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 ReadingAfter a few weeks of effort, PixMill 1.0 is now a thing. Why is this important? Well, thanks to the folks in Cupertino, CA and their Catalina OS upgrade, the house of cards that was my collection of Ruby-language code tools came crumbling down. When I refer to my code in such a manner, I’m…
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 ReadingIt’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here. On the other hand, I did warn you up front that radio silence is a thing with me when it comes to working on projects and how I deal with the workload. Silence on its own means nothing without context and Paul and I have…
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…
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