The Brick Mill Games Blog
Ruby/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 ReadingAs I’ve stated in earlier blog posts, there are times when I go into “radio silence” for a variety of reasons. Whatever the underlying reason(s), the silence aspect of it usually boils down to two explanations: I have nothing coherent to discuss, or posting something somewhere (besides flippant Facebook posts) is “yet another thing to…
Continue ReadingBased on user feedback received while I was in Europe, I got off my duff and worked on two tasks that I had left as “do later” tasks after the migration from the kenware.com domain. Well, later finally arrived. The first piece was to cull old log files and old dice requests from the DSLogs…
Continue ReadingMy apologies for the Brick Mill Dice Service users who had sent me e-mail last week regarding the dice services. I was away in Europe on a self-run driving tour of the Austro-Hungarian / Italian Front of WWI in northeastern Italy and northwestern Slovenia. In addition to seeing the terrain, museums and memorials, I was…
Continue ReadingAs part of Brick Mill Games’ efforts to write an intelligent game playing application to handle our double-blind game system, I’ve been developing a Ruby gem to allow Ruby scripts to run a GUI on any of three platforms: macOS/Cocoa, Linux/Gtk3, Win10. The name of this gem, or code library, is Epoxy. As of today,…
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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