BYOND Tabletop Simulator - Sneak Peek

This is a new side project I've been working on. Have a few of the basic features done. Thinking about where to take it next. Love to hear back from you if you have some ideas or suggestions.

Dig or Die (BETA v2.0) - END GAME SPOILER ALERT

2015 - A year in review

    2015 Summary

I was all over the place last year. I worked on dungeon crawlers, card & board game frameworks, chm/help frameworks, proficiency tools, training software, image capture software, and test frameworks. I managed to finish a few but I think I spread myself too thin so we'll work on that.

    Solitaire Prototype

Created a quick demo as my first attempt at developing a card framework. A lot of lessons learned about layering, animations, and pixel based movements.

Dungeon Dominus

I made a little progress on Dungeon Dominus last year but struggled with a lot of image layering issues and early adopter WebClient issues. 510 and all its fabulous glory will see me looping back around to push this one forward some more.

Deadly Danger Dungeon

I discovered this game on another gaming site. I was ready to dismiss it as total crap but then something occurred to me. I realized this stupid game had more plays and overall success than anything I've ever produced. It was a mind blowing moment for sure. For whatever reason, I wanted to prove how easy it would be to convert a paper made game into a BYOND multiplayer experience so I did it.

You can play Deadly Danger Dungeon in your browser by going here: http://www.byond.com/play/23.99.84.35:8802

Dungeon Generator

Another quick and silly detour. This is like my 20th dungeon generator. This one was different because it used room/hallway tiles instead of building rooms up of many tiles. I wanted to get the generator done and then play around with larger tile sets which I haven't done yet.

    Tabletop Simulator Framework

This is my most recent and active project. I've working on this one with help from D4RK3 54B3R. We started late in 2015 and it was moving along with some velocity.

Here's an example showing that you can clone boards and pieces at run-time while also transforming them as different sets. This shot is a game room where you could zoom in on any board and move the pieces and rotate the boards. Pretty neat although somewhat impractical.

Here's an example of a poker game using the same framework but just different images for the pieces and table. Just like the checkers game, you can zoom, rotate and clone anything in the room.

One more example using the same framework to show it can support a CTG game like Citadels. The framework knows nothing of the game rules. It just provides the basic physics to move the items around on the table. Anyone could upload the images for their own card game and play with friends online.

 

Sliding Dungeon Puzzle

As far as I know, this is actually a fairly unique concept for a casual game. The player has to arrange the tiles so the hero can reach the exit. Reaching the exit could be easy but first they have to arrange it in such a way to pick up loot along the way to defeat monsters, get keys to unlock doors later, avoid traps, and then escape. Levels get bigger and tougher as you progress. I think it would make for a very nice little casual game. 

Frontline Assault

Not a lot went into this one in 2015 but I did spend some time resolving a bunch of WebClient issues. I had some pipe dreams about a persistent land grabbing RTS but my interests never carried me down that road after finishing the basics. I'm going to make the game downloadable so I don't have to host it

BYONDHelp

I developed BYONDHelp as an improvement prototype for BYOND help (F1). I wanted to learn a little more about chm's and I was curious about whether we could enhance the help experience with actual example project links and color highlighting. I developed a tool set that can auto-generate all the content for the .chm and for the web. Pretty neat and I may end up finding an excuse to use what I learned at work. No plans to do anything with it but maybe it will inspire BYOND folks to update our help resources.

    Outside of BYOND:

I released my first album! 

It's available on Spotify, iTunes, and etc. 

It's a self-debut called TripSwitchinFreaks and while I technically released it this year, I put it together a while back. Nothing big, just mixing up some loops but I do get to say I've released an album so I get to check that one off the list.

        

        Poplava.com

Published a new interface along with a couple free tools. The update was a nice little adventure into the most overused theme known to man.

http://www.poplava.com

        QuickCAP

An image capture utility I wrote with AutoIt that is pretty slick and minimal. It offers a couple features I haven't seen in other image capture utils. Personally, this is one of my most used tools next to WinClickPro. In fact, I only use WinClickPro at work while QuickCAP is used more heavily at home and in the office. Love it.

http://poplava.com/quickcap/QuickCAP.htm

    QuickTrain

While thinking of how I would create a BYOND training center, I wanted the ability to create interactive tutorials to include as part of the training course. This tool which is written in AutoIt does that and it produces navigable training material that can be used in any browser. The screenshot shows a part of the capture process. 

Motivation has been a challenge for QuickTrain. The project has had some minor technical challenges (mainly my lack of AutoIT GUI knowledge) but the bigger challenge has been with justifying the effort as it relates to BYOND which gives no love to such things.

Here's an early working example made with QuickTrain that is functional but has no polish at all..

http://poplava.com/quicktrainexample/scenario.html

Other Significant Growth Areas in 2015

• Selenium Test Framework & Infrastructure
• MS SQL
• EntityFramework 6 Data Modeling and Code First development
• SonarQube
• StyleCop

2016 Investments

I'll be focusing on fewer things this year so you'll likely see a greater emphasis on something from below but you never know. I'll be doing some reflection in the coming weeks and making some hard decisions. 

Projects

• TableTopSimulator
• Outpost
• Dungeon Dominus
• Frontline Assault 
• Training Center
• Project Manager
• Resource Center (variations)
• Help Center
• Demo Center
• Poplava Studio
• Atlassian
• Bitbucket and more collaborative/open  projects
• SourceTree
• HipChat
• API - Look for some Atlassian integration learning opportunities with BYOND and C# apps.

Personal Goals

• Remove anti-patterns
• Exercise
• Strive for simplicity
• Fewer projects
• Move with purpose

Took me a while to solve this one. When running automated test cases in Selenium, FireFox runs super slow.

If FireFox (38) is running slow, it could be because of hardware acceleration. Turing it off in the profiles helps for the current user but the Selenium remote driver starts FireFox using a special profile that isn't listed in the FireFox profile editor. In order to turn off hardware acceleration every time the browser launches, you need to do something like this;

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.Firefox();
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.SetPreference("layers.acceleration.disabled", true);
capabilities.SetCapability(FirefoxDriver.ProfileCapabilityName, profile.ToBase64String());
IWebDriver webDriver = new RemoteWebDriver(new Uri("http://localhost:4445/wd/hub"), capabilities);

Hope this helps.

Assuming latest versions of everything and running on Window.

Game Design: HexGame

I've been tinkering around with a risk-like online multi-player game using the BYOND gaming platform. In its present state, the game is far from original but it's just the core engine. From here, I can take the game in any direction by adding massive maps, randomly generated maps (vs a rectangle), support a lot of players, add resources, all new game types, and etc. In this v0.1 release, I'm going to test out the AI and multi-player functionality.

 v0.1 - Feature Set:
- Anyone can download and host a game
- Supports 1-4 Players with or without AI.
- Players can late join and take over an AI and AI will automatically take over for a disconnected player.
- A couple basic hosting options
- Sounds
- Random Map (Terrain) Generator

Game Play:
- The only game mode right now is to defeat all other players.

What's Next:
- Without ordering these (or committing), I'm going to look into supporting variable size maps, host specified player counts, unit attrition, random unit generation (instead of +10 each turn), fogofwar, random starting locations (instead of 4 corners) and etc. Everything will be a host option. It should be a lot of fun to build up all the options now that the core engine is done.

Oh, I'm going to try and support flash and maybe even aim for Greenlight once the game builds up some momentum in terms of unique game play and features.