Calendar NIM Review

Normally I like to have a postmortem or a making of article about the games that I have just released, but the nature of my Calendar NIM game makes an explanation of the twelve months a bit more appropriate. Each image represents a game that I am hoping to release during the year, though it is subject to change. The games chosen are not the only games that I will be releasing, but are simply the ones I am positive that I can finish though are subject to change and unexpected delays. Still these games are pretty certain. For those of you who haven't looked at my Calendar NIM game, it is located at http://spelchan.com/games/y2018/calendarNim.php

January is a 2018 New Years image that was released by LMoonlight for free and is used to represent the Calendar NIM game itself.

February is Video Poker, which was a game that I created for my original Flash Game Development book which is in the process of being re-written for HTML5 development which will start being posted on this blog next week. This game has already been completed so this is a guaranteed release.

March is when I release my Easter game which is the egg generator. While this was really low on the vote, the generator is used in two other easter games so I am going to port the generator first. This will be challenging as the masking technique I used is  not supported in Create.js so I will need to come up with a different approach. As this game is not going to be released until the end of the month, I will probably take the opportunity to release my NIM game as a bonus.

April 1st is Easter so my April Fool games will have to wait until next year. The thirteenth of April is on a Friday so the original version of thirteen squared spikes will be the choice for that month. This game has already been completed so it is a guaranteed release.

May 25th is towel day so it makes sense to release Towels for Earth. I am not sure why this game is so high on the voting chart but this is the most appropriate day to re-release the game. I have not done any work on it at all but it is not a difficult game (it was created in a game jam after all) so this shouldn’t be a problem. As this is late in the month, I may also release Pent Up Anger which I have already finished.

June is really subject to change but I am planning on porting Fleet to C++ and using emscripten to convert it to asm.js or to web assembly. I started playing around with emscripten for my 2600 emulator project but pretty much have gone the Kotlin route with that project so this would be a good project.

July is another month with a Friday the Thirteenth in it so the Thirteen Spikes Unlimited (TSU) port would possibly be ideal. The current version of TSU was written in HAXE and compiled to Flash as there were issues with the JavaScript compilation. I will see if things have changed with that and if so this is simply re-compiling the project. If not, I have the core of Thirteen Squared Spikes to use as the base of this so it should be a very quick port.

August has String Along set up as it’s game which has already been completed so is guaranteed.

September is Coffee Quest which will be a WebGL game. As with Fleet, I will likely port this game to C++ and use emscripten to convert to web assembly and Asm.js. The construction set will not be part of this, but the extra maps may be. At the moment I am thinking of going weekly for september releasing a new map each week. This is just speculation at the moment with a final decision on what I will do to be made in September.

October is Nightmare Maze which happens to be the first episode of One of those Weeks. It is being referred to as Nightmare Maze as it is part of my book. I have big plans for One of those Weeks so there will be additional news about the project later this year (I hope).

Let’s face it. Coffee Quest was a very simple game, with the series only really starting to take of with the release of the second game in the series. This is why November will be Coffee Quest 2. It will be built on top of the Coffee Quest code base so will be in whatever language Coffee Quest ends up being released in. Again, I may release the extra maps every week but that is not certain yet.

Finally, also likely using the Coffee Quest engine, will be the high-def version of Santa’s Snowball. Higher resolution, better graphics, better sound, and 360 degree movement with an automap will make this Christmas game what I wish it was in 2017.

There may be additional surprises throughout the year, hopefully one involving One of those Weeks, but even without the extra releases I don’t think the year is too bad.

Recettear

My original plans for this weekend were to start working on the first episode of Dozen Days of Tiles. I still am up in the air as whether I should start with my Mah Jongg effort or if Sudoku would be the better starting project. Sadly, neither have been started as Steam has their Thanksgiving sale going on and one of the games on sale (92% off) was an indie story pack that contained a game I wanted. Since the pack was less than the cost of the single game, I grabbed the pack and a game called Recettear caught my eye. It was different enough that I figured I would install it on my windows machine and try it out for a few hours. The game was so enjoyable that I am writing this post about it since it ate up my DDT time.

You play the game as a young girl named Recette. Your father ran off to become an adventurer and left you in debt. To pay off your debt, the fairy Tear is helping you turn your house into a store. Because the town you live in is a haven for adventurers, it is an item shop. While you can buy items wholesale, the fun of the game comes from hiring adventurers and then going into a dungeon to "acquire" the items so you can sell them for a 100% profit.

The game is surprisingly addictive. The only real complaint that I have about the game so far is the weekly payment. It is a skewed payment scheme where the first payment is 10000, the second 30000, the third 80000, the fourth 200000 and a final payment that I haven't seen yet but from the progression would guess 500000. While the idea here from a designers perspective is to keep the game challenging, I think the game would have been more enjoyable if the debt could be paid off at a slower pace. When I screwed up and was not able to make the 200000 payment, I discovered that instead of having to go back to an earlier save and replay the week the game would automatically restart you on day 2 but with all your stock and experience. Still, I think a better approach would have been to tie the expansion of the store to the debt. As each chunk of debt was paid off (minimum payment perhaps but small enough so game could be played leisurely) a store upgrade would start causing the loan to start again.

Still, for a low cost indie game, this is quite a fun title. My recommendation, however, is not to start on this game if you have other things to do as like many strategy games this game has a one-more-turn syndrome that causes hours to mysteriously vanish into the game.