Warhammer 40k Adventure #7

Two special rules! The first is called Razor Scales and the idea is that some of the Lizardmen have very sharp scales that help them in combat. The Second is called Limb Regrowth and the concept is that like some lizards in real life, certain Lizardmen can regrow their limbs after the have been dismembered.

Warhammer 40k Adventure #6

Psychic Powers!

Using the Tyranid powers for balance reference, I designed theses powers. The Mechanics lead said that some of them were a little overpowered so I balanced them by increasing the warp charge for those powers.

Warhammer 40k Adventure #5

We have finally gotten to the whole point of the class which is design our own race a class team. We are doing Garret's idea for bringing the War Hammer Fantasy Race the Lizardmen to Warhammer 40k. My first task was to create special issue war gear for the Lizardmen.

Many of the initial Wargear were based off Space Marine Wargear and then were renamed and slightly modified. But later items were ideas they I came up with on my own once I became more familiar with the game.

Warhammer 40k Adventure #4

It must be said that Holy Cranola! These figures are Hecka cool. I could honestly see someone just purchasing the figures and not even playing the game.I imagine thousands of hours can be spent just building a cool army and painting it and giving each of the characters their own unique backstory. Warhammer is pretty unique in the sense that you don't even need to play the game to have fun with it. It can become a hobby similar to building a model railway. Also I just had a cool idea what if trains were incorporated into Warhammer somehow. I might return to that thought in a later blog. Trains.

Warhammer 40K Adventure #3

Third day of class. Randomness seems to be a major component of Warhammer. Even more so than D&D which is a game completely characterized by how things can go awesomely right or wrong. I wouldn't have expected their to be this much left to chance in such a competitive game. But I suppose one thing that makes this game so unique is the amount of risks that need to be weighed  when making decisions. When one decides to do something they must account if their roll will be high or low or where the scatter dice may take them. Players must have back up plans behind back up plans behind back up plans in the off chance a roll does not work in their favor.

Warhammer 40k Adventure #2

Second Day of Advanced Game Design and now we are rolling a 1000 point Tyranid Army. With Hormagaunts and a Carnifax  along with the Hive Tyrant and Gene Stealers from last time. I really like the unit buy system in this game because of its simplicity. When selecting units you are given a certain amount of points to spend on Units/Equipment. Each Unit/Equipment has a certain cost associated with it and the cost is balanced so that powerful units are more expensive and weaker units are cheaper. This simple restriction prevents any army from being absurdly more powerful than another while also allowing the player to be creative and to come up with their own strategies when selecting their army.

Warhammer 40K Adventure #1

New Semester! New Class! We are Playing and Modding Warhammer 40K this semester. First day of class we got right to it and started playing. I was on a team with a number of fellow students. That day my team played the Tyranids, a malevolent race of bug aliens that closely resemble the work of HR Geiger. Our team faced the Crimson Slaughter race. Tyranids winded up winning because of  the prior experience of Garett Poenitish. The game seemed very complicated, but after a few hours of play and some instructional YouTube videos the game was still super complicated. though now I do understand it better. One thing I was disappointed about mechanically was that almost all dice rolls are based off of d6s. Coming from D&D I was expecting Warhammer to show types of dice I had never even seen before. It did show me how Scatter Dice worked but other than that I'm a little let down. One mechanic that I do love about Warhammer though is the way you move the models around the field. Its very simple. You have an amount of inches that you can move. Then you measure out with a ruler or tape measure where you want your unit to move. I liked this mechanic so much I actually worked it into the overland movement system of my current D&D campaign.

The Bizarre Beast that is Scope

In my adventures as a game developers some projects that I have been a part of have turned out fantastic. Some projects have not and most of these projects have failed because they are to large in scope. Different people have different definitions of scope but I like to define scope as the sum of all resources needed to complete a project to satisfaction. For example you can say that the scope of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is relatively low because making a Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich only requires one person and several small simple components. Whereas an FPS MMO Role Playing CCG would be relatively large in scope because it would require a large team developing many different abstract and complicated systems simultaneously.

According to this definition, Scope seems pretty easy to understand. So why do so many teams struggle with scope? The answer is because many teams fail to account for the TOTAL Sum of all resources needed for the project. For example, in our PB and J example It was listed that we needed one person and several different components. Many would list the components of a PBJ to be: Peanut Butter, Jelly, Bread and probably a knife to spread the Jelly and the Peanut Butter. One component that many don't list is the Time it takes to make the PBJ.  What about the time it takes to learn how to make a PBJ if you have never made one before? Did you account for the time it takes to gather your resources? Did you account for the time it would take to clean up any messes if any were made? Did you remember to clean the knife between using it on Peanut Butter and Jelly Jars? Did you remember to clean your knife at all to avoid consuming any harmful bacteria.

I think that many would say that a Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich takes less than 3 minutes to make. I would estimate that a Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich requires 6 - 9 minutes depending on what you have handy and maybe a lot longer if you have to go to the store.  This may not seem like a huge deal when we are talking in minutes but if a project is scheduled for a year of development time this can completely cripple a company if the project needs thrice the time that was planned for. Also Error only increases as you add more parts to the project. The seemingly quaint one year project can easily turn into 7 year one depending on feature creep, morale and other outside factors. It also gets more complicated as time goes on. Are the people working on the project are the same ones that were working on it when it started? How long will it take them to learn their way around the project?  What technical debt have you accrued through years? Is the hardware you were developing for outdated now?

There are a few practices I use to help manage the scope of my projects. One practice that I get into the habit of doing is letting Practicality inform my design. I will often get really awesome exciting ideas that I think will impress a lot of people and I will happily cut them or write them down for later if I think it is going to be to difficult or time consuming for the value that they bring to the project. Some might say that that stifles creativity. And yes it does but that is the point of the practice. I also am very aware of how long something is taking. If a project is just taking to long to get to a professional level of Quality or Quantity I will scrap the project and start looking for a new one. Some will say that this is a waste of work and you should just finish it but often times you can finish several properly scoped projects in the time it takes to finish one out scoped one. And chances are if it was out scoped in the first place, the Quality or Quantity may be lacking. In general to avoid out scoping a project you should keep it simple. You should not worry about making the next big thing. You should not even worry about improving over your last project. Just worry about making something Fun, Cool and finishing it in an amount of time that you feel comfortable with.

More Pokemanz.

Getting Better.

BLULBASAURUS!!!