Blog: Books Read in 2020

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Project Updates: April 2020

It’s pretty usual for me to get to April and realize that I’ve lost track of all the things I was excited about. I’m still working on balancing my teaching so that I can be creative and productive and a good responsible teacher as well. It’s less usual to have that April realization fall in the middle of a global pandemic where suddenly everything has gone weird and suddenly I’m stuck at home, as opposed to being a little out of work for the spring and stuck at home.

Anyway, once I finish marking I want to do … something, so I’m going to “circumwork¹” and see where my projects on this blog are at.

Projects I am "actually working on"

One of the problems with maintaining the blog is that I have a list of things I “should” be working on even if they’re not actually the things I want to be working on. I try to avoid that by keeping my timelies short and achievable (yes, I know I’m bad at that) and by keeping the number of projects I’m working on at once (yes, I’m not great at that either).

Currently I have on my list:

• The Blog (as Project)
• I’m not 100% sure where I’m at with the blog, I’m enjoying tracking games and books. I don’t know that it’s a really productive thing to be doing, but I’m enjoying it. I also find that I don’t really want to put that much out there in terms of thoughts, because I’d rather put my time towards making something.
• Covert Action in Space
• I got a little held up because it turns out that randomly generating meaningful floor plans is a little harder than I’d figured. I still love the idea, but this isn’t at the top of my list.
• Game Tracker
• I’ve been teaching first year Java again and I wanted to get things rolling here again. I also taught a senior programming course in the fall which involved using online services and mobile interfaces, both of which my project needs. I opened it up a few weeks ago and couldn’t quite figure out where I left off, but managed to get it mostly on the path again.
• Pong
• I wanted to be way further ahead on this and have my AtariST version done ahead of my students, I managed to work along side them, but then completely lost the thread when the “transition to on-line” teaching happened. Hopefully I’ll have cause to get back to it.
• Code Click
• I already spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to share that moment of joy I get out of coding, and while I haven’t got that much done, I still think about code click a bunch. Transitioning to on-line has also pushed me to think a lot more about how I want to teach and the resources I want available when I’m teaching.
• 
  

Projects I have “on hiatus”

There are a bunch of things I started out and then put aside, some of them are things I want to be working on so I think it's worth listing them all out too.

• SNES Coasters
  • I’d like more and bigger coasters and maybe to spend a bit more time working on perler stuff.
• Space Station Game
  • I keep thinking about this one. I’m still not ready to really set down and work on it, partly because I’d like to build up my skill working on some other projects first. I've been playing quite a bit of EU4 which has definitely provided some feeling for how the game should work when I actually get to it.
• Action RPG
  • This is another one I’m not ready to work on yet, but I have a lot of ideas and I’ve been developing my drawing skills.
• Sci-Fi Novel
  • The problem with having sat with a story in your head for 20 / 25 years is that when you think about writing it, it feels pretty trite. There’s a lot of things kicking around in my head from as far back as when I was a teenager. I don’t really know where to go with it, but it still might be fun to tackle at some point.
• The Roofs (Fantasy Novel)
  • This is the story that sits further in the front of my mind. I’m not sure it makes sense, and it might be missing a reasonable antagonist, but I guess I won’t know until I write it.
• Chrono Trigger Sprites
  • I have the first two sitting in the window over my desk and I love them. It’s time I got the rest finished.
• Bubble Puzzler
  • I think with Pong out of the way this is the place I want to focus building games. It’s a good learning opportunity and I think it’s a great place to get started.

Projects I actually want to work on now

So I’m not sure where I want to put myself for all of the time between now and September. Obviously working on code click is a good idea for professional growth, but the Game Tracker and the Bubble Puzzler also make sense.

I also want to work on more artistic things. A lot of that I don’t think I want to make projects for, but I think that both the SNES Coasters and the Chrono Trigger Sprites. I also really want to get the Roofs written.

In an effort to keep my goals small and my projects limited, these are my near, term projects:

• SNES Coasters
  • I want to finish a set of 4 large coasters, get them fused and backed and then I’ll see what’s next. I think I can get that all done by April 30.
• Game Tracker
  • I’d like to get this working with outside data, either my original plan of google sheets, or with something else (possibly firebase). Either way I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it, so I’m going to try to have some version of that working by April 30 too.
• The Roofs
  • I don’t know how long it is, or how I’ll feel actually trying to write, but I’m going to give it a shot and try to have a first draft finished by August 31. (And yes, I think I did just put write a novel on a list of “short achievable near term goals” no, I’m not great at planning things)

(and we’ll leave the blog rolling along as it is, since that’s fun).

¹ Circumwork: To do things that feel like work without actually being related to any task that needs to be done.

Blog: Books Read in 2020

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Blog: Thoughts on Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival

It’s not a great game, but Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is a fixture in my home. I actually expect at this point that we’ve played more of that game than pretty much anybody else. To be honest, it’s not a great game, but it has some interesting points and it’s a game I’ve spent a long, looong time thinking about.

Welcome

I’d usually offer spoiler warnings at this point, but I’m not sure there really are spoilers for a party game like this. Additionally if there are spoilers, they’re for Animal Crossing in general or for Animal Crossing: New Leaf more specifically.

Things I Liked

I’m relatively new to Animal Crossing. I only picked up the series at New Leaf (the 4th game in the series, which came out in 2012). I picked it up after watching Chuggaconroy’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf Let’s Play. I bought matching 3DSs for my partner and I and two copies of Animal Crossing New Leaf. We got up extremely early on Boxing Day to watch the World Junior Hockey Championship, and started two new towns. I played New Leaf for well over a year, but eventually petered out as the new things to see in the game became fewer and fewer. My partner still plays at least a little bit each day (even with New Horizons to play as well).

The tradition keeps it going for us.

The town itself is an important part of any Animal Crossing game. Which villagers are in town, how the town is laid out, how the town is decorated are all important aspects. The town in Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival is also important. The game is played on a map of spaces spread out around a randomly generated town when you start playing. The different spaces in the game map to different events based on local fixtures so as you move around the map you get a few different experiences based on where you are. This provides a lot of familiarity as you swing by the coffee shop, or the bonfire, or the pool.

Events happen each time you land on a space. Each time you stop, a tiny vignette plays out with your character getting happier or making money, or getting sadder or losing money. The generic events are alright, but they don’t really hold the game in the long term. The events based on places around town are a nice addition, especially as your town grows, but the events that happen especially for specific characters have been the things that really charmed us. Having Blathers find fossils for the museum or Reese spend the day working with Cyrus makes the game charming and different enough each time you play it to keep it interesting. The special monthly events, like Festival, Toy Day or the August fireworks are also important and charming. We made a rule early on that we’d only play in the current month and that means that the time passing in real life is an important part of our enjoyment of the game.

The Amiibo Figures are also a nice part of Amiibo Festival. Getting to bring in villagers to live in the town (and host the games) is nice. Playing the game as the special villagers (such as Isabelle, Digby, etc…) is nice. The events provide them with a lot of character on top of whatever you bring in from other animal crossing games and the variety of costumes makes it worthwhile to keep playing.

I've had a K.K. concert running in my living room for the last three years.

Things I didn’t Like

While it has charm, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival seriously lacks things to do (let alone interesting decisions). It's probably worth noting, that my perspective is as someone who is not a kid and does not have kids, so my expectations are different than the developers. Still I feel like there are some elements of this game which aren't as good as they could be. The basic mechanic has you rolling a D6 to move around the board. When you reach a branch in the path, you can choose which direction you want to go. On top of that you can collect cards that let you go a specific number of spaces, do something special, like roll double or pick your roll, or change a few other aspects of the game.

Roll and find your fate.

The frustrating part is that there’s enough flexibility in what they designed that you could make interesting choices once a turn, or at least once every few turns.

I see that they want to have a heavy randomness in the game. The game has a strong “Snakes and Ladders” or “Candyland” flavour, in that your success in life is at the hand of bigger elements. Similarly, randomness is a staple of Mario Party, and it makes it easier for people of different skill levels to play together. However. I think they could have kept a lot of that randomness while still allowing the player to do a little more to control their own fate. A weekly card, along with the weekly turnips, would have gone a long way towards making this work. Or maybe a no-items, final destination configuration might also help for some long-term players.

Happiness in August

One of the other things that is somewhat frustrating about the game is that there’s no trade off between the two currencies in the game. You have bells (money) and you have happy points (happy … points). Sometimes you get events which give you both, just one, take one away or take both away. I have certainly traded happiness for money in my life and money for happiness, so it’s a little disappointing sometimes that the game has no trade-off option between the two. Especially as there are lots of in game events which seem like this would be the appropriate result. I spent a little extra money on my coffee today, and I really enjoyed it, is a “you lost money” event, rather than a “you lost money, but got happy” event.

The final thing that particularly frustrates me that I’d like to include here is that the game just stops. Well that’s not strictly true, so far as we’ve played the game continues, with different events each month, but the ability to grow your amiibo cuts off after level 6. I suppose that’s fair enough, but it feels to me a bit as though they didn’t have a lot of plans for people to play the game as long as we’ve played it.

Things I Noticed

The strength of Amiibo Fest is really in its charm. We’ve tried to play it a bit slowly, adding new things to the town infrequently and we’ve limited the number of animals we’ve added to the town too (which is partly due to a lack of the animals we want on the Amiibo Cards we were able to find).

Llama love is in the air.

Still despite the fact that this is a candy land style game, with a, you take the good with the bad and everything balances out mindset, we’ve managed to play about once a week for more than two years now. While that certainly says something about us, I think it also speaks to the way the game feels.

Obviously the Animal Crossing games in general are a testament to the idea that you can have many different verbs in gaming and that non-combative ones can be just as appealing. Amiibo Festival feels like a part of that dialogue, a game which focuses on togetherness beyond the game.

Things I’d Include in a Game

I have a lot of feelings about Amiibo Fest, but I don’t know that I want to, or could, create a game that follows it’s structure or design. That being said, I think the persistent environment of a board game that grows over time is very nice, especially if it can be managed in such a way that it has a narrative arc with an ending to it. Pandemic Legacy is a great game that you can play over many sessions and you build up a world with your history of mistakes and successes. I think having a gentler game that still builds up its own history as you play it is an interesting approach.

Remember Last Year?

I also think you could expand that to have a game grow over the course of a year and then have a giant celebration leading into a new game plus, new year kind of thing. That way you could have a new town grow up to follow your old towns each year, with some elements of the old towns kept around for nostalgia or remembrance and then new elements from your new town for the new year.

I was pretty flabbergasted when I saw The Runaway Guys tackle this and realized they were playing in a totally different town, and I think this game might have benefitted from making that difference a little more palpable. Obviously not everyone is going to want to step away from the town they have, but having a natural end might make it easier to decide when and how to end.

Final Things

I don’t know if Amiibo Festival could have been better. I won’t argue that the charm is reason enough to play, and if you’re looking for anything like a Mario Party experience you’re going to be disappointed. As I said, this is very much a Candyland experience. That being said, we still enjoy it and every time I play I'm struck that with just a little different construction it could have been a secret gem that really lasts.

I mean, how much charm can this game have?