While we're on the subject...

The game that I've been working on for the past few months has been getting some mainstream gaming blog press recently, so I thought I'd post about it. It's called Kriegspiel, and it's an adaptation of a war game designed by Guy Debord (situationniste extraordinaire). There's no AI, so you have to play with someone else, but there's a good chance you'll find someone waiting in the lobby if you download the game and log in.

It's a surprisingly subtle game, both complex and complicated, and it really benefits from the adaptation to the computer—I don't know how Guy and Alice kept track of movement ranges, sums of attack/defense coefficients, and lines of communication without a computer. (We've debated about whether or not this is a good thing—the game has a completely different tenor when you're playing it on a physical board. It almost becomes more about trying to find your opponent's mistakes, rather than playing strategically. Maybe that's what Debord intended? I dunno.)

My role in the project has mostly been as a programmer, working mainly on the prototype phases of the game (first in Processing, then in OpenGL, then in jMonkeyEngine). Nowadays I'm only putting a few hours a week into it, but it's been rewarding to be a part of the development of an actual, honest-to-god game from start to finish. (Well, it's still in beta. Almost finish.)