BYOND Strategy Tech Tree: 165 & 166

Last's week's post was put on hold as I've been suffering from acute pancreatitis.  I went to the hospital on Monday.  They gave me some medicine to treat the symptoms and are having me wait it out on a bland diet.  The meds ran out on Friday.  I'm not in as much pain as I was, but I'm not comfortable and I don't know when I'll be able to eat a normal meal again.

On the bright side, Tech Tree had come up short and the extra week bulks this post up.  Joy.

BTW, HDstarcraft will be streaming a best of seven match between the Plott brothers, Day[9] and Tasteless.  The games were recorded before the StarCraft II beta ended.  HD and Husky will commentate and then the players will give post-game analysis.  The stream is scheduled for around 4:30 EDT.

This edited version of Along The Tech Tree comes to you from BYOND Strategy, a guild run by unpaid volunteers on a game/development portal and software engine called BYOND.  Tech Tree focuses on recent developer activity.  For play suggestions, visit the guild.

Acebloke has updated his generic Chess program, Law of the Board.  I have to admit that I don't know enough about the different pieces and rules to appreciate the amount of work he has done, but the names of supported variants can be found on the wiki alongside files the program can understand.

What I do understand is that he could use some better interface designs.

Mecha Destroyer JD has created five units for his replacement to Ultimate Strife, Ultra Strife.  Details are still scarce and he appears to be in need of an artist.  However, there might be a playable alpha of the RTS soon if he can implement a decent interface.  He's currently looking for good examples of aesthetics and functionality.

Ashi Productions is looking for an artist to help with an unnamed hybrid of action and tower defense.  Up to four players will buy weapons, ammo and turrets in preparation for incoming waves of zombies.  Money might be offered "down the road".

"[M]y ultimate goal is to create a virtual world experience. The way Planetbreakers is set up, it's too detached, it feels like a real time strategy game. This is just not going to work."

Dead to me, Geldonyetich.  Dead to me!

I updated my mining card struggle, Grim Prospects.  Twice.  The first made multiple improvements to the interface with the goal of making the display more legible.  (Hopefully it succeeded.)  The second focused on fixing bugs... which were mostly created by the display changes.

I've also been continuing to design my economic/combative space race, StarScurrier.  Lately, I've been trying to fit it into something that could work as a physical board game so I can sell it on The Game Crafter.  This means I have to consider issues like how many pieces are moved around and how much information can be reasonably hidden without allowing for a lot of cheating.  (BTW, congratulations to The Game Crafter on their move to larger facilities.  The service is already improving.)

Both projects, combined with Genetic Fork, have convinced me to once again reveal my Multiple Game Rooms library.  The changes that caused me to hide it from the hub have been stabilized.  The library has had a reasonable amount of testing and I'm quite likely to use it in future strategy projects.