Changes in location, employment, and project.

Since my last post, we’ve moved from Las Vegas, NV to Reno, NV.  While a number of NV natives describe the day drive between two as extremely boring, none of those making that comment seem to have driven through the unending flatness of the large parts of the Midwest.  At least the drive between Vegas and Reno has mountains.

The move was due to my accepting a position as a Senior Software Engineer at PC-Doctor, Inc. here in Reno.  We all like Reno better then Vegas.  Prettier geography, trees, less traffic, better dog walking route, and a four season climate with lower summer highs then Vegas.

On Project Wellinghall, I’m now on the third phase of M3 and scenario analysis has been running nearly constantly for the last two months.  During this phase I’ve discovered two things one, even with current bare minimum feature set, the numbers scenarios required to determine the outcome of every combination is already has an exponent over 100 and the scenarios results other then stalemates are quite sparse.

While these two things are not necessarily, bad they won’t allow for a very interesting arena combat simulator since most combatant designs will result in a stalemate when pitted against each other 1-on-1.  So then the question becomes change the game mechanics to provide a more interesting 1-on-1 arena combat simulator or go with a different type of game to determine if these mechanics can allow for a fun gaming experience.  I’ve decided to go with the later and push off the arena combat simulator until at least M5 and quite possibly M8.  At that time I 2-on-2 or n-on-m arena combat simulator will be feasible and suspect team arena combat scenarios will have far fewer stalemates then 1-on-1.

This means M4 needs to be restructured to provide for a new game type.  I’m thinking of doing either an ecology simulation or a dungeon crawler type game.  Note sure which yet, but will be determined as part of M4 planning (or at least I detail out the features that both would need and start working on the common ones if I want to defer the decision until later).