Why & How I Made Awesome Town
Testing this out…can I add animation to wordpress…….HEY what do you know? That was easier than I thought. So, the idea here is, to add some life to the game. These driving cars cruse across the streets of Awesome Town in proportion to the number of tourists you attract to your city.
I managed to squash an insidious bug while trying to return things to Amazon. This outrageous, preposterous CSS bug might seem a too simple and basic to make a mammoth organization like Amazon look impotent. Maybe it’s not a bug, but a feature?
Conspiracy theories aside, if you run into a grayed out “continue” button during your Amazon return process, this simple fix will get you through to the next page, your unwanted trappings back to Amazon and your money back in your pocket.
This doesn’t have anything to do with the development of Awesome Town, or my budget template, but never mind that.
One goal of this project is to bring that nail-biting suspense so many video games provide to the table-top board game. The best board games have this imho.
To pull this off, I created an “AI” town that competes against the players. I quote “AI” because, I’m not an artificial intelligence expert and the competing town, Herndon (sorry Herndon) is essentially run with a significant number of if/then statements.
Chrome will only let me zoom out to 25%, so I animated a gif to show the table keeping track of it all:
The result is, I’m able to chart out player visitors vs AI visitors easily game after game after game. With little tweaks to the game’s “economy”, I can make it more exciting.
Discovery is a fun part of any game. That’s why I wanted the virtual population of tourists to change every time you played Awesome Town. One game, there might be a lot more Budget tourists. Another game might be mostly Luxury-minded visitors. Finding out who your customers are is part of the fun. So, here’s how Awesome Town randomizes one of the pillars of the game.
At first, I was worried that adding a screen to a board game would negatively impact board games “One more screen people are glued to”.
I think technology (screens or AR) blending with board games is inevitable, but I also think it could be amazing if done right.
Best practices for blending digital with analog game elements:
Growing up, I would beg my two older brothers to play Monopoly. That enthusiasm to play died prematurely.
You see, anytime they’d land on one of my big-money properties, they’d quit unless I gave them a sweetheart deal that usually included some of my properties. I basically paid them to lose to them.
Those memories resurfaced after playing some co-operative board games.
I began to wonder, “Why couldn’t you change the rules of Monopoly and make it cooperative?“