machai-umno

I'm just going to get out of the way an let David talk about this. A medium is willingly possessed by a raging ghost to lure it into a magical trap. An occultist bribes a satyr lord into granting him mastery over stormy skies and hardened hearts. A queen makes bloody sacrifices to fiendish masters for perpetual life. All use covenant magic. Legendary Classes: Covenant Magic  from  David  Nicholas Ross introduces covenants, secretive bargains allowing characters of any class to draw on the supernatural gifts of spirits such as fey, outsiders, and undead. This book also introduces mediums, true masters of covenant magic who can contact spirits, call on a spirit guide for supernatural attacks, empower allies and hinder foes with spell-like abilities, and enter a trance that unlocks covenants without a price and enhances their toughness and magical might. This book contains the following: The medium base class, specializing in one of 11 influences such as Angel...

Everett Kaser has been developing logic puzzles for PC and Mac for something like 20 years. There's a large number of games available on his web site; a couple have been ported to iPhone and iPad, and Sherlock is one of them. There are actually three version on the App Store: Sherlock, The Game of Logic (Free) which contains 30 puzzles. A single $2.99 in-app purchase unlocks 150,000 (!) puzzles; Sherlock PRO ($0.99) which contains 600 puzzles; Sherlock ULTRA ($3.99) which contains 7,500 puzzles. To add complexity to the choice, the PRO and ULTRA versions run natively on iPad, while the Free version is designed only for iPhone. The fact that the PC version is sold for $19.95, tells a lot about the impact of the App Store on the software industry. Starting from the title screen, the low resolution graphics scream "I'm a Windows 95 game". After starting the game, it's clear that this is a logic deduction puzzle in the vein of puzzle grids; however, it's quite...

The Script I just finished cleaning up the script for the GDC2013 talk and it can be gotten from here: http://unbirthgame.com/GDC2013_PresenceSelfAndStoryTelling_Script.pdf Additional Resources The following blog posts are probably also of interest: Story: What is it really about? This goes into more depth on how to view a story. I think this is really important in order to come to terms with interactive storytelling. The problem of Repetition Repetition is a problem when presence is a goal. Here is a list of pitfalls and how to solve them. Finding videogame's true voice This articles explores the "agreeable action outcome" design some more. Highlevel story telling design Goals and Storytelling Both of these explore the construction of a story space. Puzzles, what are they good for? Puzzles and causal histories These articles use the "interaction for presence"-axiom to view puzzles in a new way. These should hopefully help clear out a few things from the talk. ...

Perfect Tiling by Eric Paquet is a put-together puzzle game for iPhone and iPad, whose distinctive feature is that the puzzles are randomly generated every time you play. There's also a free version, which should be identical apart from containing ads. There are 10 puzzle modes, visible above. Initially only the first is available, and the others are unlocked in sequence. I found this a bit arbitrary and would have preferred all modes to be available from the start; what I would have added instead, is keeping track of the number of puzzles solved and the best time taken, for each puzzle mode. That would have added some motivation to take advantage of the randomisation and play your preferred modes multiple times. All puzzle modes are based on tiles whose shape is sort of a cloverleaf; each of the four leaves can be missing. The first puzzle mode uses a 2x2 grid so it acts as a tutorial: it's very easy to solve regardless of the random tiles you are served. I don't think t...

Tile'm all by Dimitry Bogaevsky is an incredibly hard puzzle game for iPhone and iPad. At first, it looks like just another sliding tile puzzle, but there is a clever variation, which I had never seen before: when two neighboring tiles are the same color, they merge, and from then on they can only move as a single piece. The goal is to merge all pieces of the same color. So in the puzzle above, if you move the green tile left you get into this position, which is already a lost position: continuing from here, you could for example merge the two yellow tiles and the two red tiles, but only leaving the green tiles split into two groups. The game contains 119 levels. The first three are 3x3, all the others are 4x4. Puzzle #4 is pretty difficult already. These puzzle feel claustrophobic, because every time two pieces are joined your movement options are reduced. Reaching the solution requires careful planning from the very first move, otherwise you'll inevitably end up blocked. Th...

I'm usually suspicious of puzzle games that have "easy to learn and difficult to master" in their description, but Subaku by Eric Koziol is good despite that. I'm also totally bored by sudoku , but thankfully, despite the misleading icon and the suspiciously similar name, this is a completely different puzzle . If you are suspicious too, there's also a free version called subaku mini , which contains just the first 10 puzzles. The game is played on a 3x3 grid, containing some numbered tiles. when you tap a tile, its value is decreased by one, and its orthogonal neighbors are increased by one. So tapping the 4 above gives this: when a row, column, or diagonal contains three identical numbers, they are all removed. The goal is to clear the board. So tapping the 3 above would give this, and solve the puzzle: There are 100 puzzles included; the list is well presented with colorful thumbnails, and a target number of moves needed to solve the puzzle. Note that the targ...

I apologize for not properly attributing the photos, I nabbed them as I found them ;) but I wanted to show some painted figs and some neat ideas.