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Explore Simple Game Algorithms With Color Walk: Part 12

We've now been exploring and discussing game algorithms using the simple game Color Walk for months over the course of 11 posts. We started out extremely simple with random and round-robin algorithms, advanced to some obvious greedy algorithms, and wound up discussing a number of graph algorithms. We've discovered a ton of stuff along the way, so it would be nice to step back and review the ground we've covered to see the big picture in all of the experimentation and details of the various algorithms we found along the way.

Simple Beginnings

The algorithms started out very simple so that some of the tooling structure could be built for running and evaluating the different algorithms. It would have been difficult to debug the batch run code and a complicated algorithm at the same time, so we gradually ramped up the difficulty of the algorithms after making sure all of the tooling was in place to evaluate the different algorithms.

Round-Robin
The simplest algorithm possible is purely cycling through the colors for each successive move without putting any thought into what would be a good color choice. Predictably, this algorithm does not perform well at all, but that's not the point. It's an easy algorithm to get right when building up the tooling around the game, and it provides a baseline measurement of performance that any algorithm worth its salt should be able to beat.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Round Robin	37	48.3	62	4.5

Round-Robin with Skipping
Once we have an algorithm in place, it's natural to immediately start thinking about how to improve it. One obvious thing to notice about the round-robin algorithm is that sometimes at the beginning or end of the game it picks a color that doesn't remove any blocks. We can fix this imperfection. Instead of blindly picking the next color in the rotation every time, it's easy to check if the next color will remove any blocks, and if it doesn't, to skip that color and move on to the next color in the rotation. This optimization makes an incremental improvement to the basic round-robin algorithm, and it's an idea we can use throughout our algorithm development.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
RR with Skipping	37	46.9	59	4.1

Random Choice
Round-robin is not the only choice for a basic algorithm. Another option for a baseline algorithm is to randomly choose the next color with no thought whatsoever. This strategy may seem useless, but in some cases it's very hard to beat a random algorithm. It's always worth a shot to try it out, and then you at least have a simple baseline measurement of what you want your algorithm to beat. If you can't do any better than random, then you might as well use the random choice with its fast execution. Obviously, in this case random is not a good choice.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Random Choice	60	80.2	115	10.5

Random Choice with Skipping
As with round-robin, we can employ the strategy of avoiding moves that don't remove blocks with random choice. We simply keep picking another random color until we chance upon one that removes blocks before committing to the move. This strategy is a better way to implement random choice, as it's more along the lines of make a random move, but not a stupid move. With this type of random choice, saying that an algorithm under consideration does no better than random will actually mean something.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Random with Skipping	43	53.1	64	4.5

The Algorithm to Beat

The Greedy Algorithm
The first "real" algorithm that actually does calculations to attempt to determine the next best move also turns out to be a fairly powerful algorithm. The greedy algorithm looks at how many blocks are removed with each color, and then picks the color that removes the most blocks. This strategy significantly improves on the basic algorithms in every way while still being quite fast because it's light on computation. The greedy strategy is great when it works because it's easy to understand, easy to implement, and it tends to execute fast because it only considers immediately available information.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Greedy	31	39.8	48	3.5

Greedy Look Ahead (GLA)
The GLA algorithm is an extension of the greedy algorithm. Instead of picking the move that removes the most blocks, why not look ahead and pick the move that will open up the board to remove the most blocks on the next move? This algorithm gets more complicated to implement because now we need to track which move has removed which blocks to figure out how the most blocks can be removed in a two-move sequence. Also, this algorithm is no longer technically a greedy algorithm because by definition a greedy algorithm always chooses the most of something with immediately available information, and GLA is incorporating some foresight. However, since it's an extension of a greedy algorithm and still tries to maximize block removal, we'll refer to it in the same terms. It does manage to improve upon the base algorithm, too.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Greedy Look Ahead	28	37.0	45	3.1

Greedy Look Ahead-N (GLA-N)
Once we've looked ahead one extra move, there's nothing stopping us from looking ahead more moves, except for the fact that as we look more moves ahead, the exponential explosion of moves to be considered will overwhelm us. In a sense, the GLA-N algorithm, with 'N' denoting how many moves we're looking ahead, is just a generalization of the last two algorithms, with GLA-1 being equivalent to the greedy algorithm that only looks at the next move, and GLA-2 being equivalent to GLA that looks at the next two moves. GLA-3 improves upon the previous algorithms, but then the performance plateaus while taking much longer to run for each game.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Greedy Look-Ahead-3	25	34.2	40	2.7
Greedy Look-Ahead-4	25	33.3	39	2.6
Greedy Look-Ahead-5	25	33.1	41	2.8

Plugging in Heuristics

Max Perimeter
It turns out that the strategy of looking for the move that removes the most blocks is only one of many related strategies that can be plugged into the same basic algorithm structure. The way of deciding which move is the best is called a heuristic, and we have other heuristics to choose from for that purpose. Instead of choosing the move that removes the most blocks, which maximizes the cleared area, we can choose the move that maximizes the perimeter between the cleared space and the leftover blocks. This new algorithm has the same structure as the greedy algorithm, but with a different heuristic for deciding on the optimal color choice. This heuristic manages to outperform the base greedy algorithm.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Max Perimeter	29	37.4	44	3.2

Max Perimeter Look Ahead
Since we're plugging in a different heuristic for the greedy algorithm, we can also do the same thing for the GLA algorithm, and look ahead some number of moves before choosing the move that will maximize the perimeter in the future. The structure of the algorithm was done in a way that made it easy to swap in any heuristic that we could think of when assessing how to make the next move, so evaluating it for looking ahead was easy. We found that the max perimeter heuristic didn't improve as much here, and actually started to backtrack in performance when it looked too far ahead.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Max Perimeter Look-Ahead-2	27	35.0	44	2.8
Max Perimeter Look-Ahead-3	27	35.0	41	2.9
Max Perimeter Look-Ahead-4	26	34.8	43	3.3
Max Perimeter Look-Ahead-5	28	34.9	46	2.9

Perimeter-Area Hybrid
With two heuristics, we can think about ways of combining them to make a different determination about what the next move is. One way of combining heuristics is to run one for some number of moves first, and then finish off the game with the other one. When we run the max perimeter heuristic for 20 moves and then run the max area heuristic, we get a different performance profile than either one on its own. Unfortunately, it's not better.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Perimeter-Area Hybrid	31	39.0	49	3.8

Perimeter-Area Hybrid Look Ahead
Even though the first hybrid attempt wasn't better than the perimeter or area heuristics on their own, we still want to see how it does when looking ahead. We see that here it does improve on the max perimeter heuristic a little—likely because maximizing the perimeter at the end of the game doesn't help as much as maximizing the number of blocks removed—but it can't surpass the powerful GLA algorithm.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Perim-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-2	27	35.2	43	3.2
Perim-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-3	27	33.5	41	2.7
Perim-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-4	26	33.2	41	3.1
Perim-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-5	28	33.0	41	2.5

Deep-Path (and Look Ahead)
Another idea for solving a board efficiently is to quickly clear a path to the middle of the board before spreading out and clearing away more blocks. While this exact strategy would be complicated to implement, we can approximate it by maximizing the perimeter-to-area ratio. If the perimeter of the cleared section is large and the area is small, that would be equivalent to having a deep path cleared into the board. Testing out a pure deep-path heuristic showed some pretty disappointing results, but that makes sense because such a strategy should perform poorly in the second half of the game, even with look-ahead.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Deep-Path	51	74.8	104	9.4
Deep-Path Look-Ahead-2	50	74.9	112	9.8
Deep-Path Look-Ahead-3	50	75.2	112	9.8
Deep-Path Look-Ahead-4	50	75.4	112	9.5

Path-Area Hybrid (and Look Ahead)
Combining the deep-path heuristic with a max area heuristic is what we really want to see with this strategy, and we do see significant improvements compared to a pure deep-path heuristic. However, this approach still does not best the GLA algorithm. While it may be easier for a human to play with this strategy, it's not the best one when you have the raw computational power of a computer playing the game.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Path-Area Hybrid	35	44.2	54	3.5
Path-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-2	34	40.8	49	3.0
Path-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-3	31	39.0	47	3.2
Path-Area Hybrid Look-Ahead-4	32	38.7	45	2.7

The Graph Algorithms

Breadth-First Search (BFS)
When you picture the color choices available for each sequential move in the game, the moves can easily be drawn as a graph with start and end vertices. A path from start to end corresponds to a set of moves that makes up a game, and there are a number of algorithms available for searching this graph. One basic algorithm is BFS, which searches each vertex that's one edge away, then two edges away, and so on until the end vertex is found. Because the graph is unmanageably large, we need to give BFS a head start with GLA-5 for the first moves. With this hybrid algorithm, we actually best GLA-5 by itself, on average, and we have a new best algorithm to beat.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
BFS with Greedy Look-Ahead-5	26	32.7	40	2.8

Depth-First Search (DFS)
Instead of searching the move graph in order of how far away the moves are, we can follow each path of moves to its end before backing up and going down the next path. This strategy is depth-first instead of breadth-first, and we need to be careful to limit the search so that it doesn't take forever on this type of graph. We can limit the search to only follow paths that remove blocks on every move, we can stop the search on a particular path if we've already found one that's shorter, and we can run GLA-5 first to shrink the graph that we end up searching with DFS. With these limitations we get pretty good performance, although not quite as good as BFS or GLA.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
DFS with Greedy Look-Ahead-5	25	34.8	43	3.9

Dijkstra's Algorithm
While both BFS and DFS would search the entire graph if we didn't limit them in some way, it is possible to optimize the search to try to find a nearly shortest path more quickly. Dijkstra's algorithm does just that by assigning a value to each vertex in the graph that it comes to and putting those vertices in a priority queue. Then it will pull the maximum-valued vertex out of the queue, assess the children of that vertex, and put them in the queue. The algorithm continues until it finds the end vertex, and it does pretty well against the competition. Dijkstra's algorithm is especially consistent at finding a good solution, with a low standard deviation between games.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Dijkstra's Algorithm	29	33.1	40	1.9

GLA-Dijkstra Hybrid
We can pair Dijkstra's algorithm with other algorithms to make new hybrids and try to improve performance further. Pairing it with the powerful GLA algorithm ends up besting every other algorithm we've explored. The ultimate strategy seems to be to clear about half the board with moves that maximize the number of blocks removed, then carefully select the optimal path to the end of the game with Dijkstra's algorithm. We could further optimize this algorithm by tweaking the switch-over point between the two sub-algorithms.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
GLA-Dijkstra Hybrid	25	31.8	37	2.2

Dijkstra-GLA Hybrid
Another idea was to try switching the order of GLA and Dijkstra's algorithm, and seeing how that performed. Alas, it did not do as well, so it appears that Dijkstra's algorithm really shines at optimizing moves at the end of the game while GLA is best at clearing the way at the beginning of the game.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Dijkstra-GLA Hybrid	28	36.3	44	3.1

Max-Perimeter-Dijkstra Hybrid
For one last attempt at another hybrid algorithm, we looked at combining the max perimeter heuristic with Dijkstra's algorithm. This strategy makes some sense by trying to increase the possibilities of clearing blocks in the future by maximizing the perimeter of blocks adjacent to the empty zone, and then searching for that optimal path to the end. It ended up working pretty well, doing better than GLA and BFS in the worst case, but falling slightly short on boards that had potential for less moves.

	Min	Mean	Max	Stdev
Max-Perimeter-Dijkstra Hybrid	27	32.8	38	2.3

A Big Solution Space

We've summarized 20 or more algorithms here, depending on how you count them, and that's far from a complete list of possibilities. Other combinations of these algorithms could be explored, we could come up with other heuristics to help decide on move values, and we could mix-and-match more algorithms in complex and intricate ways with varying parameters to try to find that one perfect move sequence for each game. The solution space is incredibly large.

Exploring all of these different algorithms teaches us a lot about what the solution space looks like, and how the problem (the Color Walk game in this case) behaves when attacked in different ways. We've seen that some foresight is important, making good assessments of the progress in the game on any given move is quite helpful, and combining strengths of different algorithms works well. And we can do much better than random or a simple round-robin approach!

We also have developed an understanding of a number of classic algorithms and learned some good problem-solving strategies. The articles behind all of these algorithm summaries go into much more depth and detail on each of them, and they show how to develop an algorithm within the constraints of a specific problem. You can also look at the complete code here, and experiment with it for yourself. Have some fun with it, and see if you can beat the GLA-Dijkstra Hybrid algorithm.


Article Index
Part 1: Introduction & Setup
Part 2: Tooling & Round-Robin
Part 3: Random & Skipping
Part 4: The Greedy Algorithm
Part 5: Greedy Look Ahead
Part 6: Heuristics & Hybrids
Part 7: Breadth-First Search
Part 8: Depth-First Search
Part 9: Dijkstra's Algorithm
Part 10: Dijkstra's Hybrids
Part 11: Priority Queues
Part 12: Summary

LEGEND OF LOTUS SPRING

On this most romantic of days, why not play through a traditional Chinese love story in The Legend of Lotus Spring (1999, Xing Xing). Taking place in a beautifully re-created Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuan Ming Yuan or the Old Summer Palace) in Beijing during the Qing Dynasty, it recounts the tragic love story between Emperor Xian Feng and his concubine HeHanQu, a woman who he lovingly renames Lotus Spring.

Read more »

A Word About The Polish Gaming Market

Last January, I was travelling in the European east. The main purpose of this trip was to finish my post-doctorate research about "Advergames: games as marketing tools" that I developed with Paneurópska vysoká škola at Bratislava (Slovakia). I presented the results and it was great (one more trophy achieved on the academic game).

After some days in Bratislava, I travelled to Kiev (Ukraine) and then to Krakow (Poland). In the last part of this trip, in Poland, I visited one awesome gaming studio named Moonlit. Knowing that the Polish land is a great market for games, I sent some e-mails trying to contact people from the local industry to share some ideas and discover new points of view. I talked to Mateusz Wanatowicz, PR and marketing specialist in Moonlit Games. Below, I surmised our conversation, sharing highlights of the polish gaming industry, Moonlit projects and an overview of polish gaming market.

1.Why do we need to pay attention to the Polish gaming market?

Well, it's one very important market in the central Europe. According to the last Newzoo gaming research, the country (with a population of 34 million people) has profited around 500 million dollars with gaming products. In comparison to Brazil - a country with 210 million people and a profit of 1.3 billion dollars in the gaming market - it's a very interesting emergent market to pay attention to.





2. About Moonlit Games studio

Moonlit is a gaming studio and a software house. In 2018, the company started to produce two authorial projects: Playerless - an arcade game where you need to fix bugs and the NPCs to run it correctly (PC); and Ignis - a battle arena game with wizards, sorcery and combats (PC and Xbox). Below, you can check some trailers and contents from both games.








3. Some aspects of the Polish gaming industry 

It is a promising industry as we saw in the first topic. According to Wanatowicz, the government of Poland sees this industry as a profitable area to invest money in and an entry door for many startups and small initiatives for new business. Wanatowicz highlighted that big events, games jams and young talents are receiving support from the government; and, another important point: careers in gaming area (coding, game designing, 3D art etc.) are also prominent in the academic area.

Another important thing to mention is the fact that the games from the series "The Witcher" were a way to present the Polish gaming industry to the whole world.

It is important to say that board games and card games have a main role in this context too. Local production of analogic games is growing year by year.

4.Polish gamers

Wanatowicz also said that Polish gamers, in a general way, support the local industry and they are proud of the national industry and gaming production.

5.A final message to the Gaming Conceptz audience

Mateusz Wanatowicz emphasizes that part of the success of a gaming industry is about how government, gamer community, studios/companies and universities can join powers to create a fertile ecosystem for different kinds of projects. Big initiatives as "The Witcher" series are fundamental, but supporting indie studios, small startups, events and clear marketing rules are also a key for a good gaming market.



Note: check Moonlit works in the official site and social media by clicking in the links!

#GoGamers

People Behind The Meeples - Episode 166: Jonathan Woodard

Welcome to People Behind the Meeples, a series of interviews with indie game designers.  Here you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know about the people who make the best games that you may or may not have heard of before.  If you'd like to be featured, head over to http://gjjgames.blogspot.com/p/game-designer-interview-questionnaire.html and fill out the questionnaire! You can find all the interviews here: People Behind the Meeples. Support me on Patreon!

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Name:	Jonathan Woodard
Email:	woodardj@gmail.com
Location:	Boulder, CO based, but playing "digital nomad" in Europe in 2019
Day Job:	Fractional CTO; I help technology businesses build strong engineering teams, software, and process.
Designing:	Over ten years!
Blog:	https://woodar.dj/
BGG:	Jonathan Woodard
Facebook:	facebook.com/woodardj
Twitter:	@woodardj
Instagram:	@woodardj
Other:	I use a lot of those, but don't have public profiles on any.
Find my games at:	GenCon, then Essen! Also online: Potemkin Empire on Kickstarter Potemkin Empire on BGG Time Chase on BGG

Today's Interview is with:

Jonathan Woodard
Interviewed on: 1/14/2019

Jonathan Woodard has been designing games for a while now, and has his first two published games coming out this year. Right now, on Kickstarter, you can find Potemkin Empire with Indie Boards & Cards and later this year Time Chase will be available from Renegade Games. Be sure to check out Potemkin Empire right away; it only has a few more hours on Kickstarter!

Some Basics
Tell me a bit about yourself.

How long have you been designing tabletop games?
Over ten years!

Why did you start designing tabletop games?
I recently found some of my earliest designs (~ late middle school / 1996), and I think it was because board games were just… what I was doing a lot of — Hero Quest, Dark Tower, The Omega Virus, and Magic: TG were a few of my key early inspirations, and I was just driven to *make something*, so that's what I made.

What game or games are you currently working on?
A tile laying game about Harris Hawks, a game called Weathercasters about meteorologists who are also wizards, a game about the destruction of Gaul during the Gallic war, and a few others still very early.

Have you designed any games that have been published?
Two games signed, releasing this year (2019… likely GenCon & Essen)

What is your day job?
Fractional CTO; I help technology businesses build strong engineering teams, software, and process.

Your Gaming Tastes
My readers would like to know more about you as a gamer.

Where do you prefer to play games?
With friends in someone's home, or at a bar!

Who do you normally game with?
I've got a group who played through all of Rise of Fenris together, and occasionally for stuff like Terra Mystica, also lots of exploring new games with my designer friends from Denver's Prototopia group, and some 2p stuff (Odin's Ravens, Fox in the Forest) with my wife at breweries.

If you were to invite a few friends together for game night tonight, what games would you play?
I've been really wanting to give "Root" a try.

Do you like to have music playing while you play games? If so, what kind?
A have a friend who always puts on "cinematic" movie soundtracks while we're playing stuff, which is rad, but I never think to do it myself.

What's your favorite FLGS?
I love Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor Michigan, but I'm struggling to find a favorite in Colorado.

What is your current favorite game? Least favorite that you still enjoy? Worst game you ever played?
Rise of Fenris really let me connect with Scythe at a new level, which was great,

What is your favorite game mechanic? How about your least favorite?
Flexible economies are 🔥— the resource tracks in Power Grid and Wealth of Nations are some of my favorite applications of real-world concepts in tabletop gaming. Also anything where there are clever side-effects of the primary actions you choose. I'd say I'm pretty shit at anything that involves linking a lot of complicated combos together; I might be the worst M:TG player I've ever met, so I get frustrated with those. Also anything where there's a lot of everyone-plays-on-their-own-mat… I like the interaction and verification that people (me, mostly) aren't making silly mistakes with their turns.

What's your favorite game that you just can't ever seem to get to the table?
I've been trying to get Wealth of Nations back to the table for almost three years…

What styles of games do you play?
I like to play Board Games, Card Games, RPG Games

Do you design different styles of games than what you play?
I like to design Board Games, Card Games, RPG Games, Video Games, Other Games?

OK, here's a pretty polarizing game. Do you like and play Cards Against Humanity?
How long of a response can Google Forms fit? My opinion on this game is incredibly nuanced — The game can be super fun in the right crowd, but I think the mechanisms and choices of what they include on some cards have set up a lot of people to express their worst selves and make all sorts of awful jokes during gaming, but I'm stoked about the pro-social efforts the company is backing with their money-printing machine. I also think that the fun this triggers is a really base dopamine hit, and it just presses that button over and over again, which makes it really hard to play anything more cerebral after — game night turns into that science study where the gerbil starves to death because it just keeps hitting the 'orgasm' button and ignores the 'food' button.

You as a Designer
OK, now the bit that sets you apart from the typical gamer. Let's find out about you as a game designer.

When you design games, do you come up with a theme first and build the mechanics around that? Or do you come up with mechanics and then add a theme? Or something else?
I usually get inspiration for games from the world around me (real-life systems with interesting interactions, etc.) and I put them into my Catch Sheet (https://woodar.dj/blog/catch-sheet/) to let them stew while I work on other stuff. So a little bit like theme-inspired-mechanics, if you will. I also wrote an 8-part blog series on why it's more important to consider the Player Experience (https://woodar.dj/blog/player-experience-px/) rather than either of these approaches.

Have you ever entered or won a game design competition?
I have! I submitted a design for the Letter Head contest with Atlas which won me a copy of one of their games and inclusion in the game's "DLC" if you will. My first signed game was also a result of entering the design contest at Geekway to the West last year. I didn't win, but the sponsoring publisher liked it enough that they chose to sign it in addition to the winning game.

Do you have a current favorite game designer or idol?
Tough to say! Sometimes when I see the clever interactions some of the 'modern legends' like Lang or Daviau or Stegmaier come up with, I just have to sit back in awe. I also have a ton of respect for Daniel Solis, and his commitment to designing and iterating in public via his twitter feed and Patreon. And I have to give a shout to Daryl Andrews, who hustles harder than just about anyone

Where or when or how do you get your inspiration or come up with your best ideas?
Being out in the world, and observing how systems operate in and around each other; consuming a rich array of media and inputs, and just trying to keep my mind fertile enough to let the ideas settle and germinate.

How do you go about playtesting your games?
I have a mailing list of local friends who have expressed a willingness to try my unfinished crap; there's also an invaluable designers/testing group in Denver called Prototopia that I've been a part of for a few years now. But while I'm traveling this year, 'how I playtest things' is a bit of an open question at the moment.

Do you like to work alone or as part of a team? Co-designers, artists, etc.?
I wish I could be a good co-designer, because I feel like some of the teamups we've seen recently have put out some really incredible stuff, but so far I've proven to be pretty terrible at it. Always something work on!

What do you feel is your biggest challenge as a game designer?
I struggle with cutting out cards… I find it so tedious and it drags me to a halt on almost every design that includes them, which is bad, because cards/decks are one of the most powerful components available to designers. I also find it really hard to ask people for things, so sending out a blast to my testers list to schedule things is sometimes a challenge.

If you could design a game within any IP, what would it be?
Been noodling recently on what a game based on two of my favorite 90s cartoons no one seems to remember might look like — either The Centurions or Dinosaucers. Or Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys. Really any television show that's been lost to time.

What do you wish someone had told you a long time ago about designing games?
Just f*ing do it, man. Build the prototype, get people to try it, keep iterating on it. And that publishers are very approachable if you just email them or attend a few conventions. If I'd actually gotten to the business of *designing games* instead of just scribbling in my notebook when I first started coming up with game designs… I'd potentially be a household name by now.

What advice would you like to share about designing games?
Make sure you have a really broad gaming and media 'diet' — the games you design tend to feel like the games you have familiarity with, and if what you play/hear about/see is limited, your creative design space will be too!

Would you like to tell my readers what games you're working on and how far along they are?
Games that will soon be published are: Two in 2019! One should be dropping at GenCon, the other hitting Kickstarter in the next few months.
Games currently crowdfunding: Potemkin Empire for just a few more hours!

Currently looking for a publisher I have: Trying to find one my earliest and most ambitious designs, Valour, a home now going on about four years. It's a game chronicling the Gallic War, from the perspective of Gaul; it highlights some of the Celtic Gaul's interesting ways of interacting and governing each other, in the face of an insurmountable invading force of Julius Caesar's Roman armies. It's competitive, but many mechanisms require either explicitly or implicitly to help the other players out.

I also have a lighter all-ages tactical game I'm shopping around, called First Snow! Where players team up to wail on each other during a snowday; it leverages some of the interesting characteristics of a snowball fight: The battlefield IS both the ammunition, and also any hope of a defensive structure.
I'm planning to crowdfund: Never say never, but… probably never.
Games I feel are in the final development and tweaking stage are: A shorter tile-laying/area control game tentatively called Harris' Hawk Hunt, where players are a family of Harris Hawks out on a hunt. I wrote a design diary about this just this month where I go into a lot of detail about that idea I mentioned previously, where my best ideas come from interacting and observing systems out in the real world: https://woodar.dj/blog/harris-hawk-designer-diary/
Games that I'm playtesting are: A bunch of stuff swimming in this space: A suite of games that interact with each other and can be played simultaneously (working, badly on my end, with a co-designer), a Viking-themed trading/economic game called Thingvalley, a game using weather-map symbology where players are spell-casting meteorologists called Weathercasters.
Games that are in the early stages of development and beta testing are: Something really cool and genre-shifting that I'm not ready to talk about just yet!
And games that are still in the very early idea phase are: Too many to list 😬

Are you a member of any Facebook or other design groups? (Game Maker's Lab, Card and Board Game Developers Guild, etc.)
Yeah, a bunch of those, but I try not to log into Facebook more than once a week or so.

And the oddly personal, but harmless stuff…
OK, enough of the game stuff, let's find out what really makes you tick! These are the questions that I'm sure are on everyone's minds!

Star Trek or Star Wars? Coke or Pepsi? VHS or Betamax?
Both excellent franchises but when the battle lines are drawn I'm definitely bringing a lightsaber. Pepsi, but I don't drink pop anymore. Gotta go with Laserdisc.

What hobbies do you have besides tabletop games?
Writing; building software; is Crossfit a hobby?

What is something you learned in the last week?
Sparkling wines made in Spain are called "Cava" — but the term was only invented after they joined the EU and became subject to France's laws of appellation; before that they just called it "Spanish Champagne".

Favorite type of music? Books? Movies?
I like lots of music, but find myself drawn to metal a lot, it helps me concentrate. And since it's such a divided genre, more specifically symphonic and folk metal. The best show I've ever been to was an Eluveitie show. Most of my reading is fiction, sci-fi or fantasy. Movies, I'm sort of all over the board.

What was the last book you read?
Mostly an audiobook guy; the last book(s) I listened to were N. K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" books. Really incredible works.

Do you play any musical instruments?
"Rhythm" and "Pitch" are two of my dump stats, so everyone is pretty much better off if I don't.

Tell us something about yourself that you think might surprise people.
I did two "Ironman" races in my twenties. A lot of people I've met more recently don't know that.

Tell us about something crazy that you once did.
Broke into the Michigan Central Station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Central_Station) which has been abandoned for decades; Climbed 17 flights of rotting stairs to the roof & took pictures all along the way. It's an amazing building, and was a relatively common "UrbEx" destination at the time, but still dangerous as hell.

Who is your idol?
Billy

What would you do if you had a time machine?
I'd see what humankind gets up to / looks like over the next 100, 1000, 10,000 years.

Are you an extrovert or introvert?
I think the term is ambivert? Sometimes I get super amped being in a crowd, and other times I just need to get the hell away from everyone. Both kind of recharge me, but depends on my mood.

If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?
Without dipping too far into spoilers, there's a certain appeal to Christian Walker from the Powers comic series, except that he seems to repeatedly forget everything. Otherwise, one who could read minds… Martian Manhunter or The Shadow?

Have any pets?
Negative.

When the next asteroid hits Earth, causing the Yellowstone caldera to explode, California to fall into the ocean, the sea levels to rise, and the next ice age to set in, what current games or other pastimes do you think (or hope) will survive into the next era of human civilization? What do you hope is underneath that asteroid to be wiped out of the human consciousness forever?
Tribalism, and the fear and hatred of people who are "different" — I'd hope such a catastrophic global event would force us to realize that we're all the same species trapped on the same rock, and we should act like it. I think games that didn't require a lot of storage or were easy to cart around would stick around — card games, etc. I also think we'd revert back to our species' storytelling roots, perhaps storytelling games & RPGs would become a universal pass-time, or way to share history.

If you'd like to send a shout out to anyone, anyone at all, here's your chance (I can't guarantee they'll read this though):
Can't overlook BeBo, who provided some much-needed advice and encouragement at a critical time in my growth as a designer.

Just a Bit More
Thanks for answering all my crazy questions! Is there anything else you'd like to tell my readers?

Be excellent to each other. 🚀

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Thank you for reading this People Behind the Meeples indie game designer interview! You can find all the interviews here: People Behind the Meeples and if you'd like to be featured yourself, you can fill out the questionnaire here: http://gjjgames.blogspot.com/p/game-designer-interview-questionnaire.html

Did you like this interview?  Pleasse show your support: Support me on Patreon! Or click the heart at Board Game Links , like GJJ Games on Facebook , or follow on Twitter .  And be sure to check out my games on  Tabletop Generation.

People Of Frictional: Gregor Panič

WHO AM I?

Hi there! I'm Gregor and I'm a designer and programmer at Frictional, which means I'm responsible for all the fun events in our levels. Okay, maybe they're fun just for us.

It's me! And the sign on our door, printed on an A4 and a little crumpled...

I'm a more recent recruit, having joined around September 2016. My job description, gameplay programmer / designer, is purposefully vague. While I mainly work on level scripting, I also spend time on AI, gameplay systems and level design. I also worked on our collaboration with the Tobii Eye Tracker, which I will talk about later. The great part about this is that my work never gets stale and almost none of my days feel the same.

I'm originally from a little known country called Slovenia, but I've recently moved to the land of the vikings to become one myself. Or, in other words: I moved to Malmö around two months ago and now work from our fairly new office.

My setup at work - right next to the fanart wall! No deskmate yet, though. :'(

I absolutely adore our office and go there pretty much every day to socialize with and get inspired by my co-workers. I'm also the one who nags everyone with occasional movie and gaming nights, where we usually grab some snacks, relax and watch a horror movie (obviously), or games like FIFA and Jackbox Party Pack!

BACKGROUND

I can't really remember the time when I first started playing games. I do know that around the late 90s my dad brought home an Intel 80186 PC one day, thinking he would use it for work. He was wrong. After he showed me a couple of MS-DOS games and I realized I could make things move by pressing buttons, I became glued to that PC. My parents didn't manage to pry me from it, so I've been playing games ever since. Not on the same machine, obviously.

I played a lot of games, but didn't touch the horror genre for the longest time. I still remember having vivid nightmares and being unable to sleep whenever I saw something remotely scary on television. When I was older, however, a friend of mine bought me Amnesia as a "gift". It was a dare, of course, but because I didn't want to disappoint my friend, I played through it. It was just as scary as everyone was telling me, perhaps even more so.

But while I was playing it I also realized that it was about more than just scaring the living hell out of me. It managed to fully immerse me in its world and story, which I had not experienced to this degree before. This is how I got introduced to the horror genre, and to Frictional, which would later impact my life more than I could have possibly imagined.

Making games has been my dream ever since I can remember. Given how much fun I had playing them, I thought it would be great if I could make my own – which is why I always liked messing around with settings, seeing what I could do with cheat codes, and figuring out damage formulas so I could get an advantage. It wasn't until I got sucked into a game called Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, however, that I actually made my first array into creating my own content. I made lightsaber hilts, maps, and even modified some scripts to make the game play like I wanted to.

Unfortunately, growing up in Slovenia there was no real game dev scene there, so I forgot about my dream. It simply never occured to me that I could make games for a living. However, since I was already using my computer so much, I thought it would be fun to work in IT. So I learned some basic C++ programming in high school, then went to a computer science university where I learned a lot more about programming and software in general.

For a long time I resigned myself to becoming a web developer, taking some summer jobs and part-time work in that field. The job became more and more mundane and boring, until I finally realized that I couldn't do it long term, and that I had to find something more fulfilling. That is when I remembered my dream of making games, how much fun they brought me and how great it would be to be able to help someone else have the same experience. I already had a lot of programming experience, so I became determined to join the games industry.

I immediately quit my part-time job and started working on my first small game. I wanted to do everything on my own so that I would learn all the intricacies of game development. A year or so of studying and work amounted to Welkin Road, a little puzzle platformer with grappling hooks.

In Welkin Road you use your two grappling hooks to solve movement-based puzzles.

While I was in the process of finishing Welkin Road, I started looking at potential studios I could join. That's when I saw a tweet from Frictional, mentioning that they were looking for a designer / programmer. I didn't think I was ready, but I figured this was my only chance to work with the company, so I sent my resume in anyway.

To my big surprise they offered me a work test, to see whether I was suitable for the role. I gave it my best, but after I sent in my project I tried to prepare myself for the inevitable let-down. Instead I got a positive reply and an invitation to an interview. The final decision came a couple of weeks later.

Spoiler alert: I got the job.

Given that I was a big fan of Amnesia and SOMA, the decision to accept was a no-brainer. However, it took me quite a while to properly register that I had fulfilled my lifelong dream. A year and a half later I realize how lucky I am to be one of the few people who can wake up on Mondays with a smile on their face.

After joining, I immediately started working on my introductory tasks aimed at learning the new tools. I joined at the same time as Max, so we bonded over struggling to understand all the new stuff. When those tasks were done, I started working on my first real project: designing and implementing eye tracking features in SOMA, which I will talk about in more detail in the next section.

A while after I was brought on, the company started looking to set up a studio in Malmö. I already knew that if I wanted to make games, I would most likely have to move, so the decision to move to Malmö didn't take me long to make. Finding a place to stay took a while, but I eventually managed to find a nice apartment and settle in, in no small part thanks to my incredibly kind and welcoming co-workers.

The setup in my new home in Malmö!

FIRING LASERS (more commonly known as Eye Tracking)

As promised, I will now spend some time talking about my adventures in eye tracking. After receiving a unit from Tobii, I first tested it with a bunch of games that already had eye tracking support. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was a particularly useful use case study, since it had a robust implementation and used the eye tracker in interesting ways. I was initially very surprised at how well the eye tracker worked in that game, and how seamless and intuitive it was to use without putting any strain on my eyes. This gave me the confidence that we could use this to enhance SOMA.

Once I got a feel for what the technology was capable of, I read through Tobii's SDK documentation and code samples to figure out how it all worked. In simple terms, the Tobii eye tracker provides a continuous data stream of screen coordinates that represent the location on the screen the user is looking at. Think of it as firing 60+ laser beams per second from your eyes to your monitor. Bring it on, Cyclops!

After I was done feeling like a superhero, I looked into how we could use this in our own engine, HPL3. Since Tobii's SDK was easy to use, integrating it into HPL3 wasn't too difficult, especially with the help of our engine programmer Peter.

With the technical aspects more or less dealt with, I started thinking about the design of our eye tracking features, and how we could best make use of this technology to enhance the game. This included brainstorming sessions, quick prototyping and a lot of feedback from the rest of the team.

It quickly became clear that while controlling and moving stuff around on the screen with your eyes is fun, it becomes tiring and uncomfortable really fast. For a good experience, the player must never be actively thinking about using their eyes. Instead, the game should react to the player's natural eye movements and try to enhance the experience. A negative side effect of this design principle is that unfortunately quite a lot of features become very subtle and hard for the player to notice consciously, despite having an overall positive effect.

The white circle is where the player is looking.

Another interesting aspect of designing these features was how eye tracking could be used in a very immersive first person horror game. Horror games often rely on where the player is looking to trigger certain events, which always means a certain level of uncertainty about whether the player actually registered what was happening on the screen or not. With eye tracking, this uncertainty became very minimal, which meant that the timing of a lot of the events in SOMA naturally improved.

In the end, we ended up with a number of eye tracking features we were happy with. The most noticeable ones are extended view, which makes the viewport pan towards where the player is looking, and the ability to control the flashlight with your eyes. A number of enemies also react to the player's gaze, such as the flesher monster becoming aggressive when looked at and teleporting when the player blinks, or the deep sea diver stopping when the player maintains eye contact.

Other features are much more subtle and designed to enhance immersion and mood. For example, staring at creepy and gory scenes zooms the screen slightly, giving the impression that Simon is in a trance or shock-like state and can't look away. When the player looks at enemies, the screen distortion effect intensifies to further discourage players from looking at them.

Additionally there are some really secret ones, such as Ross' distorted computer messages appearing exactly when the player blinks, to further reinforce how Ross is inside Simon's head. My personal favorite, however, is a subtle reaction from K8, the incredibly friendly and helpful swimbot, which gives the player a small opportunity to communicate with it.

The developer showcase of eye tracking features.

In summary, working on eye tracking has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience both because of the challenge, knowledge gained and the creative freedom. Besides, who doesn't enjoy firing lasers with their eyes? The end result hopefully enhances the SOMA experience, even if just a tiny little bit. So if you have the PC version on Windows and a Tobii eye tracker, consider giving an even more immersive version of SOMA a go!

The official trailer for eye tracking in SOMA.

Eye tracking is just a small part of my work at Frictional though, as I'm currently working on one of our next projects. I'm already really proud of what we're creating and I'm happier than ever with my choice to follow my dream of making games. We're all really excited to be able to share more of what we're doing, but until then we'll just keep doing our best. This also reminds me it is time for another gaming night, to keep our spirits up!

Quality Frictional Humour™ from a recent Jackbox Party night.

Wanna see who else works at Frictional? Check out the rest of the People of Frictional posts!

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What Is A Canted Sight In PUBG?

Ever tried to use two attachment in one weapon at the same time. "It's impossible" you might be saying. But it's possible now because PUBG has launched a new feature recently called Canted Sight which is a secondary attachment. Read more to know more about it, how to use it, what precautions to take etc.

About it :
 
                 Canted(meaning tilted) Sight is basically a new attachment that allows a player to quickly switch between the 1x Canted Sight and the other scope or attachments used. It is a secondary attachment. For now, it is only available on PUBG PC but PUBG might bring it on other platforms too.

How to use it :
 
                       The Canted Sight is actually the tilting of the gun at an angle. This can be done by pressing ALT+Right Click or one can change this to his own comfortability in the Settings menu.

In which weapons can Canted Sight be used:

        Canted Sight can be used in the following weapons :

Precautions : 

1. Following points about primary sight should be remembered:

         I. If you equip Canted Sight only, your primary attachment will be the Canted  Sight.
           
        II. If you equip Canted Sight before any scope, your primary attachment will be the canted sight.
          
         III. If you Canted Sight after any scope, your primary attachment will be the  Canted Sight.

 2. Attaching the Canted Sight might change the weapon's position and view of angle for the user but there will no changes in the gunplay.

3. It can affect the peeking towards left or right.