Valve's Employee Handbook

I thought this video was interesting:

Brain science also talks about focusing on strengths. If you're good at X and bad at Y, you might end up spending a whole lot of time on Y. In addition to making you miserable, it's also just not that effective. While at first glance you might think if you're bad at something, then it's easier to improve because there's so much possible improvement you could do, it's usually more like the opposite. If you're good at something, your neural pathways (as in, the physical structures of your brain) are better set up to do it, and you have more ability to learn and grow quickly at that thing. So if possible, develop your strengths. And find other people whose strengths are in your areas of weakness.

In a small company, we don't usually have this luxury though. Probably the lead designer of Portal 2 didn't do all the graphic design for the box it comes in, because Valve probably has a team devoted entirely to graphic design for marketing materials and packaging. (Meanwhile, I do both things.) That said, strengths-focus is definitely something even a small company should think about when adding any employees, or even contractors or volunteers. Just a little help in your areas of weakness, you could then have much more time to develop and use your strengths to an even better degree.

In other words, Valve's handbook's stance on that makes sense to me.

Ongoing Development

You probably haven't heard much about what I'm working on, but there are an overwhelming number of things in the works. The Puzzle Strike kickstarter is now behind us, and thankfully shipped on time. If you missed out on the kickstarter, the game will start shipping to everyone else in a couple weeks, and you can get it here. And here's what else is going on:

Flash Duel Online

We're working on the online version of Flash Duel at fantasystrike.com. If you have a star membership, you can see our progress on that right now, actually. We're focusing on functionality first, and we've gotten most of the modes implemented, from 1v1 to 2v2 to even the Dragon Raid. Flash Duel online also has animated 8-bit sprites for every character thanks to pixel artist Conor "BT" Town.

Yomi and Puzzle Strike Online

Yomi and Puzzle Strike have been available to play online for quite some time now on fantasystrike.com. For a while now, we've been working on graphical and UI upgrades that will make both games look a lot more polished. Thanks to everyone who supported the site so far, I just wanted to let you know we've been working hard to keep improving it, even though you haven't seen a lot of what we've been up to yet. We're actually spending far, far more on these upcoming upgrades than the total amount we've ever made, so it's kind of a big deal. We're still 2 or 3 months from getting these enhancements on the live servers.

The Yomi Expansion

There's 10 new characters in development for Yomi, and you can actually play them right now at fantasystrike.com in the non-rules-enforced mode if you're a star member. I'm drowning in graphic design tasks on the physical version, as I'm making 10 new card backs, way too many boxes, a totally rewritten rulebook, and other various supplements that need graphic design. Not to mention art directing a hundred pieces of character art (bad news: that part is going disastrously slowly and is delaying the whole project). As for the gameplay, the new characters are pretty varied, with several interesting new mechanics and styles. They are pretty balanced and working well overall right now, though tuning will be ongoing for a long time.

There will also be a 2v2 mode, a 2v1 mode, and a solo mode. I'm really excited about the 2v2 mode. It's been a lot of work to figure out how to make it feel like Marvel vs. Capcom style, be fun, and actually work right (emphasis on the actually work right). I think we got it! I also think 2v2 will knock your socks off someday.

SCG4 is Codex

Sirlin Card Game 4 is actually called Codex. While the Yomi expansion is my main focus now, I'm working on this as well. I recently finished graphic design for all 56 of the game's different card frames (oh my god), and I continue to refine the gameplay here and there over time. It will take years for the card illustrations and hundreds of thousands of dollars just for that probably (no idea how to pay for that btw, kickstarter I assume), and I don't even really want to start on that until Yomi's art is done. So that means even though the gameplay part of this game is actually practically done right now—all cards exist and have been playtested for quite a while—the release is far off. A game this deep and complex needs a lot of balance testing though, so at least we'll have plenty more time for that.

I've also been testing a pretty interesting free-for-all mode for Codex. FFA generally has problems in most games where it's too much about ganging up (make an alliance with your friend before the game starts, even) and eliminating whoever you want. Also why even fight anyone when you can sit back and let the others weaken each other? The unusual FFA mode I've been trying addresses all these problems and is so far working well. You might say it's inspired by the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, but actually that's not quite right. Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition's FFA mode was actually inspired by Codex's, it's just that you got to see the results in reverse chronological order.

If you haven't tried the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike, I highly recommend it, by the way. There's no player-elimination and there's naturally shifting alliances as the game progresses, because whenever anyone is in a position to win, the rest of the players want to temporarily help each other to prevent that. It usually leads to exciting, close games. And if you have tried it, it would be nice if you rated Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition and/or Puzzle Strike Shadows on boardgamegeek. (Scroll down to "user information, then "rating" to rate a game.)

Not much more info on Codex right now. It's a troublesome situation that explaining the unusual workings of it gives other companies years to do the same kind of thing before I can even release it. I will say that it's inspired by RTS games such as WarCraft 3 and StarCraft, that you have a lot of flexibility available to you during gameplay that you don't have in CCGs, and that there's no randomness in the resource system.

I will now go back to making logos, boxes, rulebooks, more boxes, and more boxes.

All Puzzle Strike Kickstarter Orders Shipped!

As of today, Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition and Shadows) has shipped to every single kickstarter backer. We managed to meet our goal of the September ship date, which is somewhat of a rare thing for games on kickstarter, ha. If any of you have recieved your order, but not the randomizer cards, don't worry. For some orders, the cards didn't fit in the shipping box, so they were mailed out to you separately. If you have any questions about your particular order or shipping situation, you can contact Game Salute (see the info in the image above).

Thanks to everyone for the support, I'm glad we managed to get extra components (boards and screens) into Puzzle Strike, and I hope you enjoy the free randomizer cards, and online coupon for www.fantasystrike.com too.

If you missed out on the kickstarter, Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, Shadows, as well as various extras like the 100+ page strategy guide are available here, and will ship on October 28th if you order far enough ahead of time.

Thanks again!

Puzzle Strike on Watch It Played

Watch It Played is an awesome series that shows how board games work and demonstrates playing them. The theory is that there's no need to "review" the games because it becomes self-evident if the game is for you once you understand whatever good qualities it happens to have. I have personally found it very helpful, and I was really excited when Flash Duel appeard on Watch It Played.

And now, the first few episodes for Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition) are up!

The rest of the episodes will be here.

Thanks Rodney and family!

Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, the Shadows standalone expansion, and some other related goodies are now up for pre-order. Keep in mind that we still plan to ship to Kickstarter backers around the end of September, and that means non-kickstarter orders won't ship until about the end of October. (Also note, if your order *contains* anything that won't ship until the end of October, your whole order will ship together once it's all ready.)

And the free online version has been been up for quite some time now at fantasystrike.com, too.

PAX Prime Thanks

Serious YomiThanks to Gabe and Tycho for holding PAX. It's so big and complex of a thing that it's hard to imagine what must go into planning and executing it all. If you guys are reading, great job, though I have one complaint you probably can't possibly do anything about. At PAX East, the layout is one enormous "room" the size of an airplane hangar or something with the video game area in the front and the tabletop games area in the back. The booths where tabletop game companies do demos are right next to the place where tournaments for those games are run, which are right next to the free play area. Because of this, at PAX East it was very easy for people who wanted to find me to find me, and it was generally easy for anyone to find anyone and to meet up and play things.

At PAX Prime though the company booths, tournament area for tabletop games, and freeplay area for tabletop games were so segmented that it was logistically very hard to deal with. The tournament area was in a different building 3 blocks away from the rest (rather than 10 feet away), so it makes it much more inconvenient to enter tournaments. When people at the tournament area asked where is the main place to buy games, giving them directions to a place 3 blocks away isn't a great thing to have to do. And trying to meet up with people in the freeplay tabletop game area is generally very difficult because there were like 6 different rooms (rather than one big space) and it's not possible to predict which rooms will have empty seats, so you can't really say "let's meet at room 210" or whatever.

Anyway, it seems like you've outgrown the entire city of Seattle! It looks like you need a new convention center that's way, way bigger than what's there. You've managed to have to have the problem of being "too popular," ha.

Thanks to everyone to attended and helped run the Sirlin Games tournaments, and to those who played my customizable card game, too. It was interesting seeing how new people reacted to it and you guys gave me generally very high quality feedback for people who were so new to the game.

I never did end up meeting the elusive Day9 but super thanks to Thom From Canada, the diamond league Terran player who had me sign his "gg" button, and then waited in line for an hour to have Day9 sign right next to it so he could tell Day9 that I would really like to talk to him, lol. Thom From Canada was also a star playtester of my customizable card game at PAX. I liked how he made a list of a few properties of the game ("things I know to be true," he said) in order to derive a few second-order statements about what must be good strategy tips. He was excited to hear that I had reasons his strategy tips might not be totally right (because it meant new information for him). And it was hilarious to see him play more and go against all his own tips. I also see why he's such a high ranking player in Starcraft. He made constant strategy mistakes while playing the card game the first couple times, creating a comedy of errors. Maybe embarrassing and funny, but I think this allowed him to very quickly learn a whole bunch of things not to do again. I wonder if there's something to that. Try all you can when you're new and accept that you'll make play mistakes. That results in lots of bad choices, but also teaches you faster than if you try to play in a very restrictive, "correct" way when you are new to a game (maybe?). In any case, big thanks to TFC. (And to the rest who played, like Claytus and Stephen Keller from the comments section of my Diablo3 post, lol.)

Oh and by the way, I won the Street Fighter HD Remix tournament again. And I met Cammy.