Soon after Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor, and began conquering towns as part of his Persian Campaign. He ordered his restless men not to loot surrounding farms and villages since the land would soon be theirs and to avoid breeding excessive hostility against them. But he told them to pay special […]
A couple of days ago, Ardwulf’s Lair had a stream where the topic was music for wargaming. A great topic, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it so I’ve put together my list of favorites just to get them in one place. Unsurprisingly they’re mostly Cold War and some anti-war protest tunes. […]
Review of “Alexander: The Making of a God”
Oh boy. This topic’s been brewing for the past year and it’s really started to heat up in the board game world and now, as expected, in wargaming. It’s the issue of the ethics of wargame publishers using generative AI in their games. George Pearson, who’s been wargaming since 1968, recently posted in The Board […]
Hello and happy holiday season, everyone! I figured I could sneak one blog post in 2023 and pretend I’ve been keeping up with it all along. It’s been my one area of neglect on this digital board game journey, but I’ve been busily working on Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great since the last […]
New Video! It’s been a while, but I think this is a fun one. I go over some of the tricks I used to make the enemy AI behave in a bunch of ways that reflect history but also allow for reacting to the human player.
I’ve added the ability to switch scenarios. This also begins the UI work outside of the main game area. Here I’m going from Chaeronea to Granicus (still under construction) and back.
Hi there! It’s been an interesting time since my last update in coding my hex-and-counter game, Arete: The Battles of Alexander the Great. I visited Gettysburg for the first time and, apart from being impressive and impactful for its history as you’d expect, it’s a fantastic town to hang out and spend some time in. […]
Well all my Find/Replace work paid off and this is exciting. Save and Load work and allow for the all-important “Resume Game” option. Here’s a vid going from a new game to a saved one.Note this also shows a sneak peek at the set-up for The Battle of Chaeronea.
Well, it looks like the weather’s finally warming up for us in the Northeast US. You know what that means. That’s right, more sitting behind a monitor designing and coding, yeah! Thought this would be a good time to document some recent progress as I’m in the weeds now and the changes aren’t as big […]
This is the first attempt running the game on an iPad Pro as a native app. Not purely native as the game itself isn’t coded with Swift, but in a Swift container and building a real app. This was a tough way to discover that Safari on iOS doesn’t support CSS filters on SVG elements […]
Walkthrough of the game after around 8-9 months of designing and programming. Still under construction with a long way to go, but it’s a full game and – dare I say – fun to play.
Long time since my last post, but it’s because I’ve been going full throttle with the development. Fixin’ bugs and takin’ names! Last time I discussed how I went about building a dynamic wargame hex grid with counters. To get this feeling like a game, the next thing we need to do is make those […]
This is going to document some of the first steps I took in planning and creating my digital hex-and-counter wargame. I’ll share some decisions I made and why I made them, touching on technology and design choices. If you haven’t read them already, check out my posts about the use of hexes in Part 1 […]
In part 1 of this two-part post, I gave a brief overview of the history of hexes in tabletop wargames. Now I want to share my initial findings in planning my own digital hex board game and some unique hex geometric characteristics. I think you’ll also see why, to a developer, hexes require a bit […]
Let’s go over a brief history of hexes in wargames and then I’ll delve into practical application and how I’ll apply it in my design in a follow-up post. Much of this is common knowledge among wargamers, and this is by no means meant to be an extensive history. Instead this is meant to serve […]
During the pandemic, I went deeper down the rabbit-hole of board games. I’ve always been into the hobby and had really started playing wargames in the past few years. It was something I tried to do as a kid but never got into (read: couldn’t find anyone to play with). So I started playing even […]