Misadventures in GameDev

Hey all! Duadikos.com and SpiralFold.com are being rebranded to Cortexabyte! The website has gotten a major facelift and I’m planning on being more active in gamvedev going forward. Enjoy!

Wow, it’s been ages since my last post. Well every year I do the Global Game Jam with my best friend pyromuffin (and usually other folks too). This year’s theme was “Wave”, so we made a surfing duel game. I think it turned out to be our best game yet! It turned out _way_ more strategic than I think any of us expected. Screenshot below: Windows OSX Linux Source

I just finished up my submission for Ludum Dare 32. The game was made in 24 hours, and I spent the rest of the time making the GUI work in different resolutions/platforms. Check out the links below to play! Web Windows OSX Linux iOS Android Source

How to hire an expert: IP Lawyers and the Trademark process​ So you need this thing done, and it needs to be done right. It could be marketing, programming, art, business stuff, a website, or whatever. You could do it yourself, but it’s nontrivial and you don’t have six months to develop your skillz enough to make it good, or in some cases you need it done right the first time.

If you’ve been following this blog and the kickstarter, you’ll know all the background stuff. Skip it. Background Moriarty’s Machinations is a hidden roles tabletop game. I won’t go into all the details, because you can find the full rules here. I developed the game because I felt the all the existing games in the hidden roles genre that I knew of had serious flaws. I wanted to take the best thing about all of them, and put them all into one streamlined game.

I have posted previously about how terrible fatcow is. My day job is maintaining a very large and complex website, so I found it unacceptable how fatcow was unable to maintain reliability on this little one. I decided I could do it better myself. All the graphical goodness was done by a friend to get a decent looking interface, and I worked on the sysadmin stuff in the background to automate everything.

I just spent the last three days pounding the carpet of Boston Comic Con in costume as a newsie, complete with sandwich board. It was long and greuling, but it was a success beyond my expectations. I got 519 people to sign up for the official announcement of the Moriarty’s Machinations kickstarter on September 5th. How did I do it? Planning and Polish. I was looking for events to fill in the inevitable middle slump of the kickstarter, and I found out that NY Comic Con (October 9-12) is right around when I was planning to finish up.

I wanted to let you know about exciting new developments. I’ll be going to Boston Comic Con in order to spread the word about the upcoming kickstarter for Moriarty’s Machinations! I don’t have the budget for a booth, so I’m going to sandwichboard it up and hope I don’t get kicked out. There has been an ongoing secret progect to make a shiny new website (again) for duadikos.com! I’m trying something different this time.

I did it. After two weeks of grueling editing and tons of feedback from family and friends, I finally managed to upload all the images and order 10 copies of Moriarty’s Machinations from thegamecrafter.com. I’m a bit nervous about how the rulebook will be handled, but we’ll see. If you are a game reviewer and want a copy please let me know! I should have them to ship out to you around August 11th.

Oh man. Bad news bears last Friday. The USPTO denied the trademark application for Baker Street Heists. I’ve been scrambling since then to come up with a new name. Well here it is: Moriarty’s Machinations The links etc aren’t updated yet, but soon will be. Stay tuned!