Devlog: Droitwich

Droitwich (n)
A street dance. The two partners approach from opposite directions and try politely to get out of each other’s way. They step to the left, step to the right, apologize, step to the left again, bump into each other, and repeat as often as unnecessary.

Back at the 2010 GDC, I had the chance of attending Jason Rohrer’s presentation of his DS game, Diamond Trust of London, where he exposed upon his view of Knowledge Chains and how they might create interesting gameplay.

Right off the bat I had one big idea related to that, which I may pursue in the future. What motivates me at the moment is an offshoot game of that initial concept, related to the Droitwich definition reproduced above.

In a nutshell, what I’ve set out building is a simultaneous turn based game where you can see which actions your opponent can play (and viceversa), but do not know their order.

From what the paper prototypes I’ve tested with my relatives seem to imply, this might be one of those cases where adding information actually makes decisions harder, not easier, because the player becomes entangled in the “If I do this then he’ll do that but then I’ll do this and he’ll do that and…” loop.

I’m programming the client in Haxe, using the awe6 and OpenFL libraries. While the game will require a basic server to be coded before i can think of releasing a demo, that’s still a long way down the road. After all, I’m programming this in my spare time after the kids have gone to sleep, so it’s not like I’m on a schedule or anything.

Also this is the first time I try to keep a devlog of one of my personal projects. My goal is to just log my daily progress, no matter how slow :)