Short version

I’m going to say up front that I enjoyed this presentation and thought that it was worth the time and cash investment.

Who is it for?

Personally I think everyone should have an interest in design aspects. The course is great for anyone new to mobile web design as it is a good overview of the practical issues and solutions available as of early 2011. If you are looking for technical specifics, implementation details or a step by step how to make your application work you should look elsewhere as this course really focuses on presenting a very design focused, implementation light presentation. I was up for that and therefore found the course rewarding from an analytical and a design point of view as it provides lots of data to backup the points made. It reminded me a little of the great book Don’t Make Me Think in that everything he said sounded a lot like common sense (the truest form of “good design”) but did I know it was common sense before I heard it? That is the best type of design discussion, one where you nod your head in agreement the entire time.

Key things I learned

The following are thoughts I had while watching the course, most of which are related to the topics but some of which might not have been Luke’s points and if I am wrong, blame me not him!

1. Mobile web is probably bigger than desktop in terms of customer base or will be soon
2. Unique features are available and accessible for web
3. Designing for mobile first is probably easier than the other way around as it forces you to design simple things
4. Design around maximizing content and have navigation as the secondary thing
5. Support full client experience including input on the device, old rules do not apply of it being limited/hard
6. People use the website frequently even if there is a native app, so don’t mess that up!
7. Small options or difficulties can have a huge impact on usage
8. Mobile browsers are arguably more compatible with each other than PC’s history. HTML5 and CSS3 are fairly safe to assume.

What was missing?

I wish that there were more references or links to implementation details for the content. I’m fairly new to web development in general and some fast pointers or tips for people who don’t have “web legacy” would be great.

What does this change for IGAMEMAKER.COM?

I’m wondering if I should focus on some HTML5 based games in order to maximize exposure of my games. No app store, no platform limits and due to time constraints the games that I can make are fairly limited in feature set anyway. With both Unity and Unreal outputting to flash, how long is it before people are authoring to WebGL and canvas for games? Perhaps that is the best place to start. Build an audience and then make unique clients if the games are popular. I might look at doing an online version of my Tic Tac Toe game and perhaps a mobile version of my site.

I am thinking of a turn based Tic Tac Toe game as a “Hello World” application and how I could do it with a minimal amount of work. For example getting rid of AI completely and only letting you play friends and keeping it super clean.

That movie was The Matrix and it brought philosophy and technology to the mainstream (not necessarily in that order). Although hailed for its action cinematography and bullet time, nearly every action film device they used was pioneered in Blade before the Matrix’s release. Blade did not capture the mainstream and therefore was lost in cinematic history. It isn’t who does it first, it is who does it in front of enough people to count. But what do these two movies have to do with making games?

Since these are the kinds of stories that got me inspired I was trying to think of what the equivalent in the gaming world it was and it occurred to me that there were largely three “reasons” or “types” of games to make.

My initial gaming inspirations would probably be titles like: Wing Commander, X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, Space Quest, Kings Quest, Wolf 3D, Doom, Duke 3D, Dune 2, Warcraft 2, etc. Some of these genres have basically died (space and point/click adventure) and others are at the top of their game (first person shooters) and yet others dominate new markets (World of Warcraft). What is the secret to why these games are great? Tonight I was having a few ideas I would like to share to categorize: Fantasy enablers, Brain Teasers and New Experiences.

1. Fantasy enablers: Let the player do things they always wanted to. Some examples: Wing Commander (live star wars), GTA (do whatever you want in a city), Star Craft (be a military commander), World of Warcraft (fantasy archetypes in an altered world), Rock Band (be a star). Games are interactive, the biggest strength is by giving into players desires. If you are trying to mimic the real world, enabling what people want to do/experience is a good way to target players.
2. Brain teasers:The brain is a muscle, people like to exercise it. Some game examples: Tetris, Brain age, Bookworm.
3. New experiences: This is the meaty one that is more like film. Star Wars showed people a new world/place. The Matrix did as well. In a craft like film, doing Fantasy enablers or brain teasers was done in the first years of the genre because it WAS new. If you look at modern film, it is more about how a story is told than the structure of the story itself. Writers don’t make the huge bucks. Actors do because it is how the story is executed and perform that counts. I think you are starting to see that crafting in games. What games have you played lately that took you someplace new? For me the only really new world that I played in a fictional sense was Bioshock. In a play sense, it is every iconic first game in a genre (Wolf 3d, Dune 2, Tetris, etc.). I haven’t played a new one of these in a long time. Are games so close to art progression that the realistic is gone and the new experience will need to be surreal? Personally I don’t think so…especially since most the innovation in this area is in controls. I listed Rock Band in Fantasy Enabler but the accessories also make this a new experience for most. It makes music more accessible.

Perhaps Rock band/guitar hero are examples of all three in unison. Fantasy of being a rock star combined with a puzzle/coordination packaged in a new control experience. Sounds like a formula for success!

Do you have films or games that have inspired you? I would love to hear your thoughts on them and why they captured your attention.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

• Dwight David Eisenhower quotes (American 34th President (1953-61). 1890-1969)

Today I was working on a a design treatment as described in Game Developers Marketplace. This book breaks down documentation into a few sections:

• Design Treatment – Small (on paragraph to one page) overview
• Design Document – Multi-page document describing everything in more depth and getting into specifics
• Design Specification – Working with everyone to actually specify how things are being built and how much time/resources it will take.

Design Treatment
One of the most influential games in making me want to create games for a living was Wing Commander. I would like to create an experience that is like Wing Commander but from a top down perspective with a simple approachable interface. This should be along the lines of Star Control II, but with a much more directed level structure and a more directed story exposition. Less exploration and gathering and a large focus on combat. Each mission should be 10-30 minutes and an act should be achievable in 5 missions (either a week or one long 1.5-3 hour sitting). Target audience is people that miss these old school experiences that don’t have time for 3D space simulation but still enjoy storytelling.

Game Story
The year is 2492 and humanity is at war amongst the stars against a deadly alien race. Things are not looking good for humanity and you are a fresh recruit at the top of your class assigned to a small task force in your region. All attacks to date have been 100% ineffectual and you are sent in with new weapon systems that may be humanities last hope for a counter attack.

Game Play and Look
The play is broken down into two sections: On ship life and combat missions.

Ship life is comprised of one or two rooms on the ship and hot spot locations that you can click on characters and talk with them. This will reveal extra information about the world to the player and create a story and connection with the other pilots on flights with you. The interface will be simple 2D environments with fixed outcomes based on where you are in the story and how well you are doing.

Combat missions start with a preallocated ship specifically chosen for the mission you are going on. These ships will very in speed and fire power and may also involve having more crew with you. You will control the ship with a keyboard or mouse and drive it around. Most missions will either be protecting ships or destroying enemy vessels or bosses. The objective is to successfully destroy, protect or rescue depending on the circumstances. Each mission will have multiple sub points and in game conversation will be handled by a small pop up.

Development Spec
The game is initially targeting windows only, will either be written in C++/Lua using the PopCap Framework or in a 3rd party engine (Torque or Unity). Game should support a wide range of PC configurations (anything made in the last 4-5 years).

Commentary

Writing the design treatment has solidified what I want to build more in my mind. The next couple of weeks will probably be fleshing out the design more and then digging in to build the first examples of each area.

Negative Motivating Factors

Negative motivating factors sounds like an oxymoron so let me be clear by giving an example. Part of why I started a side project was because I wasn’t not enjoying my day job and I wanted a plan B. I picked the “I, Game Maker” moniker for this site because that is what I really like doing; making games. My day job had somehow turned into managing the people and process and not focusing on making a product. This kind of motivational factor isn’t bad, it just stems from dissappointment rather than passion for an actual product. It got me started in the right direction but not for the right reasons. The good news is that my day job has been awesome in the last couple of weeks. Negative based motivation got this project started, but in order to keep it going I’m going to need positive motivating factors so I have been recharging the creative batteries with positive motivating factors.

Positive motivating factors

Making games is a creative process. I have made it to a point with my engine where I am now starting to actually make creative decisions. Creative decisions need inspiration so my search for motivating materials has been the priority over game progress. My research so far has been mostly in books, TV and playing games.

Books

If you like the Epic Space Opera genre, you are missing out if you haven’t read the Honor Harrington series. I just finished the 11th book in the series At All Cost and I loved it. I was surprised to see an add for a video game in the back of the book and went to the Honorverse site and it seems a little dead. If I’m ever doing a game like Stars! I may take a little inspiration from this series. Reading this reminded me to try out Sins of a Solar Empire which I haven’t really been able to get into yet.

The standard geek balance is between space and fantasy. I balanced out the space reading by picking up George RR Martin’s Hedge Knight 2 graphic novel. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first installment in the series, but it was still a great read. I don’t read nearly as much fantasy as I do science fiction but I am waiting as impatiently as everyone else for the next installment in the Song of Fire and Ice. Checking out Mount and Blade is also on my TODO list in this genre, or maybe Depths of Peril, both Indie titles.

Television

For some reason I missed out on Bablyon 5 back in the day and I have just finished the fourth season on DVD. This show was way ahead of its time! I’m hesitant to start the fifth season for two reasons: I have heard it isn’t as good as the rest of the season and Battlestar Galactica is back on! I have a fascination with story lines that have a planned interaction or over-arcing story for the duration of series. Diplomacy and space combat in this series is just amazing. On a game front this makes me want to try out Sins of a Solar Empire.

Battlestar Galactica is flat out the best thing I have watched on TV for years. I am still trying to think of how a game could capture the desparation and tension of this series and I haven’t figured that part out yet. I will choose watching BSG over working on my game any night of the week until the series is done! My wife enjoys the show as well and I probably know as many female fans as I do male. I am drawn to stories that put characters on the dramatic edge of survival where the fate of the human race lies in the balance. Star Control II, Wing Commander (1, 2 and 3), X-Wing/Tie-Fighter and X-Com are some of my favorite titles that “feel” like battlestar. I might need to dig up Homeworld and Freespace 2 since I missed those games and I believe they are classics.

Games

I have been a bit lighter on gaming in the past little while. My new trick is fitting in gaming time with my wife. We are currently trying to get all the rainbows in Pixeljunk Monsters. Hopefully I can do a break down of this game after a bit more play time. In the meantime I am trying to figure out what makes the game fun for my wife. Tower defence games are a favorite of mine and I think that Monsters brings both a cuteness and a cooperative rewards based experience that is good for everyone. Much like Battlestar Galactica, Monsters appeals to both a male and a female audience. If I’m interested in having the most people possible enjoy the games I make then I think there are some real lessons to learn. It also means that I don’t have to compromise the experience in anyway since I love this game. Does a space opera game exist that is a cooperative game? Perhaps there is a way to design that in…

Summary

I am thoroughly enjoying my space genre research and I am getting excited about the types of games that I can build. I think I am nearly at the point where I need to start an actual design and I believe my posts will be a combination of design and engine development in the coming weeks. If anyone has suggestions for other great space opera inspiration, please send it my way in the comments!

Box2D Units and restrictions

• Unit (Meter Kilograms Seconds)
• Recommended scale of moving object 0.1m to 10m
• 200m/s top speed (this one took some digging )

Scale – Does not fit my needs exactly
Given that most of the objects I am working on are roughly fighter sized, 10 meters is actually a bit on the small side. I may have to go with 0.1 = 1 meter to get the scale where I would like it. With this, my smallest moving unit would be a missile at 1m length and the largest would be a 100m boss ship. I’ll have to test if I can simply scale this. Metric calculations should scale with this even if they aren’t mathematically correct as long as I am consistent.

Top speed
I have tested the top speed in my game and it is clamped to 200m/s. However, if you assume that the ship should cover 10-30% of the screen and lets assume it is 10 meters. This would mean a screen width of 33.3m – 100m. Giving it between 1 second to 1/3rd of a second to cross the width of the screen. I think that top speed should be fine but I will have to use ray intersections for things that travel faster and handle them as special cases. If I do my scale hack, I think that since 1m becomes 10m, 200m/s should become 2000m/s which should be more than enough for missiles (roughly mach six given that the speed of sound is about 340m/s).

Getting my ship moving
With the global restrictions out of the way, how do I move my ship?

• ApplyForce/ApplyImpulse – These will let me move my ship forward or backward using the API properly (SetVelocity bypasses this). The difference between a Force and an Impulse is that an Impulse is N*s (kg*m/s) whereas the Force is N. In my case I will be applying these at the center of mass so no torque will be applied.
• ApplyTorque -  This will cause the ship to have an angular velocity. This can be overridden by setting the AngularVelocity directly.
• Damping – Both linear (velocity) and angular damping are supported and should make space…well less space like and have the ship slow down and be controllable by people that are used to friction.

In order to tune with the correct functions, I am going to be applying kg*m/s. For tuning what I am really interested in is things like the following:

• Time to top speed
• Max acceleration
• Ease-in/ease out
• Damping

These aren’t the things that you tune with Box2D so I am going to need another layer.

What do I have to figure out this week?

• How do I set the mass of the ship?
• If I change the scale from 1 unit = 1m to 1 unit = 10m, what other variables do I need to change for mass?
• Convert from setting angular velocity to applying torque
• Determine how I want to tune the acceleration/force curve over time
• Use Box2D native dampening rather than my own hacked functions

I now have a better idea of how to use the technology correctly and I am looking forward to mapping it to a more friendly tuning mechanism. More on the practical issues I run into next time.

Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing.

I think that this advice works for any discipline. Picture an athlete only reading about how to get in better shape. These days people have too much confidence in what they “know” because they can search on google for it. Knowing where to find something and actually knowing what something is are two very different things. This further reinforces my resolve that my new years plan is to learn by doing. Two other blogs I follow also seem to take this to heart: Noel Llopis’ gamesfromwithin has created Tea Time! in order to learn how to release a product on the iStore and my friend Owen has released the first video of his up coming iPhone/iTouch game Dapple. Good to see that there are one man teams making games full time!

Given all that talking what have I done? I’ve made a few small steps towards success by evaluating what my game needed the most next and adding them.

1. Sense of motion – You cannot tell where you are or how fast you are going. Need some starfield and some parallax going on. Done rough version, helped but not as much as the mini-map did.
2. Controls – Inertia and movement speeds suck. Cannot aim or fly easily. I’m going to have to play with the force and inertia and find out why impulses are varying so much with Box2D. I think parallax will help here as well. [UPDATE] Exposed the variables and tuned some but need more time spent here. It should be faster to iterate on physics now that the values are exposed in Lua.
3. Firing should be exciting and fun – Shooting is currently boring, hard to aim and uninteresting. I need bullets to die after a certain amount of time and not get stuck on the edges. They also need to pack a wallop and go where you intend to shoot them. I’m having real inertia problems here and might need to design around it.
4. Finding asteroids – The game size to asteroid ratio became sparse today and that sucks. Might need a mini-map in the corner to help the hunting. [UPDATE] This may have been the largest change I made. Being able to find tings changes the game completely. This probably should have been #1.
5. Visual reward for destruction – No explosions/scoring for killing an asteroid. I think I need to add some explosions to things that die and perhaps have some kind of collectible in them for killing them.
6. Sense of Peril – There isn’t anything to kill you yet but bad driving. Until I can easily fly around and shoot rocks this doesn’t bother me yet. One thing at a time.
7. Visual punishment for death – Not really easy to die and it goes by without noticing. Death is probably less important than peril.
8. Camera on edges – Camera is just centered and shows game world edges. Need to look at something that hugs the edges and perhaps something that lets me scale the visual distance better.

Why did I go out of order?

Never assume your priorities are correct. If something is much easier to implement than another area you aren’t sure about then just DO IT. Learn by doing. I was wrong about the priorities because the mini-map was huge!

What is next?
I think I will work on having the shots disappear and then investigate how to get the physics in Box2D working how I would like.

1. I will finish a game this year. There will be no worrying about check points along the way or releasing an engine, the game will always come first. I’m not guaranteeing it will be good or that it will be a version 1 release, but  I will have a game.
2. I will post once a week about the progress I am making or about things that are making me a better Game Maker.

Where is the game at and what is next?
I can summarize where I am in three sentences: Fly around and shoot asteroids. Large asteroids then break up into smaller asteroids which can then be destoryed and they dissappear completely. Run into asteroids and you will lose health but not die.

What to do tonight?
I love simplifying things and my view on work is that there are always two options for progress:

1. Plan work
2. Do work

Everywhere I have ever worked over plans and under delivers. I’m going to spend 5 minutes planning and an hour working. Planning should always be to get more work done.

Today’s quick plan (5 minutes):

• Add a number of lives for the player and a death state
• Create a “you win” when all the asteroids are cleared

Today’s results (1.5 hours):
Completed the plan and got lives and a you win case in. The you win continually increases the number of asteroids you have to destroy.

Today’s post (1.0 hours):
Posting is taking WAY to long. I decided to do a video again today and it is a long laborous process and since the video is boring I don’t think it will be worth doing these until I have something cool to show!

Project Assessment
Design:
Tonight’s progress drew me to two conclusions: My games currently sucks and it takes to long to modify stuff in my code base. It is still better to have a game that sucks than something that isn’t a game!

What are the next steps to make this fun?

1. Sense of motion – You cannot tell where you are or how fast you are going. Need some starfield and some parallax going on.
2. Controls – Inertia and movement speeds suck. Cannot aim or fly easily. I’m going to have to play with the force and inertia and find out why impulses are varying so much with Box2D. I think parallax will help here as well.
3. Firing should be exciting and fun – Shooting is currently boring, hard to aim and uninteresting. I need bullets to die after a certain amount of time and not get stuck on the edges. They also need to pack a wallop and go where you intend to shoot them. I’m having real inertia problems here and might need to design around it.
4. Finding asteroids – The game size to asteroid ratio became sparse today and that sucks. Might need a mini-map in the corner to help the hunting.
5. Visual reward for destruction – No explosions/scoring for killing an asteroid. I think I need to add some explosions to things that die and perhaps have some kind of collectible in them for killing them.
6. Sense of Peril – There isn’t anything to kill you yet but bad driving. Until I can easily fly around and shoot rocks this doesn’t bother me yet. One thing at a time.
7. Visual punishment for death – Not really easy to die and it goes by without noticing. Death is probably less important than peril.
8. Camera on edges – Camera is just centered and shows game world edges. Need to look at something that hugs the edges and perhaps something that lets me scale the visual distance better.

After the above list I will be able to re-evaluate and actually take the game in a better direction. Choosing the control and firing method may also redefine what my game is.

Technical Design (lesser priority)

1. Compile times: On my little laptop things are taking about 3-6 minutes to compile each change. I might test out some compile flags or get the Christmas tree of my desk and use my PC again.
2. Game classes not exposed in Lua: Variable tweaks are still exposed through C++ and increases iteration times. This might be something that would save time to address for tuning ship navigation and shooting.

Summary
I am happy that I made progress on my game. Before there wasn’t really any objective or consequence for action and now it meets the minimum bar for me to consider it a game. Now comes the exciting part of taking it from barely working to something interesting to play. Assuming my planning ratio holds at about 5 minutes of planning to 1.5 hours of work then I have my next few weeks planned! I’m also going to have to cut down on the time I take to post but I hope this video is entertaining for someone (deep down I doubt it though). See you next week.

My input system has started being largely based on the input in a game like Starscape (great indie game you should check out either on steam or their site). This hasn’t been an active decision, just the quickest method for me to get the ship flying around and shooting rocks. But now that my game is off the ground what input methods “should” I consider and how would this affect the game and its future growth ability? I see three options: keyboard controls, mouse+keyboard and predominantly mouse with hot keys.

If I go with the method I currently have, I believe that I am targeting people that are fairly technically inclined with the keyboard and are used to driving a character with at least 5 buttons. I would have the left/right movment, acceleration and deceleration as well as some kind of firing button. The games that I would be similar to that I enjoy are Star Control II (one of the best games of all time and you can get an open source version here), Starscape, Crusader and many more. I find that this method is somewhat easy to learn but I wouldn’t consider it a casual friendly interface and I would say that it tends to fit in the action/skill category where people need to learn how to fly each potential ship that the game would have. The melee mode in Star Control II would be the sort of target for my design if I went in this direction. The controls would allow for me to make unique flight characteristics and weapons firing modes as the core of the experience. One thing to note is that if I was mixing any other game experience in like an adventure or navigation component, I would most likely still be using the mouse.

Option two is the combination of both. The most interesting combinations of this for me in the indie gaming community are Crimsonland and Alien Shooter. Both of these games require the movement from the keyboard and shooting with the mouse. Abuse was probably the first game I recall playing like this and it was a great ambidextrous combination of killing might. For me this method of dealing death has some sort of arcadey rewarding feeling and it maps to a gamepad fairly well. So even though there may be more going on, it can feel more intuitive when learned and offers greater control over shooting direction with minimal additional “buttons” to learn. This combination of controls would make me push my game in the firing upgrades as the primary growth avenue and movement as the secondary. I would want more enemies to target.

Finally there is the most casual approach of all. If you stick to the ethos of mouse control (preferably with it being possible to use just one button) then you get into the realm of games like Diablo or even RTS like control. The advantage here is that you clearly have a design rule that you can do everything with the mouse and it makes sure that almost anyone that uses a computer should be able to at least play your game. You can also layer in more hotkeys or movement controls if you want to ala Scavenger (another great indie game) or even like Diablo. If I went this route, there would be less arcade action and it would be more about target selection and upgrades to your ship/character.

Thinking of input decisions is making me start to think of my target audience and the experience I want to create. The funny thing for me is that in my game history the games that have stuck with me the longest offer multiple mechanics, but typically keep the interface to them the same (Star Control II, X-Com, Starscape and many more). Currently I am leaning towards trying to implement a mouse only version only because it would be the most accessible and “pure” design but I think it would take the game away from action. I will let you know what I decide and that might be by trying them all!

In order to build a game you need to be good at lots of things. One of the things I was originally planning to do was try and do everything myself here at this site. With the progress that I am making on the code (or lack there of) I started to look at some of the Art portfolio’s on IndieGamer.com. Looking at these has got me excited that for a few thousand dollars you can get some really professional looking art. I wouldn’t say that it is cutting edge “next generation” but it is definitely professional looking and competitive in the casual gaming market. The biggest benefit I got reading through the forums was finding out that art and audio are more readily available than coding contracts. Since this matches with my own skill set this is a “good thing” in that my weakest areas can be compensated with cash.

The lack of contracts posted for gaming or design in the indie space made me wonder if most projects are actually programmer driven and if so, how different of a creative space it is vs. mainstream games that seem to be more design driven. Perhaps this is why I am so entertained by Indie games?

After finding that information, it made me feel that I was on the right path with just getting together a tool set for prototyping games and got me excited about working on the engine again. Which leads me to another progress update.

Where am I supposed to be at?

• Add in Steering library code and expose engine to lua (Nov 16-23rd)

In my previous planning post I laid out my next objectives as exposing the engine to Lua and getting the Open Steer library into the project by November 23rd. I’m a little behind on that in two ways. First off it is the 30th and secondly I have decided not expose everything to Lua because of the pkg file work involved. Where I am at right now is simply having all of the libraries (Box2D, Lua, SexyAppFramework/Popcap and OpenSteer) compiling together under Visual Studio Express 2005.

Next up is supposed to be:

• Clean up code for posting, read through various licenses to determine restrictions on posting (Nov 30th-Dec 7th)

I am interested in looking at this soon but I think the next post will still be about engine progress rather than license research. I want my demo to be a little more playable before I post the code and therefore the license stuff isn’t relevant until I am ready to post. I am still very excited that I might post the code before the new year!

Profit
There was an article claiming that roughly 4% of games make money that I saw linked from Bluesnews. That doesn’t sound like very good odds! I’m still interested in pursuing this someday and I have a great respect for people that are giving this industry a go on their own. A friend of mine is giving the indie thing a go and he just crossed a threshold that would scare me: he is spending money (not just time) on his game and hiring an artist! He has a great blog over at Streaming Colour and I really do think he will be in the 4% so join me in wishing him luck.

Note to self: With a 4% chance at making money, you better be making something you love!

Film vs. Games
Streaming colour linked to a blog with a link to an article about making games that touch people. The quote pulled out was this:

“Perhaps the problem is that we so deeply rely on reference points like film, which require stories progressing over time, when we could be referring to things like sculpture or painting, which require no timescale and people find just as moving.”\

Personally I have found arguments about these kinds of things are of the “everyone is right” variety. My take on it is that a game designers intent for a game can be broken into two categories: Immersion based and mechanic based.

Immersion based design – These are games where there is explicity a story or an experience that the designer wants to take the player through and they work very much like a movie where you have to think of how the audience will react to your film/game and you have to use all your creative tools to guide the player to do what you want them to. I think that Valve is on the forefront of studying players and guiding them through this.
Mechanic based design – Give the users a fun game experience and let them create the story around the experience. I think this is the method that most “games that could be board games” fall into. The focus of the designer is on a great set of rules and you can leave the “story of play” to the player. Puzzle games I think fall into this category.
To me the block buster games are the ones that sort of combine the two. This broad categorization is enough for me to pull the elements out of games that are explicitly there for immersion vs. what is there for the actual game mechanics. If you don’t follow or don’t agree with my division, please let me know and I will post some more concrete examples, otherwise I have to get back to work!

Progress
So I was hoping to have my game exposed to lua through tolua++ by tomorrow night. I have had some major progress by getting lua integrated into my game. I am reading configuration variables and calling an update function in my main loop now. Next steps are to figure out how to use tolua++ the most effectively for the time I have. I ran into a snag with this.
tolua++ requires a cleaned up .pkg file that contains a stripped version of what you want to expose to lua. Since I’m all about the biggest bang for the buck with the least effort, I think that I am going to expose things on an as needed basis in my pkg files so I’m going to let tolua++ sit while I refactor my main loop. Path of least resistance.

I also found a very cool feature with Popcap that you can pass -record on the commandline, play your game then run it again with -play and it plays the experience back. I may use lua to toss in a screenshot toggle so I can make a video of the play and post it as a gif! I’ll let you know how that goes.