Monday, September 26, 2011

Acrophilia



The other day I made up a game with Leah Davis. I've play-tested it three times now and it is certainly the funniest game I've ever played -- it induces almost nonstop laughing.

The game is simple. Each player takes seven letters from a scrabble set. One player is declared to be the judge on the first round. The judge uses his or her letters to make a acronym-sentence: one letter per word. Everyone else then makes up their own acronym-sentence with their letters and tries to make their sentence a logical follow-on of the previous sentence(s). The judge writes down all of the sentences and picks a winner based on whatever criteria he or she likes. The winning sentence is then moved into the middle of the table, the judge rotates one position, and another round ensues until there are no more letters.

Additional rules:
  • You must use all of your letters, no skipping "a", "of", "the", etc.
  • You can add any amount of punctuation you want. The more, the better.
  • Bonus points for punning or word-play
  • Bonus points for proper names
  • Bonus points for a sentence that is a direct response to the previous one.
  • Super bonus if you can make a palindromic sentence where you use all of the letters forwards and backwards to make a 14 word sentence!
A warning, this game gets ridiculous very fast. In all three play-tests it turned obscene, racist, sexist, etc. within a few turns. I've kept some of the play papers but decorum prevents copying any of it here. :-)

Friday, September 23, 2011

Happy Fun Coding v 2.0 now up!



After a massive re-write, Happy Fun Coding version 2.0 is now up. New features include: better UI, source code highlighting, ability to change the canvas size, and better program navigation.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Cathedral in sketchup, v0.1


I got it into my head today to create a cathedral in Google Sketchup. I really want to do this my writing a Ruby Sketchup plugin so that I'd have an all parameterized cathedral, but I started by just messing around by hand in the editor. It's tricky stuff getting Sketchup to make the weird geometry -- doing it algorithmically is going to be easier in some ways.