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Author Topic: Interview with Donald X.  (Read 2126768 times)

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Kirian

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1075 on: March 19, 2014, 09:09:26 pm »
0

I made some Un- sets for Dominion, would you come and look at them for me?

(They are basically the original cards...just completely upside down!!)
You guys could make a community joke set and post it for April Fools'. Not to try to trick anyone, just to be hilarious.


Didn't theory do that, like, three years back?

Ah here we go:

http://dominionstrategy.com/2011/04/01/sneak-preview-of-dominion-cornucopia/
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theory

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1076 on: March 20, 2014, 01:12:10 am »
+2

When are you going to post Dudes of Stuff and Things so that we can all play it (you did say it was the best game ever)?

Alternately, can you give a summary of what it was?
If theory wants he can put it up somewhere on the site for people to download. There are two versions, a DOS version and a Windows one (old old Windows). I think there is one fix in the Windows one and otherwise they are the same. Possibly the DOS version runs fast enough in DOSBox, I don't know. My computer has XP and will run the Windows one, but many computers will not be able to run it. But uh there they are, I don't mind if people want to try it, but theory will have to in some sense host it.

It's not the best game ever - it's the best computer game ever. It's very recognizably derivative of Heroes of Might and Magic II & III.

The files should be visible, attached to this post.  dudes.zip is for Windows; dosdudes.zip is for DOS. 

Context: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=5799.msg148764#msg148764
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Witherweaver

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1077 on: March 20, 2014, 09:48:56 am »
0

Are you concerned that the, well, awful implementation of online Dominion will turn potential customers away?  If I had never played Dominion in real life or on Isotropic, and I saw it for the first time through Goko, I don't think I would bother with the game.  I know that isn't fair, but trying to play on Goko is so frustrating with their lag and other issues that I consider it essentially unplayable.  And I can't imagine being motivated to pursue the game further if my only exposure was Goko.
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Jimmmmm

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1078 on: March 20, 2014, 09:52:51 am »
+10

Let's not make this about Goko bashing again.
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Witherweaver

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1079 on: March 20, 2014, 09:55:59 am »
+1

Let's not make this about Goko bashing again.

Well I didn't mean to bash, actually.  I didn't think I was exaggerating; I was legitimately curious if this is a concern.
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Ozle

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1080 on: March 20, 2014, 01:47:23 pm »
+18

What you are asking for though is for Donald to either critisize an application that is not his decision but may get him a bad impression from the people who pay him money.

Or he has to lie and pretend its great

Goko was not Donald's decision but slagging them off publically is rarely in his best interests
« Last Edit: March 20, 2014, 01:48:37 pm by Ozle »
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Witherweaver

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1081 on: March 20, 2014, 02:04:26 pm »
+1

What you are asking for though is for Donald to either critisize an application that is not his decision but may get him a bad impression from the people who pay him money.

Or he has to lie and pretend its great

Goko was not Donald's decision but slagging them off publically is rarely in his best interests

Okay, I see your point. 
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theory

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1082 on: March 20, 2014, 02:06:50 pm »
+28

I mean, Ozle's being the reasonable person in this discussion.  That itself should scare you straight.
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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1083 on: March 20, 2014, 04:52:24 pm »
0

What you are asking for though is for Donald to either critisize an application that is not his decision but may get him a bad impression from the people who pay him money.

Or he has to lie and pretend its great

Goko was not Donald's decision but slagging them off publically is rarely in his best interests

Okay, I see your point.

For what it is worth, Donald X. has posted on the Making Fun forums. If you read his posts, that should give you an indication on how he views the current implementation of Dominion Online.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1084 on: March 20, 2014, 05:25:07 pm »
+10

Are you concerned that the, well, awful implementation of online Dominion will turn potential customers away?  If I had never played Dominion in real life or on Isotropic, and I saw it for the first time through Goko, I don't think I would bother with the game.  I know that isn't fair, but trying to play on Goko is so frustrating with their lag and other issues that I consider it essentially unplayable.  And I can't imagine being motivated to pursue the game further if my only exposure was Goko.
I expected a good working version of Dominion in say a couple months; BSW for example went up very quickly, albeit with the internet/matching/etc. stuff already in place for other games, and only the main set. So it's been pretty disappointing. It's not like I'm losing sleep over it though. I'm not concerned about making the absolute largest possible amount of money.

It's different people now, I wouldn't give up on the new guys yet. They certainly hope to get a lot more players; otherwise it's not worth the work.
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Witherweaver

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1085 on: March 20, 2014, 06:52:24 pm »
0

What you are asking for though is for Donald to either critisize an application that is not his decision but may get him a bad impression from the people who pay him money.

Or he has to lie and pretend its great

Goko was not Donald's decision but slagging them off publically is rarely in his best interests

Okay, I see your point.

For what it is worth, Donald X. has posted on the Making Fun forums. If you read his posts, that should give you an indication on how he views the current implementation of Dominion Online.

Well okay, to explain my reasoning.  I do believe that online Dominion will get better, and because I'm already invested in Dominion as a game, I can wait for that to happen.  But, if I had never played Dominion before and someone showed me Goko, and I had a bad playing experience, I might not be motivated to pursue the game.  Because even though it's really great, I can't tell.  Other people might think similarly.  I think this was also brought up when that guy's online review brought the servers down.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1086 on: March 20, 2014, 07:05:16 pm »
+3

Well okay, to explain my reasoning.  I do believe that online Dominion will get better, and because I'm already invested in Dominion as a game, I can wait for that to happen.  But, if I had never played Dominion before and someone showed me Goko, and I had a bad playing experience, I might not be motivated to pursue the game.  Because even though it's really great, I can't tell.  Other people might think similarly.  I think this was also brought up when that guy's online review brought the servers down.
There's nothing useful I can accomplish based on this information. That's my perspective.
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DG

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1087 on: March 20, 2014, 08:26:13 pm »
+1

Hi Donald,

Are there any plans to make a consolidated Dominion rulebook for the web? I could see that sort of thing being useful for Goko if they ever get professional about things. I can also see that it might be effort spent creating problems, but perhaps it would be worth it.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1088 on: March 21, 2014, 02:51:25 am »
+1

Are there any plans to make a consolidated Dominion rulebook for the web? I could see that sort of thing being useful for Goko if they ever get professional about things. I can also see that it might be effort spent creating problems, but perhaps it would be worth it.
I have no such plans, and it does not sound like the kind of thing RGG would have planned.

It's possible someone else will make one though. You could look at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/68210/complete-dominion-companion.
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market squire

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1089 on: March 23, 2014, 11:01:54 am »
0

When are you going to post Dudes of Stuff and Things so that we can all play it (you did say it was the best game ever)?

Alternately, can you give a summary of what it was?
If theory wants he can put it up somewhere on the site for people to download. There are two versions, a DOS version and a Windows one (old old Windows). I think there is one fix in the Windows one and otherwise they are the same. Possibly the DOS version runs fast enough in DOSBox, I don't know. My computer has XP and will run the Windows one, but many computers will not be able to run it. But uh there they are, I don't mind if people want to try it, but theory will have to in some sense host it.

It's not the best game ever - it's the best computer game ever. It's very recognizably derivative of Heroes of Might and Magic II & III.
I was curious because i'm a bit familiar to Heroes of Might and Magic III, so I tried it and finally managed to run it via DOSBox. It plays very well and mostly similar to Heroes, but your game philosophy comes through: "twists" that can be added to the game (eh, I already know this word from somewhere...), plenty of monsters with funny special abilities, many different paths to go by leveling up heroes etc.
I really like your game and I'll play it the next weeks, but I don't really understand why you call it best computer game ever. Do you know many other computer games? (Well, I myself don't really but I'm sure there should be some more recent games that could be better.)


Would a Dominion spinoff always have the same base mechanic (every player has one deck to draw from and to improve) put together with some other stuff (board, tokens, other currencies, other types of cards, cards that don't go into the deck,...)?
Or are you also planning to abstract the base mechanics (e.g. board instead of deck)?
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Kirian

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1090 on: March 23, 2014, 11:06:36 am »
0

...but I don't really understand why you call it best computer game ever.

I think this was said extremely tongue-in-cheek.
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market squire

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1091 on: March 23, 2014, 05:29:51 pm »
0

Ah, I understand...
(my take on Heroes of Might and Magic III, which was the best computer game ever in its day).
On the other hand, I really like it, or it least so much that I thought he was serious...
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clloxin

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1092 on: March 23, 2014, 05:45:48 pm »
0

Okay, I have a serious question. Hope nobody has asked you this already
Are there ( or were there) any card(s) or idea that you really wanted to make, but neer made it too far in testing.
Maybe you constantly revived the idea for the next expansion at the time but it never made it, and since the last expansion is out, will never make it.

Also, thank you for being nice enough to actually listen to our question.
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Watno

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1093 on: March 23, 2014, 05:54:51 pm »
0

Ah, I understand...
(my take on Heroes of Might and Magic III, which was the best computer game ever in its day).
On the other hand, I really like it, or it least so much that I thought he was serious...
I think he was saying he thinks that Heroes was the best computer game in it's time, not the game he created.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1094 on: March 23, 2014, 10:32:22 pm »
+4

I was curious because i'm a bit familiar to Heroes of Might and Magic III, so I tried it and finally managed to run it via DOSBox. It plays very well and mostly similar to Heroes, but your game philosophy comes through: "twists" that can be added to the game (eh, I already know this word from somewhere...), plenty of monsters with funny special abilities, many different paths to go by leveling up heroes etc.
I really like your game and I'll play it the next weeks, but I don't really understand why you call it best computer game ever. Do you know many other computer games? (Well, I myself don't really but I'm sure there should be some more recent games that could be better.)
It's one of those "it's funny because it's true" things. Dudes has awful art (I did most of it myself, but not the rock or the boot or uh man maybe one other thing), it's low on interface-frills, it's my take on an old game. At the same time I have actually played it more than any other computer game, and can find you uh at least three other people who will cite it as their favorite computer/console/arcade game ever.

I have played a ton of computer/console/arcade games in my day. I played arcade games when they came out. There was a period where there was this incredible variety, and then a few years later it was all driving and punching games (although somehow not both together). I mostly played games with a jump button. Skaff Elias has a funny speech about how stupid it is that so many games had a button that made you be slightly higher briefly, but man I liked those games. Donkey Kong, Vs. Super Mario Bros., Rolling Thunder, Bubble Bobble. I did play some other games too, I will single out Centipede/Millipede.

I had an Atari 400, I remember Shamus especially fondly although it's a blatant red key / red door game. Crush Crumble & Chomp had a brilliant premise and funny rulebook but game-wise could have been better. Star Raiders was cool. I played a bunch of CX2600 games but never owned one.

I played games on the Apple ][ but never owned one. Ultima III and Ultima IV were each the best game ever in their day. Hitchhiker's Guide was the best text adventure although I never knew anyone to have beaten it without cheating. It showed that you could take the genre further, and then no-one ever did. Leather Goddesses of Phobos was good, but it was all downhill for Meretzky after Zork Zero.

I made a commercially available text adventure game in the 80s, Escape From Planet X. It had speech recognition, that was how I got it to exist. I worked for a company that did speech recognition/compression/synthesis.

As an adult I stuck with Nintendo for consoles. I loved the combat in Zelda 2 - it's just, your sword/shield are up/down, you can point one straight up, stab straight down. It's simple but good. Mario 64 was the best console game ever in its day. They are treading water on some of these things now - I expect Mario Kart 8 will be totally cool and yet not remotely new enough. Well to be fair Super Mario 3D World is great, and I liked the new Zelda 3DS game. Rayman Legends is a great recent platformer. I'm playing Pikmin 3 missions some these days by myself; the kids are making me replay the Mario Galaxy games and Kirby's Epic Yarn.

Secret of Monkey Island and the first sequel were the best of their kind. Plus Day of the Tentacle. The genre went way downhill since then. SimCity was cool but they never went anywhere with it, just improved the graphics and added more micromanagement; Caesar III is the real sequel to SimCity, although that series too just stuck with minor tweaks. In the Sims I had a house of all kids, you make money from paintings and eat pizza; I had a house with two prisoners who I let be completely autonomous while other people ran the house. You already know I loved Heroes II and III. Stop there, they messed it up after III. I don't know if the far-removed VI is any good or not.

I liked Oblivion and Skyrim but man the combat sucks. The skill tree is not great either. There are all these interface problems too (picking potion ingredients in Skyrim being a huge example). At the time I said, well the main improvement is that now when you pick a flower, it shows that you picked it. It's fun exploring the world though. If I were them I would make a Skyrim-type game with no combat, or automatic combat; focus on the stuff they do well. The combat is good enough in Fallout 3 although not fantastic or anything. Anyway as we know they made an MMO as their next thing and well I have zero interest in that. I'm not into RTS either.

Origins over the years could be counted on to make games with lots of bugs. I quit playing both Ultima VI and VII at points where all my saved games were wrecked. Ultima Underworld was still very cool in its day; I immediately wrote a 3-D texture-mapped engine. Sometimes you just need to know it's possible. Maxis could be counted on to make awful non-games with Sim in the title. It was a surprise when The Sims was actually good. It's still not really a game but I had some fun. LucasFilm/LucasArts, man I feel like they vanished after X-Wing. Sierra was pretty bad, for in-house games anyway. They profited from just not having a lot of competition in the graphic adventure game genre at one point. The Heroes people also had the Might & Magic series. VI was good, it's crude but the dungeons were reasonably interesting and it's fun building up your guys; VII had the exact same dated engine but hey Arcomage, and still decent level design; VIII and IX had the exact same engine and the level design degenerated into "the heaven place is a featureless stone maze with a cloud graphic for the floor."

I played Rogue when there were no Rogue-likes. I wasn't very good. Then I played the Atari ST version, which had graphics. Oh Time Bandit, that was a fantastic game on the ST. I haven't played many Rogue-likes but I put in some time on ADoM.

Kongregate is the flash game site I go to, though I've heard some developers don't like it. Flash games actually have some innovation; people are scared to blow money on unformulaic PC games, but it's no problem for one person to waste some time on a wacky flash game. Nerdook has done a bunch of neat variations on things, check him out. I liked Kingdom Rush as a recent tower defense game; it's fun drawing the map in a tower defense game, like in Desktop TD, but you so don't need that.

Have you guys tried Desktop Dungeons? There's a free earlier version that's good. You could be trying it in seconds. The premise is "5-minute Rogue-like" although it's kind of a puzzle-game. Exploring is a resource, that's the major idea.

Anyway yes I've played some computer games.

Would a Dominion spinoff always have the same base mechanic (every player has one deck to draw from and to improve) put together with some other stuff (board, tokens, other currencies, other types of cards, cards that don't go into the deck,...)?
Or are you also planning to abstract the base mechanics (e.g. board instead of deck)?
If it has Dominion in the title, you will build a deck, and the rest could be anything. If it doesn't have building a deck - like Kingdom Builder - then it will not have Dominion in the title and will just be a Dominion-inspired game that I made rather than a spin-off.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1095 on: March 23, 2014, 10:53:34 pm »
+3

Okay, I have a serious question. Hope nobody has asked you this already
Are there ( or were there) any card(s) or idea that you really wanted to make, but neer made it too far in testing.
Maybe you constantly revived the idea for the next expansion at the time but it never made it, and since the last expansion is out, will never make it.

Also, thank you for being nice enough to actually listen to our question.
I'm there for you.

There is a big list of never-tested stuff, much of it not too exciting. There are things that got tested just a little and might still be worth revisiting. There are things that got a lot of testing and never worked out.

I'm not sure how much I would stress me really wanting to make them, but there are a few ideas that I clung to longer than was reasonable. One classic example is "at the end of the game, each other player sets aside a VP card and doesn't score it." The draw for me is that it's a different kind of attack, it's not so similar to the existing ones. At one card it's too weak, at two it's too strong, and it scales poorly with different numbers of players. There totally might be a good version though, a balanced version that was sometimes worth buying but not always. But that card also has a good chance of not being something anyone would really like. The appeal of "I haven't done it yet" mostly applies to me, rather than to players. I mean they like seeing new stuff but you know, mostly limited to new stuff they actually like. There are other things in this category, and I did revisit some of them for Dark Ages, which was expecting to be the last set. Another one that comes to mind is a hot potato card (something you don't want that passes from player to player); I first tried one in Intrigue.

We can look at where things stood prior to Guilds. Guilds wasn't always going to exist. It has two mechanics that seemed like stand-outs on the list and turned out well. It has two cards I moved into it from Dark Ages just due to preferring them there (Advisor and Journeyman). And it has two fixed-up old ideas: Taxman and Soothsayer. Taxman hasn't gone over so well on this site but I am pretty pleased with Soothsayer; it looks crazy and yet manages to be one of the weaker Curse-givers. It's simple. The idea started out in Alchemy; Taxman also, in fact both cards in different forms tried out for the same slot (Alchemist). So anyway, in terms of old ideas getting fixed up, Guilds got two, and you can see how that worked out for you.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1096 on: March 23, 2014, 11:10:27 pm »
0

Before Guilds, all of the cursers fit the theme (or at least a sub-theme) of their respective expansions.  Cultist sits in as the "curser" for Dark Ages.

Soothsayer breaks the mold.  Were all the previous examples just happy coincidences?  Was it just that Soothsayer play-tested better than any curser with coin tokens or overpay?
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A Drowned Kernel

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1097 on: March 23, 2014, 11:30:30 pm »
+9

I like Taxman, I think it gets a bad rap. It's not super powerful but it has its charm.
(Taxman is fine, I don't know why people complain about Taxman, they can't all be the best $4 card ever)
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1098 on: March 24, 2014, 03:22:41 am »
+5

Before Guilds, all of the cursers fit the theme (or at least a sub-theme) of their respective expansions.  Cultist sits in as the "curser" for Dark Ages.

Soothsayer breaks the mold.  Were all the previous examples just happy coincidences?  Was it just that Soothsayer play-tested better than any curser with coin tokens or overpay?
It was just a coincidence. Or, if you like, a natural consequence of "each other player gains a Curse" being simple, every set wanting simple on-theme cards, and no set wanting too many ways to give out Curses.

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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1099 on: March 24, 2014, 03:27:59 am »
+3

I like Taxman, I think it gets a bad rap. It's not super powerful but it has its charm.
People were sad when I took it out of Cornucopia, and glad when it showed back up in Guilds.
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