My current projects: Crystomere
The world now known as Crystomere was once a thriving and magical planet. Most magic was controlled by five colleges who eventually discovered that their power could be greatly amplified by building focusing crystals where the world's lines of power intersected. Thus was born a sixth discipline, crystomancy.
Crystomancers were, obviously, in great demand and all those who were suited to the path were sought out and trained to erect focus crystals wherever possible. Unfortunately, this sharp rise in the magical power drawn from the world led to its destruction. But the crystals also became a source of salvation in the aftermath, as they had an unexpected additional effect of shielding the immediate area, leaving a web of habitable islands among the planet's remains.
Each college blames the others for the destruction and now they war continuously to claim the power of the crystals, sending troops, both magical and mundane, to secure the area around them and crystomancers to perform the actual capture by attuning the crystals to their style of magic.
Initial development proceeded quickly, thanks to the amount of code which could be easily converted from Wyrd Engine. I initially anticipated completion of a minimally-playable version of the game by the end of February 2007, but work has now interfered and slowed development. A web forum is up where I go into the design more thoroughly and also detail the progress of game development.
Currently, the five AI factions are playing at a very simplified level against each other on my development system, sending units around and capturing territories. I'm able to watch this, but have not yet produced a client suitable for public consumption.
As of November 2004, I have been working as an independent consultant for my own company, NomadNet, Inc. I looked around at a few different accounting packages, but none seemed to fit what I was doing - this one balanced your checkbook, but little else; that one assumed every business was selling material goods; another could handle a service-oriented business, but was too heavy-duty to be practical for a one-man shop. I couldn't find something that would quickly and easily handle time tracking, invoicing for that time, expenses, and payments so, of course, I decided to write it myself.
NNA is a web-based system currently capable of handling activity tracking, invoicing, payments, and maintaining a history of available funds and total outstanding invoice and debt totals.. Expenses are handled as "activities" conducted at less-than-zero billing rates, as I discovered them to be identical to fixed-rate activities aside from the direction of cash flow.
It also has companion command-line programs for non-web based activity timing/entry and automatic generation of invoices to customers on customer-specific days of the month or week. The automated invoice generation also emails notification of the new invoice to the customer along with a link which they can use to (after logging in, of course) view all outstanding invoices on their account.
The database supports client information (including basic contact management) and multiple projects per client, but there is currently no interface for manipulating this data other than going into the database directly.
This MUD/MMO hybrid came about primarily as the result of thoughts about an MMO with perma-death which mitigated death's permanency by allowing you to pass on a substantial portion of the deceased character's power on to one of his family members. As I thought more about it, I realized that I was getting very close to the viking-era concepts of wyrd and hamingja, which gave me a name for it.
Concepts (and probably code) from Baron and Biting Blades will almost certainly find their way into Wyrd as well, as they all fit together so well to create a complete and complex world with Blades providing the combat mechanics, Baron controlling the overall economy, and Wyrd governing character growth and interaction.
I have started coding on the Wyrd Engine's core, but it's all very deep, boring stuff that's not much fun for anyone but the developer to look at.
Back in early 2000, I finally checked out a game that I'd heard some members of the local LUG raving about, Crossfire. It didn't take long, though, before I grew weary of the infintely respawning foes and the correspondingly infinite supply of treasure they carried. The readily-respawning player characters didn't sit very well either.
So I decided to do it Better.
I already had a personal-level combat system, Biting Blades, designed and tested. But I needed the higher-level system. Something that would have actual production and distribution of goods, population growth and spread, and the ability for player characters to influence all of the above.
Baron (yeah, it will probably get a new name at some point if it ends up going anywhere) is that system. I first attacked the production aspects and described my original thoughts on them in a post to rec.games.design. I'm trying to work out a way to make the general system work on a continuous timescale, rather than in discrete turns, but that's not an immediate concern; economics has my attention now...
Way back when - I'd guess it was '91 or so - I was walking down the street and pondering the deficiencies of standard role-playing game combat systems. Roll a die to hit, roll a die for effect. Bo-ring! I started thinking about the reality of skilled fighters being able to choose where they want to attack and how vigorously they wish to defend certain areas. This got into ridiculously complex models of body position and stance which I would never want to bother with designing, much less implementing.
Just as I was about to abandon the train of thought completely, I remembered a gladiatorial combat game I'd once played (I think the name might have even been Gladiator, but I only really remember the system, not the name) in which you had a certain number of points to allocate to attacking or defending different target areas. That was still a little too easy and too predictable. But then I thought of cards.
And that is the core of the Blades system: Cards. Choose to build a hand from some mix of attack cards and defense cards, then use them in your fight. One other little twist is that you get to keep attacking until the defender plays a counterattack. Biting Blades was actually released as shareware in the form of Duel, but I subsequently lost the source code and have been forced to start it over from scratch. This is probably a good thing, as I know a bit more now and Blades2 will be significantly more flexible than the original version.