nemorathwald | Entries tagged with shogi

In this post, I will make another feeble attempt to think like a businessperson. Well, perhaps not quite. Business plans are stereotypically concerned with starting a company, hiring employees, changing the world, and becoming rich. This plan concerns merely generating enough supplementary income to live on. I have realized that life itself requires a business plan, so that counts.

As I have been mentioning to anyone who will listen, I am inspired to earn income by having customers and tip-donors rather than offer a service to clients. My long-term goal is to reach a place where I earn $2,000 a month by going directly to users of my creations, without having to work for a BigCo or a client.

As Escape Artists has a cozy team of about half a dozen, and all our listeners are consuming something that I absolutely love, I consider that part of this plan. I consider a successful webcomic artist or internet musician to be another type of person who lives this way.

My latest scheme is to make games and sell them on my website. What prompted all of this was finding out how easy and inexpensive ceramic is. It also plays to my strengths, both as someone who likes building things with his hands, and using art software. Custom cookie cutters, and rubber stamps based on my own vector illustrations, will make easy and fast replicas. I just press the stamp into a sheet of clay, for an entire game; then cut out the tiles with my custom cookie cutters, which I've already made. The first set is drying now.

I'm used to game designers telling me that the only way to make and sell games is a massive outlay of capital, based on a small business loan, to get a production run of plastic parts in China. What little credit I have is mildly poor, so I used to feel game entrepreneurship was beyond me. It turns out the cost of a 7"x9" rubber stamp made from my vector art is only $35. I'd only ever have to sell one copy to make back the money to start the product line. I'd lose on the cost of my own labor if I only sell one copy, but it's the way I would want to spend time anyway. In the worst-case scenario, I've made beautiful things that previously only existed on paper. I don't see a downside.

I think many of my products will involve Japanese, since I have familiarity with that, and I know people who can help me get in touch with lots of students who might like to buy beautifully-made learning games.

Lost Garden has an article on risk/reward systems in game design theory as applied to the Gameboy DS title "Nintendogs." "If you dig into the game mechanics at an abstract level, it has surprisingly more in common with a RPG than most virtual pet games. Yet hardcore gamers make a snap judgement and instantly assume it must be a Tamagotchi-style game. ... The theoretical designer realizes that a powerup is a powerup whether you call it a 'Quad Damage' or a 'Doggy Brush'."

Similarly, chess can be played with Staunton pieces, or with Civil War soldiers, or cartoon characters; it will still be the exact same game. The Shogi enthusiasts at Marcon strongly disagreed with this when I told them about my Shogi set, but that's because when they say the "game" of Shogi they are referring to a heritage, and a community of people. Strip away whatever differences they would experience between my intuitively-grasped pie-chart graphics and the original Japanese writing and what remains will be the definition of the word "game" used by most of the Chessvariants.com community. There is a difference between the game mechanics and the window-dressing applied to it. A real-time-strategy computer game would be the same "game" even if you take all the soldier illustrations out and replace them with ants, or dinosaurs, or Care Bears, just so long as nothing changes but the graphics.

I've kept that in mind because

cosette_vajean has promised to get me the only thing on my birthday wish list this week: Gameboy DS with "Kirby's Canvas Curse," an innovative platform game which is played by drawing attack paths (OK, they are rainbows, but I will call them "attack paths"), sheilds, bridges, etc. on the screen with a stylus.

An action-platformer game.

Which is operated by drawing. *boggles*

It's like the invention of sliced bread, or the internet.

Also I recently finished last year's birthday present, Shigeru Miyamoto's creative tour-de-force "Pikmin 2" for Gamecube. I have a question about both these games. Why is it that the window-dressing of the only games with ingeniously innovative high-concept game mechanics tends to be so saccharine and infantile, as shown in the recent Penny Arcade webcomic? Why are games with an adult artistic style so derivative? As Tycho lamented, "I am a grown man who draws rainbows."

They're attack paths, dammit.

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Entries tagged with shogi

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June 2025

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