Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Out of memory ERROR

[blinky465 17028xp 0]

So I only discovered about this yesterday. But I’m super-stoked, because it launches fully tomorrow (Monday 24th April).

It’s called Demon Ship and they says it threatens to revolutionise tabletop gaming by introducing a “micro gaming” element. I’ve only seen a couple of reviews, but each one to date has made the same claim!

Now, I’ll be honest, I’ve a vested interest in seeing this kind of thing become popular – but that’s mostly because I’ve been working on something similar myself, for about a year-and-half, and never quite got the mechanics right! A number of years ago, I built 16×16 electronic game and had a blast playing games with my brother-in-law (in Italy) over the internet. We even got so far as building prototypes and getting a factory on standby to start manufacturing, just before the pandemic hit.

Then, because of manufacturing limitations, I thought about scaling the idea down from a massive 16×16 board (with 1.5″ squares) to four, more manageable 12″ squares. But it still involved lots of manufacturing just to make a relatively small 2ft square playing area.

So I started looking to my old Zx Spectrum games for inspiration – games like Atic Atac and Head over Heels (ok, mostly Head over Heels) where an entire map is condensed down into one single room at a time. I’ve been trying to implement some kind of one-room-at-a-time type game for a while (after all, once we’ve built our massive Space Hulk/Heroquest like dungeon crawler, all of the action tends to be focussed in only a tiny area of the massive map at any one time). I figured if I could make a game that was fun to play on an 8×8 grid, replacing the terrain as you enter each room/location on a larger map, then there’s still a chance that all the development work (on the electronics and app integration) to date won’t have been for nothing!

While I’ve also been working on AI-enhanced object recognition in recent months (to do away with the expensive hardware for an electronic game, and just place a Raspberry Pi camera or regular webcam overhead on a regular gaming table) the idea of an expensive/complex electronically augmented playing suface started to feel redudant. But I still liked the idea of the one-room-at-a-time approach to gaming.

And it looks like Demon Ship is exactly the kind of game I wanted to play all along.

There’s very little info about how the game actually plays – but the idea that you can reconfigure a few simple terrain pieces to represent different parts of a spaceship in a part- strategy, part- puzzler type game really appeals to me.

I’ve never understood the appeal of massive playing areas, where one side basically never moves, or where both sides charge into the middle then roll buckets of dice, ignoring the other 6ft of playing area, as all the action is condensed into a 4″ wide strip in the centre of the table. Tabletop games often feel far too big than is necessary. I love this idea of making everything as small (and intimate) as possible.

It appears that there was a play-testing group on Discord, and all the feeback to date has been pretty positive – but the rules have since been taken down and there’s little more info about the game other than “releasing on April 24th”. Has anyone else seen this game? Any feedback? Anyone else even know about it?

It already feels like Xmas Eve in my house – as soon as tomorrow rolls over, I’ll be throwing my wallet repeatedly at the screen until I can get my hands on it!