Card Mechanics

[firstfrost]

My most recent teach-myself-something-new project was the Illumineaucracy board. The springs and drifting are probably overkill for the purpose, but it was fun to play with. I asked Jelom what I should write it in, and he told me Adobe Flex - for the record, people who can answer that sort of question are the greatest resource ever. I have a very hard time telling from the description of Thing X whether it does the sort of thing I want; on the one hand, there will be an API full of technical jargon, and on the other hand, there will be a paragraph telling me how Thing X is the most amazing tool for doing everything in the world. (Sort of like justom about Java). And probably a blog somewhere explaining how Thing X kills puppies.

But that reminded me of my First Web Script Ever, which I was then compelled to rewrite: the thresh scry. The old images are all gifs, because that was when reading jpegs for a web browser was Crazy New Technology, not to be depended on. But it's all still just little card mechanics, no matter what it runs on...

Comments

Slavery Governance Board?

[ricedog.livejournal.com]

Neat! But, what is it?

(and I shouldn't've thresh scrown. I got the 4 of Ravens as the Final Outcome)

Re: Slavery Governance Board?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

It's a bureaucracy mechanic for Tourmaline (http://geskekelud.mit.edu/Tourmaline), a little email-run-for-mad-putterers-and-empire-builders I've been doing. (mjperson has been teasing me that it's Tzalmir with the bits filed off, because it starts after the fall of the evil empire. But that's when all the interesting puttering is!)

[twe.livejournal.com]

Okay, I clicked on the link again, now that anz is alive again, but I don't quite understand what I'm seeing. Are the cards pretty much all just supposed to float off my screen? I made them big so I could read them, and then I couldn't figure out how to get the ones that floated away back...

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

You can drag the board around to see where they went. :)

One of the sliders is size, and the other is repulsion; it often works well to give the repulsion slider a quick jolt to send them apart, and then put it back down to the bottom so they don't keep fleeing. There's an alternate method to put a fence around the outside of the board so they don't escape, but then they keep wiggling, so it looks sillier. :)