Microsoft announced a new version of the Xbox360 today at E3. It’s black, shiny and apparently much smaller than the standard Xbox. While I like the shape of the new design, the shiny black leaves me a bit hesitant. First, it’s shiny, which means finger prints. I bought a monitor a few months back that was shiny black and didn’t think too much of it at the time. Now everytime I sit down to use it, the fingerprints and smudges drive me crazy. I’m very reluctant to buy any other shiny device.
Now, if I didn’t have an Xbox360 at all, I would definitely be tempted to pick one up though. Much larger (250GB) hard drive, wireless N networking, plus all the other goodies we already have. I’ll have to think about upgrading…

I’ve been working on an iPad application for the past few weeks and I think I see how it’s all really going to work out. Hopefully I should have all the code done in the next two weeks and get it shipped off to Apple. Then it’s back to programming for the Sony PSP. That’s the codebase I really want to get back to.

Still haven’t heard the official word on Apple’s tablet, but as long as it’s running a version of the iPhone OS, I’ll make sure that all of the apps we’ve released will support the new device as soon as the new SDK is released. Should make for an interesting day…

A few weeks ago, my son brought home an assignment from his fourth grade teacher to design and build a boardgame based on the story of a book. My son chose “Dragon Slayer’s Academy” for his topic. Luckily, he has a mom that has played D&D before and had lots of ideas ready to help him out.

Together we came up with four areas on the board that followed the plot of the book. A home area, where all the player’s start, the castle area, the forest, and finally, the dragon cave. Each stage of the game has a few hard stopping points where the player must roll a 1D10 and beat the number on the game board. This counts as completing the task and allows the player to move on. Because of the randomness of this, players in the lead do not always remain there and keeps everyone on their toes as things change quite often.

The characters that the players use are D&D miniatures that we picked up from SciFi City in Orlando. The board is built using a cardboard base with gravel and grass material from Michael’s crafts and felt objects. Of course we had to go with a large plastic red dragon since a felt one just wasn’t terrifying.

Before building the final board, we did draw up a smaller paper version of the game and play tested it a few times to get the path down and the challenges.

As a game developer, the opportunity to help build a boardgame with my son presented me with a chance to get into more gameplay design issues than I normally get and I hope, opened my mind a bit. While we both know it’s not perfect, it is fun to play. We may refine it a bit after he gets his grade.

Click the link below to see an overhead shot of the board.

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