Crayons has given me permission to reproduce the winning map here (click it for a much larger version):

This is also a decent opportunity to praise Kickstarter for a feature: making the amount pledged independent of the “pledge tiers”. That is, you can choose the benefit of, say, the $20 tier, but still pledge $100 if you want. Often, I want to pledge a certain amount, but am totally uninterested in the extra crap thrown into that tier.

One the other hand, Kickstarter’s search feature is horrible. It should not be difficult to build a search like role-playing and rpg, but that fails totally. Also, role-playing and roleplaying return totally different results. That could be considered desirable, but only if you also allow role-playing and roleplaying (or, better yet, role*playing) searches. Kickstarter has informed me they intend to fix this, but nothing has happened as yet.

The resulting game, Valence, is… not good. As currently written, it’s about an eighth of a semi-interesting idea. Eero Tuovinen, one of the contest’s judges, summarized the game’s most glaring flaw, saying “the fiction does not breathe, for the game is much too concerned with making the novelty equipment work.”

Another bit of spot-on criticism comes from judge Graham Walmsley, who said “I can’t work out what a story would be like.” Part of the reason for this is that I totally failed to describe what “the Design” is or how it works. A more important part of the reason is that I’m not entirely sure what “the Design” is or how it works. What was in my head when writing it was a realm based around a sort of “dream logic”. That is, something sort of real, but where form is mutable and extremely odd events are just taken in stride, a bit like the oldest game of all from the “A Hope in Hell” issue of Sandman. Thinking about it now, the game might be better served by pitching the Design as a world of cartoon logic, where it is not out of place to, say, pull a big mallet out of thin air. Or something. If I ever figure this out, I’ll probably write a new version of the game.

I’m not sure yet if there is really a good game hidden somewhere in Valence. If there is, I suspect it will be a good deal longer. I had the definite sense when writing it that I was building an “abridged” version of what was in my head, in order to avoid violating the contest’s “make it short” directive (and, even then, the result was too long).

Of the (many) ideas in my head that I totally failed to explain in the game, one is the idea that the chemical world treats the notion of “identity” as much more fluid than the real world does. Part of the point of bonding with another atom is that you “infect” the atom with your personality and agenda, and vice versa.

One thing I thought of a bit too late was how to use the models to coerce the players into interacting with each other. If you read the game, you’ll see a lot of stuff about atomic bonds, but the game carefully avoids having the players (who all play carbon atoms) bonding to each other. Instead, maybe such bonding should be the center point of the game. This notion, combined with the “infection” mentioned above, could be fairly rich, but also runs the risk of deprotagonizing and asshattery.

A bit of criticism that I don’t totally agree with concerns the quantity of moving “props” in the game (molecular models, cards, Post-its, sheets, etc.). There certainly are quite a lot of fiddly bits; however, I’m not entirely sure that’s bad. It seems to me that the type of person who would even be attracted to playing a game that revolves around manipulating molecular models is probably exactly the type of person who actually likes a lot of fiddly bits. (I know I do.) Conversely, a person who doesn’t like fiddly bits is probably not going to like a game that requires them to mess with molecular models. Still, there is such a thing as too many fiddly bits. Food for thought.

I may have more to say about Valence in the future. It’s also totally possible that I won’t. Meanwhile, I’m releasing Valence under a liberal Creative Commons license, if you should happen to want to turn it into something playable.

Congratulations to Ms. Shoemaker on the completion of your game. I look forward to playing it, and can’t wait to see the iOS tools you have planned.

The gist of the challenge is to design a map of a building (or set of buildings) that focuses geomantic energy, under a particular set of guidelines, in one month. This is explained in more detail (with perhaps more asterisks and sportscars than necessary) on the challenge page. This challenge follows the same rules and procedures as the others.

The winner is decided by members of the Cartographer’s Guild forums, which are free to join. Good luck!

(Also, the contest doesn’t mention or require this, but if you want to enter a map, please consider posting it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Thanks!)

The LDraw file is here.

Part		Color		Quantity	Description
This parts list generated by LDView. Part images provided by Peeron.
	2429	71:	Light Bluish Gray	4	Hinge Plate 1 x 4 Base
	2430	71:	Light Bluish Gray	4	Hinge Plate 1 x 4 Top
	2540	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 2 with Handle
	2555	71:	Light Bluish Gray	3	Tile 1 x 1 with Clip
	3023	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 2
	3024	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 1
	3623	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 3
	3623	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 3
	3794	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 2 with 1 Stud
	4070	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Brick 1 x 1 with Headlight
	4081a	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Light Type 1
	4081a	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Light Type 1
View on Peeron.com	4085c	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Vertical Type 3
	4590	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 4 Offset
	4697b	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Technic Pneumatic T-Piece – Type 2
	47905	71:	Light Bluish Gray	4	Brick 1 x 1 with Studs on Two Opposite Sides
	47905	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Brick 1 x 1 with Studs on Two Opposite Sides
	48336	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 2 with Handle Type 2
	6019	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	2	Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Horizontal
	61409	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Slope Brick 18 2 x 1 x 2/3 Grille
	6141	0:	Black	2	Plate 1 x 1 Round
	6141	43:	Trans Very Light Blue	1	Plate 1 x 1 Round
	6141	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	3	Plate 1 x 1 Round

Please leave a comment if you want to see something added to it.

The project has a little bit to go to reach their target by the deadline of March 15. To help them, DivNull Productions is increasing its pledge to this project to $500. Two things interest me about this project. First, just like its inspiration, the result will be Open Gaming Content. Second, the design of the system is being driven by feedback from millions of hours of playing the d20 system from players all over the world, a real playground of evolutionary forces. While I’m not the biggest fan of d20, I care a lot about open source gaming, so I wish good luck to this project.

Please consider throwing a few bucks to the project to help them meet their goal. (And, while you’re at it, see if there is anything else on kickstarter that interests you.)

In its naked state, it doesn’t look like much, but the attachments fill it out nicely. The arms have two points of articulation with a wide motion range (at the shoulder and elbow), and the lower arm can be flipped around or even swapped out for different parts that use a “locking hinge”. The basic assembly is shown in the image below. In the final stage, there are two different 2×4 pieces that work for the side torso, both of which are shown. The one on the right gives a slimmer look, while the one on the left provides more options for attaching things to the front of the mech.

Here are some samples using both variations. Each is pictured with a plate containing an indication of how many of each type of dice the mech would use in a Mechaton game. If you’ve seen the game, this should be relatively straightforward. For the red dice, shorter ranges are closer to you, and one of the optional rules is used in some cases. Transparent pips are d6′s, solid pips are d8′s.

All of these models were built using Bricksmith, then rendered with LDView. In making these models, I took some liberties with the colors, as I don’t have all the right colors of these bricks. Bricksmith is built on top of LDraw, and uses its file format. Some of these use one or two unofficial parts (which you will need to download if you want to use the files).

• Naked version (bulky)
• Naked version (slim)
• Balanced
• Melee
• Jumper
• Missile
• Firepower

Parts for the naked chassis are:

Part		Color		Quantity	Description
This parts list generated by LDView. Part images provided by Peeron.
	3020	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 2 x 4
	3021	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Plate 2 x 3
	3040b	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	2	Slope Brick 45 2 x 1
	3298	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 33 3 x 2
	3666	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 6
	3794	72:	Dark Bluish Gray	1	Plate 1 x 2 with 1 Stud
	4070	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Brick 1 x 1 with Headlight
	4287	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Slope Brick 33 3 x 1 Inverted
	43720	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Wedge 4 x 2 Sloped Right
	43721	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Wedge 4 x 2 Sloped Left
View on Peeron.com	43710	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 2 x 4 Triple Left
View on Peeron.com	43711	71:	Light Bluish Gray	1	Slope Brick 2 x 4 Triple Right
	44301	0:	Black	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Single Finger on End Vertical
	44301	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Single Finger on End Vertical
	44302	0:	Black	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Dual Finger on End Vertical
	44302	71:	Light Bluish Gray	2	Hinge Plate 1 x 2 Locking with Dual Finger on End Vertical
	6141	0:	Black	4	Plate 1 x 1 Round
	6141	43:	Trans Very Light Blue	1	Plate 1 x 1 Round

• Default fonts are too small.
• Using the “larger font” menu choices improves some small fonts, but not others. Two of the main components of this screen are Flash files, so do not respond to this switch.
• Advertisements take up a good portion of the prime real estate of the screen.
• The screen doesn’t scale when you make your window wider, instead using a fixed-width, centered layout.
• Large sections of the screen are essentially useless for tracking the game (such as the header), meaning you need to scroll carefully to optimize viewing of the interesting stuff.

On a 15″ MacBook Pro (1440×900), with a maximized screen (dock on the right), the result looks like this:

Fortunately, the HTML markup of this page is reasonably good for altering (mostly because all the divs have ids), so it is possible to override the CSS for the page to fix most of these problems. Some browsers allow you to override the style of a page out of the box, but the process for doing this is fairly obscure for Firefox. A much more user friendly method for overriding a sites CSS using Firefox is to use a plugin called Stylish. This adds an icon in the lower right of your browser window that allows you to muck with the styles of the page you are viewing.

When you use CSS to alter a page, you are somewhat restricted by how good or bad the HTML of the page you are trying to alter is. While you can get extremely cute with CSS selectors, sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. Fortunately, most of the things you’d like to do to the Gamecenter site are possible. There are a lot of ways you could hack it, but what follows will alter the game tracking pages to look something like this:

To do this in Firefox, do the following:

1. Install Stylish.
2. Navigate to the NFL Gamecenter page of the game you want to see.
3. Click on the Stylish icon in the lower right of the browser window.
4. In the menu that pops up, select “Write new style → For this URL…”.
5. In the dialog that comes up:
   1. Name the style something like “NFL Gamecenter”.
   2. Add some tags, such as “NFL”.
   3. Replace the script with the code below.
6. Click “Save”.

Now, any time you go to the Gamecenter part of the NFL site, you’ll see this hacked version. If you need to turn this off, you can click on the Stylish icon and select “Turn all styles off”. Also, unless you are using the exact screen size mentioned, you may need to tweak the CSS to match your screen. If you know CSS, there is nothing particularly surprising in the code of this alteration. Also, there is nothing in the code that is tied to Stylish itself; the same CSS should work for any other way of overriding the page style that you can come up with.

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix('http://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/') {

/* Hide extra headers and stuff */
#hd-micro-nav-list, #hd-micro-nav-list, #tl, #header-content, div.tab-list-wrapper,
#gc-shop, #gc-discuss, #gc-track-search-ads, #gc-rr, div.w, div.t, #br, #gc-photos {
  display: none !important;
}

#hd {
  width: 1000px !important;
}

div.c {
  background: transparent !important;
}

/* Hide advertisements */
div#dc-header {
  display: none;
}

/* Left justify everything by default */
#com-nfl-doc, #hd {
  text-align: left !important;
}

#doc {
  margin: 0 0 !important;
}

#doc-wrap {
  padding-top: 0px !important;
}

#hd {
  height: 70px !important;
}

/* Scale the Flash file of the game scores, to make the font larger and
    reach across the screen. */
#hd-scorestrip-swf {
  height: 70px !important;
  width: 1380px !important;
}

#gc-team-stats {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 70px !important;
  left: 990px !important;
  width: 380px !important;
  height: 280px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 14px;
}

#gc-last-score{
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 360px !important;
  left: 990px !important;
  width: 380px !important;
  height: 73px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
}

#gc-last-score h2 {
  width: 380px;
}

div.widget-inner {
  background-repeat: repeat-x !important;
}

#gc-current-drive {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 450px !important;
  left: 6px !important;
  width: 760px !important;
  height: 335px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-window {
  width: 750px !important;
  height: 320px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-scroll-bar {
  height: 320px !important;
}

#gc-current-drive-scroll-track {
  height: 300px !important;
}

#gc-top-performers {
  position: fixed !important;
  top: 450px !important;
  left: 785px !important;
  width: 575px !important;
  height: 335px !important;
  overflow: visible !important;
  z-index: 300 !important;
  padding: 5px !important;
  background-color: white !important;
  border: solid 1px #ddd !important;
  font-size: 16px !important;
}

div.span-4 {
  width: 280px !important;
}

}

The makers of Stylish allow uploading of scripts like this; however, their “new account” feature is broken as of this writing. Once this is corrected, this page will be updated with a link to the “official” version of this script, which should make installation even easier.