Introduction and Greetings

So you too are a computer programmer. I also tried many times in my life to make video games. The last thing I learned was the Allegro video game library. I tried to make a remake of wizardry. It took more more than 2 years and it is not finished yet.

I now have an idea for a commercial video game, but the problems with video game is that they unfortunately take a lot of time to make. So I am now seeking board games as an alternative. Less programming and more focus on the game mechanics.

OK, this I have to argue. There is something I found weird when comparing prices of board and video games.

Let say I make a commercial video game and sell it 10$ US. The game is less likely to sell because high technology games is so cheap that sometimes they can manage to be sold below this cost. So the customer will say, why pay 10$ for a low tech 2D game when I can pay the same price for an average tech 3D game. I don't know how they can make so high tech games at a so low price. Maybe it is because some companies like EA does not pay the overtime of their employees. If a game like "warcraft 3" would have been sold around 120$ US, maybe now we could have a chance to make some competition with our low tech games.

While in board games, if you make a board game and publish it, you are somewhat even with other companies but you must make a risky investment. But it becomes more interesting when you make downloadable board games. Yes it is less popular and lower quality, but you can sell a 10$ game that would normally be sold from 30$ to 100$ US. Of course, the client must pay for some material to do the printing but it will never exceed the marketted price. Second, there is no risky investment to make for selling a downloadable game.

This is why I am now really reconsidering downloadable games as an options instead of making downladable video games.

Just thought that I'd note that I'm another dedicated Allegro person. Rather, I used to be when I played around with video games. There's totally awesome people involved in that project.

Just to keep this on topic, one thing I think often is that many board games are well suited to new computing environments. For example, you're not going to play Doom3 on your smart phone, but you could probably play Puerto Rico (just to pick a popular game) if the interface was done nicely. Particularly cool would be a networked multi-player version across phones, PDAs, and the Web.

Welcome to the site nefariousd! You will find lots of great stuff on game design here.

I consider myself a game designer, but along with designing board games & card games, I also design computer games, I too am a computer game programmer.

I have been a bit frusterated with Windows/DirectX programming lately, what does the Allegro library include?

Thanks, I think I will take a look at it.

Ah, Romance of the 3 kingdom. What a good memory. This was the time where strategy game were good. Another koei game that could be cool for either a video game remake or a board game adaptation was "Gem Fire". The theme and story was soo cool ( fantasy world island with a gem wizard in each faction ).

For the board game remake, I tought of using a classic "axis and allies" rule set. But there are so much cool unit in gemfire ( including gem wizard ), that it could be more interesting to have more diversified units. So i'll need to find another type of rule set. The video game used a tactical battle map for the battle but I don't think for a board game it could be a good idea to have more than 1 map.