It simplifies outputting numbers like 1^st, 3^rd or 4,289^th.

Clone it from here: https://github.com/elsewares/CakePHP-Ordinal-Helper

After trying and discarding a bunch of different ideas, I settled on what I hope will be a series of WPA posters rebranded and repurposed.  The first is Rose the Riveter, a classic from WWII.  After getting a batch printed, I realized how eye-catching they really are, and how they stand out from the rest of the flyers on a busy board.

I’ll let you know how the analytics shake out in a few days.

To see the whole flyer, click here (11MB).

The visual design by Jonathan evokes the charm of Sesame Street, and the full-image backgrounds make use of the tons of photographs the client had of its students.

This got my mind turning over, wondering if you could construct a sort of strategy/roleplaying game based on the idea. As an added touch, the game would play with table-chatter by limiting player-to-player communication to the short list of nouns and verbs in the game. Why not?

Here’s what I have so far:

• The game begins with each player having control of a swarm of self-replicating robots who’ve been sent to the far reaches of the Solar System (specifically, the Oort Cloud, hence the name) to return these resources to Earth. Things get strange for the von Neumann machines when they find an ‘Artifact’ in the Cloud that gives the machines a glimmer of sentience.
• The game starts with a limited number of nouns and verbs in the vocabulary. The players then construct commands for their swarm by stringing together these words (bytes). The swarm has eight spots for commands: four for interacting with the environment, two for modifying itself, two for interacting with other swarms (the other characters). You also have eight slots of ‘memory’ to move commands in an out of active memory.
• After harvesting a certain amount of resources (and gaining points for doing so), the characters advance in certain ways: they can add to the vocabulary by introducing new nouns (new structures, etc) and creating new verbs by stringing together the basic verbs and nouns. For example, ‘go asteroid make warren’ could be turned into a new verb, ‘colonize’. These complex commands would belong to one player, but others could use them for a higher cost.
• As the game progresses, then, the players can accomplish more in every turn – this simulates the growing, replicating and spreading. Also, the players may choose to specialize, adding unique verbs into their vocabulary.

At some point (I’m imagining a deck of cards with different Trans-Neptunian bodies on them), you turn up the Artifact, and things start to change. Each of the characters starts to develop ‘culture’. In the beginning, all of the players are working collectively to return resources to Earth. From contact with the Artifact on, the different characters begin competing with one another, attempting to achieve dominance over the others in one way or another (perhaps decided by the special functions that they’ve chosen), so the game goes from co-op to competitive.

As the turns continue, more of the swarm’s commands must include keywords that the Artifact introduces.  This cranks up the differences between the swarms and the competitiveness – it gets progressively harder to get things done, and the machines are progressively focused on achieving a very small number of goals.

The other aspect of the game that I enjoy is toying with the communication at the table – requiring that players communicate with one another with only the vocabulary in play.  Impossible to enforce, I know, but it strikes me as interesting anyways.

basalt stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one dark gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach into the bag and draw out the stones for a conflict.  Grab as many as you want, but if you draw a white one (or more than one), you fail.

I’m also thinking about the arrangement above: the stones are laid out in a 5×5 grid, with the final pattern being significant in some way.

Now the question is: what’s the theme?  What sort of game would call for this as a mechanic?

Of course, I’ve also been developing a cluster of game mechanics – a sort of “base system” – called Cairn, which is based on stacks of poker chips placed on cards and game surfaces.  The number and color of all the chips in the stack has significance in the game, as well as the last (visible) chip.  Getting back to the stones, perhaps there’s something there along the same lines – a fusion of a Jenga-like stacking game, maybe with the idea that if the stones topple, or fall out of the prescribed circle on the game board, there’s a consequence.

In any case, it’s an interesting twist to my ongoing (and increasing!) return to game design, and finding ways to marry it both to my web development and to the greater trajectory of elsewar.es.

The client simply needs to add a folder with a simple XML manifest, along with the photos they want to appear, and voila – a new project page. The site also includes a blog, using WordPress for the back-end and piping out a stripped-down feed of posts that the Javascript in the main page formats and presents.