“Cards” in “Board” Games
June 4, 2025
Many modern board games incorporate card-based mechanics to introduce variety, surprise players, or offer small bonuses that can impact gameplay. Often, these cards give the impression of receiving something extra—an unexpected perk or tactical edge that breaks from the standard flow of the game. In Galactic Cruise, players…
Continue readingThe Point of Points: How Scoring Undermines Story in Board Games
May 13, 2025
Many tabletop games devolve into a race to get points before the game ends. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is a unique game that, like many others, devolves into a point collection process with little or no theme left by the end of the game. I won’t be…
Continue readingFrom Dice to Drama: Reviewing Games Like Films
May 13, 2025
In the interest of full disclosure, ChatGPT wrote the title of this post and helped with grammar issues in this and other posts. I was watching a movie review, or rather a review about movies, and it struck me that board games don’t receive the deep analysis that…
Continue reading3D “Lunar” Lander Game!
April 20, 2025
I think I have an installable version of the 3D Lander game: https://www.rectorsquid.com/Lander/Lander.msi This is a Windows installer file that is digitally signed by me with my code signing certificate. If You encounter this Linage.msi file and installing it doesn’t show my name as the publisher, run away….
Continue readingTry The 3D Lander Game
April 2, 2025
You can download a copy here: https://www.rectorsquid.com/Lander/Lander.zip It’s not code-signed so you might get warnings. I’ll work on code-signing it later. You would need to connected a game controller your computer to have it work well.
Continue readingBoard Game Scores are Like School Grades
March 28, 2025
I was listening to an interview on NPR with author Daniel Pink, who wrote an article for the Washington Post titled “Why Not Get Rid of Grades?” I apologize that the article is behind a paywall and the link is to a podcast. But you won’t need to see…
Continue readingMultiple UserDefault Suites for Detecting “Types” of Values in UserDefaults.didChangeNotification Callbacks
March 22, 2025
Today, I worked on the Linkage for Mac app. I had been running into an issue where changing a setting to track the open sidebar panel triggered a callback in the editor, notifying it of the setting change. This caused a crash when the editor view called a…
Continue readingSeverance
March 21, 2025
I’ve been watching Severance on TV and I’ve got to say, it is a thought-provoking show. The problem is that it’s about 20% interesting and thought provoking, and about 80% artistic mystery. It’s just slow and it takes 43 minutes to convey about 10 minutes of story in…
Continue readingLow Poly Terrain Shader for Unity
March 12, 2025
I managed to write a lowpoly shader for the built-in Unity terrain. The shadows were troublesome because I’m not using the URP (Universal render Pipeline) and I was writing the code and using macros that work with that renderer. Here’s the shader code: This is what I just…
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