26 October 2009

What Next?

I'm kicking around some ideas of what to write about next, and I thought I might ask my readers what seems interesting. Here is a partial list:

  1. Stochastic Duels: This series is stalled, but not forgotten. This will get done eventually because it is part of my "master plan". 
  2. Fair Dice. There was a spurt of interest in this following Kit's post at the Scrapyard Armory, but I had some other ideas I still want to follow up on. These include measuring a set of dice to see how regular the casting is (I found my calipers!), and some more mathematical results about fair dice I could describe.
  3. A series on basic strategic choice in war games, tentatively titled "Toy Soldiers". And by basic I mean starting with the most trivial situation possible and working up to some common choices in games.
  4. A better Battle Value for Battletech. I've been working up to this one for a long while, and I still don't have all the pieces I need to do this right. However, doing it wrong might still be interesting. What I have in minds would also be applicable to a lot of other games too. This would be even better if I could do a little programming work to calculate the value first.
  5. Painting Miniatures, which would require me to get off my butt and start painting!
  6. There is no idea #6.
  7. Designing Games: I simply ran out of time for the Game Design Concepts class over the summer, but I'd like to get back to it at my own speed. I have a growing list of game ideas, and with a little effort, any of these might be fair material for posts.
  8. Lanchester's Laws, something else I keep threatening to write about, also part of my master plan. Hmmm ...
  9. I read this post about Chaos theory, and it made me wonder if that might be worked into a game somehow.
  10. I've got a stack of old notes I started writing before I was blogging too. I should scan through those for more ideas.

That's enough. Suggestions and requests are always welcome.
GBR Giant Battling Robots Favicon

4 comments:

 Ashley said...

Well, they are all good choices, and some I will be writing about too. So, let's get in on. I know, I know, not enough hours in the day, or at least that is how it seems to me at the moment, as I appear to be running to just stay still.

Steven Satak said...

Go for the miniatures painting. I could use a few pointers myself.

Steve

skiltao said...

I'd prefer the BT-related topics marginally more than the others, but I'm really commenting to point you at this analysis (http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/) of "choose your own adventure" books as games. Very little math, but otherwise right up your alley.

Dan Eastwood said...

Wow, that is really well done. This demonstrates representing stories with directed graphs, which is math too. If we add some random chance to which path is taken, this becomes a Markov-chain. This is potential more complex, but useful for all kinds of things.

This fits in nicely with a post I need/want to write, so I'll try to work this in too.
Many thanks.