Saturday, December 18, 2010

Bricks… IN SPACE

No idea where Josh is taking this and he already used up his proposals, so here are my thoughts, still need to iron out brick placing:

There exists a wikipage called The Workbench. It is split into two sub categories, The Creation and The Toybox. The Toybox consists of a list of bricks, with any necessary quantifiers specified (such as the color and size) as well as a quantity for each brick in the list. If the quantity is ever zero, the Brickmaster may remove it from the list. If the sum of the quantities of each brick in the list is ever less than five times the number of active Mini Figures, the Brickmaster may increase the quantity of bricks in the list or add new bricks (with a non-negative quantity) to the list provided the sum of the quantities remains less than five times the number of active Mini Figures. The Creation consists of a list of bricks and their location in space. Their location is specified by a pair of triples. (x1, y1, z1) and (x2, y2, z2). x2 - x1 must be equal to the width of the brick, y2 - y1 must be equal to the length of the brick, and z2 - z1 must be equal to the height of the brick. Furthermore, z1 < z2 and z1 cannot be negative and no two bricks can intersect. (This is where I'm having trouble. Need a clear definition of what this means).
But the idea would be to let players place bricks as daily/weekly actions and add some cool rules like “a yellow brick cannot be placed so that it touches a blue brick” or “a red brick must have z1 be zero”

Comments

Clucky: he/him

18-12-2010 22:53:40 UTC

why did EE remove all my spacing? o_0

Klisz:

18-12-2010 23:12:20 UTC

Well, this is too long for me to read, but while we’re discussing new mechanics, I have a vague idea of, since we’re mini figures, being able to remove and replace our own body parts, with different parts having different effects. Unfortunately it isn’t fleshed out, but I think it has potential.

Klisz:

18-12-2010 23:13:56 UTC

...aaaand now I’ve read it. It sounds good. I can’t figure out how to define intersection, though.

Clucky: he/him

18-12-2010 23:17:03 UTC

So if all bricks are big rectangles, then intersection is pretty easy. We could maybe bound non-rectangle bricks as rectangles. But that might rule some stuff out, I donno.

Josh: Observer he/they

19-12-2010 09:48:39 UTC

Most of this I like. The one thing I’m not a big fan of is restricting the bricks available - I think I’d prefer it is MiniFigs could get their hands on whatever bricks they wanted, provided that they could pay the value.

Josh: Observer he/they

19-12-2010 09:54:27 UTC

Mentally, I’m somewhat shirking the responsibility of trying to describe in the ruleset exactly how to build things. It seems like it would be punishingly hard to make exact, so a big part of me wants to leave it implicit - keep it as abstract as possible and not based any mechanics on the minutiae of which brick connects where. Either that for force everyone to download the Lego Digital Designer and post pictures.

Subrincinator:

19-12-2010 10:03:01 UTC

Rather than quantity, we might focus on a brick’s size—a 6x6 brick is bigger than a 1x2 brick, and so might take up more space in the toybox.

If we assume that an “average” brick is 2x3, then we might want the total brick-size in the toybox to be something like thirty times the number of active Mini Figures.

Are we all building something together, like a Lego castle?  Perhaps a Mini Figure can choose to add/ replace bricks on their own body (within some sort of constraints) or to add bricks to the common project.

Josh: Observer he/they

19-12-2010 10:05:04 UTC

A communal project is a nice idea, especially if individually-created constructions can be added to it.

Brick bin limits are a nice idea.

Josh: Observer he/they

19-12-2010 10:06:00 UTC

For the record

No idea where Josh is taking this

Me neither ^_^