Diamond Trust of London: spying, bribing, and profiting from blood on the DS

It seems odd that Majesco, the same company that’s lived off Cooking Mama sequels/spin-offs and licensed rubbish in recent years, would contract an indie dev like Jason Rohrer to produce something as offbeat and serious as a “two-player strategy game about diamond trading in Angola”, but the publisher is following through with its plans to release Diamond Trust of London this year.

The blood diamond theme isn’t the only feature from this game that’s caught my interest; Diamond Trust of London has its roots in resource-gathering German board games (see pen and paper prototype in the image above) but takes advantage of players using different systems to allow behind-the-scenes bribing and spying:

“One thing about the screen environment that pen and paper can’t offer is a unique view of the world for each player, says Rohrer — in a board game both individuals are looking at the same world, which makes something like spy mechanics difficult to pull off: ‘One thing you can’t do [with a physical game] is send a spy, unbeknownst to your opponent, into your opponent’s secret area,’ for example.

Read More →

tags / diamond trust of london / jason rohrer / majesco / gdc / gdc 2010 / indie / ec

SmartStylus planned for DSi

You might have heard a little about the SmartStylus last week — PDP was showing it off at the Game Developers Conference on the Expo floor, inviting gamers and developers to try out the oversized accessory.

The SmartStylus communicates with an RF transceiver plugged into a DS’s GBA slot, and will rumble or flash LEDs on its base, reacting to your performance in a compatible game. A second version is in the works with a “more sophisticated RF link”, as well as audio features and motion input capabilities with a 3-axis accelerometer.

I played a few demonstration levels with the first model, one of which asked players to pop balloons, shaking the accessory whenever the wrong balloons were touched. Another more interesting stage challenged players to guide the tip of the stylus through a maze with their eyes closed; the SmartStylus would rumble, whenever a wall was hit. None of the games seemed like “killer applications”, but I can see some potential in the accessory.

That potential wouldn’t mean much if the SmartStylus doesn’t work with Nintendo’s new system due to its reliance on the GBA slot, but I talked to PDP for a hot second, and they told me that the transceiver is small enough to fit into a standard DS cart, a solution they’re currently investigating.

The stylus uses a single AAA battery and is currently pending Nintendo approval. PDP adds that SmartStylus effects are “easily inserted into [any] game by using simple APIs provided in the SmartStylus SDK from PDP.”

[All week, we’re featuring accessories for the Nintendo DSi. You can read more about the clever and sometimes absurd DSi accessories we’ve featured here.]

tags / accessory / accessory week / dsi / ec / pdp / smartstylus / gdc

Dear GDC nerds putting ‘the moves’ on my wife at the Marriott pool

She isn’t impressed when you brag about being in your final year of game design school. Why would she hook up with you, when she can come home to a RALLY KING?

tags / gdc / dudes with no game / wife / ec