This and That

I don't have anything specific to talk about so I downloaded Forge's source code. I'm just going to talk about various things that catch my attention.

Door to Nothingness is an interesting card that lets you win for only 10 mana, what a deal! I had no idea how it was coded since Forge doesn't have specific way to make one player win (or lose) a game. As it turns out the implementation was very simple, the losing player's life was set to 0, voila.

I didn't know Forge had Goblin Charbelcher. It is an odd card that rewards decks that use fewer lands or you can rearrange your deck with cards like Sensei's Divining Top.

I remember coding Erratic Explosion a long time ago and that card always makes me laugh because it is very, well... erratic.

The deck editor "filter" option takes up a hefty 700 lines of code. I find it very useful, so I don't really care how many lines it takes but I do get curious. The guy who coded the filter option used CloudGarden's Jigloo SWT/Swing GUI Builder (www.cloudgarden.com). I don't know anything about Jigloo but I'm going to check it out.

Some parts of Forge have been rewritten and improved like the way Forge's stores decks. All decks are now stored in separate deck files which is great. Originally I crammed all of the decks into one single file which has its pros and cons but generally it makes it harder to download new decks.

The biggest improvements have been the user interface. People sent me code that resizes the card images in order to display them on the battlefield. The "removed", "grave" and "flashback" zones can easily be viewed just by clicking on them, which is a nice little feature. New high quality scans of Magic cards can be downloaded so can satisfy you inner Vorthos and drool over the fantastic card art. Other huge improvements include X spells like Blaze and adding a mana pool for cards like Dark Ritual.

Since I'm not slogging through the source code everyday, I forget how big Forge's source code actually is and how much new stuff that has been added. When I stopped working on Forge it didn't have any aura's (creature enchantments) but now there are 55. Dennis, Rob, and the other guys on the forums have added many great features and cards to Forge.

And I didn't know Forge had Force of Will, which is insanely powerful.

It seems weird to thank you for downloading Forge and reading this blog but thanks anyways. Forge was literally started in a garage on a whim. Much of the framework that I wrote has changed. I didn't think it would ever become this successful. I personally think Forge is insanely fun (and replayable).

Thanks to the guys on the forums for the great updates and thank you for downloading this kid's dream. (OK, I'm a big kid but I'm still a kid a heart.) And of course thanks to Wizards and Richard Garfield for creating a game that is so enjoyable. Even 5 and 10 year old cards are still fun which is quite an accomplishment.

p.s.
Not all of Garfield's games are as good as Magic but he is a very talented game designer.