2008-12-22

Reviews

When you write something, reviews can make or break your effort.  While I accept this, and I was looking forward to Index Dice being reviewed, I must say that I was frustrated at one of them that showed up.  (I will quickly say that the first review was excellent... he had some complaints, but they were constructive criticism.)

Frankly, the issue is that you should write something helpful to the developer, don't just complain.

He said: "It's not zilch nor it should be compared."

Okay, fair enough.  Although, I didn't promise it would be zilch, I said it was similar to and that the rule customization would allow you to get close.  Of course, in some searching on the internet, the first two rules sets I found online - one was very similar to how I have Index Dice set up, the other was a bit different (and ironically claimed that the game didn't have many variations).  I'm not sure what to think, but since this user didn't tell me what's wrong, I can't fix it.

He said: "It would be great if it had record keeping. Stats."

This is a good point and I agree wholeheartedly.  It's on the to do list...

He said: "It also has very suspicious rolls. Almost always when the pc id down it gets a very hi score."

This is funny, at least from where I sit.  I can honestly say that the rolling mechanism has no idea "who" it's rolling for.  I can also say that the AIs are very simple (I keep meaning to make them smarter) and pay no attention to how many points you have or if you're close to winning. (They do, however, know if you are about to win because you went over the limit.  They will keep rolling at that point until they beat you or bust.)

This is similar to the turmoil about iTunes and the iPods being non-random.  This is a classic example of observation bias in statistics.  The observer is remember some data points better than others, specifically the ones that are more significant.  For example, I thought for a time that it wasn't rolling the dice when you passed, since I would see a four replaced by a four.  When I actually took the time to write down what was happening a few times in a row, I could see that this wasn't the case... my brain had just filtered out what it considered to be the "significant" events and brushed the others under the rug.

So, while I understand that it might appear that the computer has some awesome run at just the right time, I can assure everyone that I have many other things I'd rather be doing with my time than making the game arbitrarily more difficult to play... like adding stats.  

2008-12-14

Snow!

It's snowing in Portland now... this may be the first time we've seen this much snow before Christmas since we've moved here.  At any rate, this is also the first time that Allison has really experienced snow (last year was only a dusting just after Christmas, and it had basically melted by the time we went outside).

Fortunately, since we had hoped to go sledding around Thanksgiving, Dawn had already gotten some snow pants for the girls... so we could go out without worrying about getting too cold (although I still held them to only about a 1/2 hour for now).

While we were out there, it picked up again, so it looks like we may have a good amount by tomorrow.