Showing posts with label fun. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 13

Zen, Improv Theatre and Responding to Change

teve Mitchell conducted a very interesting and useful session at Agile Coaching Circles last night.

I experienced Steve's workshops before at LAST Conference 2013. Along with the session on visual communication his session was the most memorable workshop at that conference. I have certainly obtained a lot of mileage out of those workshops over the years. I have used them on software teams to increase mindfulness and creativity, at my toastmasters club as an ice breaker and on my children as a fun bonding activity.

Steve's workshops are an interesting blend of Improv Theatre, Mindfulness Training, Divergent Thinking Training and Buddhist Philosophy. With one exception the exercises Steve taught were different from the ones I learnt before.

He started off with a spatial awareness meditation to help get us in the mood and shake off the cares of the day.

When I have used Steve's exercises on client's before I haven't incorporated his Eastern Philosophy, however after the session last night I am starting to think that was a missed opportunity. The Buddhist religion has surprising synergy with Change Management as its core principle is the need to be open to change, that all suffering is caused by resistance to change, by attachment to the Status Quo and our own Imagined Future. I probably won't mention to my clients that elements of what I am teaching come from Buddhist Philosophy. Steve certainly didn't mention Buddhism during the session, I was only aware of the origin of some of the ideas from other sources. Mindfulness, of course, comes directly from Buddhism, even though listening to Western Psychologists and Business Gurus, you would think they invented it.

It was a refreshing change to attend a workshop that was so active. This active participation is one of the reasons I find Steve's exercises so valuable. Instead of passively receiving the wisdom of the presenter the attendees are constantly engaged participants in their own learning. Even small workgroup sessions are not this active.

Instead of teaching us how to convince others how to accept change, Steve taught us to be more open to change, by both, teaching us by example, and teaching us that change begins with us.

Monday, October 5

Pencil and Paper Strategic Sea Battles Game

t was school holidays, and I wanted to spend some quality time with my daughters. I remembered how much fun I used to have playing Pencil and Paper Sea Battles Game with my brothers when we were kids. So, I went online to find a version of the game we used to play—but none of what I found matched my memories.

So I recreated the game from scratch, based on how we played it all those years ago. I put together a few game sheets, and to my delight, they were a big hit with my daughters.

To this day, I’m not sure whether my brothers and I invented these rules ourselves or adapted them from somewhere else. If any kind reader recognizes this version or knows where it might have originated, I’d love to hear from you.

Burns Family Rules for Sea Battles

Each player uses a game sheet with a grid labeled “Your Ships” and a corresponding “Opponent’s Ships” grid.

Unit Placement

Players begin by placing the following battle units on their “Your Ships” grid:

Units can be rotated or flipped in any direction.
Units must not be placed diagonally.
There must be at least a one-square gap between all units—orthogonally and diagonally.

There are three types of units, each with placement rules:

These ships must be placed in ocean squares on the grid.

These air units can be placed on any squares on the grid.

These ground units must be placed on land squares on the grid.

Refer to the unit tally boxes on each particular map to see how many of each to place. Tick them off as you go.

Taking Turns

Once all units are placed, players take turns firing shots to locate and destroy the opponent’s units.

Standard Attack:

Announce a grid location (e.g., “B4”).
Your opponent replies with:
- “Miss” – if there’s nothing there.
- “Hit” – if part of a unit is located at that square.
Mark your “Opponent’s Ships” grid with:
- A slash ( / ) for a miss.
- A cross ( X ) for a hit.
When all squares of a unit are hit, your opponent must announce the unit’s name (e.g., “Cruiser destroyed”). Cross it off in the tally box.

Mega Bomb (Special Move):

Announce a target square.
The bomb hits that square plus all eight adjacent squares (the surrounding 3x3 area).
Your opponent announces:
- Any hits, along with their locations.
- Names of any destroyed units.
Record the use of a mega bomb by marking an ‘M’ in the tally box.

Winning the Game:

The first player to destroy all of their opponent’s units wins. names of any ‘Ships’ destroyed. Cross out an ‘M’ tally box each time you use a bomb.

Update :

I keep getting feedback that people want quicker games so I added some more small maps and re-did the letter code sizes.

Jagged Coast SS

The maps go from small small to extra large

Jagged Coast XL

Update 2 :

I added a interactive game down the bottom so people could try out the different maps.

Game Sheets

Demo of Maps

Geoff's Hidden Battle

Seek Mode

Choose a Map:

Hunt Mode:

Enemy Waters

Click On Square To Fire

Single Shot Mode

Tally Boxes

Shots: 0

Sunk: 0 / 8

Thursday, October 1

Source Code on Github for Simple Card Game written in Swift

knocked up a simple game in swift using SpriteKit as part of a job interview. Its based on a game my family plays all the time using real physical cards. I put it in the app store under the name Rickety Kate and uploaded the source to Github. You might find it takes 8 to 16 days for the code in the repository to find its way to the app in the App Store, one and half review cycles on average.

I probably over engineered this one. You can build your own deck of cards, anything from a 40 card deck with 4 suites to a 168 card deck with 10 suites. I knocked up some very simple input controls to control the options.

Putting 1x and 2x images in texture atlases was a little finicky. I did a little experimentation and the 2 versions of the images seem to need to be in the same atlas for the 2x images to be automatically used in a retina device. Also here were problems unless all images in a atlas had the same number of versions e.g. they all needed to have 2x versions or none should have them. I have not tried using 3x images yet.

I am going put out a series of very simple games and apps. I put out another card game called Sevens. Next one after that is going to be a tilt game with retro neon line graphics. Set in the wreckage of a large city post alien invasion, you pilot spacecraft picking up refugees, and ferrying soldiers, diplomats, wounded, equipment and supplies while avoiding Lurkers, Tripods and Space Jellyfish.

Update: Rickety Kate 1.1.4 Just passed review (22/01/2016) and Sevens v1.0.2 just passed review (09/01/2016)

Rickety Kate is now localised for English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

Sunday, March 18

Created an interactive book for new readers on the iPhone / iPad

have released my first iOS App A is for Ant

Designing and implementing this App has been a fun exercise that has allowed me to get up to speed on Objective C and to explore a few ideas I have had about educational software.

For $0.99 you get:

A beginner reader story book (with easy, medium, and hard versions) plus 13 games.