New Game : Balance Of Power

After many months of hard work and heartache my latest game Balance of Power is finally available. This game is a real departure from my last two games Wheel of Death and Perpetual Motion (both using the Box2D physics engine). Balance Of Power is a turn based strategy game. While most games are about resource depletion : a resource called health. Balance of Power is about resource distribution : a resource called influence. The more influence you have the greater your status. The higher your status the more influence you can take. The aim is to take all the influence from the enemy. When their influence is gone they will start to see things your way.

It's probably not the easiest game in the world. But like many board games it rewards the effort of learning a few basics with many hours of challenge. I actually built most of Balance prior to starting the physics based games. But I felt that it's genre would be an obstacle to it's success. In the end I came back to it and decided I really liked the game and so committed to getting it published regardless. I hope that you will give it a fair go as I think it will be worth your efforts.

RSS vs Twitter

Like a lot of people I started out very sceptical about the value of Twitter and have gradually been drawn in. I'm finding more and more useful ways to use Twitter. I don't really get the desperate pursuit of followers but have found very real value in following a small number of reliable streams. For example, I can't imagine that I would ever stop following abcnews. But I'm still very attached to RSS through Google Reader and still defining the line where something works as a Tweet rather than an RSS. For example, I still find myself following TechCrunch on both Twitter and via RSS. Twitter offers convienience while I'm still very keen to star and share things in Google Reader. Anyway I just found a very clear example of something that works much better in RSS than in Twitter : Dilbert. I can't start the day without a dose of Dilbert. Below are two screenshots the first from Google Reader and the second from Twitter. However you look at it the Reader version is handy and the Twitter version (even with the bit.ly preview addon) isn't: