It's actually kind of amazing when you think about how much female representation there was in 80s adventure movies. Not just sexploitation movies... I mean yeah, there were a lot of those too... but actual strong female leads. The first Conan was pretty early in the cycle. Then Destroyer. Red Sonya...

They sunk so much time in the art and feel of the Dungeons and Museums in these games. It's no wonder they're more central to the games theme than dungeons were in Ultima.

Fair enough. It still pissed me off. :P

After a bit of research it looks like I was kinda wrong. The 'Morning Star' pattern in weapons is the type of ball/cylinder at the end of either a mace or a flail. Both types of weapons began off with a standard end (in the case of a mace you would call it a 'club') and eventually evolved into either a cylinder or spherical metal ball to eventually a flanged cylinder shape or nubbed spherical shape, to eventually a spiked cylinder or spiked spherical shape. The evolution would closely co-incide with a smith's ability to incorporate more detail in the process. But a "Morning Star" is the style of ball, not the type of weapon itself. So my saying "I thought it was a flail" ... well yeah, it was. A flail with a morning star style end.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Thanks for the info! I was confused also.

Thorn's definition of a wasted life; Living in SO Cal or SO Texas, and *not* liking Mexican food and/or Texmex. And man, I like *all* of it. If I had to pick out a fave it'd be Chimichangas or a good Enchilada dinner with beans and rice! Oh and farkin' Guacamole. Give me some Cowboy Queso... white Mexican cheese melted with pico poured over a huge scoop of guac. Man, why'd you make me hungry? ;)

I'm not sure what's worse. Having moved back to Houston, I now have to worry about my home regularly being underwater... Eventually permanently.

Unfortunately the guide only gave advice on the correct answer. Though I'm sure I have a save close enough to where I could go back and try them.

Not only that, but even when I picked it up I thought the idea of me needing a special lute to be kinda arbitrary.

I have no idear why I decided to phrase it that way.

It's been ages since I've played either. Unfortunately, there's waaay too many other games I'd want to play before getting back to them.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Personally, I'd only revisit Ultima III and IV if I wanted to study them for design inspirations for an Ultima IV type CRPG. But I already have my own different ideas, so I personally would look elsewhere for specific ideas.

Implementing a very basic supply and demand economy, where each region has different specialties provide some great opportunities for money making mechanics. Reminds me of an old school M.U.D. I used to play where you could break up the monotony of monster extermination by buying a cart of product and carrying it to a place that had demand and could process it into other product in demand somewhere else...

@@thegamedesignlexicon Yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm imagining. Like ... Settlers of Catan has a very simplistic production model where it takes a certain combination of resource units to produce a particular product. It can be that simple, where each town has some production of raw resources as well as some tradesmen who convert raw resources into manufactured products.

It reminded me waaay to much of a Mario Party minigame.

Thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoyed my video! I agree my thumbnails aren't typical. Though I have made them the way they are for a few really good reasons; First, the style of the thumbnail is meant to emulate the kinds of dioramas that older late night television shows used like Johnny Carson or Saturday Night Live. Second, my brand identification is the most important thing to me. I'm not as much going for random clicks as I am for someone familiar with my brand to automatically know that the thumb they see is one of my videos. Third, the thumbs are automatically generated from a scene I use in my live stream, making them really easy for me to generate. I suffer from ADHD as well as a few other mental issues that make it very difficult for me to follow through with tasks that heap on complexity. Which brings me to your other suggestion; When I edit my VODs, I split them into 30 minute increments instead of leaving them in 4 hour blocks. I edit out any dead air time and that is it. You get my video the same as someone would watching it live. I do have plans to eventually make highlight videos and shorts, but until I can get proper treatment for my mental issues, any thing that requires extra labor for me has to be carefully considered as if it is too complex or labor intensive, then I will not follow through. I certainly thank you for your suggestions. If I had the ability I'd spend more time on my thumbnails, though I still don't think they'd be anything like a typical KZbinr's thumbs. And I really wish I had the mindset to go through my old footage and make highlights and shorts, but at this time I don't have it in me. KZbin is strictly a repository for my live stream.

Honestly I'm a bit taken back by having two people in the castle that you need to talk to regularly. It's an annoying mechanic.

I've never played it before. But it wasn't hard to get a hang of.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Yeah, I couldn't bend my mind around it when I tried to only think about it abstractly. But seeing it in action for a bit and it "clicks". Now I'm pondering ways to integrate this sort of mechanism into game mechanics ... Like, you could have a game inspired by Dune where you move armies around the planet using spice blows or something ... it redistributes spice along with your movement or something. I dunno ...

I find it hard to read consistently. I'll go on binges every half-decade or so. Honestly I don't think I've ever read a Pratchett book. Though the Hogfather is an excellent movie. They also made two more; The Color Of Magic, and Going Postal. Both of those based on the Discworld series. They also made a few games based on it, point and click adventures... but I have yet to play them. I just finished The Color of Magic, and I am currently watching Going Postal and they are both great. I don't think they are as good as Hogfather, but still very charming. I've been re-watching some old series I've loved in the past. Just got done with The Good Place. Great show. Reminds me of my favorite movie; I Heart Huckabees. A lot of philosophical humor. I've also been watching a lot of movies in groups based on popular figures in the movie industry. I remember recently mentioning going through all of Robert Altman's movies and stumbling upon a Stones of Wisdom analogue... That was well worth the exploration. I grew up with and loved the old Tom Baker Dr Who. I tried to watch the reboot, and while I *loved* the first series, first thing they did in series 2 was replace the doctor that I loved. So I just kinda went 'meh' and fell off it.

I used to say I was 'centrist'. Then I learned about how society worked. I've never been a centrist. Especially not 'centrist' compared to the rest of the U.S.. I may not be fully committed to the anarcho-syndicalism thing, but I can't be any more anti-capitalist.

I guess I should have expected it. It's not like the C64 could support a robust random number generator. What's really funny is the gamefaq I've been following has the most elaborate write up on the odds in this game, then at the end goes; "...But it doesn't matter because in the first round the game always generates the same six hand variations..."

@@thegamedesignlexicon FWIW, the C64 had no problem with proper random number generation. The built in BASIC random number generator would have been adequate for the purposes of Heigh-Loagh. I suspect a bug in the code that they simply never noticed during development.

I have a whole list of roguelikes I regularly bounce between. I guess the one I play the most these days is probably Caves of Qud. Though I have been digging on Path of Achra a lot too. I haven't played Moria in forever. In fact, I don't think I've played any classic roguelike in a long time.

That's where the Dungeon Master series took CRPGs. It extracted out the dungeon element of previous CRPGs and added sooo much more detail. I remember the first time I saw the Dungeon Master demo on the Amiga in a Babbage's. I was blown away. Today even games that emulate that feel of games are still some of my all-time favorites. Legend of Grimrock, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, Vaporum... all great games. In fact, I think my all time favorite D&D CRPG game was Dungeon Hack.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Well, I still like exploring a large world rather than just a dungeon, but maybe it could all be first person. Drakkhen had first person world exploration, albeit that was freeform movement. I think something like The Lords of Midnight, but not so sluggish (it takes a few seconds to render a scene, but it's drawn off screen so you're just waiting with a blank view while it's rendering. Meh.) Keef the Thief is one game that had first person town and world exploration. It was pretty cool, but don't bother considering streaming it. AFAIK, there is only one longplay of it ever and it's 9 hours long. I mean ... you wanna commit 9 hours to a single game? And that's from someone who was familiar enough with the game to know what they were doing.

@@IsaacKuo Okay, you're dropping some names that are making me giddy. For a short amount of time I was obsessed with Drakkhen. I had always wanted to get more into it than I did when I was a kid. For some reason back then I just didn't understand it all that well. As an adult I tried just to find out it was kinda a bad game. Good idea, bad execution type thing. The presentation made it seem more interesting than it really was. They say the sequel was much better (Dragon View). I have yet to try it. There was no game I remembered from my youth that I didn't re-obsess over as an adult more than Lords of Midnight and its sequel, Doomdark's Revenge. In fact my initial goal for my Streaming/KZbin community was to do a full play-through and review of that series. Then I learned more about Mike Singleton and learned that I was also semi-obsessed with his other games. Midwinter, Flames of Freedom, Starlord, Ashes of Empire, J.R.R. Tolkien's War in Middle Earth. His games were for a lack of a more creative term, utter genius. Completely unlike anything that had ever been made at that time. Pretty much most if not all of them. I was able to beat (several times) Both Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge. I believe both remakes were and still are free on GOG. I'm so glad, because the OG C64 versions had some quality of life hurdles that the remakes provided for. imgur.com/VAuVhvA imgur.com/mcA1d6z Fun fact though. Both of those games play a lot like a strange hybrid between a hex-based Roguelike, and a game like Kings Bounty than anything else. Waaaaaaaaaay before Kings Bounty or anything like it was being dreamed of. It's such a fantastically unique set of games for its time. I even went so far as to learn some of the coding techniques he used to make them in preparation for trying to create something inspired by them in Godot. Unfortunately all this was ramping up around the time my life falling apart was reaching a crescendo and I was unable to follow through.

@@thegamedesignlexicon From a design perspective, the complexity of something like Lords of Midnight or his other games is too daunting for me. Just going around exploring a CRPG world, fighting stuff, and trading is more like something I feel like I could tackle. I don't even care for dealing with multi-character parties. When Ultima III came out, I thought it was really cool. When Ultima IV doubled the party size to 8, I could feel it getting sluggish and tedious doing party maintenance ... but Ultima IV was so remarkable I stuck with it anyway. Right now, I'm thinking it's just you and your trusty pack animal (or the other way around - imagine playing as an intelligent pack animal while adventurers ... well ... it's a dangerous profession, isn't it? It's not the pack animal's fault they don't tend to live very long.)

@@IsaacKuo In Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge, it deals with all your multiple party members more like gaining (and losing) multiple chess pieces. Chess pieces that can team up, making themselves more powerful. The amount of troops they have underneath them translate more into Hit Points than troops. Plus the remakes give you a really simple interface for dealing with the multitude of party members you can gain.

I always thought it'd probably be better to just abstract town visits into a series of menus. With the towns in this game there's really little more needed. At least I can't see any reason why you'd need to tool around a town other than to find a shop, buy something at leave. At least in the more recent games they gave you a 'leave' command.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Yeah, like Phantasie if I recall correctly. I think the approach of AutoDuel and Mail Order Monsters would be fine also - a town is just a single screen where it doesn't take long to go from place to place.

@@IsaacKuo I knew there was a reason I liked the Phantasie series so much... I still haven't decided if I am going to play it next, or the Wizard's Crown series.

@@thegamedesignlexicon I don't remember the Phantasie games super well, but I think everything takes a long time and feels tedious just because you have to deal with so many party members. I don't remember Wizard's Crown at all, though.

@@IsaacKuo I kinda already decided, but that cinches it. I'll do the Wizard's Crown series as my next c64/SSI RPG on Tuesdays after I finish Blacksilver. Then the Phantasie series.

It's funny that the Doughterty Twins were really innovative in several aspects of this era of CRPG, but still ended up keeping certain banal tropes that didn't make any sense. The food one absolutely kills me. It did nothing but ensured that you visited a shop every so often else suffer death. Money acquisition could have been well more thought out on all four of these games. If I were to actually implement food into a game, I'd try to make the consumption rate a bit more realistic as well as make the effects from a lack of consumption well more realistic. Gradual. A slight suffering at first, to progressively gaining weakness, and then finally death.

In this game, I'm sure their only function is to pass the player tips and small tidbits of helpful text. Which begs more questions. Why are the only people with helpful information in the game either in the main castle, or in jail?

Two most confusing moments in the game so far: 1) Looting chests in the castle with zero guard hostility. 2) Seeing 'purple' guards that turned out to be Orcs. And yeah, the gambling thing is ridiculous. Reading a walkthrough on GameFAQs, I learned if you bet 333 at Hi-Lo, you can win 999, which is 1 below the limit that they will freak out on you for. You can then back out of gambling, and without leaving the town or anything, turn right back around and talk to the dealer and begin again. So short sighted. And it doesn't help the suspension of disbelief at all.

Questron was such an awesome step in the evolution of Ultima-like games. It drew inspiration so much from Ultima that they gave Richard Garriott credit on the first one (after an out-of court settlement ;P). The Legend of Blacksilver is the last and final entry of the only four games developed by the Dougherty twins. And they were all legendary when they were released. Blacksilver is the least known in the series and the only one I've never played (or even heard of until recently learning about the Dougherty twin's development history). Once I finish it, I will have 100% complete playthroughs of all four on my channel.

Despite the similarities, it is very evident that they spent a *lot* of time refining the graphics in the game. And as apparent in all of them (especially Legacy) the amount of heart they put into the pixel art is admirable.

I didn't know when I played it, but it was the next in the Astonishia Story series. So if you like Crimson Gem Saga, you'll like it too.

@thegamedesignlexicon already had that one, it was pretty good

When I started looting the castle and didn't get attacked by the guards I was all like, "This isn't right. I should be in combat by now! This isn't how its supposed to go!"

All this Conan talk got me to rewatch the two. I forgot how much worse Destroyer was compared to the first. Ah well. It had it's good points. Grace Jones was totally unhinged.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Yeah, it's worse. But as you say, it had it's good points. And when it comes to CRPG inspiration, there's really no bad stuff there. The characters, the magical stuff, the settings, the puzzles, the plot twists and betrayals ... all perfectly serviceable stuff for a CRPG.

Of all the types of 80's cheese, there was no better cheese than cheesy 80s sword and sorcery movies. Conan the Destroyer was leagues better in production value than a lot of films of that era I hold in high regard. For some reason I can't have this conversation without mentioning "Hawk the Slayer". Such a great movie.

Thank you very much!

So far the game feels like the shadowrealm of Legacy of the Ancients. It's not the same game at all. But all the same elements are there all with just enough changed to make it feel strange. In fact, I can't really seem to find anything that states that this game is even a sequel to Legacy. I went through the entire manual and it really does seem like they just took the same framework and created an entirely different world, with an entirely new plot.

I also didn't notice that when the guy started reading his scroll at me, and wounding me every move, it was also destroying healing herbs...

@@thegamedesignlexicon Yeah, fortunately it was only like 1 or 2 at a time and you had a ton of them, AND the guy was only like a dozen moves away. Not like the epic slog you had to push through in Questron II.

It's completely random as to where you find them. What I did was an exploit pointed out in the Walkthrough I had been following. If you repeatedly talk to a vendor, they will eventually sell you a relevant coin you don't have. It's really annoying because I had already been all over hell and back trying to find anything that might advance the plot.

Possibly. But the only thing talking to him does is enables you to get the Ruby coin. It would have been so much better in several parts of the game if what they expected of me next was a bit more ... explicit.

I'm still really interested in the history and proper name of this game. But other than reaching out to people who might know, that I wouldn't know where to find them... I would be at a loss as to where to start.

Honestly there were a lot of missed opportunities. Also a lot of good practices in previous games that didn't seem to make it into the newer ones for whatever reason... It's almost like in newer versions they ended up dropping a few good practices to sacrifice for something new...

I watched the first season of Full Metal Panic and I was like, "Meh, it's ok." Because of it, I was really reluctant to watch Fumoffu... I would have deprived myself so bad had I kept that course... It's gone down as probably my 2nd favorite anime ever. So far nothing has, or most likely will dethrone Fooly Cooly(FLCL). Best anime show of all time.

I've been lucky when it comes to stuff like that. I've been given a few 'super powers' where I am fairly obviously better than the average person at. One of them is pattern recognition and spacial awareness. Both of those will allow me to quickly recognize patterns in areas that I am only given visuals on from a first person perspective. It allows me to navigate by landmark, and people are always surprised at how easily I can re-find locations after being there only once, and even in the dark. Speaking of which, I used to 'train' myself to navigate in the dark. A memory game I learned a while ago taught me how to navigate mentally, and not rely on visuals. So when our power goes out, I don't have nearly the dis-advantage moving around as most people do, because i tend to remember my environment by objects and distances. Then give me an overhead view, or even the ability to visualize the area in a 'zoomed out' perspective in anyway, 2D or 3D, and I have the ability to near-instantly memorize pathways and major landmarks that will aid me in navigation. I've always been able to memorize addresses and directions to new locations. This has made me surprisingly adept at 3D perspective navigation in video games. Regardless of whether they are representing 2D or 3D. This ability aided me so well in Descent that the friend group I'd play it multiplayer with could not keep up with me. Descent and other similar situations also showed me that I have the ability to remember my environment, even when my perspective is altered. So, upside down, sideways on a wall. Doesn't matter. I can come out of situations like that well better off than my contemporaries. I also have an exceptional sense of balance, which might have something to do with it. MC Escher has nothing on me :P Of course as I get older it isn't getting better...heh.

@@thegamedesignlexicon Lucky you, that's so cool! Hmm ... even without making a dungeon engine support full 3d rotation and movement, they could do weird things like "upside-down flip" (as in Castlevania) or going into a mirror. Oh man, it could be really weird and disorienting to enter a reflective pool and you end up in a vertically mirror reversed world ... Using flipping or mirroring was a way to stretch out the content of a dungeon size limited by RAM, and also developer effort.

You have to get past the second dungeon, which when leaving... you are right, increases your strength and allows him to finally trigger.

Also me: Walks through a castle with 20 heavy satchels laden with clinking gold coins, but now invisible. Guard: "Do you hear something?" In retrospect, though ... I mean ... on the one hand, the amassment of huge sums of money in a fantasy game is an appealing fantasy that an ordinary person like you or me could become comfortably rich enough and it's not too terribly difficult to do. On the other hand, the WAY we amass huge sums of money is by stealing it from a gilded hyper-rich dude, and killing off a bunch of guards committed to protect the system of systemic hyper-inequality through deadly violence. Oh wait. Weren't we pondering the morality of going around stealing and slaying the cops en masse? Oh well, I guess it depends on how you feel like framing it. Still. I feel like in the 1980s it was far more likely for a computer game to celebrate the Capitalist system. Like ... Ghostbusters is the quintessential 80s game. You discover hard proof of the afterlife and what do you do? Use it as a hustle to try and make a profit as a small business. Because OF COURSE. The 80s, man. Damn, that's a reason why I like Ultima IV so much. Maybe it's just a game and it's just all an illusion, but I sure appreciated at least the illusion that you were trying to do something more aspirational than acquiring adequate wealth to survive and kill the evil wizard. I mean, that always feels nice but it felt particularly nice in contrast to the whole cultural gestalt of the 1980s.

> ... with 20 heavy satchels laden with clinking gold coins... And in heavy armor no less. > Damn, that's a reason why I like Ultima IV so much. You can give Garriott so much. Popularizing/standardizing the tileset/tilesheet. Inventing countless RPG tropes... But all of them pale to the balls the guy had in bucking the system less than a decade or so after those tropes were established. I'm sure his resistance to sticking with the status quo is what makes us think of him as utterly insane today... but back then it was his most valuable trait. I had so much fun and trouble solving IV *because* it wasn't just, 'go here. kill this. take treasure. go here. kill this. use treasure.' rinse repeat.

So, I just had a surreal experience. Stones of Wisdom is the first time I've encountered that game/type of game. Pretty sure anyway. A poker'esque bluffing game based on numbers you're given at random. I don't know the proper name of this game or how I could figure that out, and I know that's it's probably kinda obvious that it existed before Legacy of the Ancients and outside of this computer game but... I've recently been going through the Directorial collection of Robert Altman. In case you're not familiar, famous movies he directed were M.A.S.H. with Donald Sutherland/Elliot Gould/Tom Skerrit, and Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall. In fact he discovered Shelly Duvall. Met her in Houston, Texas at a fashion party and wanted her to be in his next film (the one right after M.A.S.H. called Brewster McCloud) so badly, he literally bugged her about acting for him until she gave in. Up until that time she was studying to become a biologist. In the last few months I've watched all of his movies. Seems he didn't last too long in Hollywood as he was prone to directing really artsty films that didn't make a ton of money. Tonight I sat down to the last movie in that list to complete watching entire his collection. A movie called 'The Long Goodbye' with Elliot Gould. It's Robert Altman's take on the Philip Marlow private eye character. Supposed to be really good, but I can't yet suggest it because I've just paused it at ~11 minutes in to type out this response. Here's the trailer if you're interested. kzbin.info/www/bejne/nHK8mZiQrMqsps0 At about 11 m 45 s in, Philip Marlow, to a friend of his who just arrived at his place; taking a dollar bill out of his pocket he says, "Would you like to lose a couple of bucks?", to where his friend quickly digs through his pockets for his own dollar. They call out the series... Marlow: "I got a D ..." "I got an L and *four* sevens."... his friend says. Marlow replies, "You really think I believe you got four sevens?" "You probably think I don't have any..." - friend "Well then I gotta say five sevens..." - Marlow "Uhm.... I challenge." - friend "Challenge? How many ya got?" - Marlow "None!" - friend smiling, holding back a laugh. "None? Yeah. I got three. That's good." Marlow hands his friend the bill. Pretty sure in the movie I am currently watching, they played the exact same game, substituting the dicerolls with the serial numbers on dollar bills they had in their pockets. How is that for a wacky co-incidence? Legacy was made 15~ years after this movie... I'm gonna have to mention this in my stream tomorrow.

I mean, I coded a bitboard based chess engine when I was earning my degree. That took me about two weeks. Making the back-end for this game shouldn't take anyone more than a day or so worth of coding. If even. Including the AI really. I'm sure it has a very simple tree-based behavior very similar to the dealer rules in Blackjack.

​@@thegamedesignlexicon Ah, bit math optimization techniques! I never applied them to a game like Chess, but I've done some really weird bitboard and bitboard adjacent stuff for Conway's Game of Life. This includes doing stuff on unexpanded VIC-20 and Javascript, which are radically different. I mean, the amount of overlap in the suitable techniques is low. Very low. 6502 coding ... you simply can't do 32 bit stuff reasonably and the confines of the VIC-20 RAM means tables have to be pretty small and tight. With Javascript, you can do 32 bit integer math which allows for a LOT more stuff done in parallel, and also large tables are practical - but also less efficient because table lookups aren't as efficient in general. Even so, you might be surprised how much you can do in parallel using 8 bit math, and clever tables. Like, I was using 2 64 byte tables to calculate 3 cell neighbor sums of 4 adjacent cells at a time... With javascript, the plentiful RAM and 32 bit math means that it's actually most efficient to store the cells in either 8 cells per integer (4 bits per cell, for clean sums between 0 and 15 later on) or 10 cells per integer (3 bits per cell, but with some annoyances if a sum reaches 8 or 9). I didn't feel like dealing with the headaches of 3 bits per cell, and 4 bits per cell gave me acceptable performance. But anyway, a game like "Stones of Wisdom" would be most of the development time on presentation. I mean, even with plain ASCII "print" and "input" it's still going to be more time on getting stuff to look how you like, because the logic part of the game is so simple.

@@IsaacKuo > But anyway, a game like "Stones of Wisdom" would be most of the development time on presentation. That's pretty much most games though, isn't it? My chess engine was a back-end only because there were already numerous front-ends and I needed it done on class-room semester time. The purpose of the chess engine was to have AI chess tournaments in class. How fast your chess engine was, combined with a well coded AI would determine how well you'd rank. Bitboards are fairly common in chess coding circles. Pretty sure I got everything I needed for it from a single site on the internet... The backend consisted of a 64bit integer for each board layer, ie white pawns, white rooks, white knights...etc. So six sixty-four bit integers per side, 12 in total representing an entire board, plus a few extra bits to track things like castling, en passant, etc. All operations validating potential moves were done with single or combinations of binary operations. The most complex being rook, bishop, and queen movements, which had to be done with 25mb of integer lookup data. It was a fun coding project, and the team I was assigned to absolutely love me because I pretty much coded the engine myself. The only things they did was setup a coding environment for me (I wasn't familiar with C# coding at the time), one person made all the rook/bishop/queen lookup tables, which can be generated automatically, one person made all the pawn movement tables, and the rest of the team coded the AIs.

​@@thegamedesignlexicon Oh, it depends. For example, I spent very little time on the presentation side of LifeCommand, but I spent a LOT of time optimizing and debugging the Javascript code in order to bump up the frame rate on an iPod Touch gen 4 (absolutely ridiculously slow CPU and extremely poor HTML5 implementation by Apple). Ultimately, I got it around 25fps which was still not really what I wanted. It honestly reminded me of 68000 optimization, because the overall Javascript performance was not dissimilar to a 68000 or 68020 from 2 decades earlier. I actually did not use known algorithms on the Internet. The algorithms used by others for Conway's Game of Life are generally trying to do things other than real time gameplay, and as such they skip past many many frames. And they also consume insane amounts of RAM, which wasn't going to work with the restrictions of an iPod Touch - or even web browsers. More generally, almost any puzzle game consumes a lot of time devising puzzles/levels rather than the game's graphics and mechanics. And for most board wargames, devising and playtesting any sort of computer AI takes a lot longer than the other stuff. Chess has an extremely small search space compared to even simple board wargames. But also, the goal is very different from an academic chess engine. I mean ... the goal isn't to try and maximize "winning capability". The goal is to try and maximize player fun. My favorite Reversi game wasn't the one with the best AI. It was one with an AI that I could beat, but not too easily. And with a typical board wargame, it's straightforward to tweak scenarios to simply give the computer enemy more stuff in order to balance the desired difficulty. This still takes time and effort playtesting and tweaking, of course.