Riding the Wave

One of the practices at Integrum I feel that really brings the team together is mini-breaks that we take throughout the day. There's a pool table, dart board, and XBox 360 with four controllers (the maximum per console). One of the popular mini-break events is Death Tank, a 360 Live Arcade game - a small game normally under $20 that you download directly.

Death Tank is real-time Scorched Earth, and even has some things it borrowed from the game. Younger players will see it as a real-time Worms. Angle, power, and lob are the basic components to the game. Add in the ability to scoot, potential prizes, theme rounds, and different things to lob, and you have a fun game.

As I watched and played Death Tank, it occurred to me that the game was driven purely by physics, and was successful in doing so. With Gemini, a pure physics system was painful for a lot of things we wanted to do. This seemed like a great opportunity to clone the game and see how far I could take it. So far, I'm extremely driven to see a playable game soon.

With RailsConf just around the corner, one would think I would be trying to do everything I could to further my Rails project so I can ask more questions to the Railsites I'll be around. My general thought is that when this kind of motivation comes, you need to ride it until it's over. Surges in motivation for free-time projects are fickle at best. And who knows? Maybe this will turn into a great opportunity to make a scoring web-app.