A lengthy history of The Singularity Trap, a cheap little "niche" game you are probably not interested in and almost certainly have never heard of. But sometimes an uninteresting thing can have an interesting story.

Let's introduce our human and the rest of the staff. Developed by: gxnpt = Wayne (me) Recently retired with little money but also small expenses, will probably look as old as Gandalf when I reach his age, did some freelance back-end web development around a decade ago, had an old game I designed back in 1978, and was really, really bored. Assisted, Supervised, and Berated by: the old game : Hyperwars was its name 1978 "microgame" hexmap space themed area control wargame in 3 dimensions with elements drawn from miniature battles for 2-4 players (but balanced best as 2 player or 2 teams of 2 each), and a number of other flaws now that I look at it with 2016 eyes With peanut gallery input from technology : (and the lack thereof) including my own limits, low end equipment, lack of artistic ability, and with a special thanks to Microsoft for the Explorer update and that Edge thing, which didn't make them standards compliant but stopped generating the javascript error flags. You forced me to rewrite all my try/catch structures. You still don't work the right way. Thanks. So we have some old guy – Hey, what do you mean old? I still have that loop to close on 2039. - an old microgame boardgame, and out of date technology. How can we go wrong?

Best of all, we have a host of furious fancies, so off we set beyond the wild world's end (yet again). A History in Cardboard – The old game Back in 1977 when the original microgames were coming out – Melee, Wizard, Chitin, Ogre, Illuminati, Car Wars and such – a just barely old enough to be a congress critter human had an idea for mixing miniature battle rules with hexmap wargame rules in a 3 dimensional space (a multilevel board). Since this is long enough ago to justify the third person pronouns, he also was late to mature, and while he had hair on his chest since age 21 and had recently started shaving every day he seems so shallow from almost 40 years later. Since he had extra money then, and he bought a vinyl 3-inch hexes swatch design. He used a twelve sided die for the used 2 six sided dice – lucked out in

was a regular gamer at the local game shop, of blank hexmap and began to play with a original combat tables (the second prototype the tables converting exactly).

That host of furious fancies – every game designer has them – wanted to do an amazing number of things in the game. Things that are being done now in Civ and such games. Things that had no business in the cardboard world in a microgame. But we used old checkers for planet markers and pieces of cardboard with a ship sketched on them and pads of paper and pencil for paperwork and began dropping things and simplifying things to get something workable.

In this case the we means me and the fancies. Things finally settled down and I began playtesting with a few friends. I admit these were all miniature battle and hexmap wargame players (as well as D&D players) and there were only about 3 regulars and another 4 once in a while to playtest instead of play other things. But eventually it reached a point where we – not just me and the fancies this time but all the playtesters – thought it was completed. As far as rules and mechanics went. This should be familiar – inspiration, idea, trimming and refining the idea, playtesting and further refinement. The next step was to make a prototype formatted for final production output. Instead of 3-inch hexes we found that 1-inch hexes could (barely) work. Two tiny 6sided dice were cheaper than a 12-sided and the spread matched. Typed to fit in pamphlet form with crude example sketch illustrations rulebook. One of the regular playtesters wanted to privately publish the game and had some cash. Another supposedly had contacts in production and artwork and volunteered labor. I had the game itself. And all 3 of us were friends....... Have you all heard the story of how someone takes someone else for a few thousand dollars? Yup. At least I was not the guy that used to have the money on this one. I am not going to show you the crappy box cover art or the rules booklet cover art (not crappy but stolen/excerpted from a magazine cover) or list the many “costs too much” but somehow the money vanished anyway things that failed to go into the production to the extent that I was surprised that the playtesters all bought a copy at cost yet somehow not surprised that cost was 3 times intended retail price and all the money was gone. I will say the somehow Hyperwars: Sector 27 on the rule book cover only became Hyper-Wars, Section 27. My original crude sketches including the board itself and ship outlines were not replaced with actual art (or even actual geometric shapes instead of doodles). Here is the original cardboard game:

Sure looks like my prototype sketching, but's the actual “published” game.

Rulebook: Inside front cover

Yup, looks like an old Avalon Hill chart with breakoff instead of back one and a nod towards type of damage. Points for putting it inside the front cover, but from a 40 year later viewpoint it is awkward and cumbersome.

Inside Back Cover

On the Back Cover

The text of the rules booklet:

Looking that old game over now, no wonder it wanted a do-over and began staring at me from under its layer of dust on the shelf the very day I retired and discovered that now that I finally had time again all the gamers had left town – unless I wanted to play Magic the Gathering. About the Human (nowadays) I am turning 6.4 decades this year (the retirement was an early retirement due to loss of job and lack of other jobs worth having combined with enough in the 401k to stretch till my wife also starts collecting and we flip positive by a couple hundred dollars a month). It is surprising that I shelled out nearly sixteen dollars for a cheap intro web server offer and a couple domain names to put this online, but I did have half of that still sitting in the Paypal account for a decade since my last web development gig. That lack of money – and my roughly 4 square feet of clear counter/table area in this tiny apartment – started the new game going digital in the first place. The hidden information in the new game drove the nail in the cardboard coffin. On the technical side, I know PHP (PHP4 but PHP5 and 7 compliance not an issue), HTML (v4 again but compliance with 5 not an issue, just no canvas type stuff), MySQL, have a history of using PHP/Javascript interweaves, and image creation/manipulation scripts left over in my archives from doing a jewelry site. I still lack any artistic ability – although I can design a good functional HTML control panel. I can do basic image creation and some manipulation as a purely technical exercise. Good enough for a prototype at least. Usually a game designer has a plan in mind for promoting a game, designs the game for an intended age group and market, and knows where it will fit in the current gaming world. Not so for me. According to the bureaucracy, until I reach “full retirement age” I cannot have a business or work more than a few hours a week in my wife's business or have a job that pays anything or it will reduce the retirement amount. So I guess the game must be a hobby right now. The intended market is the same kind of gamers who liked the old game (those who like miniature battles, or hexmap wargames, and possibly Diplomacy players also with the new alliance rules). Those who like “great old games”, pretty much. Where it will fit in the current gaming world is a huge question since I have trouble describing it without saying just look at the rules. It's a boardgame using individual displays and controls, based off a server but that can be localhost or LAN or a web server (including many free hosts), best played in person with multiple computers/laptops/tablets but can be played long distance, turn based using the written orders then simultaneous actions model (hello Diplomacy players), with area control as a dynamic, shifting alliances, and a bunch of hidden information. You could even play it PBEM but it might get a bit tedious in places that way like localhost pass-and-play can be with more than just a couple of players. It's a semi-abstract game now (fleet level display and 6 way symmetry in 3 dimensions for the playing field) but the computer generated paperwork is at the ship level and combat is at the ship level for targeting and damage (like miniature battles). Movement based on the hexmap rather than actual distances comes from hexmap wargames and the limited number of ship types is old cardboard “microgame”. It could be called a browser game since players just need a web browser, but it's actually a server/browser game with the browser just acting as display and input. It could be called a local multiplayer game but can also be played via web.

We probably have enough info on the human now unless we wanted to bring up health (I see Med people. They walk around on the street and look like everybody else.) or how much my wife likes technology and uses her laptop (She will tap the space bar to pause a movie it is playing on the TV when she leaves the room and tap it again when she comes back in, and fire is still willing to burn in her presence.) or why all the gamers are the next town over now. The Peanut Gallery My old laptop is a Dell Studio 1749 (I3 chip. 4Gig RAM. 500Meg HD. 1600x900 internal display). My wife has a smaller laptop (Pentium chip. 4Gig RAM. 380Gig HD. She has it at 1280x720 resolution). So we aimed the game at a 1280x720 or better display and kept the load on the serving computer within bounds for her machine running Windows 7 – it runs even better on mine with Windows 10 and better yet on a web server (LAMP – Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). While it would be possible to play it using dial-up speeds it is aimed at low end broadband or better. I use Xampp for my Apache installation on my laptop and the game was developed that way. I ran across a freeware program, UwAmp, that can run Apache in thumb drive mode without any installation on the computer and now the game is available bundled with UwAmp if you want it that way. The furious fancies were mostly trimmed and dealt during the development process, but 2 fancies refused to submit: (1) (2)

Want it to be cheap, just like an old “microgame”. Want it to be free for schools and such.

So it doesn't look like this is going to be any kind of a money-maker. But I want to play it and it wouldn't stop bugging me until I finished it.

Actual development details coming in part 2 of this blog. If you want to jump ahead and look at the rules now, see http://thesingularitytrap.com