Just as with standard notation for Tatsu, I couldn't find a pre-existing standard for move or board notation for Lost Cities. If you're not familiar with BlueLine Games, we're best known for making digital versions of board games, and Lost Cities by Reiner Knizia is the next game we're working on. Below is my draft

When reading a great article from the creators of Soma Water about how they raised $100,000 in 10 days on Kickstarter, the shared the idea of this share-page that they sent to their closest friends & supporters to ask them to share the project with their friends. The little landing page was cute, functional, and

The tabletop designer of Hive, has just begun releasing his newest game, Tatsu. It's out in the UK and getting great critical acclaim, and is currently rolling out in mainland Europe and the United States during the summer of 2016. Since it's such a new game, there isn't a standardized notation for moves yet... so

As a small two-person team, we were able to sell more units of Hive in it's second year after launch than we did in the first - despite living through the "Indiepocalypse". This experience flies right in the face of the conventional wisdom of the game sales cycle being mainly one giant launch spike followed

Our fourth game, "Simply Chess" is now available on Steam! It's just what it sounds like: Chess! We wanted to stick to the basics, but to provide a ton of play modes: local multiplayer, pass-n-play, 100 Levels of AI powered by the Stockfish engine, online play, and async play (correspondence chess) w/Steam Notifications. We are

Our official BlueLine Games Steam Group has a new post that gives an overview of our Board Game Engine.

Check it out!

Making your own game servers is fairly significant undertaking, so now that we've released our own game servers and started using them for our games - Hive, Khet 2.0, and Reversi - I thought I'd share a brief postmortem to help anyone else considering going this route at some point. Why host your own Game

Sometimes, you may need to slow-down your framerate to test certain behavior in your game/app as it would appear on really bad hardware. The following snippet lets you easily tweak a framerate at runtime. Since Update() gets called every tick, just put this in any GameComponent and you should be good to go. Press "+"

Today, we're releasing some Open Source freeware! As part of creating our next game (Reversi for PC, Mac, and Linux on Steam), we wanted to make use of some of the great AI that's already been written for Reversi over the years. One of the most respected Reversi AI programs is WZebra by Gunnar Andersson.

I often hear the question of why there aren't more board games on a certain platform. The short overarching answer is just that digital board games are a niche-market, so big game companies aren't often willing to take the risk of making them. However, I think there are some hints as to where board games

About a month and a half ago, we released Khet 2.0 on Steam. After a few updates (fixes & new features) then last weeks release of the 'Eye of Horus' Beam Splitter expansion... we're spending part of our time on our next game: Reversi! It will be on Steam and we plan to support PC,

We recently released Khet 2.0 for PC, Mac and Linux and have been working on the Beamsplitter expansion piece (among other things). The Beamsplitter piece lets the laser pass through and also reflects it at a 90-degree angle. This changes the concept of the laser from being a linked-list to being a directed-graph. This makes

Yesterday we launched our second game: Khet 2.0 on Steam. As is usual with a Steam launch, we get a ton of requests (a couple dozen a day, probably) emailed to us for free "Review" copies for press. Red Handed I often had a sense that some of these people were maybe not legit, but

Our second major release, "Khet 2.0" is now live on Steam! Buy it once and play it for PC, Mac, and Linux. Hit that link to the Steam page to read all about the game. Here I'll just wax poetic about our history launching it... ... Before we (Sean & Geoff) started making games together,

We just released a big update to Hive which included some great visual changes as well as a number of AI improvements. One of the interesting AI changes was the addition of a bit more randomness to the AI's decisions, with minimal impact on the skill of the AI. This is the 2nd part in

We make a habit of asking great Hive players to give us feedback on the AI for our Steam version of Hive . Now that the AI has become pretty formidable, a suggestion we started hearing a few times was that the AI wasn't random enough. This allowed players to basically memorize outcomes and they

While creating the Steam version of the popular board game Hive, it became clear that normal methods of on-screen debugging weren't going to be in-depth enough. If you know a lot about board game AI, you can safely skip to the "Our Solution" section. Otherwise, we'll cover some basic AI stuff so you know why

We are downright giddy to announce... Hive is coming to Steam! It'll be the same great game as on Xbox, but will have a few extra bonuses: Game will track over 40 stats on Steam and you can earn 30+ Steam Achievements. There will be 2 new levels of AI. Since even low-end PCs are

There's been a lot of excitement around the upcoming release of the Pillbug expansion for Hive. We have great news: if you buy the Pillbug expansion when it comes out, the package will have a code on it which will let you unlock the Pillbug in the Xbox version of Hive! While this is a

Combining Assets One of the basic tenets of making a web-page load quickly is reducing the number of HTTP requests that your page makes. One very common way of doing this, is assuring that all of your CSS files are combined into one request (ideally in the <head> tag), and all of your javscript files

The title says it all... now go grab it!! :D

Not literally... but we made the site faster! Our app that makes burndown charts for Trello has received a number of improvements in the past couple of weeks. A couple of days ago, we made the AJAX requests take about 1/7th of the time that they took previously. The enormous Trello board that we used

About a year ago, we started building a scrum-like burndown tool for Trello to help us manage our own projects. After a few months of work, we made it so that anyone could sign up for the free burndown charts for Trello. [caption id="attachment_326" align="alignleft" width="300"] Burndown for Trello - exponential user growth[/caption]We thought that

Keeping up with the exciting pace of this year so far... we have an awesome announcement to make: BlueLine Game Studios has been given an exclusive license to bring the extremely popular Khet 2.0 board game to Xbox! Khet 2.0 is an Egyptian-themed two-player game with real lasers. It has been growing in popularity world-wide,

After more than 15 months of work, many nights of play-testing by our devoted Alpha team, and close to a kiddie-pool worth of Mountain Dew... it's finally here! Hive for Xbox 360! When you think you're starting to get good, add me on Xbox Live - "SeanColombo" - and I'll gladly play a round with

The Konami Code is a fun part of gaming culture and a very common method for adding Easter Eggs to games. After more than a year of work on Hive, I started thinking how absurd it was that we don't have any Easter Eggs yet. When I went to look for a module for the

It seems that there are a number of implementations of fitting several lines of text (of a specific size) into a rectangle and wrapping them (we wrote one too), but I was surprised that SpriteBatch.DrawString() did not have a form which does the more simple task of just taking a string and making it grow/shrink

For some reason, there wasn't much info on this. For the sake of making this faster for others, I'll post code for a quick way to draw a rectangular outline in XNA 4.0. If you're planning on doing a ton of 2D drawing, you might be better served by this tutorial on drawing polygons. I'd

Recently, we made one of our internal tools publicly available: Burndown charts for Trello. It's been surprisingly successful: all we did was blog about it and there are about 100 users who have logged in already! Since the little app seems to be gaining popularity, we figured that now would be a good time to

BlueLine Games is a small team and we NEED to move fast (time is money!). Because of this we need awesome (and lightweight) project managment solutions. Thanks to recommendations from Vicky Carlsson we found the tools Toggl and Trello. Toggl is a simple tool for time-tracking (might blog more about that later). Trello is a

THIS POST IS LONG! If you don't care to see how the answers were calculated and just want to know the size of the 3D area into which all possible Hive games could fit, just skip to the bottom of the post for the results. While doing secondary-research to get ready for writing AI for

When working on Hive and Proximity, we're dealing with boards of hexagons. If you look at a bunch of hexagons together, you'll notice that they don't sit next to each other in a way that's a straightforward analog to square pieces like you'd find in a chess board. In the process of working on these

[caption id="attachment_100" align="alignright" width="296" caption="Something's not right about the placement of that cursor... good thing we're doing an Alpha test!"][/caption] Development has been cruising right along on Hive. While we're still a few months away from a final version, we've gotten to the point that the game is playable as local multiplayer "pass-n-play" (where you

Last week, we announced Proximity for Pokki. Tonight - in hopes of helping other game developers get off the ground with HTML5 games and/or developing new apps for Pokki - we're making the code for Proximity open source. If you have some questions about anything we did in the app, please let us know in

BlueLine's first game release is Proximity for the Pokki platform!. We're still hard at work on our larger project, Hive for Xbox 360, but we took about a week and a half aside to make Proximity. The game was an entry for the Pokki 1UP contest which is currently going on. Proximity is a territory-based

Yesterday, while co-working at The MADE (a cool game museum that lets Bay Area developers work out of some of their space), the topic of thumbstick deadzones came up. Ian Stocker mentioned that he had recently made a blog post about using the Xbox analog sticks as a DPad in XNA. Since Hive deals with

We're buzzing with excitement for this announcement... BlueLine Game Studios has been given an exclusive license to bring the extremely popular Hive boardgame to Xbox! If you're not familiar with it yet, Hive is a boardgame that's grown a huge following.  It was created by British Inventor John Yianni of Gen42 Games.  In his own

Welcome to the BlueLine Game Studios blog!  We're a scrappy startup of Indie Game Developers who are starting out our first releases in this new company by making Xbox games from award-winning boardgames. Here are some ways you can follow along with what we're up to: Add this blog's RSS feed to your feed reader