Baldur's Gate Release and the Scripting Contest

First, the news...
What is the most important happening in the Dragon Age modding community this week? The release of Baldur's Gate 2 Redux! The BGR team has put together one awesome module - check out the details here if you haven't had a chance. It's expected to be released later today and can be downloaded from their DANexus page.
 
If I were to pick one area of Dragon Age modding that I am really comfortable with, it would be scripting. It might be due to the fact that I do a fair amount of LUA and Perl scripting at work but DAScript itself is a fairly complex system with hidden nuggets waiting to be unearthed. So, when the Mini-Game Scripting Contest was announced, I was excited - finally, a contest catering to my strengths! I didn't have a chance earlier to spend time on it but this past week, I've been doing some prototypes at work.

The 8-queens problem

The game I am designing is loosely based on chess - no, not the chess game but logic games within the chess rules framework. If you are familiar with chess, you might have heard of or even played the game where you have to place 8 queens on the board such that they do not attack each other.

Now, there are a lot of variations to the above 'standard' game. In fact, a quick search will show you hundreds of math papers written on this subject dealing with unique solutions, solutions for generic NxN boards, 3-dimensional boards, n-dimensional boards (n dimensions! brings back memories of my Differential Geometry course...where nothing can be visualized as in the real world).

What's this? A triangle immersed in a saddle-shaped plane (which is a hyperbolic paraboloid) as well as two diverging ultra-parallel lines. Math! You gotta love it.

For this contest, I've put my own spin on it and attached a simple story to it so that the game can be played in that context. The number of variations that can be played are currently at 25. The real problem was putting down solutions on paper so that I can provide hints if the player is stuck. Now that that part is complete, on to coding. One of the most useful script add-ons released is, in my opinion, is Craig Graff's Variable Storage System. Terribly useful when you have to keep track of a lot of stuff and plots either won't work or are too cumbersome to implement. I will be making extensive use of this in my contest entry.

I am also resizing some models and changing them a bit to provide a good layout where the game plays out. I plan to release this as a stand-alone game too so it has to look polished enough. Will it win? I don't know but I certainly hope so. Will it be well-received? I honestly don't know. Some players might approach it as a chess game in which case it will lose some of it's charm. If taken purely as an interactive game, it might work out better. The model-work that I am doing is in part to distance the setting from the chess board as much as possible. Let's see if it succeeds.