S2E01.1 - Brett Harrison (Interview)

#Holotype #Programming #GameDesign #Python #BoardGames #Science Summary A follow-up to our last episode, in this episode we interview Brett Harrison, one of the co-creators of Holotype. Specifically, Brett is the one who programmed a computer to play Holotype against itself 10,000 times per minute in order to precisely balance the point values of different parts of the game. In this interview we'll cover a bit of the background behind Holotype, why he did that sort of optimization Timestamps 00:00 - Introductions 02:13 - Design of Holotype 03:54 - Playtesting and computer simulation 11:37 - Designing the right AIs 14:50 - What parts got tweaked 18:35 - Game length, Bone Wars, and an app 21:20 - Lost mechanics, accuracy, and personal favorites 25:15 - Closing remarks Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net  Links Brexwerx Games: https://www.brexwerxgames.com/ This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Full Transcript (Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/  )   Brian  0:06  hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. Jason  0:12  Today, we'll be interviewing Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. All right, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Jason.  Brian  0:22  This is Brian,  Jason  0:23  and today we have another special guest. This is Brett Harrison from Brexwerx Games. Brett, can you introduce yourself? Brett  0:29  Hi, yeah. Brett Harrison, Brexwerx Games, one of the designers on holotype, which is our board game about paleontology, Jason  0:35  yes. And when this episode drops, about two weeks before we will just put out our episode on holotype itself, we we're talking with some paleontologists, but this was because I wanted to ask some more about what you did for the game. So our listeners are already familiar with the game itself, how it plays the science in it, but I wanted to really follow up with an aspect I learned about when I was doing research for that episode about you created a computer simulation to basically play test the game, and we'll get to that in a moment, but I think we need to learn a little bit more about you first. So can you give us, like, what's your background? Like, how did you get into making board games, paleontology, that sort of thing?  Brett  1:13  Yeah. So I've always been into paleontology since I was a little boy. My grandfather brought me a book from the Los Angeles library, which I still have, so it's incredibly overdue, but it was all about dinosaurs, so he would read it to me when I was like six, and that's how I kind of got hooked on it. And then I eventually went to college for computer science and needing to get electives and stuff, I always chose paleontology or geology and stuff like that. So that's where I get that background always been a gamer since really young, started out with like, axis and allies, and went all up to all the Euros and everything else that's out there. So really big into board gaming. I've designed games, computer games and board games in the past, but nothing of this nature until COVID hit, and me and my buddy were like, Let's make a board game. So that's when we started working on holotype. And the theme was dinosaurs from the beginning, because I was so into paleontology, but we also want to make it super scientifically, you know, as accurate as possible within something that's supposed to be a fun game mechanic Brian  2:11   That was really obvious. So we played with a couple of paleontologists for our episode on holotype. They really appreciated the attention to detail, and so do I, because I think it's really important for a science game that, like, accuracy, at least, is you can never h