text:
In a note out this past week, Citi's FX team called a disputed election the 'biggest political risk' in the world.
They wrote:
We view most of the recent price action in G10 FX (with the possible exception of the USDJPY rally) as being the result of squaring up ahead of the US election and 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The biggest political risk is the potential that the US result won't be known due to the combination of a tight election and re-count/mail-in issues in swing states.
They cited the possibility of a nail-biter in Ohio that doesn't get resolved for days, as mail-in ballots take a long time to get counted.
Now more and more people are talking about this possibility.
AFP has a great summary of the issue:
The problem this year is that there could easily be that many provisional ballots cast in Ohio, where state law prohibits officials from starting to count them until 10 days after the election.
About 200,000 of the more than 1.3 million absentee ballots mailed have not yet been returned, the Ohio secretary of state's office said Saturday.
In an effort to avoid the mess of 2004 -- when thousands of voters waited hours in the cold to cast their ballots -- Ohio election officials sent absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state.
The aim was to cut down on lines and make it as easy as possible for people to vote: they can pop the early ballot in the mail, drop it in a box at a polling station or just walk into a polling station and request an early ballot.
But if someone applies for an absentee ballot and then decides to vote on election day -- and experts think plenty of people will -- then they will be required to cast provisional ballots that are sealed in an envelope until it can be proven they haven't already voted.
With the latest poll in Ohio showing the margin to be razor thin, this is a real issue for the country and markets.
ADDED: The Atlantic has a very deep dive into Ohio provisional ballot issue >


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An RPG in a week, starting from scratch? How hard could it be?
I did it because of a dare. There are many great resources available to small, budget-conscious independent game developers today.
On a public forum, in a counter-rant, I expressed this fact by bragging that if you gave me a week, a fresh install of Windows, and a good Internet connection, I could build a halfway decent game with no budget whatsoever. No, it wouldn't be able to compete with Halo 2 or anything (if I could create that kind of game in a week, I'd quit my day job), but it would be reasonably amusing and playable.
Tom Bampton, who runs the monthly Game-In-A-Day 'competition' (www.gameinaday.com ), said "You're on!" He then added an extra contingency - I had to do it without the benefit of one of the (free) game engines out there. I could only use a basic library / API.
At first, I dismissed the idea. I didn't have time to take a week off of work and my current game development project to do something like this.
But then I thought: What is a week? Unless you work for EA, a work-week is 40 hours. How about taking 40 hours to create a game? I was intrigued - but I didn't want to just create a space-invaders clone. How about a role-playing game - one of the most complicated genres to create games for? Would it be possible? I didn't know. I knew it would be extremely difficult. But I accepted the challenge.
On top of that, I documented what I was doing as I worked, which I expected would be a little like going through an entire development cycle on fast-forward. I thought it might be interesting to game developers - or at least an entertaining record of how I fell on my face if I failed.
The end result was a long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness record of my hourly activities. I've tried to edit it down to something a little less yawn-inducing here. So here is how I created a game in a single week from scratch, with no budget. If you want to skip to the end and see what the final product looked like, in all it's buggy, imperfectly-realized glory, you can download the Windows version of the game at: http://www.rampantga...ackenslash.html
The Plan
The Goal
Create an "old-school" RPG in the style of the old, early 80's "top-down" RPGs like The Temple of Apshai, Ultima III, and Telengard. The player will move through rooms in a stereotypical dungeon, doing battle with various monsters with magic and combat. Along the way he'll improve his capabilities through gaining "levels" of experience, and magical equipment. It won't all be about combat, however. The player will also have the ability to sneak past or negotiate with monsters. There will be locked and trapped doors and chests, and unique dungeon features that may have strange effects. The game will not be long on plot, characterization, or dialog - it's mainly a hack & slash affair. You go up the level treadmill until you are powerful enough to face the final boss, retrieve a great quest item, and bring it back safely home (your 'starting room').
The Rules
Rule #1: A limit of one work-week (defined as 40 hours)
Game Development time should be restricted to 40 total hours. These will be actual game development or research hours. Breaks of longer than ten minutes won't count towards the total time. This will be an "ideal" workweek of 40 highly productive hours. The 40 hours only includes development to a feature-complete "alpha test" stage. Debugging and packaging the game for distribution and won't count towards the development time, but no new features should be implemented. Documentation of the process doesn't count.
Rule #2: All Free Tools
Except for the software that comes with a Windows install, only free / open-source software tools are used. The point of this whole exercise is to show how you don't need expensive (or even not-so-expensive) tools to develop a game. Hardware such as a scanner, microphone, and digital camera are exempted from this rule - if you don't have these, you can probably borrow them from someone.
Rule #3: No Engines, only basic libraries / APIs
The game must be created "from scratch" without the benefit of a fully-featured Game Engine. No cheating and creating a game using some kind of "click-and-play" game-maker software to throw together a game.
The Tools
- Python 2.3 (http://www.python.org/)
- PythonWin
- PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/)
- Py2EXE to compile this into an executable for distribution (http://starship.pyth...theller/py2exe/)
- Gimp 2.0 (http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/)
- MS Paint (which comes with Windows) - for pasting up screen shots grabbed by hitting the PrintScreen key (GiMP doesn't like these for some reason)
- Free textures available from places like Toob's Tiled Textures (http://www.texturear...tures/index.htm) and Mayang's Free Textures (http://www.mayang.com/textures/)
- Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) plus my microphone or free sound samples
The (Intended) Schedule
Schedules are made to be broken, but it's important to have them as a baseline to compare your progress with and make corrections as necessary.
Hour 1-10: Basic Architecture
Design the "engine" and the main components. Get the world displaying on the screen. I should be able to move a 'test player' around the world to look at things. In fact, I should allow the "test player" to be turned into a full-on editing tool if I can swing it.
Hour 11-20: Player Interaction
Implement all core interactivity for the player - moving around, attacking things, opening doors, dying, picking up and using inventory. Bare-Bones representative objects in the environment will be created to test the interactivity
Hour 21-30: Making the World Active
Add the AI, game "events", traps, and special effects. By the end of this period, the game should be a pretty complete tech-demo of all of the game's major features.
Hour 31-40: Adding Content and Rules
Take the project from "tech demo" to game. Add all additional content. Complete and balance the game-play mechanics. Apply polish where time permits - adding special effects, animation, etc.
Post-Hour 40: Testing and Game Release
Fix bugs (no adding features!) Package up the game and release it. Finish documentation.
The Development Diary of Hackenslash: A Game In A Week
Hour 1 - Wild Freeform Design and Base Classes
I spend this hour creating some basic classes for the game - and using these to help guide my design. The world is represented as a series of rooms, connected by portals. Everything in the world is room-relative, similar to how old Adventures and MUDs are designed. Most objects in the game are represented by a "GameObject," which has a position and contents (which include other objects - a map might contain rooms, a room contains a box, a box contains a sword... and I guess the sword could contain more rooms, but we won't go there.)
- I create a "creature" and "player" object
- I generate a set of "attributes" off the top of my head for creatures, and put this in a class. Apparently I'm a game geek who has played way too many RPGs. I don't know exactly how the game mechanics will work, yet. This really is seat-of-the-pants game development!
- I make a "room" object, derived from GameObject. Rooms have width, height, and walls - and not much else right now. I figure out how things will work and make corrections as I go. I don't even have PyGame linked in at this point - I don't even have anything other than a console for output. But I feel like I've made great progress!
Hour 2 - PyGame 101
The goal this hour is to initialize PyGame, and start putting things on the screen. Actually, I spend most of my time going through the PyGame documentation and figuring out how to do things, since I have almost no experience with PyGame or SDL. I end the hour bringing up a blank screen filled with black. So far, it's not very impressive. Actually, there's quite a bit going on behind that black window - sort of like the Black Triangle story. There's a functional game-loop, page-flipping, the calling of several classes, and a lot of stubbed behavior. But that doesn't make the black screen any more impressive.
Hour 3 - If the Walls had Ears, I'd be cussing at them
This hour's goal is to get a room's walls displaying on that black screen. To make this happen, I need a room, and I need graphics. I spend a lot of time in GiMP touching up some textures downloaded from Mayang's Free Textures, so that they tile. I create a texture manager class. And I fill out a sample room structure. I also spend a bit more time looking through PyGame's docs to see if there's anything else I can use that might make the job easier. At the end of the hour, I still don't have walls on the screen.
Hour 4 - The Inn Now Has Room
After fighting some syntax errors, I finally get the walls to appear on screen. Not displaying correctly - they are in the wrong positions, with gaps between segments. It's horrible. But with a little bit of tweaking and bug-fixing, I have something resembling a 10-square by 10-square room on the screen.
Without a really detailed project plan, it's really easy to get lost when you get to one of those points where you wonder, "What next?" It's very easy to get stuck chrome-plating what you've already done without moving on to the next task. I decide that if drawing one room is good, drawing two rooms is better, and move forward towards this goal.
- I create a "minidungeon" file to handle the generation and storage of these rooms.
- I start adding logic for "portals" - holes in the wall that lead to other rooms (and provide all the offset information necessary to draw the adjoining rooms).
Hour 5 - Hackenslash Gains More Rooms
- I Change the title of the window to be "Hackenslash!" Just because it was cool.
- I create a Map object to contain rooms, and a MapMaster class to hold multiple maps.
- I add a second room connected to the first via a portal.
- Neighboring rooms connected to the current room via portals are now displayed.
- I fix some clipping bugs where the walls aren't displaying correctly when partially outside the viewport.
Hour 6 - Wherein We Practice Our Mad Drawing Skillz
- I add a door class, and set up the maps to accommodate doors (since these need to be shared by two rooms). (Editorial Note: Too bad I never got to actually use these!)
- I create 3 more wall tiles, combined them together into one "sheet"
- Walls graphic changes based on type.
- I make a simple top-down player-graphic.
Hour 7-8 - Rotations and Exclamations!
- I figure out how to have PyGame rotate bitmaps.
- I have the test-player spin slowly in a circle. Lots of tweaks are necessary to correct for size changes as he rotates.
- I learn how to use fonts in PyGame, and I build some classes to display and animate text.
- I add a manager class to automatically handle all this animated text. Having them be "fire and forget" means they'll be much easier to maintain, and I'll be more likely to use them in the future.
Hour 9-11 - Feature-ific!
Once again, I face a troublesome "What next?" decision. Rooms need more interesting features, so a "feature" element goes onto the list. I don't know what sort of behaviors features should have, so I decide to go from specific to general. I decide on three static features that could be found in a dungeon room: A rug (visual only), a pillar (blocks movement and line-of-sight, like a wall), and a staircase (blocks movement from some directions along some tiles, and "teleports" you to a new location at the end.) I determine that features can be larger than a single square, and should be able to be rotated any ninety-degree step.
(Editorial Note: In retrospect, a very dumb decision - I spent way too much time on this feature and derived very little benefit from it.)
I end up spending about three hours working on "features," between graphics and fighting some poorly designed code.
Hour 12 - 13 - We Want Loot!
I create art and code for items. It's amazing how much time can get sucked away doing artwork. It's particularly annoying when it still ends up looking like dumb programmer art no matter how hard you work on it. I add a lot of details for items, including their value, size, equipment slot, graphics image data, and so forth. They aren't interactive yet, but at least they are being drawn in their correct locations in the room.
Hour 14 - Carpets
I'm clearly behind schedule, and what do I do? I decide that the black background is too ugly, and I put in floors. After working on the floor graphics, I discover that I'd forgotten to put a transparent background on the player and item graphics. So I spend more time fixing them. But the floors look cool. Cooler than black, at least.
Hour 15-16 - Click! Click!
- I implement mouse control and event handling.
- Add player responses and movement to mouse events. The movement is blocky, not yet smooth-scrolling.
- The player isn't yet leaving the rooms or checking for collisions
- I fix several bugs
- I create a prettier-looking staircase in GiMP. By now, I've already crossed the threshold of Hour 17, so I start to get a little bit nervous. I should now be 2/5ths of the way done with this game - the second "working day" of development. While what I've got up and running is pretty impressive thus far, I recognize just how much I've got left to do. I now have 4 more working hours to finish up basic player interaction according to the schedule. It's going to be tight... but I still don't regret putting those floors in!
Hour 17 - Smooth Move, Until You Hit the Wall
- More time is spent cleaning up graphics and fixing bugs.
- Add collision detection and smooth-scrolling to player movement.
- Player can now move multiple steps (turns) on a single mouse-clock.
Hour 18 - Crossing the Threshold
- The player now goes through portals into other rooms.
- This exposes a cosmetic bug with overlapping walls and floors between adjoining rooms that is really jarring.
- More bug-fixing on rotated portals not allowing / prohibiting movement.
Hour 19 - Stairway to Heaven, Menu Hell
My brother volunteered to do some music for the game. He did the music for Void War, and is really good. This reminds me that I need to do sound (and now music) for the game. This looks pretty simple in PyGame, so it shouldn't take too long (Editorial Note: I never did get around to this, sadly. Hackenslash ended development as a silent game.) My next goal is to handle interactions with creatures and items in Hackenslash. I'm really fond of how The Sims and Neverwinter Nights did context-sensitive pop-up menus that appeared when you wanted to interact with a game object. I'm thinking of doing something very similar here.
- I get stairways to properly 'teleport' the player to a new room.
- I do some research on the Internet and through PyGame docs to see if anyone already has some kind of menu system in PyGame already done with an open license that I can use. I don't find anything.
- I start work on the menu system.
Hour 20 - 21 - What's On the Menu?
- I continue work on menus. Menus can be associated easily with the object that spawned them, making it easy to 'call back' to the originating object with a callback to handle the player's selection.
- I start work on item menus. They simply pop up and allow a selection at this point - clicking on an option does nothing but close down the menu.
Hour 22 - Falling Asleep at the Wheel
- I continue work on items - trying to make them functional and have them respond to menu commands - this includes putting more contextual information about the menu in the player's "action" queue. Right now there's still not much that the item actually does, except create an animated 'bark' reflecting command information.
- I improve how movement is calculated for performing an action, which allows more flexibility. It's getting very late - I'm finding myself "zoning out" while working on this. If I wasn't paying attention to the total time - sure, I'd work through it. Since I'm on a limited number of "work-hours" for the development of this game, having a less-productive hour is really bad news. It's interesting how your priorities shift when you consider time a limited resource. So I go to bed.
Hour 23 - Stat Attack!
- I modify (and actually start USING) some of the attributes class that I created in Hour 1.
- I create a window in the upper-right corner to actually display those stats.
- I optimize said window so that it is just a bitmap that quickly blits on screen, rather than writing out font instructions every frame. I update the bitmap only when I detect a change in the stats.
Hour 24 - Player Menus
- I wrap up optimization on the stats window.
- I create a pop-up menu that appears when the player clicks on his avatar.
- I create sub-menus for potion usage, casting spells, etc.
- I fix some bugs in the menu response handling.
Hour 25 - I Take A Saw To Floors and Walls
This morning I had an idea in the shower (why is it that the shower is such a great place to have ideas?) for eliminating the overlap problem for walls shared by rooms (see the Hour 18 entry). What if I only draw half of the exterior walls (walls 0-3) in a room - the half facing into the room? That way there'll be no overlap with walls of neighboring rooms, and I don't have to add some complicated logic to detect and resolve overlaps.
I begin work (yet more engine / foundation work) on this "quick fix." Unfortunately, it really complicates my room drawing routing (for floors as well), and turns out to not be as quick a fix as I had hoped. It takes about an hour to create and debug this system to make rooms more seamless. But the results are much nicer. While debugging the code, I discover a few more movement bugs related to crossing portal thresholds with negative offsets, and fix that.
Intermission - Crisis Management!
At this point I realize I'm more than 3/5ths of the way through my schedule, and that I have less then 15 hours left to finish the game. I go through my list of Things To Do, and assuming one hour per feature, it'll take around twenty-five hours to finish it all. That's ten hours over my limit I'm halfway through the time I'd allocated to getting the environment active, and I've not really started on it yet. The project is officially in jeopardy. Going overtime is really not an option I'm allowing myself. Hiring additional help or buying some more code / resources isn't an option, either. Since I'm only counting real "development" time for my 40 hours, I'm already pretty maxed out on productivity - I can't think of any way to be more efficient. Aside from spending a lot of time on the Internet looking for magical free solutions to my problems, I really have no choice here but to cut features, and see what I can do to simplify my design.
- Doors: CUT! I REALLY want doors in this game. This is the most painful feature to cut - especially since I've already spent some time working on them already. But there is too much work to be done on them - especially considering the AI has to deal with them. I probably need 2-3 hours to get them working, and I don't have the time.
- Inventory: SIMPLIFIED! Forget having a "back inventory" of usable items you don't currently have equipped. Anything you aren't equipped with gets converted into money immediately.
- Traps: SIMPLIFIED! I wanted to have all kinds of nasty traps with interesting, debilitating effects. Not gonna happen. Traps will have a simple visual when they go off, and just do damage and temporarily increase the chance of running into a random ("wandering") monster
- Bows (Missile Weapons): CUT! It's going to be just melee and spells in this game.
- Saving / Loading the Game: SIMPLIFIED! Only your character will be saved and loaded, not the state of the world. (Editorial Note: I didn't even do this!)
- Particle Effects: BACK-BURNERED! These are getting dropped to the bottom of the priority list. I really doubt I'll get to them. I wanted some cool particles for animations for spell effects... but that is unlikely to make it.
- Spells: SIMPLIFIED! I had a concept for spells where you could "find" spells in the game via scrolls, and that there'd be over a dozen spells you could use. Well, as much as it pains me... I don't see that happening. I'm going to have only a handful of spells available now: Heal, Damage, Debilitate, Buff, and Recall. To deal with increased level, I'm going to allow the player to "beef up" the spells by increasing the number of magic points that go into the spells
- Monster and Player Animations: CUT! I don't have the artistic talent to do a great job, anyway. While deciding what I won't do (or what I'm dropping down in priority to highly-unlikely status), it's equally important to decide what I absolutely must do - what needs to be made top priority. There are a lot of elements to the planned game that I consider very important - like searching for traps, finding secret doors (well, secret portals now), and unlocking chests. But the core of the game is combat. If that's not there, nothing else matters. So I decide I must focus on that, and getting combat working is top priority. I set a goal that by hour 30, monsters will be working - at least enough that the player can kill them. With my adjusted priorities in place, I move on to continue development.
Hour 26 - The Roll of the Dice
I work out the core "dice" mechanic, something I've had in mind for about the last week --- how the random chances come into play. Since we're not limited to using real dice, we can make a random number of any range we want. Like 1-33, or 6-17. So what I do for a "standard" roll is a weighted, random roll against the total of the attacker's score plus the defender's score. If the number is above the defender's score, the attacker wins. For example, let's say I have a total attack rating of 15. I'm attacking a monster with a total defense rating of 10. My odds are 15:25 (25 is 15 + 10), or 3:5. So the game will generate a number between 1 and 25, and if it's above a ten, I win. Damage uses a slightly different type of roll. I add the defender's "armor" rating together with the attack's "damage" rating. I generate a random number between 1 and this total, and then subtract the armor rating. If the total is less than one, the defender takes no damage. Otherwise, he takes the amount indicated. So if a monster with a damage rating of 10 attacks the player with an armor rating of 5, the game will roll a number between 1 and 15, and then subtract 5 for the damage. This explanation took more time to document here than it did to write. The dice-rolling code looks like this:
from random import randint def StandardRoll(attackerScore,defenderScore): if (attackerScore<1): # If the attack rating is 0, the attack always fails return 0 if (defenderScore<1): # Otherwise, automatic success on defense rating of 0 return 1 roll = randint(1,attackerScore+defenderScore) if (roll>defenderScore): return 1 return 0 def DamageRoll(attackAmount, defenseAmount): if (attackAmount<1): # 0 attack rating? No damage will be done return 0 if (defenseAmount < 1): # Man, don't screw with us with negative numbers defenseAmount = 0 total = randint(1,attackAmount + defenseAmount) total -= defenseAmount if (total<1): return 0 return total
Filling out the hour, I decrease the window size for drawing the dungeon to get a slight framerate increase --- the section to the right will now be entirely User Interface stuff. I also make sure the player's movement is corrected for frame- rate.
Hour 27 - Building A Monster
I have a lot to worry about to get monsters working. I have to change the game update system to make it turn-based. The player needs a variety of ways to interact with creatures (bribery, combat, spell-casting). The monster has to interact back. There's AI and pathfinding considerations. And graphics! DO I display the monster with the same top-down perspective? I can't worry about all these at once - I need to start small. Just putting a monster in the room and displaying in the correct position on the screen is a good start.
- I create a "monster" class, derived from creature.
- I create an "ActiveAI" list for the main game loop to deal with activated monsters.
- I work on art for a monster - which takes me the rest of the hour (and it still doesn't look very good- I should have just used a smiley-face).
Hour 28 - The Monster Appears, and the Player Has to Change His Armor
- I get the display routines working for monsters
- I make the monster block the player's movement.
- The perspective on the monster is totally different from the player, but I don't care. But the player graphic looks more terrible by comparison, so I re-do the player graphics.
Hour 29 - Time to Come Out Swinging
- I create a menu and menu-responder for the monster.
- Player attacks are working
- Main loop responds to the monster dying.
- Experience points are awarded for killing the monster.
Hour 30 - With this Sword, I Thee Slash
- I create the first of true equippable "items" (a '+1 sword')
- Monsters drop their items when they die.
- Game loop update gets broken into turn-based and non-turn-based updates.
- Massive changes to player movement / actions based on the turn-based architecture.
Hour 31 - Entering the Final Stretch
- Monsters get emotional - I give them three 'attitudes' towards the player, which can be adjusted by player actions.
- Money is added to the game, in the form of silver
- I get the "negotiate" action working, where you can bribe the monsters to leave you alone if you haven't attacked them yet.
- Monsters attack a player if the player is right next to them (and they've not yet been bribed).
- I fix a bug where the player decides to treat a monster like a chest, and runs up to them to begin the negotiation. This gives the monster a free attack before the negotiation happens. That kinda ruins the point, but it's funny.
Hour 32 - Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
- Finish negotiation logic
- Add monster hunt / chase routines
- Monster chooses between spellcasting attacks (stubbed out) or melee combat In order to save time, I cheat on monsters chasing players through a portal. I just assign a random chance of the monster going through the portal each round. This gives the player a better chance to escape, anyway.
Hour 33 - Wandering Artwork
- Monsters now wander around if they aren't actively attacking the player.
- Artwork for some items and potions
- I add potions as items - they don't work yet, but they appear
Hour 34 - 35 - Drink Me!
- Potions get added to the player's potion inventory
- Potions have the appropriate effect on the player's stats. Healing Potions restore hit points, Essence potions restore mana points.
- I add pure treasure (which gets converted immediately into silver) as an item.
- I start working on equipment items. Equipment items are a little tricky. Since I don't have an "inventory" of unused equipment, you can't carry a spare sword around with you. If you pick up an item and you already have another item in the "slot", the game asks you if you want to replace the old item, or cash in the new item for treasure. For items where only a single slot is permitted (like a weapon, or armor), that's not too hard. Wands and rings are more complicated, since those can be in one of several slots. After almost an hour of working on this, I realize that I've got the player running through two menus (one to pick up an item, and another to choose what to replace) for items is really ugly. It's far better to have the game be "smart" about it and reflect these options in a single menu. I end up overhauling some of what was already done, throwing away a little bit of code, to make this change to a simpler system.
Hour 36 - HACKENSLASH!
- I create a "Hackenslash" title panel with a sword graphic, and link this bitmap into the right UI panel display
- Add the logic for the "monster display" panel to display the information on whatever monster last had the mouse pass over it.
Hour 37 - We Don't Need No Stinkin' Word-Wrap!
I create a scrolling "text box" class to display game mechanics information. This is useful both for player feedback and for debugging purposes. Without any user controls (like scroll bars), development goes extremely quickly. It actually takes more time to send it lines of text from various events in the game (picking up items, attack results, etc)
Some of my preliminary work back in the first 20 hours is FINALLY paying off - there's a good framework in place for calculating the bonuses for skills based on equipment. All items have a 'dictionary' (a great Python construct) of bonuses and penalties to SOMETHING (the name of the roll). So when I get ready to make a roll, say, an attack roll, I just run through the equipment list and apply all adjustments with an "attack" key. I'll do something similar for spell effects. Next, I work on the menu for opening chests - and decide to simplify it significantly. Why not just assume the player is ALWAYS going to check it for traps, and will ALWAYS attempt to unlock it if it's locked? The extra steps in there are tedious. No sense in having trivial choices floating around.
Hour 38 - A Little Bit of Magic
I'm frantic now. Three hours left - I have to work on ONLY what MUST be in the final game.
- I generate five types of spells - three that are cast on the player, two on monsters.
- I add extra "levels" for the spells to give them slightly more variety. The levels vastly increase the power (and cost) of the spell, and are only available as the player's "magic" skill increases.
- I make the player-menu non-static, so I can add menu options that become available only under certain circumstances.
- I add the ability to "level up" through a set of menus that become available from the player menu when the player's experience points exceed a certain level-based threshold.
Hour 39 - Crisis Management, Part II
What I'm missing:
- Searchable secret doors and items
- Quest Items - and a place to return the quest item to win the game
- Sound Effects
- Music
- A merchant from whom to purchase equipment
- A place to rest
- Random equipment with different bonuses and names
- Random monsters
- Graphics for the new equipment, monsters, and merchant.
- Random chest traps & locks
- Creatures casting spells
- Wands
- A larger dungeon with a quest item (and maybe boss monster) at the end.
The ability to sneak around (?) to avoid being attacked by the monsters. There is no way I can get these all in with a little over 100 minutes to go. I can handle maybe three or four of these if I'm fast. What is the minimal set of items needed to make a playable game? I decide on the following
- The player must be able to rest to regain health and magic points
- Monsters and treasure should respawn while the player is resting
- Random equipment types and abilities should be generated with the treasure, and should gradually scale up by player level
- Random monsters should be created with abilities and numbers that scale up to the player level. The initial room (the one up the stairs) becomes the the "rest" room (pay no attention to the awful pun - aw, heck, it's part of the charm). There will be no monsters in this room, ever. I add a new dynamic entry into the player menu when he's in a rest area - the "rest option." Then I create a routine to "re-initialize" the dungeon while the player is resting. Right now it's a stub. I add the remaining equipment graphics in GiMP. I have no time to make them look any good. I simply draw them in 32 x 32, blur them in areas to hide my awful artwork, and then sparingly add some highlighting so they don't just look like a blurry mess. Now they look like a touched-up blurry mess. For the random equipment generator, I have the game pick one or two random abilities and slap them onto the item, with a possible range based on the player's "level"
- (Editorial note: Unfortunately, the player's level is never actually displayed on the screen anywhere. D'oh!). Certain items have mandatory effects - a sword has to improve either your attack or your damage rating, armor must improve your armor rating, and a shield improves your defense rating. I add these constraints... and we're now already well into hour 40.
Hour 40 - The End Is Near
I have no time to create actual unique monster types - so I frantically work on just changing the names and stats of the one monster I have - the goblin. I throw some silly-sounding adjectives in front of the goblin names, and I have them "level up" similarly to the player based on the player's level. I finish up the "re-initialization" routine to repopulate the dungeon while the player rests. I finish up some routines to deactivate monsters that are far away from the player, and to make them become active when the player enters the room. I add a couple more rooms to the dungeon, and then I'm out of time.
Post-Development Work: Wrapping It Up With a Bow
After talking with a friend, I'm convinced that I shouldn't work on fixing any bugs except the ones that crash the game. Since the purpose of this project is to show off what can be done in 40 hours, I leave it in that state. There are lots of non-critical bugs: stats aren't being displayed properly in the right-hand panel; I don't think goblin hit points are increasing with level; I'm not convinced monsters are properly de-activating; monsters are ignoring collision detection; treasures are appearing inside interior walls; monsters are ignoring magic attacks from long range...
I leave them, and focus on the crash bugs. This means playing the game quite a bit. It's actually pretty fun. Not play-this-game-for-hours fun, but certainly an amusing diversion. Once the crash bugs appear to be mostly quashed, I work on the distribution. Py2exe is supposed to make things ridiculously easy, allowing you to package a Python program as a native Windows executable, including everything you need so that users don't need to have Python installed to run the program. It's not quite so easy as all that. First, it tells me there are missing modules, and the executable crashes in the font code. I check on the Internet, and find that the 'missing modules' are red herrings, and what I'm missing is a font file that needs to be copied over manually. After I do this, I get another crash in the executable. This is much harder to track down. It turns out that I need an icon for the window - something that didn't seem required in the non-compiled version. Once I have that in place, everything works. I run a few more tests - and I seem golden. WHEW! I create a zip file of the distribution (I'm not going to bother with an installer / setup program), and I'm DONE. My week-long project actually took two-and-a-half weeks of real-world, part-time effort. It's definitely not everything I hoped it would be, but I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished: http://www.rampantga...ackenslash.html
Aftermath: The Post-Mortem
Interestingly enough, the lessons I "learned" from working on a game with such impossible constraints are very applicable to the development of any game, on any budget and schedule. A lot of the lessons Hackenslash taught me weren't completely new to me - but these sorts of things often bear repeating. Without further ado, here are the Top Ten Lessons Hackenslash taught me:
Lesson 10: Doing something like this really was worthwhile
I didn't think I'd have time to do something like this when I first found myself challenged. But now that it's done, I found it not only taught me a few things, but it increased my enthusiasm for continuing work on the project I put on hold for this. You wouldn't think that working on Yet Another Game would feel like a vacation, but it did. And after all, I didn't lose that much time - only forty hours. This was a fun experience - one I'd be happy to repeat again in the future.
Lesson 9: Cutting features isn't always free
Some of the last-minute changes to Hackenslash really blew the game balance out of whack. The inability of monsters to cast spells, and the lack of need to for the player to 'conserve resources' as he pushes deeper into the dungeon trivialized some of the challenge to the game. If those features were going to stay 'gone,' the game needed another design pass to re-balance it and improve the modified gameplay. In other words, cutting features introduced an additional cost to the development of the game. This made me wonder how many retail games were released in a terrible state because the development team didn't have time to re-visit the game design after features were cut to meet schedule.
Lesson 8: Do the important stuff first
I found I tended to be more productive, efficient, and make more progress on the game when I was in 'crisis mode," realizing how tight my deadline was and making a conscious decision to (usually) only work on the pieces that made the biggest difference in the game. I think I may run through a similar exercise with all of my future projects: I'm going to try to break my development time into, say, 8-hour segments, and play a little game with myself: If I pretend that I only have those 8 hours to 'finish' the game, what could I do that would make the biggest difference in those 8 hours? I don't know if it would pay off as well at the end of the project as the beginning, but it's worth trying.
Lesson 7: Scope will expand to exceed your budget and schedule
Every programmer I've ever met tends to underestimate the time required for him or her to complete a feature. Add to that the dreaded 'feature creep,' and you can guarantee your project is going to be way over schedule. I'm not one of those guys who believed that "feature creep" is always a bad thing. I think some of the most killer features - the ones that turned games into hits - often came about as a form of "feature creep." But new features are seldom free. You will have to make room for them in your budget - and that often means cutting other, less worthy features. This project taught me a little bit about being ruthless in cutting features. In truth - if I had the option, I should have added an extra ten hours to make the game truly "work" - but only after cutting all the fat (like doors, magic wands, etc.)
Lesson 6: Get the Game Playable as Fast As Possible
The sooner you are able to get things on screen and start playing around with it, the sooner you can revise and improve your design, weed out the things that don't work, and come up with great ideas for making the actual game better. It also helps you catch bugs (especially those ugly design bugs) earlier, which makes them much easier (cheaper) to fix. It also aids you in sorting through priorities.
Lesson 5: It's sometimes much faster to throw away old code and start over
I only ended up completely throwing away some code and starting over once in this project. While I can't know with a certainty if I really saved time by doing this, I suspect I would have been fighting the design flaws of the original method all the way to the end of the project. On the flip side - throwing away the old rotating feature code and starting over with a better design might have saved me some trouble.
Lesson 4: Python Rules!
I can't believe how quickly many features came together using Python as opposed to, say, C++ or even Java. Things like typeless variables, dictionaries, and extremely easy-to-declare lists (allowing a mixing and matching of object types) made it very easy to implement content lists, attribute handling, spell effects, and so forth. I was already a fan of the language, but now the prospect of using Python, tied into a high-level 3D engine, has become extremely appealing to me.
Lesson 3: Don't underestimate the art requirements
Looking up source art, drawing, tweaking, testing, and re-tweaking artwork... even little 32 x 32 bitmaps - consumed a great deal of my time - and the results weren't nearly as satisfying as what I'd have gotten if I had devoted those hours to programming. Would an experienced artist taken less time? Undoubtably - though the difference probably wouldn't have been too extreme. Would their results have been better? Absolutely. Be careful not to trivialize the effort it takes to generate art for your game, whether you are doing it yourself or getting someone else to do it for you. It can suck up a great deal of time if you aren't careful.
Lesson 2: I need to be more efficient in my use of time
A night where I'd devoted four hours to working on the game often ended with only two hours (or less) of actual development time taking place. Some of the time went to documenting what I was doing, but I also found myself losing focus, taking extended breaks, not immediately returning to work after a minor interruption, surfing the 'Net, playing (quick) games, or whatever. Now, taking breaks during long stretches of development is a good and healthy thing. But by recording my actual productivity, I was pretty surprised at how inefficient I was with my usage of my development time. I'm not getting paid by the hour. Better use of my time means I can get more done AND have more 'free time' to do other things. So I'm going to be making a concentrated effort to improve my use of time when I am "on the clock."
Lesson 1: IT CAN BE DONE
While Hackenslash in its current, 40-hour incarnation is hardly a poster-child for high production values, I think it demonstrates how much can be done - on a fairly complex game - with no budget and very little time by a single developer. Given more time - and even a fairly insignificant budget - or the help of a few friends - who knows how much better it could become? The bottom line is this: If you want to develop games, nothing is stopping you. You can find the time. You don't need a big budget or fancy tools. You don't need a team of specialists. You don't need years of training. All you need is the will to make it happen. And that's the most important lesson of all.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Not to say I told you so, but: I told you so. Federal judge Claudia Wilken issued a ruling last Friday in the landmark antitrust case brought by former University of California, Los Angeles basketball player Ed O'Bannon and others against the National Collegiate Athletic Association, determining that the association illegally prohibits campus athletes from profiting from the use of their names, images and likenesses in video games and television broadcasts.
What does Wilken's 99-page decision and accompanying injunction order mean for amateurism? For the future of college sports? Glad you asked:
V-Day! Let economic freedom ring! Brett Hundley can ask UCLA for a salary -- and a car! The next Johnny Manziel can sign as many autographs-for-cash as he likes! Missy Franklin doesn't have to choose between appearing in commercials and swimming at school, and the University of Oklahoma's pasta police can hand in their badges and their guns! Amateurism is finally dead. College athletes finally get to enjoy the same basic rights of American citizenship as the rest of us. Huzzah!
Slow down. We're not there just yet.
Um, okay, then how about this: college sports are doomed! No more women's rowing scholarships! The University of Alabama will now spend $200 million a year on football, and hock its English department so it can afford to outbid Auburn University for a third string cornerback! Disgusted fans will stop watching! The Big Ten will drop down to Division III, just as the lawyer who writes Jim Delany's legal declarations promised!
Nope, that's not happening, either.
Wait. I thought the O'Bannon lawsuit was The Big One. The case that will change college sports forever, ending amateurism as we know it. It's not?
Not quite. After five years of legal wrangling and a three-week bench trial, Wilken issued an injunction prohibiting the NCAA from enforcing any rules that restrict schools from offering big-time football and men's basketball players a "limited share" of the money generated from the use of their names, images and likenesses (NILs) in video games and television broadcasts.
So college athletes can now be paid?
But those payments are limited?
Very limited. Starting in 2016 and under the terms of Wilken's injunction, the NCAA and its member institutions cannot enforce any rules that would prevent schools from:
* Increasing the financial value of athletic scholarships to cover the full cost of attendance via stipends;
* Depositing as much as $5,000 a year per athlete -- drawn from NIL revenues -- into a trust fund that would pay out to said athletes upon graduation and/or the expiration of their playing eligibility.
In other words, big-time football and men's basketball players soon will be free to receive cost-of-attendance stipends while they're in school, and as much as $25,000 in deferred compensation after they leave?
Pretty much.
Are schools being forced to give athletes bigger stipends and deferred compensation?
Nope. For that matter, the NCAA doesn't have to pass new rules: a) capping stipends at the full cost of school attendance; b) capping deferred compensation at $5,000 a year per athlete; c) preventing athletes from borrowing against the value of their deferred compensation while in school. But given the association's self-proclaimed core value of price-fixing via amateurism, it probably will do just that.
Did Wilken strike down the NCAA rules preventing individual athletes from cashing in on their NILs via commercial endorsements -- for example, a star quarterback lending his smiling face to an advertisement for a local car dealer, or someone like Franklin selling signed photographs?
Nuh-uh. Those are still violations. Even though O'Bannon's lawyers asked for an injunction allowing commercial athlete NIL use.
Are former players like O'Bannon potentially getting any money?
Again, no -- O'Bannon and the other former college athletes named in the suit, like NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell, surrendered their claim to damages prior to the trial in order to have the case heard by Wilken alone, as opposed to a jury.
Wait a second. The major college conferences just voted for NCAA legislative changes that will give them more latitude to set their own financial rules and give athletes greater benefits. Association president Mark Emmert already has pushed for a $2,000 cost-of-attendance stipend, while the presidents of the Big Ten and Pac-12 schools have endorsed stipends and other small, athlete-friendly reforms like four-year guaranteed scholarships. What are schools actually losing here?
Beyond a potential extra $25,000 in cash -- about the cost of a new Toyota Camry -- per major college basketball or football player? Nothing.
So why is everyone acting as though the O'Bannon case is such a big deal?
Because Wilken's injunction is only half the story. Actually, not even half. More like a footnote. The real news is in her decision, and the headline is as follows: as a legal defense theory, amateurism is now about as useful as Zoroastrianism.
Remember: this is an antitrust case. Antitrust law exists to encourage marketplace competition and discourage the formation of price-fixing monopolies and cartels. When prospective employers out-bid each other to offer you the highest salary or stores slash prices to entice you to buy a new cell phone, that's good; when a single entity or collusive group uses overwhelming market power to limit salaries or charge extra, that's
Comcast bad.
Enter the NCAA. For decades, everyone from former association president/architect Walter Byers to one of the association's own expert O'Bannon trial witnesses has noted the obvious: the NCAA's member schools conspire to cap compensation for otherwise valuable college athlete labor at the value of athletic scholarships. Imagine that you're an emergency room doctor. Or an athletic director. If every hospital or school in America agreed to only pay you in room, tuition and board -- and if you took a dollar more, you'd be suspended from working anywhere -- would you accept it? Or would go find a lawyer?
Such is the basic situation facing college athletes. Only the NCAA has very cleverly redefined college students who are very good at running and jumping -- but still, it should be noted, American citizens -- as "student-athletes" and "amateurs," and therefore undeserving of the same protections under antitrust law the rest of us take for granted. Amazingly enough, a long line of federal judges have bought this argument. Bought it so thoroughly that collusion-via-amateurism had never been put on actual trial. Not until the O'Bannon case.
Under antitrust law, marketplace restraints that would otherwise be considered illegal -- like limiting college athletes' freedom to negotiate and enter into contracts both with schools and other interested parties -- are sometimes allowed, provided they're procompetitive. What does that mean? Basically, a procompetitive restriction is one that's necessary for a product or industry to exist or thrive in the first place.
(Example I've used before: Flash drive manufacturers agree to a USB standard, but compete on the basis of memory size and price. The courts approve. Why? Without a collective standard, the overall market for computer memory peripherals would be harmed).
During the O'Bannon trial, the NCAA put forth a number of procompetitive justifications for amateurism -- arguments that were remarkably similar to the ones made by status quo-favoring college coaches and athletic directors on a near-daily basis. In her decision, Wilken demolished each and every one:
* Competitive balance: Without amateurism, the association claimed, rich schools would be able to dominate on-field competition by outspending rivals for the most talented high school recruits. Wilken noted that this already happens -- only instead of paying their workforce a competitive wage, schools simply funnel cash into multimillion-dollar coaching salaries and lavish, gold-plated facilities.
Oh, and if the NCAA was truly concerned about Alabama's financial advantages vis-a-vis Troy University, it would do a whole lot more to share revenues between the power conference schools and everyone else.
"The fact that high-revenue schools are able to spend freely in these other areas cancels out whatever leveling effect the restrictions on student-athlete pay might otherwise have," Wilken wrote in her decision. "The NCAA does not do anything to rein in spending by the high-revenue schools or minimize existing disparities in revenue and recruiting."
* Education: In a pre-trial brief, the NCAA argued that amateurism helps integrate athletics with its core mission of academics -- largely by ensuring that college athletes participate in sports as "students rather than professionals," which makes them spend their time "doing what students do rather than trying to make as much money as possible, which is what professionals do."
In other words: if we pay athletes, they'll spend less time studying and more time playing and practicing.
Problem No. 1: as the Northwestern University unionization case has made clear, big-time college athletes already can spend 50 or more hours a week on their sports. Problem No. 2: plenty of other students hold down part- and full-time campus jobs, yet still manage to study, graduate and do what students do. Wilken kiboshed the NCAA's baseless assertions, rightly noting that without amateurism income restrictions:
… the student-athletes' own incentives to perform well academically would remain the same, particularly if they were required to meet these academic requirements as a condition of receiving compensation for the use of their names, images, and likenesses. Such a requirement might even strengthen student-athletes' incentives to focus on schoolwork …
As for the association's related argument that empty wallets help elite college athletes fit in with their non-sports peers -- for argument's sake, just pretend this $7 million private chef-equipped Kentucky basketball dorm doesn't already exist -- Wilken wrote it was "not clear" why the same logic doesn't apply to wealthy students, or why "paying student-athletes would be any more problematic for campus relations than paying other students who provide services to the university, such as members of the student government or school newspaper."
Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?
* Fan preference: The association contends that fans adore college sports not only because the elite 18-to-22-year-old athletes on the field and court are students wearing university colors -- thereby creating a lucrative marriage between brand and talent; between spectacle and rooting interest -- but also because they're unpaid. Change that, and the same fans whose passionate interest creates the billions of revenue that allow coaches and athletic directors to get paid plenty would turn off their televisions, pack up their tailgate grills and find something better to do with their Saturdays. Like yard work.
Needless to say, this argument ignores the Olympics, which dropped amateurism years ago yet remain lucrative and popular. It disregards professional tennis, which beat the Olympics to the pay-players punch. It contradicts the example of every sports league ever, none of which have adopted amateurism in a shrewd bid to attract more fans. But whatever. During the trial, the NCAA offered as supporting evidence … a public opinion survey. A glorified poll. Of the same public that once opposed school desegregation, same-sex marriage and free agency in baseball.
Wilken was not impressed:
… This survey -- which contained several methodological flaws and did not ask respondents about the specific restraints challenged in this case -- does not provide reliable evidence that consumer interest in FBS football and Division I basketball depends on the NCAA's current restrictions on student-athlete compensation. Further, Plaintiffs offered evidence demonstrating that such surveys are inevitably a poor tool for accurately predicting consumer behavior … [highlighting] various polls and surveys which documented widespread public opposition to rule changes that ultimately led to increased compensation for professional baseball players and Olympic athletes even as Major League Baseball and the IOC were experiencing periods of massive revenue growth. This evidence counsels strongly against giving any significant weight to [the NCAA's] survey results …
* Product survival: Big Ten commissioner Delany and other college sports power brokers swear that without amateurism, their conferences and/or schools would drop out of Division-I sports altogether, becoming the first multibillion-dollar industry in recorded human history to pack things in rather than give its employees raises. Wilken found this "not credible," which is the legal term of art for bulls--t.
* Because amateurism: Believe it or not, the NCAA's core amateurism legal defense long has been a laughable exercise in semantics and tautological logic: athletes can't be paid because they're amateurs, and they're amateurs because they can't be paid. Such is our core principle. Wilken didn't buy it -- possibly because she's a federal judge, and therefore capable of complex thought beyond the level of a particularly clever golden retriever; probably because O'Bannon's lawyers demonstrated that amateurism isn't an actual principle in the first place, but rather a nebulous term that consistently means whatever the association says it means. Jon Solomon of CBS Sports explains:
… [Wilken] noted that under NCAA rules, a tennis recruit can preserve amateur status by accepting tens of thousands of dollars in prize money before enrolling in college, yet a track and field recruit would forfeit his eligibility if he or she did the same. Also, Wilken said, a football player is deemed an amateur by accepting a Pell grant that exceeds his total financial aid package above the cost of attendance, yet he would not be an amateur if he instead received the same amount of money for use of his name, image and likeness in live broadcasts.
"Such inconsistencies are not indicative of 'core principles,'" Wilken wrote.
Surprisingly, she did not add "LOL."
Who were O'Bannon's star witnesses?
Easy. Everyone who testified on behalf of the NCAA. Time and again in her decision, Wilken uses the association's testimony to support her points. Like Emmert stating that it's not the NCAA's mission to stop rich schools from taking advantage of their pricey athletic facilities. Or University of South Carolina president Harris Pastides admitting that schools probably wouldn't leave Division I in a world without amateurism. Or a parade of NCAA witnesses explaining that fans love college sports for pageantry, tradition, rivalries, school spirit and community pride -- anything and everything except unpaid players. Or Daniel Rubinfeld, the association's expert economist, who in his own college textbook specifically refers to the NCAA as a cartel.
Why does this matter? For one, it's funny. Downright ironic. More importantly, it makes Wilken's ruling less likely to be overturned in an appeal, because the NCAA will once again find itself arguing against … itself.
(And yes, one more time, I told you so).
If the NCAA's suffered such a resounding legal defeat, why is Wilken's injunction so tepid? Why didn't she just issue an order prohibiting all amateurism restrictions?
Two reasons. First, the case itself was relatively narrow, focused on compensation for college athlete NIL use within the context of television broadcasts and sports video games. Second, O'Bannon's lawyers asked for an correspondingly limited injunction, even proposing a trust fund/deferred compensation system that would allow the NCAA to again redefine amateurism and maintain some level of economic control over athletes.
Should they have pushed for more? A wholesale demolition? Perhaps. The association's case was surprisingly weak. That said, the O'Bannon team's restraint was calculated -- likely making it easier for Wilken to rule in their favor by giving her the opportunity to direct college sports toward eventual fairness and antitrust compliance, as opposed to demanding that she dismantle the NCAA's entire economic system all at once.
Will the NCAA appeal the decision?
Yes. The association has little choice. If Wilken's decision stands, college sports amateurism has little chance of withstanding future legal challenges -- most notably a suit filed by prominent sports and antitrust lawyer Jeffrey Kessler that seeks to eliminate the NCAA's restrictions on pay for performance entirely.
Will O'Bannon appeal?
The plaintiffs might appeal the specific $5,000 deferred compensation cap, which could have been better determined by additional negotiations between the NCAA and O'Bannon's lawyers, and seems rooted in former CBS Sports television executive Neal Pilson's trial testimony that he would be "troubled" by college athletes earning $1 million a year, but not by $5,000.
If the NCAA does pass a rule limiting deferred compensation to $5,000, wouldn't that just be more price-fixing at a higher rate? And why should athlete NIL money be deferred in the first place?
Good questions. Kessler will be happy to take them up.
Does Wilken's ruling give the NCAA any chance of winning an appeal? Any ammunition for future antitrust cases? Did she throw them a few bones?
Actually, yes. While Wilken didn't accept any of the association's procompetitive justifications for amateurism, she wrote that some might have partial merit -- particularly the idea that consumer (read: fan) preferences "might justify certain limited restraints on student-athlete compensation."
So the next time amateurism ends up in court, we should expect World Survey War III?
Pretty much. Would you be less likely to watch the University of Texas football team if its players were earning $25,000 a year? $50,000? If they were paid via post-graduation trust fund? Via sacks of Spanish doubloons? Somebody somewhere already is crafting the survey questions. Pollsters need billable hours, too.
What was the strangest part of Wilken's decision?
Easy. In declining to issue an injunction that would allow college athletes to endorse commercial products -- a logical corollary to allowing those same athletes to cash in on the use of their NILs via television and video games, because really, what's the difference -- Wilken wrote:
… allowing student-athletes to endorse commercial products would undermine the efforts of both the NCAA and its member schools to protect against the "commercial exploitation" of student-athletes. Although the trial record contains evidence -- and Dr. Emmert himself acknowledged -- that the NCAA has not always succeeded in protecting student-athletes from commercial exploitation, this failure does not justify expanding opportunities for commercial exploitation of student-athletes in the future …
What exactly constitutes "commercial exploitation?" Why would Manziel appearing on the cover of a video game box be exploitative, while his face scan and real name appearing in the same game's code be perfectly kosher? Wilken doesn't say. (Nor does she explain why she put the term in what almost reads as air quotes). Expect enterprising athlete lawyers to take dead aim at this ambiguity.
Speaking of future lawsuits, what else may be coming?
Lead O'Bannon attorney Michael Hausfeld told CBS Sports' Solomon that his team is considering legal action against networks -- like ESPN and the Big Ten Network -- for their use of athlete NILs. If schools decide to give men's basketball and football players larger stipends and deferred payments, civil rights lawyers may invoke Title IX and demand equal composition for female athletes.
Will the O'Bannon decision affect the outcome of the Northwestern University football unionization case, which is currently being reviewed by the national office of the National Labor Relations Board and could end up defining the school's scholarship football players as campus employees?
Wilken's ruling isn't binding labor-law precedent. However, the board certainly will: (a) read it; (b) seriously consider its reasoning. Neither is good for Northwestern's facts-light, amateurism-heavy case, which makes many of the same arguments the NCAA made against O'Bannon.
If Wilken's ruling holds up and football and men's basketball players start getting stipends and trust fund deposits, what will that mean for me as a college sports fan?
Nothing. Nothing will change. The big fish of college sports will still out-recruit and outperform the minnows, and the compensation caps mean that schools like Ball State won't be able to strategically target their resources and outbid schools such as the University of Kentucky for the occasional five-star high school basketball player. Ohio State University will not replace the University of Michigan on its football schedule with Bard College. Women's lacrosse teams will solider on as money-losing, feel-good university marketing tools. The sky won't fall; it won't even get cloudy. And all of that will make amateurism-defending NCAA Cassandras look increasingly out of touch, downright ridiculous, like the Republicans still railing against the Obamacare freedom-pocalypse that never actually happened.
Will we see college football and basketball video games again, this time with player names and faces?
Good news: It's possible!
Big picture, what happens next?
Suppose you're in a legal war of attrition, and the law ultimately isn't on your side. What do you do? You try to change the law.
According to Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports, the NCAA's board of directors began discussing the possibility of a federal antitrust exemption six years ago -- a year before the O'Bannon case was even filed. The Wall Street Journal's Sharon Terlep recently reported that both the association and major conferences are considering asking Congress for the same.
Odds of success? Hard to handicap. On one hand, lawmakers expressed rhetorical sympathy for amateurism during recent House and Senate hearings on college sports; in an opening statement, senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said that "students play college sports for the love of the game, not love of money. That's the ideal." Moreover, both the NCAA and its member schools enjoy a significant home-field advantage over college athletes on Capitol Hill -- one group can wield money, lobbyists and influence; the other can offer autographs and photo-ops.
On the other hand, public opinion is slowly turning against amateurism. The NCAA itself is increasingly unpopular, and came under fire at a hearing chaired by Rockefeller for issues including athlete stipends, athletic department involvement in campus sexual assault investigations and concussion safety. Moreover, we're talking about Congress -- an institution increasingly loath to get anything done, particularly anything as controversial and high profile as a college sports Get Out of Jail Free card.
Can't the NCAA and its opponents work out some sort of Grand Bargain?
That's the logical endgame. Perhaps college sports could resemble the Olympics, where athletes are free to accept individual gifts and earn endorsement dollars but do not earn salaries for participation. Perhaps they could resemble pro sports, where unionized athletes are paid by schools, but agree to salary caps and some limits on outside income through collective bargaining. Whatever happens, one thing is certain: the status quo cannot stand. Near the end of her ruling, Wilken writes as much:
… to the extent other criticisms have been levied against the NCAA and college policies and practices, those are not raised and cannot be remedied on the antitrust causes of action in this lawsuit. It is likely that the challenged restraints, as well as other perceived inequities in college athletics and higher education generally, could be better addressed as a remedy for the antitrust violations found here. Such reforms and remedies could be undertaken by the NCAA, its member schools and conferences, or Congress …
Speaking with CBS Sports' Solomon, O'Bannon lawyer Hausfeld sounded a similar note. "The NCAA will hopefully never be the same," he said. "It's going to go through a metamorphosis and if it approaches it wisely, it should sit down and discuss with all the interested entities how best to form a new way going forward."
Yes. It should. Thanks to O'Bannon, amateurism is done. A more equitable future beckons. It may come via blunt force legal trauma. It may come through negotiated consent. Through an injunction that could have been much worse, Wilken has bought the association and its member schools time to pick a path; through her devastating, defense-stripping decision, she is telling them to use it. After a century of imperious, impervious obstinacy, will the NCAA finally listen?


text:
markbaa necesitaba un nuevo diseño de página web y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 18 diseños de 7 diseñadores freelance.
This is a web design for a church. We have a logo, wireframe, site structure and logo. We just need someone to put a bit of design finesse around it, if that makes sense, rather than a from the ground up design.
CCC Balmain
There is an existing site, http://www.cccbalmain.org which is functional but not great. The new site is under construction at http://test.cccbalmain.org/, which you can see is rather.... well, under construction. However, the structure has been created and has been extremely thoroughly thought out and based on thorough research. This is no fly by night "oh I think this will be good" job. The fairly complete wireframe/structure is at http://www.useyourweb.com/cccbalmain/. This IS more or less final, definitive, and decisions can be made on this structure. However it is a wireframe, and no design hints should be taken off it, it is purely about structure and content, NOT about layout/design.
We can go to 1024 pixels wide, how to present the navigation is part of your job.
We will be using the template you can see at http://test.cccbalmain.org/, but modifying it heavily to accomodate your design. While you can use that as inspiration, and that is our preferred structure, if you have ideas that fall outside that, don't let it be a hinderance.
- The church is in Balmain, Sydney, Australia. Balmain is a very trendy, inner city suburb. There's lots of artists, a diverse mix of very wealth and working class people. Lots of hip cafes, trendy bars, etc. A mix of modern and very old. The design should reflect that. Here's some photos of Balmain that I think represent it well:
- http://images.portplus.com/9ad47c11…8f75a2.jpg
- http://sydneywebcam.smugmug.com/pho…0537-M.jpg
- http://cdn.wn.com/o25/ph//2009/02/0…grande.jpg
- http://www.oceanswims.com/nsw78/Res…49wide.jpg
- http://www.architecture-page.com/as…ouse/1.jpg
- We are after something relatively clean/minimal, but feel free to interpret the Balmain feel as you think is best
- The target age group is mostly 20s and 30s.Noteable church sites:
- http://www.sjks.org.au/
- http://www.smallboatbigsea.org/
- http://bethmeth.com/
- http://www.incarnationtoronto.ca/
- http://fbcedmond.org/Well designed and seemingly very well thought out: http://www.rccjax.com.
The first point is the most important, we are our own church, not another church. Those links are for broad inspiration only.The strongest design theme of the site needs to be friendly. The photography will emphasise this. See the wireframe for information about what photos will go where. We are doing the photos, they are underway now. Please use the existing logo. Style guide says this should be kept on a white background. We can be compelled to bend this rule if the design is good enough :)
- Stock photos of people should be avoided, as the photography has been considered carefully. Other stock photos are fine if appropriate. We will pay reasonable amounts for stock photos if needed.


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To explain my perspective on the fate or future of television, I need to begin with a story. Several years ago now, I was on a blind date. He was a doctor, by my recollection; handsome, well-educated, funny, a catch by most standards. Things were going well. There was sushi, wine, all the get-to-know-you stories, and then at some point I asked if he had seen something on TV recently. He leaned away from me and said, with more than a hint of disdain, "I don't watch TV." "What?!" I exclaimed. A hush went over the room. "You don't watch TV? I LOVE TV!" Needless to say, date over.
I know that in many circles even owning a television is a sign of a weak intellect and a weaker soul, but my exuberant love of TV endures. I love my TV memories like the Creature Double Features on Channel 56 and my family gathered watching the last episode of MASH. I love being able to relate to people with whom I share nothing in common but our shared delight in Tabitha's Salon Makeover. I love television events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars. I love discovering shows like The Wire that completely transport me into a new world like really good fiction should whether written, performed, or projected. And I am one who prescribes to Steve Johnson's argument that "the boob tube" can actually make you smarter (www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html).
But television has been changing rapidly, and it's been several years now that we've been hearing about the end of television "as we know it" coming soon to a living room near you. What will become of TV? Or more to the point, what will it become?
Turn and face the strange (Ch-Ch-Changes)
The dawn of the DVR (digital video recorder) may have sparked cries of a falling televisual sky around 1999/2000, but in fact it is not one change that has inspired the current crisis in television, but the convergence of a number of overlapping technological changes enhancing the way our entertainment is delivered to us that have started network head spinning. Here are a few of the trends:
Increased delivery systems – Your television is no longer your sole link to this business called show. Thanks to the dawn of the broadband world, your computer and phone are also considered suitable devices for watching a short, a film, the news or any program.
Niche-casting – With cable networks dedicated to everything from classic horror films to fly-fishing, there is literally something for everyone. The internet explodes this concept even further with everything from YouTube series on do-it-yourself fingernail design to the now classic piano-playing cats. More culturally significant is the fact that this could also mean that those minority or marginalized groups that have long languished as clichés on traditional television, or who have been invisible altogether, may finally find more authentic representations of themselves online.
Time-shifting – For those old enough to remember the VCR, the concept of time-shifting is not new. However the accessibility of delayed viewing through DVRs and the internet make it much easier to use (I still can't program a VCR…) and will definitely eliminate the concept of "prime time" altogether. "Must See TV" has been replaced by "Maybe Later TV."
Interactive programming – More and more people (read: mostly those under 30) are foregoing the traditional entertainments for gaming (online or otherwise), where your participation is the experience. These kids are no couch potatoes.
You Tube – Why dine on whatever the networks have cooked up this year, when you can host your own dinner party? As of May 2009; 28,800 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every day (http://mashable.com/2009/05/20/youtube-video-uploads/). Nielsen's numbers from July 2009 showed 11.2 billion total streams of that same content. (http://mashable.com/2009/08/13/nielsen-july-video/). As Ben Parr from Mashable notes, "That's nearly double the population of the entire world. Let that sink in for a moment: two videos for every person on the planet, and all of these views were generated just inside the US." User-generated content is our new favorite station.
So, what does all this mean? A straw poll of my Facebook friends (who represent multiple genders, social classes, sexual orientations, races, religions, and generations) told me all I need to know. No one is watching TV when it is "on." A lot of people are skirting the high costs of premium cable channels to watch programs on Netflix (some even splurged for the Netflix set-top box – the Roku). For those without cable or a DVR, Hulu is definitely a savior. There's that whole downloading illegally thing that we will all agree to know about but not speak of. And just about everyone is watching something particular to their interests that no one else has ever seen or heard of.
Now, there is a narrow scope of television that is getting watched live: reality shows (which are much cheaper to produce than narrative, episodic television), news, and sports. In some ways, this kind of programming requires a live audience and rewards them. For example, American Idol asks to you vote during its programming and by some counts, more people vote for their favorite idol than for president (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/may/26/realitytv.usnews). As for the news, in this media market if you are 5 minutes late to the story, it's already over.
From what you're saying, it seems like people are still watching stuff. Why is this a crisis?
Well, it's not a crisis right now for you or me, frankly. We have more options than we ever have and more and more of those options are low-cost or free. However the business model that makes TV work is in crisis and that is what is at stake for networks, media conglomerates, and many of the artists who create the content.
Nearly everyone who owns a set knows that advertisements are what pay for the programming we hold dear and, despite corporate fears, skipping the ads is not a new phenomenon. A commercial has always been the perfect cue for a bathroom or the kitchen visit. But now the technologies that make television programming so much easier and more convenient to watch (online video, DVRs, etc.) are matched by an increased ability to track viewing behaviors. Nielsen, the networks, the media overlords; they are watching you and they know what you watch and when (and if you skip the ads). This new information has the potential to change ad revenues and the fear is that the change will not be for the better.
As the networks watch their audiences flee the confines of their couches for the freedom of their computers, one of their challenges is to devise ways to make money from online programming. Will charging per show work? Just charging for premium content? Hulu recently announced it will start charging in the coming year. When this news was posted at EW.com, the reader comments were almost entirely negative. One reader, "Bill," noted "thus marks the end of Hulu." Another said: "who will pay for Hulu? It might be illegal, but you can find any show online – for free. This is such a stupid business move." (http://news-briefs.ew.com/2009/10/22/hulu-to-start-charging-in-2010/) According to Tech Crunch, as of March 2009, Hulu had approximately 40 million individual users and 397 million streams. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/hulu-gains-10-million-viewers-in-february-now-no-4-video-site-in-us/). This documented loyal following could create a new money-making model if their attempts at charging for service actually work. However, it is more likely they will lose a lot of their audience once a PayPal account is required to watch what they have to offer.
Yet another challenge faces the networks as their average viewer's age ascends: "According to a study released by Magna Global's Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo." http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117988273.html?categoryid=1275&cs=1 The young, the most highly sought demographic for advertisers, are jumping ship and it's harder to sell an aging market to a sea of advertisers looking to unload their products on those with more disposable income.
With the business model in flux, tech options increasing by the day and the median age of live broadcast viewers reaching retirement, no one yet knows how to accurately price ads, whether online subscriptions will work or what direction consumers will move. Hence, a crisis for the traditional business structure that could possibly inspire changes in the content you see.
So what's next? Should we stay tuned?
There are a few likely outcomes in trying to maintain the traditional delivery systems, build the new ones, and make sure everyone is still making money. Cable packages may finally be unbundled to allow for more a la carte network selections (though the cable companies won't let this happen without a fight). The number of programs taking on hybrid forms, aka "transmedia," will increase. Take NBC's Heroes for example (though I am possibly the last person in the U.S. who is watching it). Their website features additional graphic novels pulled from the plotlines, interactive games, additional storylines shot as short form videos enhancing the broadcast, and trivia quizzes to play as you watch live. This, of course, also indicates the increased synch across devices. Eventually your phone, the internet, your video rental outlet (Netflix or the nearly out of business corner video store), and the more traditional programming delivery systems (satellite, cable, etc.) will all be one. Technological convergence is where we are and more of it is where we're headed.
As for the ads, it's more about old methods than new technology. Commercials have slowly been migrating back into the shows themselves, like in the early days of radio (think product placement). Some sponsors get exclusive coverage on streams. For example, if you're watching a show on Hulu you'll see a series of four or five of the same short ad over the course of the program. Other advertisers are sponsoring uninterrupted streams of entire programs – so that you really do want to thank your sponsor. Reality programs are huge sponsorship opportunities; consider BlueFly's exclusive deal with Project Runway to provide all shoes and accessories for their competitions. Through building online fan communities for programs, producers are able to build a much more accurate profile of their fanbase in order to "sell" them to the advertisers. Online data-mining used to cater ads to users will step up its game. Now, none of this really solves the business model to the degree that the network CEO's need it to, but it's a start.
However, improved ad revenue and the convergence of all my personal media devices are not the things that excite me about changes in the industry. What does excite me are things like access, creativity, and innovation. Some critics are suggesting that an "Indie TV movement" might emerge from these industry-wide growing pains (http://gawker.com/5265239/the-end-of-television-as-we-know-it?skyline=true&s=x). Internet Indie TV is already happening to some extent. Drunk History, Funny or Die, Channel 101, Return to Supermans, Yacht Rock, Horrible Turn and God, Inc. are just a handful of the shows and channels emerging out there. In a recent article in WIRED, Bob Garfield notes, "These projects rely less on financial incentives than a sheer desire on the part of the artists to share their enthusiasm with the rest of the world." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html. This is absolutely true and you feel that spirit when you watch them, but I'd be surprised if all of these inventive minds didn't want a little piece of the action, or at least funding for a new camera.
Thankfully the independent sector is innovating the business model too. One example outlined in Scott Kirsner's recent book Fans, Friends, and Followers is Michael Buckley's YouTube sensation What the Buck. What the Buck is a 3 times per week 5 – 10 minute pop culture commentary starring Mr. Buckley and his in-your-face, tongue-in-cheek approach to culture watching. Buckley has not only been incredibly successful in building a loyal following (over 650,000 subscribers and 180 million views according to his YouTube profile), but he's managed to make a living from it through the YouTube partners program. The program splits ad revenues with content producers who allow YouTube to place ads directly in the perimeter of the video. For Michael Buckley, this has meant an income of over $100,000/year according to the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/business/media/11youtube.html). Not too shabby, but also, not too common.
My personal work is with documentary filmmakers. The competitive environment they face is daunting. Given the accessibility of the technology, there are more filmmakers out there than ever before, many of whom are extremely talented, and they are all reaching for the same pots of dollars at a time when traditional funding avenues for media are few. While this is incredibly difficult, there are a lot of artists out there taking a more entrepreneurial approach to getting their work done. Some are using "crowd-sourcing" models to fundraising, building their audience from the time they start shooting and inspiring those fans to contribute to the creation of the film. D.I.Y. (Do-it-yourself) distribution is upending the traditional model of film distribution, providing filmmakers with more flexibility and freedom (Mahnola Dargis does a fantastic job outlining these trends here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/movies/17dargis.html). These creative approaches to getting projects made may not be solving every filmmaker's budgetary crunch, but they demonstrate the inventiveness of the independents. By hook, crook, stream, or VOD (Video-on-Demand), these stories will be made and seen.
With this increasing amount of work from independents flooding the market to join the network fair, one important role that needs to be filled as new models of media consumption grow is that of the curator. A YouTube future seemingly operates without one, but for many (namely me) that is just too much material to sort through. Trusted programmers, curators, scholars and critics will be in demand in this new era to help us choose, understand, and appreciate what we're watching.
The couch potato lives to flip channels another day.
A recent study by Deloitte LLP suggests that television viewership is still rising (http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/media-world-why-is-tv-viewship-still-rising/19282337)
and it's possible that TV's mighty foe, the DVR, may turn out to be its best friend. In 2007, Nielsen changed its practices for measuring viewership, adding a new category of measurement called "Commercial plus three ratings." "Commercial plus three" measures viewing (including whether or not the commercials were watched) for shows that are watched either live or played back on a DVR within 3 days of the live broadcast. This new rating system has meant the difference between make or break for some shows. According to the New York Times: "House, second among all shows in its live program rating…became the top show in terms of commercials viewed within 3 days with a 5.68 rating (about 6.53 million), gaining almost 18 percent. NBC's comedy The Office has one of the single biggest gains – 26 percent from its live program rating – to 3.92 (4.5 million) for its rating including playbacks." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/business/media/02ratings.html?_r=2 (I'm betting Jay Leno wishes he didn't "DVR proof" his show right about now.) Add all this to the fact that Nielsen's data also reveals that 46% of people still watch the ads when viewing shows on their DVRs, and this mountain seems more like a molehill. (http://nytimes.com/2009/11/02/business/media/02ratings.html)
Yes, there are revolutionary changes afoot, a generation of young viewers moving from the tube to other screens, and countless experiments to be excited about, however I believe it's fair to say that the beast we know as the couch potato is likely be with us for many years to come. Television shows, or something to their equivalent, will endure. Will they be viewed on an actual TV? With TV households numbering at approximately 114.5 million (Nielsen, Aug 2008), you can bet that they will for some time (particularly if the rate of the HD conversion is any indication of rapid change).
In the end, as a viewing public, we still just want to watch our favorite shows, when we want to watch them, and be able to share them with our friends. How we do that may change over time, but it's still what we like to do and it's likely we'll be doing that for a long time (whether it loses me dates or not!).


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Factors Contributing to Congenital Heart Disease
Factors Contributing to Congenital Heart Disease
What causes congenital heart disease?
A congenital heart defect (CHD) is a heart problem which is present at birth. It is caused by abnormal formation of the heart during fetal development. In most cases, when a baby is born with congenital heart disease, there is no known reason for it. Scientists know that some types of congenital heart defects can be related to an abnormality in the number of an infant's chromosomes, single gene defects, or environmental factors. In most cases, there is no identifiable cause for the heart defect, and they are generally considered to be caused by many factors. The factors are usually both genetic and environmental, where a combination of genes from both parents, in addition to unknown environmental factors, combine to produce the trait or condition.
Maternal factors and CHD
Most mothers of babies born with congenital heart disease will look critically at their own behaviors during pregnancy to try to find a cause for their child's illness. It is important to remember that most cases of congenital heart disease have no known cause. However, some types of congenital heart defects are known to occur more often when the mother comes in contact with certain substances during the first few weeks of pregnancy, while the baby's heart is developing. Some maternal illnesses and medicines taken for these illnesses have been shown to affect the heart's development. Other illnesses or medicines seem to have no impact on the baby's heart. Always talk to your healthcare provider for more information.
Women who have seizure disorders and need to take antiseizure medicines may have a higher risk for having a child with congenital heart disease, as do women who take lithium to treat depression. Mothers who have phenylketonuria (PKU) who do not adhere to the special diet needed to manage the disease during pregnancy have a higher risk of having a child with congenital heart disease. Also, women with insulin-dependent diabetes (particularly if the diabetes is not well-controlled) or lupus may have a higher risk of having a child with heart defects. Mothers with connective tissue disorders are also at higher risk for having a child with congenital heart disease. Counseling is important for women with these chronic illnesses before becoming pregnant.
Rubella, a virus that most people in the U.S. were immunized against when they received the MMR vaccine, is known to cause birth defects. A woman who has never had rubella nor been vaccinated against the disease should consult her healthcare provider before becoming pregnant. A mother who contracts rubella during her pregnancy has a very significant chance of having a baby with birth defects, including congenital heart disease.
Pregnancy conceived by assisted reproductive technology (ART) has a higher rate of congenital heart diseases as compared to pregnancies that were naturally conceived.
Always talk to your healthcare provider before taking any medicines while you are pregnant.
Family history and CHD
In the general population, about 1% of all children are born with congenital heart disease. There is an overall threefold increased risk for congenital heart disease when a first-degree relative has congenital heart disease.
Some heart defects are considered to have autosomal-dominant inheritance. This means that a parent with the defect has a 50% chance, with each pregnancy, to have a child with the same heart defect, and males and females are equally affected. Similarly, there is also a 50% chance that a baby will not be affected.
Consultation with a genetic counselor or genetic specialist is encouraged for women with congenital heart disease before becoming pregnant. In families with CHD either in the parents or prior children, fetal echocardiography can be done in the second trimester, at about 18 to 22 weeks of pregnancy, to look for the presence of major heart defects in the fetus.
Chromosome abnormalities and CHD
Chromosomes are the structures in your cells that contain your genes. Genes contain the code for your traits such as eye color and blood type. Usually, there are 46 chromosomes in each cell of the body. Having too many or too few chromosomes results in health problems and birth defects. Structural defects of the chromosomes, where a piece of a chromosome is missing, or present in duplicate, also cause health problems.
Problems with chromosomes that result in genetic syndromes, such as Down syndrome, often result in a higher incidence of infant heart malformations. Among infants with chromosome abnormalities, around 30% will have a heart defect.
There are a number of chromosome abnormalities associated with congenital heart defects. Some of these include the following:
Down syndrome (trisomy 21)
Trisomy 18 and trisomy 13
Williams syndrome
Turner's syndrome
Cri-du-chat syndrome
Wolf-Hirshhorn syndrome
DiGeorge syndrome (22q11)
Chromosome analysis can be done from a small blood sample to look for a chromosome abnormality in a child with a congenital heart defect.
Single gene defects
There are an estimated 70,000 genes contained on the 46 chromosomes in each cell of the body. Genes come in pairs, one of which is inherited from the mother, the other from the father. Genes not only help to determine our individual traits, but also may be responsible for health problems when gene mutations are present. When a single gene is mutated, a number of health problems may occur in a person. when several health problems occur from one genetic cause that is referred to as a syndrome. Some of the genetic syndromes associated with a higher incidence of heart defects include:
Marfan syndrome
Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome
Ellis-van Creveld syndrome
Holt-Oram syndrome
Noonan syndrome
Alagille syndrome
Other genetic syndromes that are not due to a single gene defect, but are associated with CHD, include Goldenhar syndrome (hemifacial microsomia), CHARGE syndrome (coloboma, heart defect, choanal atresia, retardation, genetical defects, and ear defects) and the VACTERL association (tracheal and esophageal malformations associated with vertebral, anorectal, cardiac, renal, and limb abnormalities.)
When a child is born with a congenital heart defect, if there is a suspicion that the child has some type of genetic syndrome, a doctor who specializes in genetics (called a clinical geneticist) may be asked to evaluate your child.
If a child has been diagnosed with a chromosomal or other genetic abnormality, genetic counseling is helpful to determine the risk for heart defects occurring in future children.
March 21, 2017
Identifying newborns with critical congenital heart disease, Up To Date, Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics. Kliegman, R. 2011, ed. 19, ch. 418.
Reviewed By:
Ayden, Scott, MD,Bass, Paul F., III, MD, MPH