-+@ Hawk's Shadow @+-

What am I doing here? Shadows has been released for almost half a day online and there are quite a few good cards with lots of buzz going around. I wish I could show some more cards, but I'm lazy and I'm also getting ready for the pre-release tournament (sealed deck). It'd be weird though, but I'm taking the approach of playing it as if I'm playing a draft... with the only difference being that I don't get to draft any cards, but I do get to keep all the cards I get from the packs and the starter. Going through starter deck lists and the cards to see if there are any obvious strategies - well, since there are only 2 anyways: Run to 9 or prevent your opponent from running to 9, it's a no brainer to figure out which deck does better at which. The big bonus? I'd be getting an offline version of the promo card - Yay!

And in other news...

Just because it's shadows online release doesn't mean other things come to a halt. It's no huge secret that JC is adapting VS now, and since Ed has linked it up for him onto the engine, he's been testing like crazy. JC has given me access to it though, so I'm busy downloading the cards. I wonder if he has all the scans and all the promos. Maybe I should go test out a few games with him and hope that the discussions with UDE will prove useful and that we would get VS on the engine.

I updated PAD today to include the Linda workaround. It works find outside adventure phases, but I couldn't find a way to keep things straight when cards are discarded, so that's one minus there. Something I'll have to fix when the next version of the engine is released. The one thing I haven't yet tested is playing her to an opponent... wait, there's another, I haven't tested what happens when she's played during an adventure. Urgh. Back to the testing board. It took me over 4 hours to get all the complicated scripts into the game... and all for just one card. I wonder if it's worth all that work, but I guess it has to be done because she's the only character card that's messing up with CP calculations at the moment... hmm... actually, she still does mess it up since I can't get the discard a character thing to work. Oh well, let's hope the next version of the engine will be released soon. Anyways, I did fix Linda so that if her counter is updated during the adventure phase, it'll update the CP die there. So that's that. Billy though, could be a problem... but that can be fixed later I guess.

Oh and Shadows isn't the only thing that was released today. The next version of the engine has gone up for private testing and Tomi and Skerry and Logan and I have been busy messing around with it... it's very very buggy as can be expected, but there are also quite a number of cool "candy" in this update. What are those? Well it's still early to be revealing things yet, but lemme just say you won't be too disappointed. As Tomi told me the other day, it's got something to do with "ihoa" ;)

Well, I best call it a day and get back to other stuff. Tomorrow would be the done/next buttons for PAD and Billy and I'll call it a wrap after that... at least until the next version of the engine comes along. Lots of things to be excited about though. Keep your eyes peeled :)