-+@ Alien Queen @+-

And if you haven't already guess it yet, it's Aliens vs Predator CCG. Kudos to Martin who got it right for this month. He gets lots more mention in my blogs to come, I guess, as a prize or something.

I'm going to be a bit mundane and put up two cards that people have probably seen today...



Art credits from left: Holmberg/Shreve, Nov, Werner/Nov/Holmberg. Wictul had a text change today. Wall has never been shown final, which is why it's there. The image on the right is the only new one, of course. Pencils by Werner, colours by yours truly and the background in part provided by Holmberg. I like the final colours - red and black. It makes it looks a bit more darker. That, along with Boqyea isn't probably the final image, unless nothing better comes along. We'll have to see.

The engine and the website got updated of course, and it's been spammed on the MND custom card forums. The forums has been seeing quite a bit of activity due to one person - werty. He's really going crazy there and he seems happy to be able to find someone to interact and talk MND with. Well, I should introduce him to Insiider at some point... but Insiider is a bit icky right now due to the hackings.

Too many people were complaining about the G'Kar and Psi thing so I updated the file early this morning just to keep people happy. Really, some people have no patience... myself especially. I'm going to ignore Babylon 5 until about March or April now since I've added in that fix and the new stuff that removes an entire discard pile from play.

The other thing I updated was Elemental, because someone actually played it... and not only that but made a few comments. Those were easy stuff to do so I added them into the game, especially with the new build of the engine. I guess I must be getting used to the new engine.

There was a fourth update today - I fixed up Christoph's Dagobah gML and uploaded it to the engine, complete with all the images. That took a while but because I asked him to reduce the size of the images, it didn't take as long as it would have taken. So the 4th set is now up on the engine. I wonder what Star Wars fans will say now. Oh and I'm effectively mentoring Christoph now. He seems very well mannered, unlike me :)

My gToons rank dropped back to the upper 800s again. Oh well, it's hard to swim in these fast flowing headwaters. Still, 800+ is nothing to scoff at I guess. I'd still like to try out a few other strategies, but I'm hampered by the lack of cards. Oh well. Here's hoping they'll release a new batch of cards this year.

I had a rematch against zoeckler on LotR Online with the exact same decks. He did ring toss site 2 when I played 2 Siege Troops. I really do like my Besiegers, but blew away my engines with Gandalf by site 4. Still, I was 2 sites ahead by then and was making him pay. Gothmoth on site 7 with 4 sites and again on site 8 with 5 sites means he was taking wounds like there was no tomorrow, and of course Hate came in handy. Meanwhile, my frodo was being burdenated like there was no tomorrow by his orcs. I reached 9 with 5 comps including gandalf and frodo and he played 3 orcs and fellowship enquea. T&E took care of enquea and I had to do the sacrifice comps thing, but I won... barely. 9 burdens on a Resistence 10 Frodo. That was hardfought and sweet.

-+@ Snapshot @+-

Weekends are usually busy, so there isn't much to show... or is it? I've just checked the Dagobah expansion for Star Wars (Decipher) and things seems to be going very well. I've sent a few comments back to Christoph for further work, but once that is done, and depending on how things are suppose to work on Star Wars, I'm sure Dagobah will go up on the engine soon. Here's 3 of the new card types in Dagobah.



Oh and Return of the Jedi was the first every memory of a movie I watched that wasn't on TV, so those pictures brings back a lot of memory for me.

What's to say? End of month admin stuff being cooked up. Just a side note - thanks to all the MND players on the engine who's keeping the game afloat there. I think we're picking up new players there as well - please be kind to them.

Tomorrow, will be the end of the month report for January 2005. I think I'm going to make it one that would be the "master" copy or something. Most of the stuff on there doesn't change much anyways... we'll have to see. Also March will mark the beginning of my 3rd year on CCG Workshop as a PL, so maybe I should revamp it then. Who knows... I'll have a think about it.

Other news... my gToons rank is back in the mid 800s now thanks to a few games over the weekend. Not a lot, just enough to make sure I can stay in the 800s for a few more days. Jawbreakers and slams are the only 2 things that my deck can't handle at the moment, but other than that, I have a 50-50 chance against every other deck.

CCG Workshop wise, the games list page has been updated slightly and things look a bit better now. The legend is now on the top of the page instead of the bottom which makes it easier to read I guess. The other thing that would be good would be to add in a PL column to that list, but I'm not going to make that suggestion to Ed though, it's hard enough maintaining those types of pages.

I notice that Bowling has gone "public" although it's not done yet. When I get the game done, it can and will go public ASAP. Probably sometime February. The other game that has gone public is JC's Tournoi. It'll have to wait until he makes it public though, so I'll just have to wait for it patiently.

I think Mark is back onto Summer Camp again. I haven't seen him update his progress post on the forums though. Maybe I should look closer. Everyone else seems to be taking a break this weekend, and I think they deserve it. Logan has finally got Crypt to work in the new version of the engine after a few long nights of coding and is probably celebrating this weekend somewhere near the beach. Martin has been quiet, although I suppose that means he's just cooking up more ideas for his games. I hope we'll get Upkeep monitoring in Doomtown soon.

-+@ Have Me Some Fun @+-

Well, at least that's what I want it to be. Some days though, when it rains, it pours cats and dogs. Pardon the mixed metaphor there. Where shall I start? Ah, images. I finished scanning the Asgard cards I have for Hyborean Gates. Here are 3 of them. I've been having problems with the scanner too...



Well, hopefully, I can edit away the imperfections.

I've been having problems with blogger for the last few hours, which has really gotten my blood to boil... figuratively speaking of course. I hope this gets posted. I'd sure hate to lose it. Spent the day divided between coding and gaming... and other things, but that's for another blog.

Played 2 games of Final Twilight with Nate today. Won the first, lost the 2nd on purpose so that I won't be 3 for 3 against Nate. Well, I really shouldn't be beating up the creator at his own game every time, I don't think. While playing, I noticed a few more things that could be done, and since I had to add in the Preview card images that were missing anyways, I decided I might as well do those as well. So now the game has a bit more automation than a no-frills game and with a bit more work, it'll be at the level of a licensed game. I really should stop working on it though, other things needs to take up my time...

Like Bowling, which I tweaked a bit today. I got the setup all functional, and I am going to guess that with about 4 more hours of work and testing, I can get it to be fully functional... with an AI for one-player games. That sounds so cool, but I'd need a 4 hour block (straight) to sit down and work on it though. Good thing the weekend is upcoming.

One thing about one-player games on the engine... once you run out of tokens, you can't play them. Blegh. Oh well.

I played quite a bit of gToons today, and when the ranking update came around, I had almost jumped 100 places to be somewhere in the mid 800s. Yikes! The most memorable match was against a fellow animal deck where all 5 of my animals were negated. Colours to win were red and green and with only Dexter's parents out (1 red, 1 green), I won the game with a colour win. Final score was something like 13 to 17, one of my lowest games ever.

Also played one game of LotR O which I lost, but I had fun killing off the 3 hunters with the besiegers. I guess I'll only have about 2 more weeks to play with my Besieger decks before rotation takes out Hate, one of the cards I really do enjoy playing with. I've got to try building a version of the non-solo Smeagol with a few more cards that I think might make things more interesting. Maybe over the next few days...

Project ChuckieCheese didn't get too much of an update today - I suppose everyone was busy. Either that or everyone has given up already. Who knows what's up with those people. Anyways, I wanted to look for a player in the Greater Phoenix area and I put out a post on Insiider and within a few hours, a couple of them offered to help. Insiider people may be an idealistic bunch, but they are always helpful when needed for short term projects. Either that or they are good at being busybodies!

I got an email today from Russ (who introduced himself, since I don't know him) asking me about card making programs. Well, I know of at least one out there, but I don't have it and can't name it off the top of my head. I pointed him to the forums and wished him all the best there. He's now on the engine checking out MND, which is one good thing in my book.

Ed told me I seemed to be the "original games" man, and I wanted to reply - "What? One game (Final Twilight) doesn't a man make", but sometimes there's no arguing with Ed and it was easier to go with the flow anyways, so I let things slide. Anyways, he wanted me to do this original game with cool graphics and sent me the rules. Well, I'll only do games on my terms I guess, and I said as much to him, in a much nicer way of course. I can't say much more than that, but when I can, it'll be here in all its fully glory (or should that be full ugly?).

Christoph, the new PL, popped up to ask a question about the gML so I started to help him. I ended up updating the Star Wars gML for him to work on. It's quite bizzare to be working on someone else's code again, to see things not written by me and formatted in a weird way. I so feel the urge to put everything into the way I'd do things... but... that's not my job, nor do I have the time. So after a quick hit and run, I fixed the problem and passed it on to Christoph. Everything else remained as they were and I tried my best to turn a blind eye to the things that was nagging at me to change.

I haven't seen or heard news about new CCG releases for this year. Origins will probably be the first time that any major news would be announced. I wonder how some of the major licenses are faring - GI Joe and TMNT were both made into CCGs last year, but news has been scarce and far in between. I guess I'll just have to wait till Origins to see what is happening with them.

-+@ Know Your Enemy @+-

I'm probably a few days late, but Decipher has started showing the Black Riders spoilers, so here are 3 more of them.



I'm not impressed, but then not all the cards are shown yet. There have been lots of hints being bandied about, but the set will mark the start of the rotating out of the Fellowship block, so I guess I've got to find more interesting strategies to play. I did play a game with my Rohan/Besidger deck. A rather weird game where I won only because I had the tenacity to race to 9. My beseigers were doing nothing against Legolas/Eowyn/Glorifindel/Arwen.

I played some gToons today as well... and lost quite a few. So when the rankings were updated after lunch, I was in the mid 900s again. Oh well, I win some, I lose some. Those Ed, Edd and Eddy decks are a killer to play against and the only tie I get a chance against them is when I am able to pull off a colour win, which I did in one of them.

The other game I played today was Final Twilight with Nate. He was using a modified Faust deck, I had Mark Jarus and all the men in blues. Turns out I made the better choice as I won the game by killing off the vampire. Cops 1, Vamps 0. One thing to note though - I was rolling sixes almost consistently in that game. I wonder if Ed did something to the code so that PLs roll sixes in their games. Hmm...

Well, the game was an eye opener. Found a few minor bugs as well as the fact that I hadn't included any trackers for Money or Moren, which is also called life. I took down a whole list of small little things to do as well and updated the game earlier. Now the game isn't even "no-frills"... it has auto draw at the end of turn and auto draw at the beginning of turn. It has auto unrotate at the beginning of turn. I was going to add in pay and play and attachments, but decided that would have been too much for a supposedly no-frills game. Still, I can't wait to play the second game with all the enhanced extras.

The other game that's Indie (Ha! Yeah right. I so much doubt it!) is whatever that will come out of Project ChuckieCheese. I sat down this evening to throw together the rough rules so that we have a point of reference for discussion. I'm not really looking foward to this game... the cards are going to be horrible to design, the art is going to be hard to find and what was I thinking working with 2 people I barely know? I think I must have been temporary insane... wait, no, I'm permanently insane anyways... so I guess that would make me temporary extremely insane?

Having said that there have been a large number of people - i.e. 2, but that's 2 more than usual - trying to recruit card designers from CCG Workshop for their projects. I wonder why all the sudden interest. Curious minds and all that.

I updated the plates post yesterday to put Final Twilight public. While doing that I added in a few alts of the PLs as well. It's always fun doing that set of lists, but there's so much info there and I make so many typos and mistakes that it would take ages to fix. Hopefully things are up to scratch now, but I have no idea. Well, the reason it's called plates is because... here, lemme put up my plate:



That's why it's call plates. It's just a series of posts with the lists that I made up and collected and the plates are just one of the list. Yes, I know there are a lot of juicy bits of info in that plates drawing, particularly for those who don't usually get to see it - this is the view I get when I view it of course, the general public is welcome to find out which game on gEngine hosts these images... and I can safely say it's one of those games above. Oh and I just realised that the Terminator cardback is missing from that image. Ah well, more work to do.

Bowling went closed testing yesterday. I really hope I can finish it - i.e. make playable, before the month is done. Somehow I have serious concerns that I won't be able to make it, but that's one thing I'll try my best to do. The other thing to attempt to finish this month would be the Hyborean Gates scans. Well gates are done, 400+ more cards to go. Haven't had time to work on MND really, the Final Twilight updaate today caught me by surprise and usurped the time I had set apart for MND and Bowling tonight. Ah well, such is life.

I have a long discussion with Martin about quite a bit of stuff today, PCC being one of them. It's always interesting to get his opinions because most of the time eventhough we agree on the generics, we so disagree with the specifics. It's weird how we can do that. Nevertheless, it's always good to have a different Point of View and I guess Martin is probably one of the best person to get it from in my case.

The other person I talked with today was Craig (skandall) who has aspirations to be a Project Lead on CCG Workshop. It was an interesting conversation, I would say about why everyone and their dog would like to make a CCG without images. I'm just so amazed. I mean if you are going to make a CCG, you might as well go out of the way to get the art for it. I hope I convinced him that art is a good thing for a CCG.

I got asked on the forums about the Triple Triad folder/icon on my desktop, to which I replied something to the effect of "there are so many other Triple Triad sites out there, do we really need one on the engine?" The answer is no, but that hasn't stopped me from adapting games like Kings and Go Fish. Which reminds me, when one is out of tokens, they can't even play 1 player games like Kings... which is a pity.

Talked with a number of PLs today, but I don't think many of them are working on games in particular, most of them are just brainstorming or waiting for Godot or something. That reminds me, I've got a Crypt update to download... if and when I get the time... and I have to post about the Final Twilight update today...

-+@ There's Something In Here @+-

and I hope it doesn't smell. Well, images first. I scanned in all the gates and the cards that one uses to make the pyramids in Hyborean Gates so let's put those up.



That's 3 of the last few gates. The images are rough, I just wanted to see how they show up. Apparently I need to clean my scanner as well.

So of the 4 things I need to do by the end of this month, I've only finished #1, which is the MND EL update. I've just started Hyborean Gates, still midway through Bowling and I think I'll move HumAliens to next month if I can't finish it this month. The bonus is that I've completed the only optional - to do Triple Triad scans. Of course, Go Fish has been updated this month, so it's not too bad a month at all... provided I can get Bowling public and Hyborean Gates into closed testing. Oh and did I mention that Final Twilight went from zero to public in about 5 days? That has been what's keeping me on the adrenaline burn.

Yes, Final Twilight is public now. Nate should be happy that I dropped everything to adapt it for the engine. Well, I've been inspired by it anyways, no not the actual game itself, but the adaptation of it. I so much liked the background image I made for the game that I specially made it into my windows desktop image:



Those icons in the middle (if they aren't clear, just click on the image and a bigger one will popup) are actually the folders of all the games I'm a lead for on the engine and a few additional ones - Scooby Doo and Wizard in Training are both there, and the Tournament, because I started coding for it and then handed over the whole thing to JC. When I need to work on a game, I don't have to hunt on my harddrive for the folders, I just click on the respective folders on the desktop to get at all the working files, which is stored in the respective folders.

I did those icons today. Did a whole lot more other icons of cardbacks as well just for the fun of it. If anyone would like some icons of games that are on the engine - cardback icons that is - they are free to IM me and I'll see what I can do.

Bowling is the other thing that I'm bashing through at the moment. I just uploaded the essential images and the code to the server. Hopefully, Ed will link them in soon so that I can private test there. Maybe I might even be able to meet my deadline of making it public by the end of this month. We'll have to see.

I still haven't got the Arderial image from Mikey (mikula). It's a pity really. I was hoping I coudl bash out that card, the add the original 5 regions worth of TG cards onto the engine for playtesting. Well, I can wait for a while more I guess, while Bowling get fleshed out and Hyborean Gates gets scanned out.

Project ChuckieCheese is still going on an interesting pace, as ideas are being tossed around and things are taking shape. Somehow I still doubt that anything will come out of it except talk, but the people there might surprise me and actually get a working something ready... oh in a year or 5's time. Only time will tell I guess.

I broke the 900 barrier today in gToons. I'm was ranked 898 earlier today, but since the rankings change midnight eastern, and I check before that earlier today, I might have moved, whether up or down I have no idea. Still, I never expected to break through to the 800+ rankings, so that's good I guess. Played a couple of games as well and lost a couple. Won a rather interesting game where my Green Lantern took out someone's make everything green and gain lots of points deck. The thing about gToons is that is punishes a 1 trick deck real bad. Top decks probably have a key strategy and a backup somewhere, just like my Dexter's parents in an animals deck.

Also played LotR today. Non-solo Smeagol lost on site 6 against a rather nasty Trolls deck, but the retooled Rohan Eomer Third Marshall deck I was playing got to site 9 and won, despite the casualties, including Eomer himself on site 7. I think I'll continue tweaking that deck as I "steal" strategies from other people. Both decks uses Besiegers for the flip side. Hate and Terrible as the Dawn is going... actually I guess I can take out TatD since Galadiel got X'ed. Besiegers will still suffer against Dwarves though. I've got to think of some anti-Dwarf tech for my Besiegers. Maybe I should ask Brash about it. Hmm...

-+@ Desperate for Air @+-

Well, air isn't the thing I'm desperate for. Time seems to be it...



Those are three of the Final Twilight cards that I added images for today. And with that the game is ready for alpha test - and awaiting Ed to get it all up and running on the engine. Wait for 2 weeks, that seems to be my motto. Two of the cards above has an icon that I designed... if designed is the word. Nate was going to remove the neutral icon from the game so I never got it, but it's such a waste to remove an icon so I made a blank black icon to replace the neutral icon so that the cards doesn't look so weird. I'm pleased with the results. Also, I think Kitana should be Katana... but who knows what Kitana means in the Final Twilight world...
EDIT: ED linked in the game early!!! I'm uploading images now, soon it'd be rules and stuff. The game will be ready for download in about 12 hours time!

That's all the coding I did today. Pitiance, really, but enough for today. Tomorrow will probably see either the start of Hyborean Gates scanning, more MND cards, more Bowling or a combination of any of the three. We'll have to see.

While I'm on the MND custom cards, the forums dedicated to that doubled it's membership today from 7 to 14. I don't even recognise some of the people who signed up there, but it seems to be attracting not only the crowd from Insiider, but also from other places as well. I guess that's the advantage of the official site being down, more news of which is on the said forums.

Project ChuckieCheese had a boost today when Chris and I sat down (online) and hashed out most of the ideas. The name is still up for grabs, but the official name of the project is now ChuckieCheese, or PCC. Why ChuckieCheese, well, why not? Heh, glib answer, but one of these days I may explain why it's called ChuckieCheese. Anyways as the game takes shape it'd be interesting to see if we can get the images to backup the cards. I don't know, that would be the hard part and I'm not too willing to spend time on it when I have yet to finish Tainted Glimpses. We'll have to see.

Talking about Tainted Glimpses, I really, really have to get the cards up for playtesting as soon as possible. Interest seems to be there, but I have no idea how long it'll last. Maybe I should announce a date for it or something... like February or something so that people can come on the day to build decks on the engine and play... not that many would. Still, that would be nice.

I logged onto gToons to find that I was ranked 902. Wow. Played a few tough games and lost 2, but I did win one against a PPG deck with a Liberty Belle slam. Wow. How did I do that? I concentrated on the colour win. The final score was 97 to him and 33 (or something like that) to me, but that didn't matter as I had 4 greens and 3 reds - 1 more green and 1 more red than him for the colour win. Heh, that was interesting. He challenged me to a rematch, but I declined and left since I had other things to do. I also introduced the game to someone who got hooked to it. Heh, oh well.

I fired up the battletech gML today... just to check a card name. I doubt we'll get it back on the engine anyways. That's a pity though. People are still asking me what are the chances of getting it back. Oh well, ce la vie. Who knows, maybe WhizKids will let us do the game or something. Somehow I doubt that though.

I saw Stefan back on the engine today... probably grabbing FZOO to do more work. I don't know if Ed has been lighting a fire under their backsides to get things going on that front. I guess he would probably have. Kev seems a bit disgruntled (or is that just gruntled?... I probably mean grunted?) about getting MotM before Origins. Since I know I had a chaser about PAD, I wonder if I was the oddity, the novelty? Probably not.

Talking about Kev, someone was checking up his Dragon Dice adaptation on the forums. It's interesting though that people are checking it out. I wonder how much traffic that game will get once it's adapted. Somehow I doubt it'll be alot, but I may be surprised.

I haven't heard from Martin for a few days now (and since I've written this, he'll probably IM me the next instant he sees me after he reads this), so I hope that means all's well for Monster Mash and/or VTES. Hopefully it doesn't indicate that he's on a burnt out. Well, he could have a break if he wants to, that's not up to me to decide. Still I wonder though what he's up to... might be a whole new game, maybe an original one if the forums are any indication.

Logan has still been continually improving his games this week. It's Crypt today. I suspect most, if not all his games will be updated by the end of the week. This might bode well I guess... Mall of America might finally get some attention and then hopefully after that he'll take an old game. Heh. It's good to see him coding. It's small things like this that keeps me going myself.

Ed thinks he needs to know what everyone is doing. That is admirable and all. I guess all he needs to do is to read this blog for 5 minutes everyday. I try to give the lowdown on most of the PLs.

Oh, I probably haven't mentioned this yet, but a few days ago, we got a new PL onto the engine. The next time you're on the engine, check that 10tacle, or Christoph as he's known outside of gEngine, has that gear icon next to his name. He'll be working on Star Wars and hopefully that will make things go a lot faster for that game.

And to round off everything, kari mentioned to me earlier that he'd like a set of forums of his own. I recommended the one I'm using at elitrix.net . I have no idea if he can include it in a frame, but if he does he'll probably use it. Well, he doesn't have a CCG site and doesn't really want me to link up his personal site, so I have respected his wishes. However, perhaps if enough people ask him (and do please ask him nicely), he might put up a CCG website about his second favourite game (Doomtrooper is his favourite, of course). What is his 2nd favourite game? That you'll have to ask him.

-+@ Eager Youth @+-

The Go Fish update was a bit overdue, but it's finally done. New cardbacks in the game, and updated th plates as well. The plates are a bit wonky, and I took the opportunity to edit the entire series of posts there. Anyways, here are the 3 cardbacks that were added to Go Fish:



Sideshow is a bit blurry, but I didn't get a good image from red tag games. Final Twilight is the one in the middle, just in case it's not obvious enough. Talking about Final Twilight, I finally added the final few scripts to make it fully playable. Well, it needs a bit of playtesting to make sure everything works OK, but I'm sure it'll all there. All I have to do now is to add in the images, of which I'm still waiting for, then for Ed to link it up to the engine so that I can make the precon decks from the engine without the worry that I'd make a typo or three, upload the rules and then it should be done and ready for beta. Not too bad. 5 hours of work over a 36 hour period so far... and counting, but it's getting there. I'm hampered more by the lack of images from Nate and of course not being able to link it onto the engine myself.

Some 3D animator showed up on the forums asking if it was possible to add his unfinished games to the engine. I'm really against adding unfinished games because they more often than not turn out to be white elephants. I'll keep an eye on that, but I'll neither help nor hinder the efforts. This will probably be the place where I raise my objection.

The other game that I went through that process with was Tanshihana of course. It's still unfinished more than a year after work started... and it'll be 2 years in a few months. I did tell Nick that if he can finish the art for at least 2 factions or 100 cards, I'll considered programming a truncated version of it onto the engine with those 2 factions. So far I haven't seen that much activity from him. I doubt he'll get the push to finish it...

Project ChuckieCheese is the other one that people have been asking me if they can get it onto the engine to playtest. This one is even worse as there isn't even a concept behind the game yet. Well, I haven't given a reply because I don't want to discourage them from coming up with the concept, but once that is done, I'll tell them that my conditions for adapting it to the engine would be a properly designed game (set of rules, set of cards) and images to go with all the cards. I doubt Project ChuckieCheese will even get off the ground though, since as I said, it's being carried out by Insiider people and those people do a lot of talking, but not a lot of action.

My Custom Card forum host just moved servers. That's going to kill traffic for a few days. That's a pity though. Daniel (dartax) has actually been drumming up support for the customs. I think he's vitalised by quite a number of factors, one of them being that the playtesters get to influence the direction that the TG cards are going. Well, let's hope I get TG onto the engine soon.

And on the non-CCGW news, my gToons ranking has dropped back to the mid 900s again... until I played 3 games today. Won all three, one of them being an all green Green Lantern setup. Didn't net anything over 100, the lowest I scored was 87, the highest was 98 in the 3 games. With the 3 wins though, my rankings are back to where they were before the weekend... and then some. I'm ranked 902 now. Wow. I'd need about another 100 ranking points to break into the 800 barrier though. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

-+@ Computer Center @+-

14 hours after I started Final Twilight, the game is almost ready to go into beta testing. Of those 14 hours, I doubt I worked on Final Twilight for more than 4. Anyways, here's the latest screenshot:


Yes, this entire post is going to be about Final Twilight. I haven't been this amped up on a game since... Yukk! I think. All that's left is to code in the 2 icons and the Preview set of images once I get them from nate, throw together a simple setup script and an autodraw script for the game and it can head into beta testing as "no-frills". Not too shabby.

I guess this is where experience takes hold. Any poor newbie would probably take days if not weeks to throw this together. I make it look easy... and I guess that's one of the reason why people think it's easy. It's actually not. I've got two things going for me. Experience is one - I've got 20 games on Engine - more than that if the tally includes games I've mentored or have written huge chunks of code for. The other thing is that I have a large enough code library so that I don't have to write anything from scratch. I can pick what I want from Babylon 5 or Elemental or wherever, add them into a game with a little modifications and voila! Instant game.

Making MND customs has also helped in the process indirectly. I do believe that my image skills have improved since... well, HumAliens was coded - the background took no more than 5 minutes to crop from an existin card (Vanisher), edit - clone, paint, blur - to get it ready. I like the cool twilight looking effect of the card... and the overall play area looks cool... especially that ghostly handprint near the lower left where one goes to click to make markers.

Since I got the cardback, I also updated the forums to include it, not to mention saving a copy for Go Fish. The Go Fish update is a bit long overdue, but I was waiting for that cardback so that I don't have to do 2 Go Fish update this month. I expect that Monday will see an interesting update on Go Fish, and the plates post.

So, what's this game waiting for? Ed needs to link it up to the engine and give me all sorts of access to manage it. I have no idea if he'll do it quickly. After all, JC's Tournament has been waiting for it to be made public for more than a month now. So who knows? I hope it's soon though. I've got the enthusiasm burning through my system like molten lava through a lava tube. Who knows, if I can catch and ride this wave of enthusiasm, I might actually finish Bowling and have a good working start on Hyborean Gates. I sure hope so.

Talking about Hyborean Gates, one other thing is that I've finished scanning all the Triple Triad cards, so next week (or is that this week?), I'd be going through Hyborean Gates scans. Oooh!

-+@ Learn by Doing @+-

Haven't had this much fun on the engine for a long time now. Nate finally came through with about half of the images for Final Twilight...



Note that these are full card scans, but images actually rebuilt by the engine as I coded them from all the myriad elements. So far only the 6 promo cards and dozen "Premere" cards (which I have renamed Premiere) have been coded. I'm still awaiting some more icons and the cardback and the images for the Preview set from Nate.

The links are all up there to the left as well... I made a quick update to include the Final Twilight links in there. Also took the opportunity to update a few links there.

Didn't have time to work on Bowling or MND today, although I did have quite a bit of fun on Insiider with Project ChuckieCheese. What is that? Well, that's something I'll reveal in the future when the time is right.

I can't believe that JC still hasn't got Tournament public yet. He's probably been asking for more than a month now. Poor him. I've just put in the request to setup the support structures on the server for Final Twilight. I guess I better bunker down and wait at least a month before I get those.

Logan and I were testing out the new kit and he was trying to locate the source of the lag. Apparently it's the few lines that move stuff that might be causing the lag. Oh well. Let's see what happens there.

Tomi is probably feeling free like a bird. He can't do anything because the stuff he wants isn't yet in the kit and he doesn't want to start on a new game while in the middle of a big game like Duel of Ages. That's a pity though. I was really looking forward to playing DoA. I guess good things come to those who wait for them... or something like that.

-+@ Tight Formation @+-

I would say this has been a rather productive day for me. Scanned some more Triple Triad images and here they are...



This time around I've opted to show the red images. Each card though has two sides, a red and a blue side and both of them have to be scanned in for the game. Yes, I'll be going ahead with this game at some point in time, probably after a few other things like Bowling is wrapped up.

Talking about bowling, I finally finished the layout of the game. Which means all image work is done, now to get down to the nitty gritty of actually getting the game playable. I just realised that I could actually get the game to play by itself with no human intervention. Anyways, as Cosmic Wimpout from GTO has shown, there is always a way to program in human intervention and I'll attempt to do it... sometime in the future.



That's the 1024 by 768 version. There'll be more space for larger screen resolutions. Actually, I guess I can squeeze in a third player... maybe something to consider for future versions.

So what else has been happening? Let's see, last night I finally made my first update to a game that is actually playing on gEngine. MND - both versions - had the EL and SP cards updated to the latest version. I'm still toiling to get the custom cards stuff setup. There's the website and the forums of course, and hopefully more people will get interested. Keeping the game alive.

I was directed to http://www.ig-games.com earlier today from a conversation I had with an anti-MND Custom Cards guy, who is attempting to make a CCG with the ingredients taken from MND. So far there are a number of proposals, but since these are Insiider people I'm talking about, it would probably end up to be all talk and no action. Oh well.

Tomi was updating WoT earlier today. At least he's getting the orphaned games up to a playable standard while waiting for the stuff he needs to finish up DoA. He probably would have to wait for quite sometime though, since Ed seems to be out of his development mode. Oh well.

What has Ed been up to? Who knows? Probably hatching plots to try to make my life more difficult. Well, I don't think he makes my life more difficult on purpose, it's just the result of certain things that's been going on, I guess. Oh well, such is life.

Mark seems to be busy getting Summer Camp into gear and I hope he isn't running into too many brick walls. I doubt I'd be able to help him at all since I haven't done any serious coding since PAD was finished 3 months or so ago. Kev is also busy working on Monkeys. I wonder how that is going. One of these days I've got to play the game to see how far its progressed.

-+@ Trick of the Light? @+-

If it's too good to be true, then it's probably not. 3 MND images today just to show off some of my photoshop skills, although having said that, they aren't that good to begin with anyways...



Art Credits, as usual, from left to right: Werner/Holmberg, Goodman/Werner, Holmberg/Gillette/Goodman. If that branch on the terkoz looks familiar, it's because it's the same branch as Umbu Paw. The rest of the image is basically from the Terkoz card, modified and recoloured as necessary. Jarith was born from an image that Stephan (Drakk2) told me hasn't been used in a card... in fact it took quite a lot of work to modify the image to be acceptale for the card, but the modification seems to be OK for most part. If those Quidos look familiar, that's because they are the hands of the Looph. The background and slime is from my favourite Bograth card, the Sludge Hyern. All 3 cards were fun to do today, and besides these, I also renamed Furnace Heart back to Heart of the Furnace.

So, that's all 6 cards for this week. Not too bad considering I had tons of other things to do. That means I've passed the 80% mark... a fifth more of the set to go, 20 more images or so. This is crunch time. So, with today's cards, that means Bograth has 2 more cards to go and Paradwyn has 3. The other 4 regions that still needs art are Nar (7), d'Resh (6) and Naroom and Arderial with one each. Robert (stalker) is still working on the Ploomb, while I still haven't got the Arderial image from Mike (mikula). Next week will probably be the official start of Nar and d'Resh, and the goal is to do 5 cards. Hopefully, I'll get to finish Arderial next week.

I actually worked on Bowling yesterday and did the scorecard. It looks horrible at small resolutions and I don't even have enough space to put in the player names. I either have to go for smaller numbers or make it only for large resolutions. Somehow the latter seems cumbersome. Anyways, more work is needed there.

Haven't worked on Go Fish as I wanted to, guess I'll have to do it tomorrow or something. Really though, I wonder if I'm even meeting up to what I'm supposed to be doing this month. I'm gonna guess since I haven't finished Bowling or updated MND, I'm on the "no" answer to that. Oh well. Guess maybe I shouldn't be planning for so many things over the next few months.

My gToons rank crawled up a bit, so now I'm near the 900 mark. I wonder what a few more days of not playing would do... Break the 900 mark by the end of the month? Maybe... if I have the time to play.

Martin was advertising this blog, or so it seemed that way. I know of a few other people who seemed to have bookmarked this. I wonder what they read, it's just so weird to get more than 10 hits a day to this page, most of them from people who have this bookmarked and who comes daily. Maybe it's because of the nice MND pictures. I hope it's not because of any announcements they think I might scoop here because there won't be any... I've got my own forums now (link on the right were it has been for the second day now).

I'm still looking for a good CCG announcement page - one that would announce the new CCGs, new expansions, etc. I'm tired of digging through all the MTG announcements to get to the less popular games though. If anyone know where I can get that, I'd appreciate it very much.

-+@ On a Roll @+-

This is the third successive day that I haven't posted MND cards? Must be a miracle.



I opened the booster box and the 2 starters I got in the post the other day and got the above cards foil. Well, those cards are always foiled since they are the fixed foil in the second starter. Note the diamond shape (i.e. two points) represents a fixed card. Commons have 3 points, Uncommons has 4 points, rares have 5 points (i.e. the traditional star) and ultra-rares have 8 points (i.e. an asterix). Not very decipherish though. It reminds me very strongly of an AEG game - Humaliens and Initial D were the competitors and while the former floundered, the latter went strong for another season, taking Beyblade out of the equation.

The packs were interesting in that there was a decal sheet with each booster pack, each one of them were numbered out of 45, so I assume that there were 45 different decal sheets. Decipher, being Decipher has decided in all their wisdom to make the decals collectible as well so I didn't get a full set of them, but oh well, I don't intend to collect every card in this game. All I want is to have enough cards to try out the game... when I have the time.

I played gToons earlier today... and was surprised to see my rank at a level close to 900 instead of lying in the mid-900s. This is despite a few days of not playing. Interesting anyways. I won two games and lost one, so I will climb up a few more spots, but I doubt I'll be going under 900 soon.

I added some more forums to the CCG Workshop forum... hidden of course at this stage since the games haven't even been confirmed as to being ready yet. Which forums are those... well, I can't say for now, but those who were around when I added them probably saw them briefly while I was tweaking them into the proper configurations.

Talking about forums, I started one for my MND custom cards. It's rather empty though and it's waiting for posts. 2 people have signed up for it so far, and I'm grateful for it. I also had to update the webpage to point to the forums, and spammed in CCGW's forum and Insiider about the new forums. Hopefully more people will sign up and post there, but since the game is dying anyways, I somehow doubt it.

No new MND cards today, nothing new on Bowling as well and I guess I will be going on to do the Go Fish update later... or maybe tomorrow. Let's see what happens.

-+@ Cloned Queen @+-

I think I'm gonna take a break from MND today... so let's go and see what sort of goodies I got over the weekend...



Yup, Attack of the Clones, and there's a Clone Queen in there... although she's padme or whatever. I like the card design, it's clean and easy to read and the colours differentiate the different type of cards. WotC always have collector numbers and rarity marked on the cards, and this is no exception. Before this ends up as a review... lemme just say that I was impressed with the starter pack that I got - playmat, 2 decks, rules, dice and the cardboard punchout that WotC likes so much. Oh and there is even the Netrunner-ish quality where you play two different decks - Light Side and Dark Side.

I've yet to go read the AGoT rules, which I found again yesterday. Hooray. I've got to read that to see if I would actually enjoy the game. So little time to do so many things. Maybe one of these days I'll spec up the game for FFG... then again maybe not... those cards are really really expensive.

I played my non-solo Smeagol today and enjoyed the game. Sure I could do with some power rares in there... well one power rare would be enough... would be nice to be able to discard 3 cards from hand to wound a minion once. Not a lot, but it's still fun to do I guess...

Played a game of MND with Bert (mooky) just to help him test out a deck. It was fun though, mainly because I won :) Core vs Core battles are hard to do and his LE creatures with an unconventional start is interesting, but as he found out, doesn't hold out much by the time the third magi rolls around.

I had a quick chat with Martin about various other things and the end effect of it was that I got encouraged to work on Bowling. So I finally finished the images for the scoreboard and sometime tomorrow or the day after will be trying out the code for them. I think it all goes downhill from here - downhill as in easier, and hopefully not a loss of quality. We shall have to see though.

I updated the plates post and the forums as well in the middle of everything... takes quite a bit of getting used to, but I've been doing so much multi-tasking recently particularly while waiting for images to open that I'm getting used to working on two or three different things at one go.

I read AGoT rules through once and am pleasant surprised at how much of it was stolen from other games - Take Doomtown, Babylon 5 and Wheel of Time, throw them into a blender and you would probably end up with A Game of Thrones. Still, it might be interesting to play the game if only for the insights into how game development has progressed since the beginning of the millenium.

While I'm on game development, someone on Insiider moaned that all the good ideas for card games have been taken. Well, it's hard to find something unique these days I must admit and a new that that seeks to take over the market has to either come from a well established property (but even then, that has no guarantee of success - witness Beyblade), or has really innovative mechanics (Pirates of the Spanish Main comes to mind there).

Tomorrow might see my first game update this year... no, Bowling earlier in the year didn't count because it's still in development. I'm talking about a game currently available to all... and Go Fish is its name. Yes, I need the images from there for the plates post (which I'm sure nobody bothers to read these days) at the end of the month.

-+@ You Want Some of This? @+-

Let's start the ball rolling with this...



Well, it's not MND that's for sure... and wait... it's not Black Riders as well...actually I finally got my box of Shadows that's not online and those were 3 of the foils I got from the box. I actually got 2 of the One Ring foiled. Hmm... not a good box I think. I've yet to sort the cards, but I know I saw a Witch King, one Goblin Horde but no Salt of the Shire. That card is going to be hard to come by. I'll need to sort the cards out and stuff, but being the first set in a block, I'm sure I'll be rather needy at the end of the day.

I also got the 2 starters and a booster box of Beyblade cheap with my Shadows. Those haven't been opened yet, but hopefully will be soon... and of course I still have the WotC Star Wars starter cards to open. When it rains it pours, or so they say. Urgh, this is like a tropical storm and a tsunami all at once. I hope it lets up soon, but somehow I doubt it.

I actually found a place to play Triple Triad online today. And it's a busy place too with quite a large number of people logged in while I was there. I'm actually rather surprised by it since it wasn't that busy the last time I checked... about 18 months ago. Oh well. I guess they are moving ahead. They've got custom cards and such. Sounds interesting though and I doubt CCGW will be able to compete with them. Oh well.

Insiider being up has been a good thing. It's still going slow due to the double hacking and I think people are staying away, particularly the non-RP types. That's a pity though, it had such good promise for non-RP. The RP types are moving as well it seems, to a different site. That would probably reduce the traffic on Insiider but quite a bit, but we'll see how that goes.

I did work on one MND card today - Nick finally did some colours for me on the Bograth Shadow magi and he did them much faster than I would have done. Darius isn't gonna be too happy with the art since it isn't MND-style, but this one is specifically drawn for Shadowsfall Promo so we'll see what he says about that. Well, if he can get me better artwork, I won't mind... really...



I haven't been working on Bowling though, more because of the fact that I really really have limited time at the moment to do anything. I really wish I can get it over and done with so that I can move on to Hyborean Gates and Firestorm, but I somehow doubt that I can do that until the end of February. Oh well.

During the day, there were a number of people who logged in, said hello and probably left in frustration because they didn't know what to do next. Once upon a time, Tomi and/or myself would have been there to guide them through the game downloads, but no longer. Now that we can't minimise the engine, it's a bit risky to run from work so it's not being up and running much these days. I did come across this gem of a conversation just as I was writing this:


[Hermball] Hullo?
*** Hermball has moved to the Magi-Nation Duel room
*** Hermball has entered from the Magi-Nation Duel room
[Hermball] Helloooooo.... Echo, echo, echo
[Hermball] Echo........
*** Hermball has moved to the Star Wars (Decipher) room
*** Hermball has entered from the Star Wars (Decipher) room
[Hermball] hello
[Hermball] hello?
*** gNet: Hello and welcome to CCG Workshop. I can answer some of your questions if they are phrased correctly. Direct a question to me with a gNet: in front of it, eg, gNet: How do I do this?
[Hermball] ahh... there the gnet
[Hermball] gNet: How do I download cards?
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] Sigh...
[Hermball] gNet: how do I do this? download
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] grrr
[Hermball] gNet: how do I get card pictures?
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] hmmm.... could be here for a while
[Hermball] gNet: how do I resume a download?
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] gNet: What do you know?
*** gNet: I am the CCG Workshop chatroom bot. I can answer some of your questions if they are phrased correctly. Direct a question to me with a gNet: in front of it, eg, gNet: How do I select a game?
[Hermball] gNet: How do I select a game?
*** gNet: Frist, press the SELECT button at the top to open the Select Game slider. Choose the game's type from the Tabs at the bottom (eg. CCG, Card, etc.). Then click on a game's icon and read the description for cost & status info.
Press NEXT at the bottom, choose the game version (if applicable), and set your skill level.
Press NEXT again, to load the game and its essential images onto your PC. After the images finish loading, you will be moved to that game's chatroom. (Unchecking the box at the bottom prevents this.) Most games have additional images, which are not required for play. These may be manually downloaded before or during a game.
[Hermball] AHA!... closer
[Hermball] gNet: How do I manually download images?
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] *screams*
[Hermball] gNet: *
*** gNet: I do not know the answer to that question, but I have stored it away so an answer can be created for it.
[Hermball] gNet: How do I download images?
*** gNet: To download images for a selected game, use "Tools -> Image Downloader" from the menu. Then with the Control & Shift keys, select the image names and press the "Reload" button (or just press "Grab All"--this skips any images already on your PC). As images are downloaded, they will also be rotated. This may cause your CPU to spike & the chatroom to slow down.
Alternately, images may be downloaded, one by one, during a game from the Hand display or the Spyglass.
You do not need to have all the images downloaded to play the game. However, it will greatly assist your game if you do have the images.
Note that some CCG's have over 1000 images, which will take a long time on a dialup connection. So, most games' images are available on a CD: http://www.ccgworkshop.com/store.jsp


He finally managed to do it after all those trial and errors. Yay for him. I really have got to get the bot working properly as well... this is one case where the BOT actually helps. It would be nice if there was a message advertising about the BOT (which can be disabled if one wishes) on entry - this way new players get to find out about the BOT and buttons and stuff. But I guess that will be a pipe dream for some time to come.

-+@ Sharp Eye @+-

Those of you with a sharp eye might be able to see where I recycled the images for today's cards from.



Art Credits from left: Holmberg, Holmberg, Gillette/Holmberg. Bograth cards, as usual are nice to do. I really like how the Weebo ended up there, seemingly sinking into that pit. The other 2 uses image from two games mainly... which two, I'll go silent for now. Still, it's a nice trio of cards today and it was fun to do as well. I also got a sketch of a Bograth Shadow magi from Nick today. It looks a whole lot more Bograthy than Core-y (pardon the juvenile English), but I'll see what I can do when I colour it to make it more Core. Well, I'm not gonna colour it today though. Mikey said he's finished the blanket, and he emailed it to me, but I didn't get anything unfortunately. Well, I've asked him to resend it. Lets hope I get it by tomorrow to finish the rest of the 6 cards for the week and the arderial cards in the set.

Insiider is back up again today. Nothing much going on there, but I posted a newbie help post... and spammed it on GPN and CCGW as well - the links are available to the left. Nothing much is going on there as the forums get reconstructed again though... the last backup was something like 3 weeks ago so quite a large number of posts were lost. Oh well.

I did play a game of MND today... lost badly to Arderial, but then it's always hard to beat Arderial, especially with Shimmer. I've got to build better decks, but I'm just too lazy. These days, I just throw together the required 40 cards and play a game.

Logan got Crypt working again. He must have really burnt the midnight oil to get it to work. I think Tomi will enjoy the fact that Crypt is working again since he needs to "borrow" stuff from Crypt to make Duel of Ages work. It would be fun to see what happens.

-+@ Hived Airlock @+-

So, it's the weekend and things are going slow. Three more EL cards for preview, and there's only KT and universal left IIRC. TG is going slow - next week will probably see 2 each of Bograth and Paradwyn and hopefully the Arderial card and a Nar card. Let's see if Mikey can get me the blanket art for the Arderial card... and I'll just have to recycle images for Bograth and Paradwyn... unless I manage to get new stuff.

I've been playing quite a bit of gToons recently - but I'm still at the low end (or is that the high end?) of the mid-900s. It's hard to even maintain this level of ranking at this point, let alone advance. And to think that once upon a time, I went from 17000+ to 4000+ in a single day. Ah, those were the days.

I got a starter pack of WotC Star Wars... or Star Wars TCG as I have been told (there are just too many SW games... attack of the clones is right!) I haven't opened it yet or anything... time is always short, but it does look promising.

Talking about SW, WARS has its first expansion out. I'm glad that Decipher is staggering the WARS releases and LotR releases though. Black Rider info is still trickling out - the packaging details are already available on Decipher's sites. They've also just spoilt another one of Black Rider's card complete with image that's got nothing to do with the Nazghul! Yay! Oh why not... here you go.



And CCGW news? Not much really. I saw Thomas the other day... or rather he saw me and said hi. Oh well, I wonder what he's been up to. I haven't talked with him for a while. Would like to talk to Timmie for a bit regarding WARS too as well... but he's been MIA himself... probably too busy playing Halo 2 or WoW.

I talked with Ed the other day and apparently there have been 9 people who have sent in an NDA... but haven't gotten their keys to the kingdom yet (or in this case, the gear icon and the various other things). I think half of them doesn't even come to the engine anymore! Well, bug is handling that side of things anyways... hopefully some of those people will take over Imajica, the 2 Legacy games, Buffy and WoT. Orphaned games are no fun to watch - they are just like an uninhabited house that is going to the dogs, so to speak.

I had thought Monster Mash was already on the engine. It seems that it's not there yet. Oh well. I'll have to update my lists at some point for that. Maybe Martin will surprise me and get it onto the engine before the end of the month.

We are midway though the first month of 2005 and activity on the engine seems to be... slow. This time last year, there were a large number of games waiting to be turned into beta. This year, the only game that fits this description is JC's Tournament (of which I provided the framework so I guess I'll have to call it well done). Martin and Tomi and Mark have been busily plugging away at their games... and Kev and I seem to have an on-again, off-again relationship with Monkeys and Bowling respectively. So that's a total of 5 people working on new games. Martin, Logan, Tomi, JC and myself are of course constantly maintaining our games... and even then I haven't done much this year, but I guess if things are going swimmingly, there's no point in rocking the boat (hooray for mixed metaphors!).

I just got an IM from Nick Szankovics telling me he's continue developing Tanshihana. Yay for him. He does need to buck up and get his images going on. Yes, I know it's horrible finding images, and one has to find motivation working away on it, but the rewards is probably worth it IMO. Let's hope he gets that done relatively quickly.

I smell something on the horizon with Eric and a new CCG that he's designing. I wonder why the rush for PLs to want to develop their own games. Martin has Mega Monster Fight, Mark has Sideshow, Kev has Homestead and nowEric is joining the fray with something...well probably anyways. Only time will tell I guess.