~ Signature Games ~

This is intended to be an index for all the Signature Games posts on my blog for easy access. Note that infomation about the Signature Games and secondary signature games is usually near the end of the blog for the day.

Defination

First list

This list will be modified as more blogs are added.

~ Novelty's February Monthly Report ~

28 days this month... and I think I've done more this month that the past 3 combined...

Shepherds
This is the last month I'm going to report about the shepherds... they have been coming and going way too fast. As of today, there are 4 shepherds... or maybe 5.

gNet BOT
No time to work on the BOT this month. There is probably a bazillion stupid questions there as well as some not so stupid questions there waiting for answers. Maybe when things settle down and I get more time I'll finally get to sorting those questions out.

Forums
Tempest of the Gods was made public again. Highlander and Terminator got new forums this month, although traffic on those forums are close to nil. It's been a while since game which has no PLs has had a forum, but I thought those 3 definately deserves something for display on the forums. Added a whole load more for games which have a potential to be adapted on the engine. Most of them are dead games with no big following though. Cardbacks are required for some of those forums.

Games
This is a busy short month... not many games seems to have been updated, but of those that has changes, those changes are usually very significant.

BORD Borders
Borders didn't get the special icons, however the popup text got a make over and they now show if a card has a special function.

BOWL Bowling
Game was made public this month sans AI. One player mode works correctly. Two player mode runs into a bug with the delay that takes place while sending stuff to the server. This will have to be corrected at some point. Also, Ed wants the pins to be actual visible dice. I guess I'll have to add that in as well.

FTWIL Final Twilight
The graphics and the function of the game had some further tweaks as the game marches from being a "no-frills" to being a licensed game. The server isn't accepting any updates though, so it hasn't been uploaded yet

HALN HumAliens
A number of New Order cards were added this month.

GATES Hyborian Gates
I've scanned all the cards that I have for this game this month.

MND Magi-Nation Duel
5 Regions of Tainted Glimpses were added to the engine. This together with the Shadowsfall upgrades, were the main focus of work here on this game.


March 2005 Plans
This should be a busy month. I had to turn everything topsy-turvy because Ed requested that Portable Adventures take some priority with the Encounter automation.

Bowling needs a bug fix this month for 2 player mode to take into account of the lag with the server. Also the images needs to get updated with actual dice images as opposed to what they are now.

Babylon 5 needs to finally get the bold text in for all the cards. This will be a major upgrade for minor benefits.

MND Playtesting of Shadowsfall will result in modifications to those cards... and the addition of Tainted Glimpses continues this month, definately with KT and Weave and hopefully with Arderial and Naroom.

HumAliens and Second Order should definately be finished this month.

Hyborian Gates needs to get spoiler-ified, cards needs to be clipped and processed for the engine this month.

Wildstorms needs codes that will remove the battlesite from play or to return it to the Battlesite pile. Add attachments support to the game.

The regular optional - Go Fish cardback updates will still be retained for the month.

Once the next version of the engine is out, Kings (all 3 versions), Reversi and Checkers will need an update to remove all the ugly owner names.

So, prioritised games for this month:

1. Bowling - bugfix by 18th March
2. Hyborean Gates - spoiler and images by 31st March.
3. HumAliens - Second Order updates by 24th March.
4. Babylon 5 Bold text by 31st March.
5. Magi-Nation Duel - add in the next few regions for Tainted Glimpses. Update Shadowsfall Promo if and when necessary.
6. Wildstorms battlesite modifications and attachment support by 31st March.

O. Add Go Fish cardbacks when available.
O. Automate Portable Adventures encounters.
O. Kings, Reversi and Checkers needs to have all the ugly owner names removed for the next version of the engine.
O. Download Terminator images from the internet.

Rest of the Year Plans

Aliens vs Predators and Terminator (AVPVT) - Add Atmosphere cards and create the Planetfall scenario. Get Terminator scans from website, add it to the engine and create the 2 additional scenarios, as well as the Terminator scenario(s). Quite a bit of work here, but between Ravage and Ryan(Rekkon), I hope to get everything up and ready by the end of the year.

Babylon 5 (B5) - Still on the list of things to do is the automation for replacement and the automated influence tracking and automated initiative determination. Those would take quite a lot of time that I'll have to schedule to be set aside.

Borders (BORD) - Game is fully functional. It should probably get promoted to Now Playing soon.

Bowling (BOWL) - More playtesting is needed for this game especially after the fix.

Checkers (CHECK) - This is another "no frills", "low-tech" game at the moment. It would probably get upgraded once I have the time, motivation and ideas, but for now it's playable and that would have to do.

Elemental (ELEM) - The tidal wave automation has long been outstanding. I think it's possible to do this now, but the script is going to be rather complicated. No schedule for this. Not a high priority since the game works well without the automation and I don't want to introduce something that would introduce errors. It will be done when I can find the time and the motivation. Also the next build should see hotspots being added to the game.

FastBreak (FB) - The game is beginning to feel a bit "low tech" now, eventhough it did have a few innovations (when it was first made). Could do with more playtesting and more inprovements, but until I find the time and the motivation, this isn't going to be done anytime soon.

Final Twilight (FTWIL) - New cards are being added on a regular basis so those will have to be coded in. A pay-and-play system and card attachments are also in the works. This game was originally intended to be "no-frills" but since it's now getting licensed, it'll have to move beyond that.

Firestorm (FIRE) - New licensed game for me to do for 2005, for July public release, or at least that's the plan.

Go Fish (GOFSH) - What do you do when the game plays well and is bug free? Nothing I suppose. However, it'd be getting a minor facelift soon - a tiny crab will be added which will allow an 5 more players to play the game simultaneously. I doubt we'll ever get 13 players into a Go Fish game, but who knows? The schedule is undetermined at the moment, and it's not high priority. As usual, cardbacks will continually be added to this game.

Hamlet (HAMLT) - There really isn't much to do on this simple game except more playtesting... and perhaps a tournament or two. Hamlet is one of the few of my licensed games I'll consider ready for Now Playing status.

HumAliens (HALN) - Once New Order has been added, all that there is to do for this game is massive playtest.

Hyborian Gates (GATES) - Hopefully this will go public in April. It's going to be another "no frills", "low-tech" game though so it might lie fallow until someone with more enthusiasm and ideas comes along to take it over.

Magi-Nation Duel (MND) - Custom cards are still ongoing and I think people are rather used to the gameplay. The only other thing that can be done is to track how energy is gained and used up. However that is a monumental task since every card does it differently and there are many modifiers... which means it's not going to get done.

Portable Adventures (PAD) - The other area to update would be the Encounter cards. I have a rough idea of how to automate these, and because of a request from Ed, will probably be done in April. In addition, there are two card sets that will be added near the end of the year so those will get priority when they are available.

Quartet (QUART) - More playtesting is needed on this game. Not much improvements will be made until further playtesting is carried out. The game seems stable though.

Reversi (RVRSI) - Since Tomi added the left-click functionality and upgraded the images, it's done and has been upgraded to "Now Playing". No work required.

Triple Triad (TRIAD) - Scanning has finished, but I have no idea when I'll have the time to code this. There is also a rather good site to play it online anyways, so it might be moot to adapt it to the engine... but it'll make a good distraction for one the the months when I need a distraction. I only have cards 1 - 90, so if anyone wants to scan in the rest of the 18 cards, for me, they are most welcome. Please PM me for more details.

Urland (URLND) - It could use some scoring automation at some point in the future, time to be determined.

Wildstorms (WS) - There's the plan to add my custom StormWatch expansion sometime this year, probably in the second half of the year.

Wildstorms Legends (WSLS) - This game is going into the queue after Bowling, Firestorm, Hyborean Gates and Triple Triad. I guess that makes it a November public release game.

Wildstorm: Set 1 (WSS1) - The WSS2 update is still planned, although it hasn't gone ahead. The game also needs and auto-score if the defender wins. This will be done with the WSS2 update. Schedule: June - October.

You Need Drew's Truck (YNDT) - I'd like to automate moving the truck, and automate the initial placements of the donuts. I'm going to wait for the grid system that Ed has promised though before working on it.

Yukk (YUKK) - This game feels rather low tech, but it works well. I think I'll leave it as it is.

I have way too many games on my plate. No new game announcements from me until at least until June, unless it's a game like Final Twilight which will be a one week distraction.

2005 Plans
April - FIRE, GATES, MND, PAD
May - ELEM, FIRE, URLND, AVPVT (Terminator)
June - WSS1, YNDT, AVPVT (Terminator)
July - WSS1, TRIAD
August - WSLS, TRIAD
September - WSLS, WS (Stormwatch)


High Priority for next 3 months (after March):
* Automate Encounters in Portable Adventures
* Make Hyborian Gates beta
* Card templates for Silk Road and playtest. Finalise rules.

Medium Priority:
* Firestorm
* Add Terminator to AvPvT
* Add bold text to B5 cards
* Finalise Shadowsfall Promo Magi for MND

In between Medium and Low Priority:
* Add hotspots to Elemental
* Automate YNDT truck moving
* Automate scoring in Urland, add hotspots
* Add AI to Bowling

Low Priority:
* Triple Triad
* WS Legends
* WSS2 expansion for WSS1
* Stormwatch expansion for WS
* Atmosphere for AvP
* Crab to Go Fish

No Priority:
* Highlander
* Tempest of the Gods
* Armageddon

-+@ Bloom @+-

not boom... bloom as in flowering, as in bringing to fruitation the months of waiting on ones labour.



Image credits from left to right: Kwup by Werner/Gillette/Holmberg, backgrounds by Werner/Gillette; Urok's Skullcap by Werner, stick by Holmberg, background by Zastrow; Kintow by Holmberg/Gillette, foreground by Werner/Holmberg, background by Holmberg. Basically it's just a day of cut and paste... Justin's Zastrow's background from Guody was inspirational for the skullcap and the background for the tail is actually a combination of Chill Cane and Polar Rudwot. Go figure. So that's 3 more cards done, 17 more to go, 1 each of Arderial and Naroom, 2 each of Paradwyn and Bograth, 5 d'Resh and 6 Nar. Robert said he'll email me the uncoloured Naroom image... I have no idea when. I'm still waiting for the last Arderial image from Mike. So that means I've got to find 15 more images, including a Bograth magi. That's not going to be easy. Well, according to my spreadsheet I'm 83.65% completed, which is a good thing. I also renamed Uloron to Aloron to fix that. So that's that I guess.

Let's do a quick round-up of my other MND news... I opened up the Keeper's Question #2 : Slumber contest today, although any entries posted before the 1st would be declared null and void. People are already trying to figure out what to give that spell. It's fun though. Twilight War, the 3rd MND fan-made expansion is gathering some steam. I'm not even sure if this will be made yet, but there seems to be interest for it. We'll have to see what happens I guess, after TG is fully out for playtesting. I think I'm going to set an end of April deadline for SP cards, and that includes the art as well. I'm rather happy with the small expansion the way it is.

I spent a good part of today talking with both Timmie and Christoph regarding Star Wars (among other things). Well, they are going to get things rolling there I guess and things have been happening fast with Christoph lighting the fire under Timmie's ass. Before the week is out I'm sure the virtual cards will be added to the engine.

I scanned in the Power Surges for Hyborian Gates earlier, not doing it yesterday because the LotR game with Kari took ages. That means I've got 4 more pages of Vortex Tactics to scan and that'll be all the scans I need to do... maybe I'll finish it after this. Meanwhile, I sent Kari back to the drawing board to work on his LotR deck - he's suffering from having a limited number of cards to work with... and I don't pity him. I offered to give him some cards, actually gave him some, but he didn't feel too good about it, so I didn't push to give him more. Oh well. And the release tournament is tonight... I wonder if I should join that one or the one tomorrow morning... hmm...

Mark and Kev have both been on the engine today. I guess they are doing their last minute push on their games before Origins. Origins though, happens to be an interesting deadline at CCGW... it's about 6 months after the anniversary and since things are tracked either during the aniversary (e.g. number of games public) or during Origins (e.g. number of PLs), it is a rather important deadline.

Logan was around earlier too... but I missed him since I was talking with Timmie and Christoph. He was saying the other day that he's waiting for Ed to send him the Maul of America images so that he can start coding. I didn't realise he hasn't got those yet. That conversation sorta came about because I remarked that I was converting the front page of CCGW to look like MND Workshop with the articles and the news on that page. Well, it'll be good to have some non-MND related news there sometime... MoA will be ideal.

I removed Tomi from Dying Lights and Heresy because he really didn't want to hold on to those games at this point in time. He might pick them up after DoA, or he might not. No idea how fast DoA is going, but I doubt it's going to be fast... even if anything is done, the server is still partially inaccessible anyways.

Which is why Final Twilight is still sitting on my harddrive waiting for the server to open up so that I can upload it. I spent too much time on the last update and I'm a bit nervous that there's only one copy of it in existance. Maybe I should back it up to someplace online... and talking about Final Twilight, I've got an idea I'll need to approach Nate about. Watch this space!

Also, I was thinking about something special that CCGW could do for St. Patrick's day. Luck of the Irish tournament or something, I have no idea. I'm still drawing a blank there though. I don't want to make it something related to MND, although at the rate things are going, MND might be it...

And the forums got updated majorly today. I added quite a number of new forums for games where the game itself and the publisher is dead, or games where we have permission. Those are the games we would probably be able to adapt for the engine. This list isn't comprehensive, but there's about a score of games on there... although most of them are little known games... I mean, well known games are those whose either the game or the publisher would be around today... well, that means I need a whole host of cardbacks for the forums... the only 2 of those games without cardbacks and that I have cardbacks for are Dr. Who and Galactic Empires. Everything else needs a cardback... although I'm not in a hurry to get them since there's no way I can upload them. Also included in the list are 4 of the games now on the engine which has no leads. Two dozen games up for grabs. The new games also have a line in the forum stating that they are looking for new leads. Hopefully people will bite.

I've also put up AvP, vT and Checkers up for new co-leads to take over, in addition to the two dozen games. I doubt I'll get anyone, but any one who's interested in becoming a PL faster than the usual wait can probably sign up as PLs to those 3 games. Besides getting access to the keys of the Workshop, aka the devKit, they'll also be learning how to code from me... almost like a 2 for 1 package. The games are already made anyways, so it's not too difficult to get the rest of the things in there.

So that's 27 games currently looking for new PLs for the engine... which is quite a large number. Yes, all the good games are already "taken" in some form or another, but these next few are there to make CCGW live up to one of the original goals - i.e. to have every dead CCG alive again for play online.

And the Vortex Tactics cards of Hyborian Gates just got finished scanning... it's nice to multitask while blogging. So that's all the scanning done and that's what I said I'll do this month. Next month, the spoilers and the clipping of the images while I work on other games.

And while I'm thinking of working on other games, Ed wants the dice in Bowling to actually be pictured as dice. Well, I've got an idea as to how to get those dice 3D'ed, and I should probably do that next month when I'm fixing the code for 2 player mode.

I still need to finish up the end of the month stuff... that's 2 days away, of course, but there's always so many things to do at the end of the month... not that anyone ever bothers anyways. Still I guess it takes discipline for my part to do them... after all, I guess I'm the only person using those and I might as well do them and not regret not doing them later.

-+@ Maelstrom @+-

which is a nice Scandinavian word...



LotR images because Kari have been trying to sign up for LotRO the whole time I'm writing this and because I've played a bit too many of the games today. Black Rider releases tomorrow, I have no idea what time tomorrow, probably midnight Mountain time tonight, which is like early afternoon tomorrow. I hope I'll be able to get in and the server won't get swamped. I do have 2 boxes of boosters waiting for me to take delivery of. Oh, and of the 3 images above, they are 3 out of the 4 "old culture" shadow minions... with the fellowship block rotating out, Moria culture would only have 4 cards left in standard format now... it should be splashable with the bridge though... I think...

I actually lost 2 gToon games today... I'm gonna cringe as my rankings drop to mid-800 again. Oh well. Too many people with Jawbreakers online though... and the weekend is coming up too. Blegh. I hope I don't have too much work to do to keep myself at 800.

I finally got Thunderbird and was impressed at how similar it is to the old Netscape that I am still using. I guess it's time for Netscape to go... ah, well, such is nostalgia. The good thing about Thunderbird is that it can pick up the atom feed that this blog is generating and I actually get to see how the blog looks in an inbox. Way cool. I tried out bottomfeeder, but the images there were just a bit... weird to me.

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Blogshare today. That's where Blogs are traded and are valued based on how many links there are to each other. Since I barely know anyone, I doubt this blog will even do that well. Oh well. We'll have to see where that goes. There's an icon on the right to the page, and I don't know about insider trading, but I wonder if I could increase the price of my own stock... eep... someone has actually bought my blog... and I started off with $500, now I have $2000... that's fast... (and oh, that is fake money, if anyone is wondering). And I used some of that fake money to buy shares in AJ's Strategy Games. I don't think I'll make much money there as that is a new blog though. Oh well, at least I'm supporting it from this post!

The images server have been acting weird today. That, combined with the fact that I can't download gMLs via the engine has been bad... well, not so the latter. Timmie wanted a game of B5 today and I would have complied... if I could actually load it. I couldn't of course, so I ended up working on Final Twilight.

So Final Twilight had the tweaks I've been itching to put in for quite some time now... updated the major character images, change the stats for Kerra, attacking actually rotates the character... and updated the moren and money counters. Those weren't too bad to do in the end. Portable Adventures provided source code that was good enough as a starting point to work on those counters. I'm impressed with the final result, but because the server has been down, there's no way I can upload it. Oh well.

I should get some Hyborian Gates scanning finished as well. That's the last outstanding thing for this month on the list. I can't believe that after about 3 months or so of being tardy, I've actually finished everything on the list. Then again, I've reduced the goals for this month as well, I suppose to something that's actually feasible.

Whoops, nope, I'm actually gonna teach Kari how to play a game of LotR with a starter deck. This is going to be so retarded (because the starter decks are retarded), but I guess it gives me practice for tomorrow's tournament... which I hope to join.

And on to other CCGW news - Christoph is now working on getting the virtual cards available for gEngine play as well in addition to the printed cards. Well, he'll probably finish those before next week is through I'm sure. The funny thing about Star Wars virtual cards is that they use the existing images... I mean, with 3 movies and a special, not to mention lots of other stuff, they could have come up with more original images, but I guess they were lazy... they being the Star Wars player committee, not Timmie and Christoph.

Logan has been busy with Concentration and Crypt still, adding updates for at least one of them today. I doubt it got through though, since the server is down. Poor him. Well, we all have to wait until the server is fixed. He's been trailblazing on the new stuff that Ed is adding though, and finding numerous things that needs to be fixed.

Martin is probably a bit sore at me for mentioning things here that he thinks I shouldn't have. Well, maybe I should have signed an NDA with him or something. Anyways, he's got the new VTES expansion scanned and stuff and ready for the VTES engine as it is now being called. Well, this weekend should see it getting coloured in I think. I supplied the # codes for a few things, I don't know how it will look at the end of the day. Hopefully it's more pleasing on the eye.

Ravage signed up as the Access Denied shepherd yesterday. I have no idea he even knows how to play the game. Well, Tomi said he'll update the game soonish maybe... and then later Ed was asking about the game. It's sorta weird really, but what do I know? I don't even know how to play the game.

I saw Kev in the chatroom today with Monkeys... I guess he's testing something out or something. Haven't seen Mark in a bit, but he's online as well. Probably busy working on Endeavor to get it ready for Origins. And as for the other PLs? Who knows what they are up to?

~ Links Panel ~

Well, I just discovered that there's an atom feed going out. For those who aren't getting the sidebar on the left, here's the sidebar in a post form. I use my blog as a portal to all the sites I work with on CCGW, BTW.

CCG Workshop Links

• CCG Workshop - Main Page


• CCG Workshop Forums


• CCG Workshop FAQ

Quick Links

General

• Ebay - Great for finding those old CCGs


• CCG Trading - Great site for trading CCGs


• Game Player's Network - Discuss most of the current CCGs here


• Penultimate CCG Review Website - Richard P Weld's site - no longer updated


• Wikipedia - Collectible Card Games List


• Board Game Geek - Huge list of Board and Card games


• Card Games Website - Deals with almost every Playing Card Game


• Cardhaus - Where I buy CCGs

Lord of the Rings

• LotR Decipher - Official Site


• LotR Decipher Forums - Official Forums


• LotR Online


• LotR Online Forum


• DGMA


• LotR Market - for online buying/selling


• Banshee's Store - for buying online cards

Magi-Nation Duel

• Magi-Nation Duel - Official Site


• Insiider Forums - Cranky former Magi-Nation Forums


• Magi-Nation Duel Yahoo Group


• DeckTech - Good site for MND strategies


• Matt's Underworld - WebSite of Matt Holmberg (MND Artist)


• RichWerner.com - WebSite of Rich Werner (MND Artist)


• Whyrl's Deviant Art - MND Artist


• Novelty's Custom Cards


• Novelty's Custom Cards Forum


• Magi-Nation Duo - fan made CCG

Wildstorms

• WildStorm Productions - Official site of the company that used to publish Wildstorms


• Draken Lair - Draken Smoke's Wildstorms Page


• John Patrick's Site - Custom Cards galore


• Wildstorms Yahoo Group

Babylon 5

• Vorlon Space - Great for Babylon 5 resources


• Bruce's Babylon 5 Page - One of the designers of the Babylon 5 cards


• Babylon 5 Yahoo Group

HumAliens

• HumAliens - Official Site


• HumAliens - AEG Site


• HumAliens Yahoo Group


• HumAliens CCG Rules

Urland

• Urland D&F - Official Site


• Urland FAQ


• Urland gEngine Rules

Interactivities Ink

• Interactivities Ink - Makers of Yukk! You Need Drew's Truck and Hamlet: A Game in Five Acts.


• Hamlet gEngine Rules


• You Need Drew's Truck gEngine Rules


• Yukk! gEngine Rules

Firestorm and Portable Adventures

• Firestorm - Official Site


• Firestorm Rules


• Portable Adventures - Official Site


• Portable Adventures Rules

Aliens vs Predator

• Aliens vs Predator - Fan Site

Final Twilight

• Final Twilight - Official Site


• Final Twilight - Official Forums

Classic Games

• Borders / Crazy Eights Variant / Uno Variant


• Bowling Dice


• Checkers


• Go Fish


• Kings / King Corners


• Quartet / Authors / Happy Families Variant


• Reversi / Othello

gToons

• Cartoon Network gToons


• gToons Organiser - A good place to view non-Slam gToons


• The Ultimate Cartoon Orbit Resource - some info on gToons


• The Cartoon Orbit Galaxy Codes page

Ghostly Presence

• Doomtrooper Underground - nipa's Doomtrooper site


• GridIron Fantasy Football - kdevine's GridIron Site


• Paris City Grid - toon's Netrunner site


• Duke Nostalgia - Toy Reference site


• Big Knobi Klub - Ricochet's site


• Red Tag Games - ShadowJump's Original games site


• ShadowJump - ShadowJump's CCGW games site


• nipa-Martin blog Index - Links to all nipa-Martin Posts

-+@ Diplomacy @+-

That's something I obviously lack...



Yes, I've only got 5 more days to go with the scanning and today I decided to get the Osirian cards done. So that's another 7 pages gone, 10 more to go. Hopefully, I'll be able to do them over the next 2 days or so, at my leisurely pace. Well, I thought I might as well showcase a badly cropped card... in this case the image on the left. You can tell it's part of a whole there. Maybe I should showcase an 70s hairstyle piece in future as well, particularly since Martin thinks the images are nice.

The main thing I did today was to update 2 cards for Tainted Glimpses on the engine, and to add the Core TG cards onto the engine, but I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit I think. Over the afternoon, someone decided to abuse Diplomacy and built a rather nasty deck based around it to prove to me that the card needs to be changed. Hence the change. I also took the opportunity to change out Phrup Jar as well, due to the change with Transmogrification. The Core cards are a walk in the park to do, I should be used to it by now... also did an ad for TG in general and posted it up on the front page of the engine. I guess there's no harm showing the ads for that and for TR, which I made a few days ago...

Logan was the second person to ask me to help with the What's Going On thing this week. Really though, people seem to think I'm like an expert on it. I'm not though, but since I did the trailblazing about 2 weeks back, I guess I've got 2 weeks more experience then anyone else. Hmm...

Ed actually uploaded Rock, Scissors, Paper to the engine tonight, making it the 92nd game to be added to the engine. Of course there are still 12 games in closed testing including it (Bowling was the 80th). I have no idea how soon it'll get public, but it's nice to know that almost 100 games have been adapted for the engine.

So, with that in mind, I made a quick update to the plates post internally, in preparation for the end of the month update. Yeah, I think this end of month I'll be very well prepared. I've already drafted out my February report, which still has a couple of blanks for the stuff that I'd be doing between now and the end of the month.

Otherwise CCGW has been slow... or that's how it seems anyways I guess. There's probably lots happening behind the scenes or something.

Didn't play gToons today, but I did try my hand at the auction. Really though, after using ebay for a while, the auction tools on gToons is a bit retarded. Didn't manage to get anything, which isn't really a pity, since I only have about 700 points anyways. I did manage to key in all the codes to get all the cToons yesterday... and for all of you who are looking for those codes, on the left you'll find a gToons section, the last 2 of which should have all the codes that you are looking for. If you are looking for a slam, I'm sorry, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get one of those.

Played some LotR today... 2 more days till fellowship block gets rotated out. There were a few... hard words said in the lobby when I entered. Well, the LotR players are a bit clique-ish I guess and since the implementation of the guilds, a bit confrontational as well. Gang wars and all. I'm the "anarch" of course, running around, trying to prevent myself from getting trampled and such. And what's this I've been seeing? Dwarves with Smeagol? I guess Gollum must really be a problem for Dwarf decks, because everyone seems to be splashing Smeagol. Of course, Smeagol is also good for controlling the site path, but still...

And the alienspredator.com site seems to be down. I wondered what happened. That was such a good site for AvP stuff, not to mention Terminator stuff as well. Oh well, its loss will be missed.

And for those of you getting this page via RSS feed beware the bottom feeder.

-+@ Vaporize @+--

Just like dew when it comes in contact with the morning sunlight...



No special points for figuring out those are Terminator cards. I haven't started work on this yet, but it will be the next "expansion" to be added to the AvPvT game on the engine. This will be the last published expansion. After this, there are the 2 unreleased expansions before moving on to the fan-made ones. I got Ravage to do a prelim survey at the scenarios for me - I had a cursory look at them earlier and I thought Countdown (with a few mods) would be enough for this game... and Ravage has confirmed it. So that should be what's happening I guess.

I'm scanning the next set of Hyborian Gates cards as I'm typing this - this time it's the Hyborian cards themselves. Each region supposedly has a particular good spot and Hyborian is supposedly good at attacking. I have no idea though. I read the rules a few days back and it seems very straightforward to do a no-frills adaptation of this game.

BTW, I have no idea how Martin can corrupt "no frills" to "no fries", but I thoght that was funny. Yes, Martin, I know you are reading this, you've been checking every 12 hours or so and I haven't exactly written anything for over 3 days... if you want to find something to do though, maybe you should create your own blog... or if you want to, we could start a blog with 2 writers... but as they say in Canada "Mon chien est mort".

Let's do the non-CCGW CCG stuff first. For those who even care, I didn't drop much this weekend, only a loss of 10 or som places down the ranking ladder, so I'm still in the low 800s. I doubt I'll invest the time to break into the 700s level soon. Played one game today, and enjoyed it. It was a fun PPG deck with no slams and we were tied on points, until I got the 15 for the colour advantage. Yay for me.

I have been playing quite a bit of LotR recently as well, playing against people who are suffering since two of the most powerful cards - Galadriel LR and Final Account have been banned in standard. I barely use the former and I can live without the latter since I don't run many Gandalf events and my decks weren't too much affected by it this time. Also, since the fellowship block cards are being rotated out online this coming weekend, it's probably the last chance for me to play with those cards. I know come next month, everyone will be making new decks and stuff since an entire block is being rotated out.

Project CHuckie CHeese is supposed to be playing our first game tomorrow for Secret Wars just to iron out the mechanics. I wonder though if the game will even take place. I haven't seen the cards that Chris has been designing and he's keeping mum about them. We'll have to see what happens there. Have I mentioned that I don't think this game will even get off the ground?

The MND Blue Furok competition, which I've retroactively named Keeper's Question #1, has just completed today. Mitch's design were clearly superior to the rest of the field and I had to pick him as the winner. Quite a few good entries though from the other people but they need more work to get their card design up to scratch.

The MND tournament went full blast over the weekend, gathering a large number of games. I have no idea how many exactly, but people have been playing with fun decks for quite a while now. It's interesting to see the enthusiasm they've been showing for the game. Hopefully enough people will play enough games to place in the competition.

Ed has made available a number of things available to PLs, one of which is the What's New column on the webpage. I've wasted no time to put up 3 sections, two of which deals with MND. Hopefully people will see the game, although dying, is not that dead. The third thing dealt with the public announcement of Bowling going public, which has been rather overdue. The other thing that is overdue is the announcement that Le Tournoi went public, but I'll leave JC to do that.

JC updated his info for Le Tournoi and I think and I can finally update my BGG list... if I feel up to it. Not tonight though, maybe when I get more time. Nope, can't even do it yet. Tournoi isn't even approved on BGG. I guess they haven't got to it yet.

Timmie has been trying to get a game of Star Wars going all day. It's going slow for him though. I wonder if he or Christoph have posted on the Star Wars boards. Perhaps not. I have no idea. I think I will stay away from that game for a while since those 2 of them are trying to make it, and I quote, the "best" version of Star Wars available online. Well, compared to Apprentice and PBEM, I'm sure it is. The interesting thing is Christoph hasn't added a new expansion for a few days now. Maybe he's experimenting with something. Well, it does give me time since I don't have to update his WGO on the engine.

The weekend has seem minor activity going on from some of the other PLs, with the exception of myself, of course. Tomi had a mythos expansion out, Logan and JC fixed a few bugs in Crypt and Rage respectively and Mark was hanging around. Kari and Thomas are still doing that tournament of theirs... apparently there's been quite a few "things" happening there. I'm glad I kept out of it.

Someone is actually playing Bowling as I write this. I have no idea what he thinks about it, but I don't see any errors on the screen so I guess it's going swimmingly. That reminds me, I need to do a screenshot for the game as well. Maybe a bit later... maybe I can get Thomas to help... and I did, but apparently the click on ball to roll code has got a few glitches. Oh well, back to the drawing board... and no screenshot as well.

I should really make a push to do Final Twilight this month... and finish what I want to do for it. I've been lazy though, could have done it over the weekend, but decided to do "other things" instead. Oh well, guess it'll just have to wait.

I'm downloading Duel of Ages as I write this... now... Hyborian Gates scanning finished for the time being, three more regions to go there, Orisian and Power Surge and Vortex Tactics and 17 9-card pages to scan in. Should be doable over the rest of the month. Anyways Duel of Ages, I forgot that I had access to it on another account... anyways, Tomi hasn't been working on it recently, but I can see all the rest of his hard work there. Should be an interesting few minutes as I peruse it.

Finally, this is the first reminder for myself to get ready the end of the month stuff. 6 more days to go and I guess I better get ready or get swamped then. This month is the shortest one and one with the most hassle as well. Heh. Or something like that.

-+@ Snowball @+-

Heh, not the object, but the verb usuage of it which means that things grow large from something small, just like my CCGW work and responsibilities. Oh well.



Well, did the Gaean scans today. They aren't too bad. I still have Hyborian, Orisis, Power Surge and Vortex Tactics to go. That's a lot of cards as the latter 2 are the events and the combat modifiers respectively. Well, 10 more days to scan 4 regions. I think I can make it. Martin asked me for the online rules today... that would need to be scanned as well.

Martin and I talked about a lot of things today. I learnt about arrays, for one, and I finally know how to use them. I also found out about VTES and beta testing... but I'll let Martin and Ed announce those themselves. I'm not going to steal their thunder by announcing their stuff here. Martin has also scanned all 2200+ VTES cards for the engine. I am amazed that he did that. I guess VTES is now the CCG with the most card on the engine. I've gotta update that list one of these days.

Talking about lists, I updated a number of the, one of them being the Board Game Geek list that I maintain for CCGW games. I also submitted in an entry for Le Tournoi for there since I would need it to get my list there up to date. Hopefully it'll be added soon.

I updated my list on BGG because Nate pointed me to the Final Twilight for sale page there. We were trying to figure out where he could advertise the set release today and BGG was one of the places. He's also placed announcements on the CCGW forums and I've put in a corresponding announcement onto the WGO fo the engine. It was fun. I also got to be in a chat with 2/3 of Neo - the other third being Mike or HeffX, who hails from the border town of Eschede (I passed by there on my way to Germany almost 10 years ago). It was weird sitting in their business meeting.

Talking about business, I found out today that Interactivities Ink is going out of business. Yes, you heard me right, as in they aren't going to be a company anymore. I guess they aren't making too much money from their cards and books. Oh well, I wonder what this means for their 3 games on the engine though. I hope they won't be yanked anytime soon.

I was also talking with Tomi earlier, while we were browsing through BGG... apparently he found out from there that Titan has been republished by FFG - perhaps under a license from AH? I have no idea. He's trying to get the game back onto the engine though, I hope he succeeds.

Talking about FFG, I was going to try out AGoT, the online version today. Didn't get to download the client though. Blegh. Just isn't my day I guess. Toon is supposedly interested in adapting this game for the engine. I hope we do get permission to do it. The other game that would be good to get permission to do from FFG would be Call of Cthulhu (of which I'm sure either Martin or Logan would be more than pleased to adapt it).

And while I'm on the getting permission business, Justin (Cait Sith) was nagging me to talk to the product manager of AEG's Warlord, who, or so Justin implies, is pushing Warlords onto some online platform on the forums. Well, I'm not that interested in an AEG game, but everything hinges on Ed's talks with Zinser and I have no idea where things are at there.

Oh a few minor things happened today, the engine went on a fritz while Timmie was trying to update SWD, and apparently him and Christoph are gunning all out to make the game the best online version adaption of SWD. Well, here's my best wishes to them in that endeavour.

Before I forget, I played some LotR today, but didn't win. It's hard these days to win I guess - everyone has such tuned decks... and by tuned I mean boring. I don't know why but there are only a few decks online that gets played. I do miss the unique combos that MND has been spawning online lately.

And yes, I did play a game of MND today... with a newly built Qwade/Qwelling deck. It wasn't very good, but I had fun playing that decktype for the first time. My poor opponent wasn't too happy that he lost, but I did give him tips on improving his deck... I have no idea if he was even listening though.

I played one game of gToons today - it was a good one really. I faced an atypical animal deck, based around Booboo and Taz, still, but it had animals like the orange scooby dee and the yellow monster thing that adds 1 for each animal (which grew quite big as both of us were playing animals). I got a colour win (and a points win as well) in the end, with Dexter's parents and the robot. Of course, the fact that I cancelled his Scooby with my Pup to gain Dee's double bonus was probably cursed by my opponent.

[BTW, all posts relating to nipa-Martin can now be found at this post.]

And as to nipa-Martin, two things have caused me to realise something that distinguishes them, and thus, I have to refine my theory. The first is nipa and Martin both confounding me by doing things the other person would do... well, that is to be expected, after all there are only so many different ways to code. The second is a post by Timmie about a certain problem that is central to nipa-Martin (more on this below). Hence based on these two facts, here's how the new nipa-Martin Theory is defined.

nipa tends to solve problems in the game design when adapting the game. This involves a complicated use of everything at his disposal - menus, cards, other objects, etc. to achieve whatever he intends to do to adapt the game specific mechanics onto the engine.

Martin tends to solve the same problems with scripting and code when adapting the game. This often involves lenghty scripts, lots of loops, arrays and calls to other scripts which makes the script look very much more like computer garbage than a language.

Of course, nipa uses complicated scripts as well... and Martin is also known for using the design of a game to his advantage. Hence the original premise that they are diametrically opposed to each other no longer holds true and this is probably the most radical change in the theory. Due to this, Tomi has been revised to n10M9 and Martin is at n8M10. I'm still keeping the scale of 0 to 10 though, with 0 being least and 10 being most.

Ed though is still outside the nipa-Martin theory. Whatever he wants to do, he can always add in new methods to do it. He calls that the golden rule - according to him it's like having access to all the gold. Well, he's welcome to Fort Knox, I guess, but the rest of us have to grovel and beg like paupers or learn to make do with what we have. He's in a league of his own for the purposes of nipa-Martin though.

Logan posted a problem in the scripting forum. Now, I can't reveal the exact conversation, but I can say that Tomi and Martin both suggested solutions. It was interesting to see that Logan went for Tomi's suggestion first, although it didn't work. Hence I'll have to revise that to Ricochet n8M8.

Timmie posted something that needed a solution as well, and it was telling that Ed suggested adding something new for it, Martin suggested a complicated coding change and Tim himself was thinking along the lines of a huge code change. So TimalakofBorg n1M4. I suggested a solution that Tomi and myself had developed/brainstormed for Fastbreak and variations of which was subsequent used in Titan and Babylon 5. Hopefully that would increase Timmie's n number by a few.

So the new revised list:

Ghosts
BugLaden nxMx
nipa n10M9
Ricochet n8M8
Martin n8M10
Novelty n8M7
kdevine n4M8
toon n3M7
ShadowJump n3M6
kapa n2M1

PLs
Bruce the Goose n1M6
Jammer Jun n2M4
TimalakofBorg n1M4
Izibaar n0M3
Rainbow n1M2
stormcloak n0M2
10tacle n0M0
wumpus n0M0
amarriner n0M0
kiloecho n0M0
[Note: The last 4 haven't got any games adapted yet on their own, hence the zeroes.]

Former PLs with games adapted
jackalope n1M7
mechaman n2M5
hiro_antagonist n1M5
sillywiz n2M4
jaycurl n2M3
Valorian n2M2
JudgeWhyMe n1M3
j235 n2M1
Point Infinity n1M2
superryoga n1M0

That should be everyone I think. This new comprehensive lists has forced me to consider a few of the former PLs and I think some of them deserves a description.

Nick (superryoga) was surprisingly very adept with solving problems the nipa way - he knew what was required for his game and stuff. However, the thing that let him down is that he had no amplitute for the coding and scripting, hence the overall failure of his project.

Shane (Point) and Yannick (Judge) both had games out, but from what I remember they were basically "no-frills", and of course back then with all the handicap on the engine, "no-frills" isn't anything to write home about. They did nothing special with the game objects as well.

Jason (jaycurl) and Monty (sillywiz) did some interesting things in their games with scripts and objects respectively. The jaycurl attack script in Wildstorm has since being incorporated into games such as DoomTrooper and Babylon 5 and ShadowRun. Monty's use dice to draw black lines was a scource of inspiration for game layout and design and the basic concept is now used in games as diverse as Portable Adventures and Bowling.

James (mechaman) was the person who adapted Buffy, of course, but besides Buffy, he's scripts has appeared in Shadowfist and HumAliens as well. Specifically, it's a unique dice script that ensures that they display correctly whatever the view.

-+@ Turn @+-

If I'm making this hard, well, probably it isn't too hard to figure out which game the titles of this month's blog is from. 28 days this month, meaning that there's probably less for me to choose from.

Anyways...



Yup, more HumAlien images, this time from the Alien faction. Added these 3 cards to the engine... yes, that's all of the Alien faction for this expansion. I think this expansion focuses on the Clones and the Robots. I must say the art isn't too bad for a kiddie game. It's a pity it didn't have a cartoon to popularise it, but oh well. Anyways, that's just 8 cards out of 200+ added, I'm going to take it easy on this and add in less than 10 cards at a go. Next up, the Beast faction... but don't ask me when I'll be doing that.

Didn't play gToons today, but I did have a look at my cards and tried to build an alternate deck. Failing miserably won't even begin to cover the feeling. I did get a number of LotR games under my belt today though. Felt really good just practicing doing stuff in a game, if only to prepare myself for the release tournament at the end of the month. Yeah, that's always fun.

I did play a few MND games today as well "just for practise". I haven't played so long that I've almost forgotten how to play, I guess. I built a stupid Cald swarm deck... with 3 Green Stuff just for laughs. It's funny how the deck can wipe out my opponents though... I guess their inexperience shows through here. Oh well - nobody expects 3 Green Stuff in a Cald deck for sure... it's just like mixing... mud with fire.

A couple more MND tournament results have trickled in today, so I made a nice table in the forums for people to see where they stand and who they need to play with and stuff. Nothing too complex, but I hope it'll encourage them to play more games and stuff. I wonder how successful this is going to be and if it's going to be worth it to have another one next month. We shall have to see.

11 days more until the end of the month. Means I have 11 more days to finish scanning Hyborian Gates and to get the Final Twilight counter modifications in. Hmm... they don't seem that daunting, but nevertheless they do seem to require a bit of time. I hope I can get them done ASAP though, I don't really want to drag them on into next month. I've got Portable Adventures encounter automation to do as well. Urgh, that is gonna shape up to be a big headache all the way around.

At least I DID get borders done. I can't think of a good way to add the icons though, that would have made it too much like UNO, so what I did instead was to put the special card names onto the popup text. Well, that's the best I can do I guess, I really want people to remember all the specials in the game though. Anyways, it's not a big deal as the players on the engine seems to prefer CCGs to the other games... card games like Borders and Go Fish aren't going to be very popular... since they are just "a waste of tokens" as one person told me.

And as for the gossip bit... let's see... one new expansion from 10tacle today, Timmie is still happily playing Star Wars on the engine with all the new cards. I have no idea what the triumvirate are up to, they seem busy (and rightly so) with their personal life. Mark is around doing something, what exactly I have no idea. Kev is probably monkeying around with Monkeys somewhere when he's free and he's up to it.

And wumpus should have his 3rd tour tomorrow. There's a funny story here. He was complaining about the draw to 13 being broken... the moment I heard his complaint, I knew it was because he's changed a card name and forgotten to edit it out of his deck, hence the draw to 13 was failing, because it was drawing a card that no longer exist. I'm just surprise that he still complains about it when it's such a common problem, especially with Mythos where things, and by that I mean card names, get changed around so often. Oh well... card name changes = bad idea generally, unless you have a good reason to do it.

Oh, and I had my first complaint about the name "Project CHuckie CHeese". Urm... that's just the project name and stuff, it's something that was coined to refer to the game that is in the works, while a name for the game is being figured out. "Secret Wars" is the current favourite, but nothing is written in stone yet, hence the need for a name to refer to the whole project. Urgh and double urgh about the complaint. Anyways, Chris is finally getting around to getting the decks decked out and stuff... we'll be playing our first game next Tuesday and stuff. It does sound interesting and stuff, we'll have to see. I already have Nate saying he'll have a look to see if Neo will do publishing and publicity for the game. Might as well do it under Neo since he's got the experience with Final Twilight. Nothing is written in stone there as well though.

And before anyone asks me (again) anymore about these... Terminator is a game I'm adapting for the engine, it's not a new game that I'm doing, rather, it's an expansion for AvP. However, because of the way those games are setup, things are a bit different there. I'm going to lump in the first Terminator scenario with the Countdown scenario for AvP... don't ask me when, it's definately not this month.

Highlander is a game that is NOT on my current to do list. Note the highlight and the underline. I haven't said I'll do it yet and I doubt I'll get there for some time. Hyborian Gates and Portable Adventures needs to be finished first and out the door before I can even consider doing it. And what about Tempest of the Gods and Scooby Doo and all those other icons that one sees on my desktop? Well, those icons are nice aren't they? There are more where those came from.

Oh, I had a talk with kari about the doomtrooper tournament. It was decided that since he and Thomas are both very capable of handling it, I should butt out because I'm not wanted... or something like that. Ah well, I'll let them progress at the pace that they want to go... at least I can say I offered to help, and I wish them the best.

I wonder if I have the time for a distraction this month though... Hmm...

-+@ Grow @+-

and grow we must. Things also continue to grow here, and so too does what I seem to be doing. Well, the only thing that's not growing much is my free time. Oh well.



Those are the new Gondor cards, can anyone say escalation? I thought the new dwarf cards were bad, but this is even worse. Coupled with Noble Leaders of Forts and some of these are just deadly. 12 more days till the online release though. Something to look forward at least. I've already pre-ordered a box of boosters online just to get the physical promo card so that's a good thing... I think.

The MND chatroom was talking about escalation vs progression at one point. People seems to understand escalation very well, but not many people realise that progression does not necessary mean escalation. A card may progress and improve, but if the card is well designed, it's balanced in the game and it keeps the power levels in the game about the same, eventhough it has had an upgrade. Going "sideways", that's my term for it. Bruce's Babylon 5 expansions have been going that way as well, increasing the number of possible decks, reducing reliance on a few copies of a card and increasing options to which to play with. That's something people will have to start to learn to be able to do in a CCG, particularly a fan based one, where sales and profit aren't the motivating factor.

Talking about MND, I'm still doing the fixes for the typos in the adaptation of the TG cards. They are trickling in slowly, which has resulted in the gML being udpated on a constant basis. There are way too many things to check for, unfortunately, which is why the players ultimately pay the price. Maybe that's one of the reason why they don't like playing with the custom cards. Who knows?

The MND tournament is going slower today. Only one game played and it was an interesting one. So that's 3 games so far this tournament. Hopefully there'll be more before the end of the month. I think I should also see if Thomas would like me to hand out coppers for the Doomtrooper tournament as well, if kapa isn't already handing them out. I'll have to ask him when I next see him.

Martin commented to me today that Hyborean Gates images are nice. Well, they were done by Boris Vellajo, so I suppose they should be superb. The criticism was of the 80s hairstyles and the horrible cropping, which is prevalent, but does not occur on every card. The art style isn't my sort of art I'm afraid, but I do seem to find enough pleasure scanning them in - the more I do, the quicker I get to move on and complete other things... like Portable Adventures and Firestorm.

I scanned the next "region" of Hyborean Gates today. No images to be shown because I'm a bit lazy at cropping them properly. Besides, the engine needs a different crop than what I show here. I like doing them in small chunks though, it seems a lot more is accomplished that way rather than looking at the whole big chunk and thinking to myself that I'll never get to finish them. The same theory holds true for the next HumAliens expansion and MND TG expansion as well - little by little, stuff gets added, until a week or two or however long later they are done. Things work much, much faster this way since I'm a bit more motivated to work on them... because the chunks are smaller. I should keep this in mind when scheduling future work.

Talking about future work, I was looking up on Highlander CCG. Again, another game that isn't really in my league, but since there seems to be some interest, I might as well match the lukewarm response and see what I can do. Didn't find the rules online - I wasn't looking for that, but for the card back for the forums, and I found a whole site of custom cards. I have no idea how good those cards are.

Talking about the forums, I added the Highlander and the Terminator forums today... I decided that Terminator fans might want to distance themselves some from the AvP fans. You don't really have to mix and match those two I guess, although it is possible to do so. Also added in Endeavor for Mark to play around with. That's not visible to anyone though, but it's there. I cleaned up some of the old forums as well and moved a few forums around... the end result is only visible if one goes and look for it, which I think is a good thing. Nothing drastic, no evolutionary step changes, just gradual unobtrusive changes.

There's a new ToJH shepherd apparently. He's rather unobtrusive as well. He's signed up for his 3 tours, but I've barely seen him playing on the engine, so I wonder what he's doing. I doubt he'll stay a shepherd for long. The two newer HotS shepherds are already missing tours. Oh well, the system has never worked properly anyways.

I was just thinking earlier that Kev said that he'll get Monkeys ready for Origins. Well, I'm sure he has got plenty of time till then, well, maybe not him personally, but there's lots of time between now and the end of May. Then again, I know how time sorts of creeps up on someone and says "Boo!" in their face, so who knows what will happen. I'm still looking forward to a game of Monkeys though.

No new expansion from Christoph today. Timmie is still going all out to play games on the engine though... each time I see him he's in a game with someone. What's the point of being a PL if you can't play the game, right? I wish I had people like Christoph on my games too. Then they can do all the work and I can play 24/7. Yeah, that sounds fun... not.

I don't think I've mentioned that Nate has asked me to help Neo playtest the next set of cards, or something, for Final Twilight. Well he seems to be a busy beaver. I was a bit surprised to find out that his co-conspirators were non-US people - one's in Canada, the other is in the Netherlands. Kinda reinforces my theory that the US starts everything because it's like the largest market for things like this, but all the skills involved are foreign... or something like that. That theory will hold even less water than nipa-Martin though, I'm sure.

Mark was on earlier, although I have no idea what he's working on. He's got Summer Camp, of course, but in addition to those, he's been recently working on Nodwick, as the update yesterday shows, as well as something called Sideshow from Red Tag Games and now this new game called Endeavor. Yeah, it seems that everyone has multiple project these days... even Martin, I think.

Ed has hinted that he's starting work on the next new build of the engine. Hopefully, it'll be just bug fixes and nothing too big that will break the engine... again. Someone told me the engine looks like Halloween, and I have to agree, the orange on black just doesn't put people in the mood to game. IMO the black should be a nice shade of grey for starters, but what do I know?

I played quite a bit of gToons today and saw my rank go back up to the top of the 800s again. Well, it's going to stay there until next week, when I'll be force to repeat this episode again. Still, I won against a deck with a Liberty Belle, so my deck must be doing alright. I also picked up a few more cards today since there seems to be a bug with the codes - some of the expired codes are now available again. Between the two links on the left in the gToons section, one should be able to get all the freebies available. Yes it's a bit addictive too I'm sure. I try to restrain myself from playing too much these days.

-+@ Drought @+-

Writers get writers block, I guess I have what's known as coder's block. I'm so dry it's worse than a drought. Probably a coding version of the El Nino effect.



I did scans for the next race in Hyborean gates - Atlantis. Only 4 pages of them, which isn't a lot, but I guess I'm missing some cards. I have no idea what these cards do though, it's gonna be interesting when I finally get down to reading the rules.

Talking about dead games, someone offered to help me scan Highlander CCG. I asked him to do the rules first and I haven't heard hide or hair from him. I doubt that project will be realised soon, but there's always hope. He has also offered his Tempest of the Gods scans... something I doubt I'll get.

Since I'm on dead games, I was looking up Terminator yesterday to see how difficult it would be to adapt it. I think it shouldn't be too difficult, but all the myriad of scenario that it would spawn is gonna make me wish there was an easier way of doing the scenarios. I wonder if it could be merged with Contact or Countdown... there's a thought.

Bowling went public on the day before Valentines. Yay! It's missing the AI, but otherwise it's fully playable. I like it too. Sorta like a boring version of Yahtzee, but it's something to do when one is really really bored. I wonder when someone will go and score a perfect 300... maybe kari - he's know for doing crazy things like that. Anyways, it's the 80th game to be adapted for the engine. 80! Wow, that's a lot of games and hopefully there's more to come. I can't believe it's finally finished though, so it's time to move on to other things.

MND had the next two "regions" TG cards added on the engine. People are already telling me cards are too powerful. Transmogrification seems to be an early target since it's way too undercosted. I've just revised it today. Rewrites were coded in today for Phosporescense (too similar to aglow), Right Stuff (to encourage play by Gorb) and Disassembled Construct (mechanic was too complicated).

The MND tournament kicked off on Valentine's day. A few of the matches have been played so far with 2 being completed - I know of a third which was terminated because of a crash. Oh well, that's one reason why I have been trying NOT to organise tournaments lately - the inability to resume games. Really though, that should be fixed to garner more confidence in the tournament structure in future.

I played some LotR yesterday and today and people are already saying farewell to decks that will be rotated out by the end of the month... online at least. It's a sad time I guess since some of those people have been playing those same decks for years now literally. Oh well, shows how much Decipher can mess up a game by appealing to greedy economics.

I checked out the origins stuff yesterday. Apparently a "Red Tag Games" is offering a game called Endeavor. I wonder what that's all about. Hopefully we'll get a preview of it either on the forums, engine or on the RTG site. Meanwhile, Mark seems busy. He's got a Nodwick updated finished.

Christoph have been putting out a few more expansions for Star Wars, it seems he's gunning for a daily sort of release. Good and fine though, since Timmie seems to be reaping the rewards of that by playing more games. IMO the game needs a nice background to make the playing experience a bit more enjoyable... at least to the eye.

I haven't heard from Julien for a while, I wonder how's things going on with him. Things seems slow with Shadowfist in terms of updates, but play is now resuming to the normal levels, which is a good sign... I guess. It's a pity though that most of the players there don't bother *talking* with the rest of the players on the engine. Oh well.

-+@ Lightning @+-

Not the grease variety, but rather the colloqual variety as in Quick as Lightning.



It's a bit intimidating to add in an entire set, complete with all the coding that it requires. However, as I have discovered with MND, adding in a few cards at a time doesn't seem to be that daunting. Hence that's why I've only added the first 5 cards of New Order to HumAliens. The next few updates will probably see piecemeal additions to the game, but then again, since nobody plays it, I don't particularly feel compelled to do everything at one go. The images above are three out of the five cards that got added today.

The PM purge that I started yesterday continued today, and I must say it was fun peeking at stuff that happened more than half a year ago. There's a lot of history on the site I guess, history that only a Nostalgia(c) like me would value, but nevertheless brings back good memories. It's a pity I have to purge a few of those though to make way for future PM.

Also updated the forums a bit - Thomas wanted 2 of his tournament threads merged (although he didn't exactly said so that way) and I did it for him in a more elegant way instead. I've made the Tempest of the Gods forum visible again to all registered members. There has been some interest in that so I might as well revive the forums to see where that goes.

I got contacted today by Craig Randall (skandall) asking about becoming a PL again. Hmm... it seems Ed offered him Judge Dredd, despite the fact that Eric is still the PL for that. I wonder what is going on behind the scenes there. Well, since Dredd is Eric's only game, maybe Ed is trying to get rid of Eric? I have no idea. I hope that's not the case. Craig though seems enthusiastic about wanting to be a PL. I suspect he just badly wants to get his own games online, and there is nothing wrong about that I suppose. He offered to lend his help to Firestorm. Would be interesting to see how things develop there.

Logan is doing funky things on the kit. It's interesting to see what he's doing, although it's going way above my head. Well, whatever he's doing is going to benefit the development of all future games, so I'm looking forward to it.

Mark was online yesterday, but I have no idea if he was working on Summer Camp or was just working on something else completely different. Maybe it's Sideshow? I have no idea. I can't wait to see Sideshow on the engine though.

Christoph added another 3 "expansions" to Star Wars. I'm going to guess that those are what I'd call "promo sets" - or sets that have less than 50 cards. He's really moving forward with the cards though and poor Timmie is so lost behind. I haven't seen an increase of Star Wars games being played though, so I guess they need to advertise it more.

Otherwise nothing much seems to be happening on CCG Workshop. Meanwhile, my gToons rank is still at the mid-800s which isn't too shoddy since I haven't played for a week, but I'm going to say that it'll probably hit 900+ after the weekend is over. We'll have to see...

-+@ Heal @+-

That's probably the simplest title of my blog yet to date. It seems appropriate after yesterday and my gratitude for those of you who've been concerned about my well-being. I'm better, but barely.

Images for today, since I'm not at home...



Yes, that's the last of the EL images for the time being... and today seems to be a MND day...

Threw together a tournament MND deck... oh, I'm getting ahead of myself again. I started a Elder's Legacy tournament yesterday, with the rule that each deck should have at least one Elder's Legacy magi, so people are scrambling to get such a deck ready for the tournament. The prize is a whopping 15 coppers, so hopefully that will draw enough people for it. So, I made a deck with Relaura that is specifically built for her and she isn't too bad. The deck is sucky though, but for fun play, it's not too shabby.

The middle image above isn't an EL image but one of the 4 for the Keeper's Quest promo. I think I'll make the March tournament (if the February one is a success) a Keeper's Question tournament, where the winner gets to suggest the text for the puzzle boxes.

Didn't get to play gToons or LotRO, although, LotRO seems to be making inroads on CCGW. How? Heh, I'm not going to say... at least not yet. Watch this space.

Today was also a day I got to talk with all 3 of the triumvirate and it was rather fun to just talk about nothing in particular (or nothing that can be mentioned in public anyways). The usual coding stuff, me spreading rumours, stuff like that. Personal stuff as well, which I doubt will interest anyone.

I can say that Martin posted in the forums that the VTES beta will be ready next month if not by the end of this month. Whether everything else can be ready by then remains to be seen, but people are already queueing up for the beta test so who knows what's going to happen. It's going to be fun to watch.

I had to rebuke Doug (ultradoug) on the forums today - he is just misunderstood I guess, but his online antics are ... well, borders a bit on the disturbing side. Well, hopefully he'll behave online in future, although somehow I doubt that he'll be behaving for long.

Talking about Doug, Robert is finally going ahead with his Sailor moon fan made expansion. It'll be interesting to see how things go there. He was busy for a while and sorta lost track of CCG Workshop, but now that he's (maybe) back on board, hopefully things will progress faster.

Oh, and not that it would interest anyone, but I cleared my forum PMs today. It was at 86% which is a bit excessive, so I had to purge most of the old stuff. I have nothing later than 6 months back anyways, with more than half of those in the last month or so, most of which is not important. The bulk of those were from Ed who it seems prefers to use PM. Heh, I know this is probably the most boring thing I've blogged about. Oh well.

The big news today is that the What's Going On section on the engine is now editable by all ghosts. I promptly put up info on the Blue Furok competition and the MND tourney, which subsequently broke the whole thing. Yay for me, breaker of all that's good and working. It got fixed finally though by Ed which is a good thing.

And there's a new sub-class of PLs it seems. Just when I thought things couldn't get any more complicated they do. Well, let me list the PLs just for fun:

1 PL who is Bugladen
8 PLs who are also ghosts
5 non-ghost PLs who are in charge of a game
4 PLs who are alternates logins of PLs
3 PLs who are assistants to PLs
2 PLs without any games public yet
1 PL who isn't even in charge of a game.

or a total of 24 PLs or 20 individuals. Wow.

-+@ Corrupt @+-

Some days, like today, I feel like jelly that's thrown at a brick wall. Urgh. Not the best way to feel. There was a corrupt image for Bowling today, which is why I chose today's blog title, and Kari reported it to me. Took me about a second to realise that I've capitalised the N in gNet in an image name that defaults to all lowercase on the engine. Ah well, something easy to fix anyways. The game is fully playable now, but there's an odd bug with endturn, so I might have to change the way it's coded in beginturn. We shall have to see. I would also need to playtest the 2 player mode. I'm sure I've made a few sillies there.

Anyways, images for today features everyone's favourite little people - hobbits:



Well, I'm not sure if all 3 will make it into my hobbit deck. That deck needs a revival of sorts after the fellowship block is rotated out so that I can at least get it up to being competitive again. Lots more work there, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to spend on that.

So back to CCG Workshop, Bowling is in closed testing and I'm going to say that it'll definately be in open testing by the end of the month. It's going to lack the AI since I'm feeling the time pinch, but I'll put that in at some later date. Priority though will be going towards Portable Adventures, Hyborean Gates and Final Twilight.

I'm still waiting for Nate and/or Ed to tell me that Final Twilight has been licensed. Apparently that's where they are heading for... hopefully, it'll still be a one copper game thing because I'd hate to see it being in the Shadowfist-class... that entire class is just... a bad idea, to dress that idea down a lot, IMO.

Can't work on Hyborean Gates for this entire week since I won't be home. How do I get to blog away from home? Easy, a notebook with wireless access and some sweet hotspots in known residential areas. Look for the circle thing marked near the corners!

Christoph has started working on the next Star Wars set. I wonder how much Timmie is yelling at this point... I don't think he's able to keep up with Christoph, not with all the extras that are needed for certain cards to play. Shows just how much innovation Star Wars designers probably have, or just how stupid they are... or both.

I wonder how Summer Camp is doing. There was a brief outburst a few days back and now it's all quiet again. ShadowJump is taking quite a bit of time on this game, but then this is the first game he's fully automating as well. It's a hard job, automating cards. He's also probably busy with whatever secret projects he's working on and real life as well, I'm sure.

I haven't heard from Martin at all lately, and I did miss him when he messengered me earlier (Sorry Martin, I was watching TV!). I wonder what secret plans he has cooked up in that mind of his... as they say, an idle mind is the devil's workshop, so I'm sure he's not got an idle mind. Hopefully it's VTES related and stuff relating to VTES being made available for play, even in a limited form, to the public.

Thomas must be really busy with schoolwork and such, he's not even frequenting on here as often as he used to. Or maybe because he has a new love interest? Who knows? I wonder if anything is being done on Frank's Zoo though. I haven't seen any questions from him or his brother in a while now.

Tomi told me about a broken custom Doomtrooper card on the engine. It's pretty slick combo and has probably killed the tournament thing that Thomas is running. Funny though, and I see Kari as a victim of that card combo.

Are we getting new PLs anytime soon? I have no idea. Martin was saying that there aren't too many published games that we can still adapt these days the other day, as I've probably already blogged, and although I've countered that that is not true, the fact is those remaining games really have little to no die hards... but then again neither has games like Wildstorms or Hyborean Gates, so who knows? I'd love to see the cards for Fantasy Adventures, Tempest of the Gods, Ultimate Combat, Riftwar and the 2 Echelon games on the engine at some point in future, although not adapted by me preferably. Those aren't good games, but there's probably unique game mechanics in there that is not used by anything else. Two other CCGs I'd like to do at some future point are Scooby Doo and Wizard in Training, and preferably with a co-Lead to do half the work or something, but that's going to be way, way down the line.

I'm also beginning to wonder if Ed isn't too pleased with the Urland adaptation. Both Urland and Frank's Zoo has gone public and I haven't seen hide or hair (or board and card in this case) of the Urland expansion. I'd really like to get my hands on that to add to the engine, but I guess at the end of the day that's up to Ed to arrange.

The other thing I'm waiting for is for word from Ed about Igor from Interactive Ink. Somehow I doubt that will follow on as well. Oh well, the games from IntInk are nice, but not really suitable for the engine. Igor might be the exception, IMO. Anyways, I don't think I'll have the time to adapt this for the time being, so I guess it's a good thing that Ed hasn't got it yet, although it'd make me happy if he does get it! Heh, I guess I'm just greedy... or a masochist!

And for something a bit extra today, since I'm in such a mood... a where are they now section. The following were some PLs who's since left CCG Workshop for other pursuits. Here's the lowdown on some of them.

ChampionofSolaris - former BTECH pacman and sheriff/ghost, CoS, as he's more affectionately (or maybe not?) known has moved back to Alaska to work for a law firm. He's just recently got married (i.e. a few months ago, near the end of 2004) and is a regular fixture on the evenings that he's free on LotR Online.

JeffyD - former Ultimate Combat PL. JeffyD seems to be flirting from site to site, getting partially involved, then disappearing all over again. It seems that is his modus operendi.

chocobo134 - former Checkers PL. chocobo is now a regular fixture in the gEngine chatroom as he offers his regular thrice weekly HotS tours as a shepherd. He is also one of the longest surviving shepherd.

Well, this will probably be a regular feature on my blog for the future... there are always a number of former PLs to update I'm sure.

Didn't play gToons today, but saw my rankings go back down to mid-800s. That was freaky, the rate it drops so suddenly. I'm sure it'll probably go down more over the next few days. Oh well. I do need a better deck idea though, and probably some more cards to inspire me. It's a pity I can't even buy some the Pack 1 cards (it's Pack 4 now!).

-+@ Nightmare's Dawn @+-

I've spent two long evenings on Bowling, updating the scoring, and sad to say, I've only got the first nine whateverthatiscalled done. Sure, it checks for spares and strikes now, but I can't get it to end turn at the correct time. I suspect it might be a kit error thing and since my web connection is patchy now, I can't test it on the engine. Blegh. I'm going to make it available to all PLs in a bit though... hopefully that will get people interested.

And the pictures bit? Well, I've yet to show the KT bit of EL, so here are the 3 from there:



And besides the 3 universal cards from the set, that's the last of the regions to show here on my blog for EL cards.

Let's see, played gToons... got to the upper levels of ranking 800+ but that won't last long as I don't intend to play for a while. I went up against some rather interesting decks too and I did enjoy some of those game.

Played LotR... and it's getting boring. People are tuning up their existing decks in anticipation of Black Riders hitting the stands. It's interesting to see what people are playing. As for me? Non-solo Smeagol has been getting whacked by everyone. It's not even funny anymore.

Big news for the last 2 days - Bowling. I spent almost 8 hours over 2 days on it. It now works and stuff, sans AI... that's going to kill me when I program it in as well... we shall have to see. Hopefully, it can get finished before the end of the month. I do really have a few other things to do though, but since I've added 12 MND cards, I'm going to concentrate on Bowling up till the time it goes public.

Final Twilight really should get another update to make the counters more specific to the game. I'll have to see what I can do to get them there. I don't have the time though, which is such a pity. Well, Nate is happy with what we have so far, but that's no excuse.

Logan is dedicating quite a lot of time to his games - Crypt and LMS seems to be getting major workovers over the weekend. That's interesting anyways. Christoph has a 4th Star Wars expansion out. Someone should give that kid (well, he's not technically a kid) a medal for spunk or something. Really though, the onus now is on Timmie to code the functionality for those cards in Star Wars. I'll wait for another 2 years or so. Things seem quiet from Tomi and Martin, but I'm sure it's probably the calm before the storm. Who knows?

-+@ Glimpses @+-

Glimpses are exactly what we are getting from Decipher on Black Riders. The dwarven cards seems to have gotten a huge boost though...



Rather powerful cards. I wonder what is being rotated out with the fellowship block though. Blood Runs Chill and Lords of Moria probably, but I think people are beginning to tweak their dwarf decks.

Today has been the MND day. I finally kicked off the Keeper's Quest Promo Contest - the first of four. Hopefully, I'll get enough people interested ... not only in the contest but in the game as well. One can only hope. The Shadowsfall Promo playtesting rewards program has also been cross posted to the custom card board... and I increased the incentive too, so hopefully, that'll get more people to post me more reports. Last but not least, the Cald and Orothe TG cards have been loaded into the engine. I wonder if anyone will use them. Speag Strangler has already been highlighted as being too powerful. That will probably change. All the Taint spells will probably change as well, since it's so much easier to play Agram's staff than to lose 2 energize. Let's see what playtesting brings.

Otherwise, it's a slow day. Lots of people playing games, few people doing visible coding... except Ed who's probably bugfixing a few things. The programming forums are abuzz with questions as Timmie tries to figure out how to do certain things. More power to him. It's nice to see that Christoph has kicked Timmie's backside into gear. Christoph himself is pondering the mysteries of being a project lead. He gives me the impression of being stand-off-ish, but not in a bad way. Maybe he's just new and needs to do a lot of "catching up".

I wonder how Kev is going on with Monkeys or Mark with Summer Camp. Logan has been busily coding in the Crypt expansion until the wee hours of the morning. Martin probably is busy with VTES - he recently posted a very nice update to the beta version, which I think means that play on the VTES server is probably going to start soon, although I'm sure it won't be public initially.

Nate has also been busy - one of the things he's done is to publicize about Final Twilight on the engine. I see a steady stream of people selecting it and getting images probably. Hopefully they aren't getting too lost there. The game is simple anyways, being no frills and all, but I'll keep an eye out on them anyways if they need help.

And what do you know? Original game request #5 of this week has been presented to me. Really though, if it was that easy to adapt a game, lots of games would have been added to the engine already. Although I may make things look easy, it's not. I wish people would take it into their head that eventhough it might seem easy, programming something as complex as a game, even a relatively simple playing-card game like War, isn't a walk in the park. Some of the PLs might do it efficiently and quickly if and when inspired, but generally, it's a long meticulous process that involves coding in at least 2 different computer language, with (for me) 5 or 6 different windows open, including a text editor, a graphics editor and the engine and shuffling between all these various windows while trying to make a cohesive whole.

Which brings me to Bowling. I really have to get it finished soon... hopefully tomorrow, which would start in 10 minutes for me at this point in time. I should at the very least get the non-AI scripts working by the end of the week and then worry about the AI at some point in future... it's only a rather simple (I hope) change to add in the AI anyways.