-+@ 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.