-+@ 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.