-+@ Cannon @+-

Hopefully not a loose one...



Art credits:
Kellus by Goodman, background by Holmberg
Cloak of Protection by Werner/Gillette
Puddle Arboll by Holmberg/Sato/Nov

I don't like the end result with Kellus... I had to change the skin colour to blue and I think I didn't do as good a job as I would have liked. Oh well. The cloak is interesting I guess, but rather bland. Liriel's Cape was the forerunner of that cloak. And it's probably ironic that I converted fiery Arbolit to the Puddle Arboll. It definately rings true for the FT "It's an unfortunate half breed" to some extent. Also corrected the images for Darunia and Darunia's Twist as well as Uloron.

With the cloak done, and with the large number of defects raised for MND since Bograth and Paradwyn was added, I thought it'd be good to do an update of the game on the engine, so that was a couple of hours worth of work. No coding change this time around though... nothing small left to add and all the big stuff could cause game instability, not to mention a million lines worth of code to check for all the exceptions, so I passed on those. So as of today, TG has 11 regions and 78 cards up on the engine. Only Nar and d'Resh to go... and with the 2 Nar images above, it means I only need 3 more Nar images and 4 more d'Resh images to finish the set. Hooray!

I've also started work on getting TW organised some and have got the first 4 regions named out on the Custom Card forums - Cald, Naroom, Orothe and Underneath. That's 4 × 6 or 24 cards out of the 100 card set, so hopefully that will draw some interest. Mitch has offered to do Orothe and Nar and I think Frank wants to do something, although he hasn't said what exactly. We'll have to see what happens. I'm doing Paradwyn and Cald, of course, and probably all 6 Arderial cards since I really don't want Arderial to be broken. We shall have to see there.

The tournament is winding down, I guess. It happens whenever Mitch qualifies and everyone else just can't be bothered to catch up to him. Oh well, let's see what happens. Hopefully someone else qualifies this month and gives him a run for his money. Kevex just joined up today bringing the total number of players to 8. I think this is the most that there is since the tournament started, and because of the way things are setup, it got a lot more games played as well.

Also updated the posts on the forums advertising TG, but have yet to make that announcement in Insiider... or even on GPN. I should at some point I guess. Also, wrote about image making over at MND at gEngine blog. It's a must read for people who want ideas about how to make art for cards I guess. So now I have 5 expansions in progress for MND - SP will come out of playtesting at the end of the month, and then it's going to be crazy as I update the engine and the website for the cards. TG is currently in playtesting and hopefully all the cards will be up by the end of May. KQ has the fourth competition next month and should see the cards being added to the engine in June. Hopefully, by June, the cardlist for TW will be finalised. And of course EF, although is in progress, really has no hurry to be added anywhere. They are just nice pictures at the moment.

Well, just in case people start thinking MND is my life, it's not. I had the 2nd Urland playtesting session today and 3 people showed up. Unlike the last time, the game is fully playable this time around and we did play a 4 hour game. People enjoyed the game though, which was good and they said they'll be back next week to play. Someone should be around to guide them to play, I guess, but since I'm not here next weekend, it won't be me. No bugs found in the playtesting session, but quite a few upgrades required. And I still haven't have had an exact idea how to do auto scoring, but hotspots is a good hint about where to go from there.

Other news, nipa seems to be working on Access Denied for the tournament later today. Hopefully, he'll get all the kinks ironed out before the tournament. Ed though has been busy holding tours for AD. Hopefully he'll be on time this week for the tournament as well. Logan seems to be having a sweet time tweaking SR to his liking... and the players are coming in droves as well. That's a good sign in my book. Mark has got Summer Camp going last I saw and I suspect he's going to put in quite a lot of the new features. Poor Kev is playing catch up on Monkeys. As I suspect, he didn't get it ready by today, but since he still has a day and a bit before the week is out, maybe he can meet that deadline...hopefully. He's also looking into changes to Capitol as well I think. Martin has gone on holiday, which he really deserves after working so hard on VTES. Knowing him, though, he'd be missing his tweaking on his games... still ME has grown leaps and bounds since he last updated it.

And the non-ghost PLs? Pretty much very quiet. Robert had some activitiy on the forums, after Doug asked for things, but I have no idea if he'll even have the time to code them in. We'll have to see. Tim have been asking a few more questions, but I haven't seen a Star Wars update yet. Maybe he's trying to get his head around things. Craig has been quiet for a few days now, and Tony has been quiet for a long while as well. I have no idea if that's a good sign or a bad sign. Aaron is missing in action again. Oh well, I think it might be a year or two before Sim City even gets started, if at all by him.