-+@ Shadow Infiltrator @+-

This CCG has really good card titles...



Art Credits:
Pride by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Exodus Flight by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Acid Rain by Holmberg with special effects by myself

For a change I haven't done anything MND today, so there's a collective sigh of relief from all my regular readers. The three cards above are for... you guess it, Exodus Flight, including the title card of the set. Note that Acid Rain is the first time that I've attempted the rain effect, and the smoke effect too. It looks OK, practice makes perfect, I suppose.

Some guy has been posting up his drawings - pencils - of MND art. He's offered it for the custom sets if it can get coloured. Hmm... if I wanted pencils, I would probably have picked off Holmberg's and Werner's stuff off Insiider, but I'm not that desperate... yet. Still, it's interesting to know that someone is interested in providing art... now if only I can encourage him to learn how to colour over his own drawings...

I actually made a new LotR deck today - solo Gandalf with Frodo... it sucked, so I added in Smeagol with a follow... it still sucks. Gandalf cards just costs too much to choke. The flip side though has a weird uruk combo. Time to work on it more... if I can figure out how to prevent frodo from getting overwhelmed most of the time...

We had a new PL yesterday - Josh Coomber aka Vampus has been made co-Lead of CWNB. He's been lobbying after this for almost a year now, I'm sure he's glad he finally got the position. Well, it's up to him to deliver his game... I wonder if he'll end up like Aaron or Gray... taking ages to finish their games. Who knows?

Josh has also been checking for missing images, and today he reported the ones in Final Twilight, so I updated FTWIL today to include those images. It's a tough go since I'm currently in the middle of downloading all the Fastbreak images from the server. Yeesh... I've been downloading for almost 24 hours now and I'm barely a fifth of the way through. Dialup sucks.

The other game I updated today was Checkers, which Josh has reported earlier about the display defect. It worked when it was last updated, but since then, the engine has removed a few other things and display settings have changed oh so slightly. That though, caused some ... let's just say confusion for the Checkers code, which I had to ... unconfuse. That's an easy job, but again, uploading it took ages.

Since I have got the game development bug, I was actually clipping the Hyborean Gates images today... got Asgard and Atlantis done, which gave me a good feeling. Who knows, perhaps by the end of the month the game will be in beta? At which a voice inside my head just whispered "... and pigs will have wings."

What has everyone else been doing? Ed is finishing up his new pet project - promoting games to Playing. I've mentioned in my last blog the dozen or so games updated. It seems more is on the way. Tomi was working on Duel of Ages over the weekend, but he's also been busy with the minor maintenance stuff on his games. Martin, for a change, isn't working on VTES, but was last seen working on Abduction. I think that's going public soon as well. Mark is working slowly but surely on Monster Rancher. I'll say it'll probably go public near the end of the year, in December of January. We shall see.

Of the non-ghosts, Thomas updated 7th Seas with a whole lot more new images. He's still slowly progressing there. I was surprised to see Ultimate Combat going into Playing... it's still missing an expansion or so, and probably had as much tests as I think it should have, but it's not up to me. JC seems to be missing in action - I think he's on vacation, but MBOR got "promoted" just recently, so I'm a bit confused.

Tony has been slogging through two games which might not see the light of day, so I shalln't mention them here, but it's interesting to read through his coding tricks and pick out the simplest of mistakes - mostly newbie mistakes at that, but that's how we learn. I know I make a lot of those mistakes too... the difference is that with experience, both from coding way too many games and reading through other coders stuff, I have a rough idea what to be on the lookout for.