-+@ Move to Partial Cover @+-

Or covering your arse?



Art Credits:
Sand Fratt by Jeffry Ransom
Agrilla Hunter and Bagala Outcast by Jen Reed
All backgrounds by Matt Holmberg.

Another 3 cards for Exodus Flight, although I haven't done much MND custom cards lately. I did manage to announce the winner of the 5th DJ contest and get ready the 6th (and final?) DJ contest today so that was half of my MND achievement for today. The other half was to fix up bugs in the game on the engine, thanks to the defects submitted by one of the most loyal MND player that is out there. It's good to have a solid bunch of dependable MND players on the engine.

The other CCG thing I did today was CCGW related as well. Final Twilight's Trinity series 2 is now available on the engine. I was more interested in showing off the artwork (not done by me) than anything else, especially the cool ads I created yesterday. Those still haven't been added to the engine yet, but I guess it'll be done s**n.

I wanted to get a B5 update going as well, but didn't quite have the time. Hopefully there'll be another B5 update before the year is out. I find that I'm happier coding for games that actually get played than those that just sit there. I guess that's why FastBreak is languishing and Hyborian Gates barely register on my radar. I really have to get that going ASAP though... I want to get it over with before the end of the year. It shouldn't be that difficult to create a no-frills game. I just need the time.

And then in the queue after that? Quartet needs a screenshot and various minor bugfixes. YNDT needs to ensure that it's playable. Then it's Urland and the big revamp. I know I'm no longer competing with Ursuppe, but I think I owe it to Urland to see how awesome a game it can be. Or something like that.

Which makes me wonder if Capitol is getting an update soon... Ed was supposed to be working on it... or was he? I have no idea. He seems to be tweaking every semi-abandoned game... Frank's Zoo got some tweaks, although it's far from complete, then there's Sailor Moon... and of course Rock, Scissors, Paper is still in the works. It sounds interesting though to flirt from game to game. I know I do that on a regular basis!

Otherwise things are quiet... but then again, that is to be expected. Major things only happen about once a week or so. I've got (still) a number of end of the month things to handle as well, despite the destruction of the old CCGW forums. Somethings are just too interesting not to do.

-+@ Fast Deployment @+-

Martin guessed the titles I think. They are indeed from BattleTech.



Art Credits:
Hanging Bungaloo by Beth Zyglowicz.
The other 2 hyrens by Jen Reed with backgrounds by Holmberg.

Three more images from Exodus Flight. I really should be working on them as well, but I haven't had the time. Twilight War should be the next set that would be going into playtesting on the engine and I haven't had the time to work on those as well. I guess they can wait. Here's the status of the next few custom MND sets:

Twilight War: 5 more images to be found, 2 Nar, 2 d'REsh and 1 Universal. After that the text needs to be completed for all 100 cards and as a departure from the previous sets, I'm going to post them up for comments before adding them to the engine.

Double Jeopardy (Promo): December should see the last of the contest for DJ and after that they'll need to have the final text posted up for comments as well before being added to the engine. That is, unless someone sends me an image before the end of the year. This month's contest has finished, but I haven't judged the winners yet. Oh well.

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 5 creatures, 3 relics. NEED 1 creature
Bograth: 1 spell, 1 magi, 4 creatures, 3 relics. NEED 1 magi, 2 creature/relic
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: 7 creatures, 2 relics. NEED 1 spell, 2 magi
KT: 1 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 spell, 1 magi
Nar: 6 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 2 creature/relic
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 magi, 6 creatures, 1 relic NEED 1 spell, 1 magi, 2 cretures/relic
Paradwyn: 6 creatures, 2 relics NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 1 creatures/relic
Underneath: 2 creatures NEED 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 spell, 1 magi, 1 creature/relic
Universal: 1 spell, 1 creature, 2 relics Need 2 creatures/relics

If all goes well, Tainted Glimpses and Keeper's Quest will end their playtesting status in March 2006.


I've also been updating the site with the new calendars and the non game cards. Most of the calendars are coutesy of Frosthyren Shaw. Patrick magimutt Miteff has been great in providing some of the hard to find cards. They will probably be added there as soon as possible. I've also added two new calendars for this year based on the art from the custom cards. These are 1152 by 864 pixels and the full image can be downloaded from the Calendar section of the Custom Card site.

And while I'm on MND, the tournament seems dead this close to the end of the month. I don't think people are purchasing passes and tokens to play anymore. Hmm...

The B5 league meanwhile also seems dead and not many games are being played. I wonder who will get this month's end of the month tokens. Probably farquardon again I'm sure. Well, that's one thing to look forward to. I've also finally asked Ed to link in the league ad to the engine to be rotated with the rest of it and while I was at it...


Two new ads for Final Twilight based on images from Trinity. I like the reflective effect on the police car for one and the other image just has rather warm shades which makes it feel comfortable. Definately better than anything I can ever draw for the game and I think Nate is really moving ahead with the game. I've got to add the cards to the engine soon as well... maybe tomorrow.


The other ad I created today was for Hyborian Gates. Utter Distraction by name and I guess by nature. It's pretty much a sample of the images in the game with almost nude and erotic images of both males and females. Hopefully this ad will attract attention to the game, eighties hairstyles or not!

I also finally finished typing the spoiler for Hyborian Gates and have exported it into xml. Now I just have to do some quick search and replace to get it into a gML format and I'm done. When will get game get beta? It's probably a while off yet. After the cards have been added and the images checked, I've got to add the markers and then expand the common area and add in the dimension cards somehow. It'll be messy.

Josh messaged me yesterday asking for some clarification on the gML. I guess that means he's working on CWNB... although he's going to find it hard going in the first few months of doing that. I know I did when I first started and at that time, things were a lot more simpler. Now though things are way too complicated that someone new probably would have to take ages to get used to all the nuances of gML.

And one can't mention Josh without mentioning Tony. He's been quiet after the release of the WoT cards but I have a feeling he's still tweaking with Fluxx and getting more cool stuff into it. I guess Fluxx is going to be his definative game, the same way that Logan is known for ShadowRun and Tomi for DoomTrooper.

Christoph has also been quiet lately, but I wonder if he's finally succeeded in getting the player committee to organise a tournament on the engine. He's been going flat out on the game for a while now, including updating the wiki to include a rather comprehensive article on how to play SWD on the engine a while back.

Robert has almost practically dropped off the face of CCGW, so much so that Ultra-Doug Brown has got Ed to look into updates for Sailor Moon. That would be interesting to see what happens in that game. Doug desperately wants to be a pacman for the game there though.

Another person that seems to have dropped off is Julien, who still hasn't signed up to the new forums yet. I'm waiting for him to do so, so that I can give him moderation rights to Shadowfist. I do wonder what he's busy with though... hopefully it's not rioting every night in the suburbs of Paris! HA!

Kev also has been rather quiet lately, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Monkeys still isn't done. I have no idea. He's passed on some of his games - Galactic Empires to Gray and CWNB to Josh... although Gray hasn't even been seen or heard from for ages now - he hasn't signed up to the new forums for one. And since I seem to be making lists of people who haven't signed up to the new forums, add in Eric and Craig too.

On the other end of the specturm, Martin is busy working on VTES for its December release less than 2 weeks away. He has a new submenu with the Function shortcuts that I think looks really cool - in engine colours and all. Perhaps I should steal that for my games.

The other person that has been extremely busy is Mark. He's getting Aquarius ready for beta and that game seems to have gone from scratch to beta in less than a month. I have no idea what sort of game that is though. I'm still waiting for a cardback there to update Go Fish. Mark has also picked up a licensed boardgame to work on. It'll be his first board game and he has reservations about it, but I'm very sure he'll be able to cope with the challenges.

That meant I had to update the plates post which is getting a bit complicated now. Since it's on the wiki though I was wondering if I was adept enough to make a template for it... I have no idea. That's one thing I'll have to start learning one of these days - how to make a template for the wiki.

Logan has been busy on the wiki adding quite a few things here and there. He saw that I put up my language capabilities and added it to his page as well. It's nice to see he speaks German and Japanese to a certain degree.

Tomi hasn't been free enough to work on anything much, but there was a DoomTrooper update today. I haven't looked at it yet, but I'm going to guess it's only minor bugfixes. The DoomTrooper players have been slow signing up to the forums too. I wonder where they are hiding these days.

Ed apparently decided to change the code for each game. So now DoomTrooper is DOM which seems funny to me. I would have preferred the old code of DOOM. That means I've to update the geek code as well... but I think I'll leave it at the old 5 letter codes ... it'll take too much work for everyone else to update their geek code to the TLA. Well, at least MND is still MND...

-+@ Yellow Jacket @+-

Eh? What a title...



Art Credits:
Chyter by Jeffry Ransom, background by Holmberg
Evergreen Hyren by Jen Reed, background by Holmberg
Spiky Beeb by Austin Gardner, colours redone by Nov, background by Nov

Just a quick short (Ha! probably not!) blog today to keep all the people who read this (yes, all 2 of you) happy.

Nothing much is going on with MND. The tournament is still going on and a game was just played over the last 24 hours. I wonder how many people are excited about that... I think all that's left are just the good players since everyone who seems to be a beginner seems to have dropped off the face of the tournament. Oh well.

The 5th DJ contest ended today. I haven't posted up the winner yet, but the entries look interesting. This will be the penultimate contest though. Next month's DJ contest will probably be the last one... unless someone gets more artwork for it.

I actually updated the unofficial site with the 2002 calendars today. It's a small little section, but as the site moves on from the cards and the card game to the entire mythos of the world that is the moonlands, every little thing is going to start building up. About a score of people, or at least hits from a score of unique sites are being registered at least on a daily basis from across 5 continents... so...

I updated the plates post yesterday for a whole lot of things. Mark got 2 more games on his plate and one is already in closed testing on the engine. He's being going like a maniac with his games lately, which is a good thing IMO. He's also picked up his first board game - perhaps he's looking for a challenge?

Ed was busy with a new version of the engine, and this time there was a White Wolf version as well, so Martin got happy and decided to do major work on VTES. He figured out a few cool tricks for the game too that one of these days I'll have to add to my games. Hopefully this game will be made public soon.

Tony released a few hundred fan cards for WoT a few days ago... that must have taken ages to code by hand. He's even added a burb to B5 in his release too. It's funny though how B5 has got massive play while WoT doesn't really. Perhaps it's the quality of the WoT player, or maybe it's just the subject matter?

Talking about B5, the league is turning up quite a number of bugs and shortfall in the B5 programming... and I'm happily explaining to everyone how to use the defects report page on the website (not the forum). Well, I guess I'll start seeing an upswing in B5 defects over the next few days.

There was only 1 league game over the league weekend... and d1ngo won that game, so I suppose he'll be taking away the 5 copper tokens and stuff. Things seem to be going slower for league though as people begin to see how difficult it is to actually play a B5 game mega-competitively and to win on time. I've yet to play a game though... hmm... one of these days.

Bruce/deleriad has started templating cards for the next fan-made B5 expansion... and his first 2 cards got shot at rather constructively... hopefully those won't be the final versions... but it's always interesting to get new cards. I wonder if we'll get a new card template this time around. Probably not.

Mark Smith of Radical Racers fame from Lo'Jac Entertainment buzzed me about the new forums. I had to explain to him that the forums were destroyed and that the new forums is a bit more simple than the old ones. He's happy with the forums though, although I haven't seen him posting anything about Radical Racers on the forums yet. Maybe he's getting up to something.

Mike/Grover also asked me about the possibility of a DoomTown FAQ thread/post. I directed him to the CCG forum, because that's where all the "low post volume" CCGs should go. I haven't seen anything from him either on the forums, but there are better DoomTown mailing lists and bulletin boards out there.

I still have about 4 more Final Twilight images to colour for the next next next (or something) expansion. I wonder where I'll find the time to do that. I also have to finish up Hyborian Gates which has taken ages to do. Oh well, such is one with little to no motivation to adapt a complicated game... let's hope that motivation hits soon.

I bought the 40th anniversary version of Dune and read it. Made me understand more of the CCG now. Might even say I'm inspired to play the CCG again. Then again, thinking of the complex rules and the limited large number of cards... hmm... I guess I'll stick with the novel.

-+@ Pouncer A @+-

Time to pounce on things to get them started again.



Art credits:
Alpha Balamant by Jen Reed, backgrounds by Holmberg/Nov
Sandsifter by Jeffry Ransom, backgrounds by Werner/Shreve
Frigid Weebo by Jeffry Ransom, backgrounds by Holmberg

Another 3 more cards for Exodus Flight. That's the set that's going nowhere fast, but it's still going. I wish I have a bit more time to look into MND custom sets, but time is a commodity in short supply for myself right now. People are still doing artwork and stuff for the Insiider cards, so I am going to guess that there will be some cards, although I have no idea how much.

The Official MND site going down for much of the time is a blow for the remaining players and where possible, I have tried to recreate the parts of the site useful to players at Novelty's Custom Cards. The hit rates for that site has gone through the roof since I started that and there are people advertising the site all online, including on Gaia Online and the various Yahoo Groups. It is still missing about a score of d'Resh VotS cards, but in place of that, I've put up the alternate art cards and all the promos. It's turning out to be a good site content wise, but as usual, my web design skills suck so the site looks barely mediocre.

The CCGW forum blew up last month which put a halt to the first Shadowsfall tournament. CapAp/John was leading when everything fell down so I gave him some tokens and he seems to be happy. There has been a lot of games starting up again this month for the tournament this month, but there aren't too many new players and the game seems to be on a decline. I guess as long as the existing players are happy, the game will survive. It has survived for so long now.

Double Jeopardy has another contest this month of course. I was so busy last month that I retroactively named Mitch as the contest judge. He didn't choose himself, but chose Daniel/Dartax instead so that worked out well. There's only been 2 entries for this month's competition... well, it's still early days yet.

Someone called me Mr. MND earlier this month because I seemed to be involved in everything. Oh well. I guess maybe it's about time I took a step back and just let the game die or something... or just wait until the animated series airs, if it does airs. It is definately taking up way too much time though, but it is fun.

The 4th anniversary for gEngine passed by quietly, since I lost all my articles and lists that were stored on the forum for that. I guess I'll start a new tradition where I don't bother too much with the anniversary. No new games were made public over the anniversary, but Mark did make Monster Rancher public a day before so I guess that works.

The only other games that went public after Radical Racers was Fluxx which Tony had been working on for a while - it's his first full fledge game too. Otherwise things are quiet on the CCGW front in public. There's always things going on behind the scenes but I'll leave the respective PLs to announce that.

The engine itself also had an upgrade and a few things were moved around. Ghosts have all lost their gears and ranking has been replaced by something called "level". What good is the level, I have no idea, but it's not fully implemented yet. Perhaps in future when it gets added it'll be of better use. The other major change is that the game wall is now in place. I have no idea if the players are using it though... perhaps they need to get used to that idea as well.

MND wasn't the only tournament that got affected by the loss of the forums... the Rage Tricks and Treats tournament originally scheduled over Halloween was hit as well, so they had to extend it. The other thing that the loss of the forum dealt with was the B5 league, but since all the records are being kept by Alwyn off the forums, it wasn't affected too badly. The league is still ongoing and there's even a league weekend next weekend with real cards as prizes. It is shaping up to be an interesting league after all.


I won't call myself the regular artist for Final Twilight, but I was given a series of 5 more cards to colour in. The image above is for Street Thug - pencils by Antonio Rojo with colours by myself. It's a bit cartoony and I don't think it's indicative of the art found in Twilight, but Nate seems to like it so it'll be in a future expansion of the game.

Talking about the game, there's going to be bucketloads of expansions to Final Twilight starting in December and I've already have the first expansion to add into the engine. I was told to hold off until December though, so that will only go in then, but at least things are starting to move for the game, and I'm happy about that.

One thing that isn't moving too much is Hyborian Gates. I still have yet to type out the Vortex Tactics into the spoiler - that's the last thing left in the spoiler. One of these days, I'll just have to get on to do it. After that, it's basically just importing that onto the gML and adding the scripts and the other pieces required to play the game. Perhaps I'll release it early next year.

I still have to finish up fixing a few other games - YNDT for starters, then Urland needs a huge overhaul. I think Quartet needs some tweaks as well to get it up to scratch and Bowling is still waiting for the AI to be coded in. Lots of work on too many of my games. A quick summary:

AvP - No-frills, images needs to be clipped.
vT - Spoiler to be created, images to be clipped, scenarios to be added.
B5 - Where do I start on this? Bold text, replacement handling, full starting hand automation, initiative determination, lots more to do.
BORD - The reverse card can finally be coded now that the engine has support for it.
BOWL - AI automation and some minor reported defects
CHECK - It's would need time for me to get everything going on this game, up to the point of automation and AI.
ELEM - This is still waiting for the engine fix to enable hotspots for pieces on a card. It's going to take Ed to ensure that the engine is capable of handling that before things can move.
FB - Lots of playtesting needed. It's playable, but things like score automation would probably needs to be done.
FTWIL - An upcoming expansion might be time for me to add in attachments as well.
FIRE - Nothing going on here... I have all the images, but no time to work on anything.
GOFSH - I'll call this finish and done with.
HAMLT - It's public, but there is nothing to check for victory conditions.
HALN - There is no support for the new cards, which would need a massive amount of playtesting to catch.
HGATE - still in the coding stage... it's going to be no-frills
KINGS - Let's call this finish and done with as well!
MND - The players are happy with the setup as it is and minor changes to enhance and speed up gameplay would probably not be too appreciated.
PAD - Ed wants everything to be automated, and now that the engine is finally capable of doing it, it should get done at some point.
QUART - There still some bugs and suggestions on this game that needs to be close out at some point.
RDRCR - It's No-Frills and the engine version is going to be slightly different than the print version.
RVRSI - Minor defects exist on the game, perhaps due to the complications of making sure things work with the AI in 1-player mode and to allow 2 human players as well.
TRIAD - Heh, this is so not going to be done for a while now.
URLND - Scores automation, numbering the oceans, automating a few other common tasks... lots to do here and this would be the second one of the licensed games to get attention... after YNDT.
WS - Some automation would be nice for one of the oldest games on the engine... wish I had the time for it.
WSLS - Heh, well, let's shelf this under the table for now.
WSS1 - An AI would be nice... I think I will be ripping out the preconstucted deck and replace that with a randomly generated deck.
YNDT - some more minor bugfixes required for the game. It's pretty slick now.
YUKK - I'll call this one done as well.

And the title today is from the same CCG as last month since nobody guessed what it was last month. I guess there hasn't been enough entries to guess it as well.