-+@ Zero In @+-

as in focusing...



Art Credits:
Squak by Holmberg, background by Holmberg/Werner
Iger by Shipman, background by Nov
Wiscon by Zastrow

3 more from EF, that's almost the rest of my library. Very soon I've got to get the remaining 6 cards done and then get ready to get people to do the design for the cards. I wonder if anyone is up to that at this point in time. We shall see though. While I'm on the subject of EF cards, Essence just did one recently which can be found at MND at CCGW blog, which is why I'm down to 6 instead of 7. 5 more underneath creatures and 1 Nar magi to go and then the cards can start their design life.

I just realised that after making the May calendar, I did not post it up on the custom card website. Oops. The website is getting slightly neglected though, and I'll neglect it for a while until about the end of the month when I put up the June calendar together with May's. I should also probably add some more content there, but there's only so many hours a day, and there's so many other things to do... like add TW cards to the engine.

I just added the 6 Orothe cards today, bringing the total up to 26 or something like that, barely a quarter of the TW cards. I hope to get everything done by the end of the month. Minor automation stuff is still being added to the game and I'm going slowly to ensure that people get used to the changes.

I still haven't announced Cure for all Seasons yet, that's probably going to wait until TW has gone online fully for playtesting. And then, of course there's DJ to go as well. *sigh* It's a good thing I'm on a hiatus. Yay for the hiatus.

Tournament-wise, things are looking good for MND. This is the first month that 2 tournaments are running concurrently and there seems to be interest for both of the tournaments. The regular monthly tournament has got over 20 games played, if the results are to be believed, and I've started a play 3 games with me tournament with the custom cards. We shall see how many games I end up playing. If the response is good, I might even continue with it over summer.

I also did some WSS2 images today. I finished the 'Cats and SW backs, but there's still a whole lot to go. Hopefully I can get the rest of them done before the end of the month, at least that's the target.

I have been playing a bit of Auto Assault (TCG, not the MMO) with my one and only starter deck. I have no idea if people see the starter deck and get complacent or something, but I've been winning most of my games much to the embarassment of my opponents, who all seem to have a good subset of rare cards. It seems weird though, that they should have all these cards and not know how to use it.

Nightmare Before Christmas released the Christmastown expansion just recently I think. I haven't been through all the cards yet, but it seems promising. One of these days, I've got to find an avenue to play the game. I think it's going to be simple, yet fun, but sadly, I haven't found anyone to play with yet, online or offline. Oh well.

I'm still waiting for the announcements of the Star Gate CCG that will be released this year... maybe. Apparently the Shadowfist guy is in charge. I wonder whatever happened to Shadowfist though. Did it die out? Hmm... I guess I'm just ignorant.

And I have no idea what other PLs have been doing on the engine. Things are pretty much quiet at the moment, although I'm sure it's just the calm before the storm that will be Origins. Ed is still busy working to stabilise the server - hopefully, we'll get the stability soon.

Someone also contacted me for infomation about providing art for Final Twilight. I have no idea how that went other than the fact that I gave Nate's name and email to the artist. Nate seems pretty happy about that though. Perhaps we will get some more cards soon.

Anachronism Online is one thing I want to look at in detail. I signed up ages ago, but have yet to get a game. One of these days...

-+@ Infuriate @+-

betcha I'm doing that now with the titles... carry over from last month... guess the CCG.



Yes, 3 more cards from WSS2, and I finally finished cropping these cards this week. And what a long week it has been, but more on that further down. I finally realised how to get rid of the camera flash showing up on the cards, but it meant that I had to take the photos in daylight. So the last batch was done that way. Some of them still has the reflection of the camera on the cards (stop looking at Copycat's boobs, yes, that's a reflection of the camera), but otherwise, the colours should be better than the washed out reflected glow of the camera's flash.

So that's the front of 63 cards cropped, named and ready for coding, now I have to do the back of the cards. Hopefully, that will be quicker than the front since that is just a basic scan (it's not chromium, so there's no need for the camera, it scans normally) and then more cropping, naming and what not. After that the cards can be coded into the game and WSS1 will have a new expansion, hopefully by the weekend, but realistically speaking, be prepared for it next week instead.

That was Monday. Tuesday was a whole different kettle of fish.

Daniel was online Monday where I happened to corner him and chat about life, love and other mysteries. Well, not the love bit, but definately the other two. One of the by product about that chat was that I finally got permission to finalise Chess Wars and adapt it to the engine. So yay. First off was the draft rules which got cleaned up and modified slightly to make it more presentable. The rules are on the wiki which makes things a whole lot more easier.

Next up was to get server permission from Ed to modify and upload the game, as well as to get him to put the game back up on the main server. That was simply toggling a few things on for me, and by this time, he should be used to it since this is the 20th time or so he's doing it specifically for me.

The hard part was actually coding the game itself. Daniel has done some preliminary coding, when he was last a PL. That was 2003. OK, 3 years isn't a long time, right? Well, with respect to the engine it is. The huge gulf between that and even my most basic "no frills" game was obvious - any of my games is definately miles ahead in terms of technology in the adaptation. I had to add a background, and pretty up the display images for the game, then automated setup and a few other simpler moves. Then I moved it beyond my "no frills" by adding in Pay and Play. With that it was ready for the big leagues, or at least public testing, and that got released on Tuesday as the 93rd game on CCG Workshop and the 80th game currently available. (It pays to be the person who keeps track of these things.)

One thing I would like to point out though, is that during the process, it was a pleasure to have... well, firstly a really up to date developer's guide thanks (mostly) to Logan. Logan, together with Ed and to a lesser degree Mark has been keeping the developer's guide really, really, really comprehensive and user friendly. But more than that though, I had Logan and Ed online at the same time I was coding that (all 3 hours, which was all it took to convert the 2003 version to a 2006 "presentable" version), and their help, in real time was invaluable. I think that would actually be the best way to train a new person to be a PL, but that would mean Ed would get really, really busy if that was so!

And I needed an ad to announce the new game of course, but I didn't really wanna spend way too much time on the ad. So a quick picture and some word art in photoshop and a rather monochromatic image was created. Yeah, I shouldn't quit my day job to go into advertising.

Of course, a new public game meant oodles of updates on the wiki and I spent most of Wednesday at that task. While there though, I took the opportunity to change out some html tags to the native wiki format which makes thing look even better, and easier to edit. Live and Learn, or as some people like to tell me, QBE - Qualified by Experience.

While working on the wiki though, I realised that a Go Fish update was definately required for a few things and that also got done on Wednesday. The update was timely too as it allowed me to add in a few more cardbacks into the game that aren't just black cards. I reckon that there's way too many black cards in that game, so I'm trying to dilute them out.

So, that's 3 updates in a week and it's only Thursday, I've done a lot haven't I? Well, actually, there's more.

It's the end of last month and the beginning of this month though, so there were oodles of end of the month things to do. Game statistics had to be recorded, analysed and updated. The data is public on the website (well, the raw form is anyways), but the collated data that I've been recording for... well, a while now... is only kept with me. I'm not even saving the analyses anymore, I just give a quick summary to Ed and whoever's interested at the time I'm actually working on them and move on. The thing is though, the analyses doesn't result in anything at the end of the day, so I guess that's why nobody bothers.

Then there were tournaments. I had to close out the April MND tournament, which was won by Freigabe with 6 games played. Not a large number of games, but the total overall number of games played for the tournament has been holding even. Tokens had to be given out, results has to be posted, things like that. The usual boring tournament organising stuff.

Then I had to start the May version of the tournament. Rules had to be posted, the corresponding entry on the engine has to be created, the announcements made, yadda yadda. Same old story. While making the announcements though, I went through the old ones and updated those as well, namely the Rage tournament, and... well, that's it. I have no idea if the Doomtrooper league is even going to go on this month and I haven't (yet) heard from Thomas regarding who to give out tokens to for last month.

And while I was on the MND forums, I gave the Weave creatures a twirl and designed 2 of them for TW. I have no idea if it is me or if nobody really "gets" Weave, but people were complaining that they were too overpowered and underpowered... uh... so I guess that makes them balanced? I still have to do the magi, the relics and the spells, though, and hopefully that should be going ahead soon. The creatures basically fit the defensive weave subtheme, and I threw in the weave bulb/homestead combo into that as well. The other cards will have to cater to creatureless (a direction that Weave's heading into even before the company went belly up), the "Weave" effect itself, manipulating the discard pile, cald hate and uh... well, I don't think I can do junjertrug or any other creature type, which is a pity though. I'll have to see what else I can throw in there.

Before I go though, I just want to say that I bought my first booster pack of Magic the Gathering over the weekend as an impulse buy together with a starter deck of the Naruto CCG and a Japanese CCG that's called (as far as I can make out) Masked Super Dragoon. Borrowing from an Airbus advert... "Will wonders never cease?"