-+@ Telling Secrets @+-

Won't you like to know what I know?



Art Credits:
Skywalker's Tunic by Beth Zyglowizc
Crystal Chisel: Pencils by Jeffry Ransom, Colours by Nov, background by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Draught of Life by Nov, background by Holmberg

Draught of Life's was today's image. I'm really enjoying these one image a day things. I couldn't believe how much the image reminded me of a Keeper's Quest card, the colour scheme, the grass thing, the red blob, the universal card template. It's giving me a good feeling overall drawing that red liquid in a corked bottle. Fun too. The first time I tried to colour glass and it didn't end up too shabby.

And because it's a slow day, I'll use this paragraph to talk about the other card I drew this week that's shown above. Crystal Chisel was originally drawn by Jeffry, but like all his images, they were coloured with crayons and pencils. So I took his image and recoloured it and that was the end result. There's a blog entry about it too.

The custom cards took a huge step today - Project Second Chance just got into its second phase for some cards. What is Project Second Chance? Project Second Chance is an MRP project that attempts to upgrade underpowered cards by grafting onto them additional text to make them more potent. Will everyone playing online be forced to use them? No, the PSC cards will be clearly marked as such and players can have a choice to either use them or ignore them. Some CCGW tournaments though, will mandate that PSC cards be used instead of the official versions. When will we get to see PSC cards on the engine? Each individual PSC card will be added as soon as it is completed - the process is list (get listed on the forums), vote (majority voted to be in the project), design (new text), add (to gEngine).

Well, today is the last day of the March tournament and it seems that there is a clear winner. I've seen some rather good decks from Bobby and GoC as well. I have no idea who to award the extra tokens though. And next month's tournament already has 2 signed up participants. There's also been a huge amount of games played this month, despite (or because of) it being the first tournament with the unfinalised TG cards. It's been interesting though.

I've been talking about hotpoints (not hotpants!) with Mark and Logan for the past 24 hours on and off. It seems I'm some sort of hotpoints expert at this point in time - I'm not! The one game that I rewrote for it is in such a huge shambles that I don't even dare release it to the public. However, I did point both Mark and Logan to the pitfalls and suggested alternatives that they either didn't think of or didn't know existed before. Hopefully that will help them on CA and LMS respectively.

One more day to Final Nights. Will it be released a day early today? or later than the April 1st date? After all, the announcement did mention "around" which introduces some element of vagueness (Ed is learning how to be vague after all the times unexpected delays have come to bite him in the tush). Nevertheless, it's still interesting to speculate and to see what will happen.

I didn't manage to catch a game of Auto Assault today due to the lack of players, but that CCG is shaping up to be really really interesting. They are still working on things - changing cards, tweaking text, small minor stuff that doesn't detract from the overall experience of playing the game. Can you tell I'm hooked? I'm looking forward to their adaptation of Anarchronism now! Curses (or Praises) to the great and mighty Eddie for suggesting that I try out the game.

Did I mention that we have one fewer PL these days? Time to update my records now. It's also the end of March and Ed did force me to write a whole slew of reports every quarter. OK, I exaggerate again, it's only 1 report. So time's a-wasting blogging...

-+@ Voodoo @+-

I assure you, black magic this is not.



Art Credits:
Twilight War by Werner/Gillette/Goodman
Harp of Time by Vido/Nov
Keeper's Quest by UIEvolution

All 3 cards produced today for the upcoming Twilight War. One of them is the Univeral card for the 100 card set. The other 2 are promos that's going along into the set as well. With these cards, the only 2 images left for TW are the 2 d'Resh ones and that's 98% of all the card images done so far for Twilight War. Things are moving along... and moving along faster than I had expected.

The harp took way too long to colour and looking at it now, it doesn't hold a candle to what an image for a card should be. Ah well, it will have to do. The pencils is by a new fan artist who draws excellent with pencil on paper, but who haven't coloured anything yet. Based on that image, I'm not sure I want to colour the rest of his pencils though - I doubt I'm doing his images justice. The nightvision image for Twilight War by contrast too about 5 minutes to do and I really do like the effect there. Of course, it's an existing image so things were much easier there. And for the first time, an image from a computer game actually made it on a card. That's the Keeper's Quest opening screen from the game of the same name. I had to edit it slightly to remove the "Press Start" notice, but it doesn't look too shabby overall. I'm happy with the images though and they should be going up onto the engine next year.

I'll also have to go back and fill in the promo for Shadowsfall, since that is the only expansion without a promo at the moment. I wasn't going to do a promo for the promo expansions, but DJ sorta scampered that and now that I've done KQ, I might as well go back and do SP. Haven't found any images for that yet, but there's no rush... if anything the promo for that will be going together with Ancient Enemy, which is 2 big expansions away (after TW and EF).

The Custom Card site also had an update, if only to add on the above 3 cards. Moved the old news to the Old News section as well, and next year, I'll probably have to move the old news to the 2005 news archive. The other thing on the website is a notice for the Springfield MND tournaments - that's still going on with a moderate group of people which is good.

Things are beginning to pick up for MND though and people have asked me if I'm printing the custom cards - the answer is no, and even if I were, I can't make money off them because that's just wrong. There's nothing stopping someone from printing the cards out, sticking them onto some spare commons and using those in games though.

The two big things on the engine is the release of VTES in a couple of days time... that's going to be fun watching a huge number of people play the game finally - and it's all for free as well during the first month. That's just so awesome. Hopefully the WW people are satisfied with all the work that Ed and Martin has done.

The other thing that's been going on at the engine is that the Experience Points system have finally taken off. People are being drawn to games like Wheel of Time just for the free tokens. That's especially good for exposure for the game. Mark has added XP to some of his games as well and that's another good thing IMO. The current list of games with XP according to the WGO are Aquarius, Endeavor, Grave Robbers, Fluxx, Summer Camp and Wheel of Time.

On a quick note, are CCGs dying? WotR laid off 15 middle management personnel - probably some restructuring fo sorts, but that's not going to inspire confidence in an investor. AEG has had trouble releasing L5R and Decipher has cut down to a core product of two games. When some of the biggest names are shedding excess baggage, one has to wonder what's happening in the industry.

Nevertheless, there's a number of new games being announced for next year. Battlestar Galactica by Wizkids, World of Warcraft by Upper Deck and Godzilla and Stargate, both by Comic Images. I'm looking forward to Stargate out of those 4 mostly because I wonder how Comic Images is going to pull the game off. BG though might prove interesting as well.

And my top picks for this year's games would be Anachronism by Tri-King games and Full Metal Alchemist by Joyride. Neither are doing rather well though, but both have a hardcore group of players to keep the game going. Hopefully, one or both of them will get onto the engine soon.

-+@ Omega @+-

Final letter of the greek alphabet, final cardname for the month. Grats to Martin for guessing that it's HumAliens...



Well, might as well let HumAliens go out with a bang this month. Those are three of the PET cards that got added to the engine today. That's 119 cards out of 155 cards added. 36 more cards to go. I think I should just get it over and done with tomorrow and finish all 36 cards. At least that's one less distraction. There's still quite a bit of work though, as some of the new cards adds in functionality that the game isn't capable of. I'll leave that for a rainy day I guess, or until such a time when Ed wants this game to be tourney ready.

I did the stats today, and I must say that it's surprising to see that eventhough the number of tokens were lowered from 15 to 5, the total number of games have not changed much. There were bigger swings near the beginning of the year than the difference between last month and this month. That's good news for CCGW I'm sure.

Also did a small update on MND in preparation for the big update coming soon. SP is going out of playtesting, and "Novelty format" needs to get added to the game. Quite a bit of work there, and I guess if I'm doing HumAliens tomorrow, this will probably be for the rest of the week. Hopefully, once I get this out, and get TG onto the engine, I can forget about MND for a while and concentrate on other things.

Yes, the monthly report was written yesterday. 8 games to work on next month. Looks big. I have no idea what I'll work on after these two games. Most probably a combination of Hyborean Gates, Urland and YNDT. People turned up to play Urland today, but I really wasn't that interested in testing the game since I know everything works fine - I haven't modified the game in anyway since the last playtest. I really should put some time into it though. I hate having this huge sword of Damocles over my head with such a large number of games to update and to get up to scratch.

I updated the plates post a bit today, added in a few tidbits here and there and upped my prediction for Origins. Well, that's just a prediction, I'm practically plucking numbers out of the air for the prediction. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong... and that the numbers will be greater than what I've predicted.

Everyone else has been rather busy. Tomi and Logan were doing upates to Yahtzee and Kismet respectively to get them ready for the new engine and to close out a few other things. It was interesting. Mark said to me today that Summer Camp should be public before Origins and since Endeavor is being played in Origins, he hopes to get it done on the engine before Origins too. Somehow I doubt that will be the case, although he has 2 more months to get everything finished.

I tried out Ultimate Combat today too. Not too bad for a freshman attempt, but I'm sure things can be improved. The cards look ugly, but then again, all cards from that era had an ugly design I guess. I wonder how Gray is coming along with GE. I hope he's progressing some...

Yesterday I downloaded some rather good GI Joe scans. Too bad it's a WotC game, but I had a nice time looking at the images. I wonder if I can find the same for the TMNT card scans? Most probably not. Anachronism has been the rage everywhere I'm going - the talk about all the cards being easily available (as opposed to it being in booster form) means that the collectible part is gone, but the customisable deck part of the game is still there, so people are going wild about that. There are some balance issues though, but not too bad. Apparently one of MND's ex Card designer had worked on it as well. Interesting, I guess.