-+@ Surplus @+-

of work to do...



Art Credits:
Mud Mantle by Austin Gardner and myself
Sunstone and Tempest Amulet by Beth Zyglowicz

All 3 are for EF, and these were done quite some time ago. I did template 2 more creatures - a Paradwyn one and a Core one yesterday, but I haven't have had the time to load them up yet because I've been getting all the Firestorm images from the server so that I can begin work on those. Still, EF is coming along as the gaps are being slowly plugged.

I wish I could say the same about the other sets, but I can't. The good point is, people are playing with Shadowfall and discovering things and making suggestions so I spent a part of today updating MND for the engine. Nothing major there, just bugfixes, text changes to TG and I added the DJ cards that have already have had a Jeopardy contest.

The third contest ends in under 48 hours and it has got more responses than the Stuff Twins, so I guess that's a good sign. Perhaps this is the easier of the magi so far, being single region...? I've liked the entries I've seen submitted so far for this contest. It's going to be hard to pick a winner for this contest.

Mitch is probably totally depressed as he's getting whopped in the Malovis Challenge. Bobby played with a scary Arderial deck - I presume his Shimmer deck with the crazy energy gain-age deck. That's one reason why I like weird and wacky formats for tournaments... otherwise people just play their uber decks and win... especially in this environment where one has infinite amount of cards.

I'm still clipping Hyborean Gates cards... it's slow going and the image quality is poor, but I'm not going to rescan them since I doubt many people will play the game anyways... that and the fact that the cards are going to be full scan. I'm going to make them small and the text is going to be a bit more blurry than usual, but the game should still be playable with the hints and all.

The next set for B5 has suddenly concentrated on the mercenaries. It's not really surprising since there was a foreshadow of this, but the discussion and the design decisions are getting interesting there with people supporting most of the ideas that is thrown about. Still, there's only about half a dozen people involved with the design... which reminds me, I best send out an invitation to the Yahoo group to invite people to participate in the design. I did send a PM to Billy "Binky Jackalope", but I have no idea if he will even read the PM.

Elsewhere, JC got Rage and Guardians updated to Now Playing. This was right after the Rage tournament as well as the moot, so hopefully, this would increase the number of Rage games played this month by quite a number... hopefully. Shadowfist still leads in that category, I think and despite the Malovis Challenge, Doomtrooper still has a healthy lead on MND, which is good news there as well.

Someone logged in today asking for VTES. Told him it isn't available and to come back closer to the end of next month. I hope they aren't disappointed. The VTES engine looks a bit dead though, people log in and log out but they are like ships passing in the night... well, almost literally.

We were discussing how many games will go public before the anniversary and we counted a possible 9, although it's highly doubtful all 9 will be finished in the 6 weeks. We'll have to see. If nothing, I'm going to attempt to get Hyborean Gates public by the anniversary date to continue the trend of releasing a game on the anniversary date!

And for some weird reason, today is Talk like a Pirate day... so does that mean 7th Seas will get played more...? Who knows?

-+@ Lightning @+-

Not the grease variety, but rather the colloqual variety as in Quick as Lightning.



It's a bit intimidating to add in an entire set, complete with all the coding that it requires. However, as I have discovered with MND, adding in a few cards at a time doesn't seem to be that daunting. Hence that's why I've only added the first 5 cards of New Order to HumAliens. The next few updates will probably see piecemeal additions to the game, but then again, since nobody plays it, I don't particularly feel compelled to do everything at one go. The images above are three out of the five cards that got added today.

The PM purge that I started yesterday continued today, and I must say it was fun peeking at stuff that happened more than half a year ago. There's a lot of history on the site I guess, history that only a Nostalgia(c) like me would value, but nevertheless brings back good memories. It's a pity I have to purge a few of those though to make way for future PM.

Also updated the forums a bit - Thomas wanted 2 of his tournament threads merged (although he didn't exactly said so that way) and I did it for him in a more elegant way instead. I've made the Tempest of the Gods forum visible again to all registered members. There has been some interest in that so I might as well revive the forums to see where that goes.

I got contacted today by Craig Randall (skandall) asking about becoming a PL again. Hmm... it seems Ed offered him Judge Dredd, despite the fact that Eric is still the PL for that. I wonder what is going on behind the scenes there. Well, since Dredd is Eric's only game, maybe Ed is trying to get rid of Eric? I have no idea. I hope that's not the case. Craig though seems enthusiastic about wanting to be a PL. I suspect he just badly wants to get his own games online, and there is nothing wrong about that I suppose. He offered to lend his help to Firestorm. Would be interesting to see how things develop there.

Logan is doing funky things on the kit. It's interesting to see what he's doing, although it's going way above my head. Well, whatever he's doing is going to benefit the development of all future games, so I'm looking forward to it.

Mark was online yesterday, but I have no idea if he was working on Summer Camp or was just working on something else completely different. Maybe it's Sideshow? I have no idea. I can't wait to see Sideshow on the engine though.

Christoph added another 3 "expansions" to Star Wars. I'm going to guess that those are what I'd call "promo sets" - or sets that have less than 50 cards. He's really moving forward with the cards though and poor Timmie is so lost behind. I haven't seen an increase of Star Wars games being played though, so I guess they need to advertise it more.

Otherwise nothing much seems to be happening on CCG Workshop. Meanwhile, my gToons rank is still at the mid-800s which isn't too shoddy since I haven't played for a week, but I'm going to say that it'll probably hit 900+ after the weekend is over. We'll have to see...

-+@ Fast Break @+-

Rush Rush Rush... urgh, the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland can't be as busy as me.

Let's go do non-CCG workshop stuff first. My gtoons playing is getting better, but without those super duper slams, I'm afraid I'm not climbing up the ladder anywhere as fast as I could. Oh well, can't be helped. Still pushing it for under 1000 in a bit but I doubt I'll make it there for another 2 or more weeks. The good news is that I've introduced the game to a few other people who are playing... and they in turn have introduced to more people. It's fun though. Really.

LotR Online started leagues and I joined 2. They aren't too bad, it's almost a new format, but it costs $10 to join a league. Yikes, expensive. WA is probably laughing to the back since about 300 people have joined. That's $3,000 for just a week. It would probably die down, but it'll earn regular income for WA I'm sure. I won 3 games out of my first 5 for last week. Can't play any this week. It's fun I guess, but the $10 cost is way too expensive, since I doubt I'll ever win it.

And back to CCG Workshop news...

Work on MND is still going slowly... I'm still working on the webpages for Elder's Legacy. Got a few more artists to work on Tainted Glimpses and Shadowsfall Promo. Hopefully, TG will get on the engine by the end of January, and the first 10 cards of EL on the website by about the same time too. I really wish I have more time to work on this.

B5 had a quick update yesterday... or was that the day before... to make it compatible with future versions of the engine. I've also put the word out for which text to make bold on the cards and stuff so hopefully that would be a good thing that would be implemented next year. To distinguish from normal text though, I might have to make it purple or red or something. We shall have to see.

No work on Bowling yet. I really do wish I have a weekend all to myself so that I can just sit down and code it. It should be really easy to code, AI and all. Pity though that I'm so short of time.

ToJH went public a few days ago, and VTES will follow in the footsteps in a couple of days. I'm glad I'm away. ToJH picked up quite a few games played. VTES will probably pick up a lot more games played... MND had a decent run while people are waiting for VTES. That's a good sign I think.

Daniel offered to do Firestorm images. Hmm... that would be good. Work on it won't begin until after I've finished Bowling though. I better make that clear. DoA is going along nicely as well. I think that's a game I'll try to pick up once it's ready.

-+@ Who's the Boss @+-

Right. Where do I begin?

Well, I added two forums today to the forums. I wonder if anyone has noticed them yet. Wildstorms Legends Solitaire Edition (phew, what a mouthful) is a game that I guess I'll be doing next year. The other game is also comic book based - VS system, which is heading into its fourth expansion already. The latter is in development, but probably won't ever be released unless we get permission from Upper Deck (I hope we do).

That knocked on to Go Fish where I added 5 card backs ... and 2 to the actual game itself.





Erm... I'll let you figure out which is which.

I was talking to Daniel earlier and I broached the subject of adapting Firestorm to the engine. I don't think he was too pleased with the idea, but oh well. Yes, I'm not only thinking of adapting it, but I have said (to Ed) that I'll do it next year. So I guess that's on my plate for next year. Better hope I get Bowling and Hyborean Gates finished soon... and Portable Adventures of course.

I did manage the tweak in Portable Adventures that was giving me errors yesterday. Finally figured out what was causing it after some sleep. Lesson learnt = if something keeps on giving errors, rip it out and sleep on it. Things will be clearer the next day. I haven't started work on the Next/Pass button, but hopefully it'll be done before the weekend. The first part should be easy, the second not so easy. Hopefully, I can finish it in under 3 days, working 1 hour a day.

Picked up another new Polish shepherd today. I guess they probably think it's a neat way of getting free games. Well, they seem to be doing fine so far so I guess it's all good. I give them maybe one or two months before they drop off the face of the engine though.

Well, the first broken loop has just shown up in Shadows. Pity I didn't think of it first, but half of it uses the same combo I have in my hobbit deck. It closes the combo to make it a loop by returning a discarded card to hand... interesting concept really, and many predict that one of the cards that I depend heavily on for my combo will be banned. Oh well. Such is life.

-+@ Through all these Shattered Emotions, there's a Lesson to Learn @+-

Where do I even begin? Chronologically might be best.

I finally had a look at the Tainted Glimpses cardlist for MND and finalised the 6 Arderial cards going into that list. I'll have to create 3 of those images, which means my work is cut out for me I guess. Still, 3 is not that bad. At least I know Arderial will have all cards in that set. Next up Bograth.

After that, I fixed Kings so that it closed out all the known loopholes. It plays better now IMO and I know that quite a few people have been playing it recently. I had to get Martin to help me out with the translations and it was a good thing he was around.

Quartet is finally back up again, not with the new things I had imagined, but with the old game minus a few cards and the addition of a few new cards. I'm still not sure if I should put in much effort to maintain this game. Still, it's a game and it's up. Hopefully, that together with Go Fish will form a good basis for the engine version of "Old Maid" or whatever politically correct form it gets transformed to be. With those 3, that "family" of card games should be complete.

Go Fish also had an update today - I had to put in Echelons of Fury into Quartet, so I decided to add the corresponding card to Go Fish as well. The Fury cardback isn't ideal, I got the box image from BGG and I superimposed on the Fire cardback, but I don't think the results are too obvious anyways, unless one looks at it with a magnifying glass (or the electronic equivilant), so I let it pass.

The forums had a minor update, and I also updated the BOT. I'm still amazed at the number of questions that get asked with typos and/or as single phrases where the answers could be anything. Well, maybe I should give 42 as the answer the next time.

I also played a few good games of LotR O today and had fun. Well, considering that I've spent a small fortune on it, I better have fun for quite some time. Haven't been motivated to build new decks, but I'm working on a good monoculture deck. No news from decipher if they the RotK Anthologies is being released on schedule. I do need to make an order from cardhaus soon and I'm waiting for that to get into stock before I make the order.

Didn't get to talk to Mike Nickoloff today. I think he's probably scared of me. Oh well. Didn't work on Portable Adventures as well, although I'm thinking I should sometime this week. However I think I'll work on Hamlet first, because that really should get some stuff done.

I sent Bug the Iron Maiden images - whatever that's done for playtesting anyways and the Firestorm text. I wonder if he'll have time to work on the images for some sort of playtest on the engine. That would be nice. I might have to see to it at some point when I'm even more fired up for Portable Adventures than I am now.

I also asked Bug to make Abduction public. That game is so cool to be played with. I have no idea when he's going to do that but I hope it's soon.

And ideas? Did you know that there's something from the house of ideas on the engine?

-+@ Baby I'm ready to dig in, ready for more than skin on skin @+-

Happy!

I've almost hit the 100k mark for Pineland, after rejuvenating Sawkerchee that is. There is a minor League and a major League stadium next to each other and down the road from that is some weird part of Hollywood. I finally discovered how to make one way onramps onto the highway, and the heart of the city has been now zoned for high density. All the large spaces have been occupied though and there are still small plots of land here and there that would be converted to residential areas soon. Traffic is still a nightmare to handle, but I've convinced my Sims to use the subway - one of my most favourite things to do... I'll lay line after line of subway without a second thought about the expenses or the cost... of course, the city now has almost 10 mil worth of funds for me to play with, so it doesn't really matter how much I lose :)

And I didn't lose too badly in my LotR games today. Quite a few people using Galadrial RB and my Besiegers had a tougher time than usual, particularly agains Elf/Archery FPs. I'm quite happy with both sides of that deck though - Hobbit Tales and Sauron Besiegers. Next up will be to reuse the first deck - Hobbit Pump and Uruk Hais - with the tricks I picked up from playing Besiegers. Might be fun.

Fun is also the keyword for the ability to play around with the forum controls. Removed the first 2 forums... and did a few more cleaning up and preparation for future happenings. Well, the thing is, eventhough the forums look half dead, there's actually quite a bit of life in there, particularly on the coding side of things which is hidden from most everyone else. I just wish the Tavern could be a little bit more... alive with some Buzz.

And talking of Taverns, I taught two new people - shrike and mental - Portable Adventures today. It was an impromptu tour and we played Lair of the Rat King. They seemed to like it. The interface still feels a bit klunky - I wish I could do legality checking, but that would mean I need to put in the turn order stuff... which I am suppose to do soonish. Shrike won the game... only because the game was going on for ages and mental keeps on making weird undos and I sort of threw the game. But it was fun... in its own way. It's a pity we didn't get to switch decks to play 8th Grade.

Taking about switching decks, I got the "in development" cards from Mike yesterday and I was looking at them today, well, only Iron Maiden. I haven't downloaded Firestorm (the portable adventure expansion, not the CCG) yet. Some of them are actually rather nice. When will I add them... urm... well, I have the excuse that they cards aren't finalised yet. But it'd be nice to play with something new for a change and I've got to download Firestorm soon.

Oh and I'm seriously considering if I should adapt Firestorm. Mike is nice to work with and gives quite a few goodies when working on his games. I know, it's sad, but he's sold me onto his games. Hopefully we can get more mileage ouf of those games after they are coded.

And since we are talking about mileage... how about a truck? You know you can't depend on your friend, Drew's truck, forever, ya'know?

-+@ Ain't Nobody Gonna Say Goodbye @+-

I finally made contact with Mike Nickoloff today - yes, that Mike Nickoloff. He was a rather nice guy to talk to as well. I must have come across to him like a bumbling teenager though. He offered me his place in Santa Monica to crash at if I ever head over to LA and offered to send me some Firestorm cards. I wonder if money grows on trees for him or something. Have I mentioned that he's really really nice?

I cleaned up the forums some more today and updated the plates post for the PLs. I was more in the mood for general housekeeping rather than coding today, although I did update Go Fish. I hope I didn't break anything in there though.

I got my box of Tempest of the Gods boosters today. The cards are printed on really good quality cards. However the art isn't as good as it can be, which makes the overall quality of the cards a little bit below par. But for a 1995 game, I suppose it's good.

Popped back to my "old" message boards just on a whim - it's nice to know that I haven't been forgotten there. As usual, the 2 people who knows the deal invoke my name and the one mod answers. It's almost funny to watch them do that dance which gets repeated about every 6 months or so.

Just hanging around the LotR O trade room now and shooting the breeze with the peeps there. Nothing much happening otherwise.

And where will the winds take you today on the seven seas? Why don't you find out for yourself?