Month: September 2010

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Recettear and Stuff

Well The server migration is done for all but a few client’s subdomains that will have to linger for them to launch their sites first.  Overall I’m pretty happy with how it all went, only a minor hiccup or two (thank’s wordpress for storing all your config options for all the plugins in a nasty mess of a database table with file paths thrown whereever, Yuck!)

Anyway, that’s not what I want to talk about.

Recettear (rhyme with Racketeer)

My Shop, it's not much but it's mine.. until I miss my payments.

An Items shop tale.

This little gem of a game is all about running your item shop supplying the foolhardy adventurers who go explore the dungeons.

The controls were pretty much undocumented but there’s only the arrow keys and 4 buttons (z,x,c,v)  so after a few moments pounding the keys on the keyboard I was off.

The story starts with you waking up and the local Collections Fairy, has come to collect on your (now Mysteriously absent) father’s debt.  After some dialog and a basic tutorial I’ve converted my house into an Item shop.

You Sell High, Buy Low.. and run around town, meet people buy all sorts of strange things and always keep an eye on the clock.

The Fairy Mob's Deadlines are always looming.

The game doesn’t take itself too seriously and riffs easily off all the RPG (especially jRPG) conventions.   Now don’t take that to mean it’s easy.  It kinda plans on  you failing so it lets you keep your shop levels between playthroughs, which is a bit  odd but not that big a deal.

Gradually you’ll meet more and more people around town and learn the individual shopping habits of your regular customers.

Then there’s the Adventurers.  Cheap bastards.  All of them.   However,  you can hire them and join them in their explorations of the local dungeons etc  (Played a-la old school Zelda where you control the hero) .

So you want the heroes to have good equipment so you can loot the dungeon for better loot so you can sell it to them before the Fairy Mob comes collecting their Massive Debt that dear ol Deadbeat Dad left you with. (what in the world did he buy to get so far into debt?)

Oh no Poor little lost girl!
Meet tounge in cheek RPG Stereotypes!
Explore dungeons! Kill things, Get Loot to Sell!

Overall, It’s a fun game that provides some challenge and plays well in small increments (yay for games that dont require 2hrs to get started playing!)

It’s available for a measly $20 at GamersGate, Steam , impulse etc etc…

Analog Diversions

And Finally I’ve managed to sneak in  a couple Hours of painting to finish up the First of the new Elementelves (i know clever isn’t it?) Paintings.  I’m resisting the urge to pull it down and tweak some more bits on it (which I might).

And last but not least.. there has been sheep progress.  Another 5 sheep drawn and inked.  So that’s down to 25 to go.  Then to paint them and place them.

(P.S. Drawing sheep holding a martini glass is HARD)

That’s it for now.  As soon as I stop shaking I’ll get some thoughts down on Amnesia, scariest tensest game I’ve played since RE2.

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Odd Migratory Hiccup

For some reason something went *kerboolooie!* and the site went mostly poof for a bit..I might have uploaded of moved the wrong config file…
anyway everything looks better now..
Carry on.

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Impractical Exercise

Unplanned Diversions

So as I’ve mentioned before I’ve been playing / testing the Elemental Beta, which has since been launched er.. well… poorly… Apparently There was a bit of developer tunnel vision and it turns out the release version was kinda… well.. unfinished..  However Stardock has a history of supporting their releases magnificently.. and if the newly released 1.08 patch is any indication Elemental is quickly on its way to being worth it’s weight in gold.

So Funnily enough, this plus a couple other factors all gelled together and I’ve unexpectedly / inadvertently managed to start a new project.

First the elemental launch  got me thinking a lot about about the old classic Master of Magic(now available at GoG) and Age of Wonders (also at GoG and Impulse) and how hard it would be to make a classic fantasy TBS with modern tools.

Second, I’ve been coming to grips with building real web apps with CakePhp and getting used to working with the whole MCV concept.

And, perhaps, most significantly, I’ve messed with fun tool-set jQuery overlays and dungeon creation tools via web browsers in the past and while updating all my domains I found that I had registered fantasywarsonline.com a long time ago and simply never gotten around to messing with it.  So I spent some time re-discovering things I’d made a long time ago.

So one evening later, in the breaks between putting teething baby to sleep,  I’ve managed to get a good start on a random map creator, and some basic database modeling laid out.

I’ve got a few freelance projects to work on this weekend and a painting to finish, but hopefully I’ll be able to define some Fun Milestones to knock out so hopefully this can be a fun multiplayer web based TBS.

Analog diversion update

The Sketches for all 4 element paintings are done.

The finalized sketches

And the Fire Element Painting is getting closer to being done.  I hope to wrap it up in the next few days (baby willing)

Step 3 the Hair
Step 3 the Hair

That’s it for now.  I know I haven’t gotten to the Amnesia or Reccetear games post, I just haven’t played anything in the last couple days to get screenshots from them, however they’re Both Excellent and you should buy them.

Amnesia is probably the scariesy 8-10hrs you’ll play this year, and Reccetear is an addictive, cute and surprisingly huge rpg where you play the town’s item shop owner!

[edit] clearly this was written late late at night and makes little sense in parts… updated for coherence.

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Migration

Boring Technical Stuff

So my old virtual server over at godaddy is at this point running a 3-4 year old image with just miniscule specifications and it’s time to switch providers.

I’ve been hosting client sites at media temple for a while now and they’re seemingly rock steady and way more responsive that the mess that godaddy has devolved into. Which kinda seems to be the trend.. the last host did the same thing 6-7 years ago.

So the new account has been purchased, and the great migration is underway. In the process I’m streamlining my internal and test sites significantly so I can provision and deploy client previews much easier. Additionally I’m consolidating my SVN repos and starting them out with a clean slate so I wont have so many indivdial branches and subprojects to keep track of. (YAAY!)

I’ve got 16 domains and about that many subdomains to shuffle over and so far the process has been running smoothly. Wenderflonia.com and swiftthought.com (and their related client pages and subdomains) are going to be the last things punted over before pulling the plug.

I’ll be notifying clients indiviually with the new name servers they’ll need to point their domain registrations to over the next couple days or so.

I’ve also shuttered Drakkheim.com for the time being. It really deserves to have it’s own special purpose and until I can do something with it It’s going to re-direct here.  The performance increase is really noticeable over at www.beautifulbasics.com (our food and healthy living community site) which has been re-opened for registration btw! So pop over and tell us about yourself.

Ok 7 domains moved.. now to get some rest.

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Wandering the Wasteland

Non-Gaming Goodness

So the summer deluge of freelance projects has slowed somewhat and a bunch of projects have gotten finished and I’ve got a nice body of work to start off in the professional portfolio side of things.  There’s just a couple websites to launch and tweak and then whatever new projects come this way… (with potentially a super super exciting project mixed in with it)

So that Gives me a few, precious, moments where I’m not playing with the cutest baby ever, to step away from the computer and rest my eyes on something that I’ve just realized that I miss.

Painting… so I still need to finish the oils, but I want to just crank out some pieces and make fast, bright vivid things and not have to worry about the whole setup and whatnot that the oils (even the water based ones) take.

So here’s a quick peek and the first of 4 24×24 canvases that I’ve got scattered across the kitchen/studio.

The colors are so vivid it totally blows out my camera’s color range.  I love it!

Gaming Goodness

So in few spare moments I’ve had where I can sit down and play something have been consumed by a couple games, Stalker : Call of Pripyat, Amnesia, Elemental and Reccetear.

I’m just going to ramble a few words and pictures about Stalker and Do a post later about the other 2.

So I’ve had it for a while but it somehow just got pushed back into the background since it came out along with the whole bunch of goodness that came out last year around the same time (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age etc )

So when the chaps over at Rock Paper Shotgun mentioned some of the incredible user mods that have come about since its release.

And the results are pretty dang Spectacular.

Like this morning shot when the morning mists burn off and the rising sun lets you see into the distance.

Very pretty. And dynamic. And Massive.

And Full of Terrifying Wildlife.

But that’s ok.. you get guns.  That each have their own upgrade tree, so as the game progresses you get to tweak out your favorite guns with extra perks.

And when the sun sets, or you have to enter an old dark abandoned pumping station it delivers some of the most tense and jump worthy gameplay that’s been my pleasure to partake of in quite some time.