Author: simon

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Reboot

My how time flies when you’re busy!

In fact it’s so easy to forget to keep updating the blog when you’ve got real projects that need to get done. Luckily I’ve got a good pace of things going and seem to have settled into a nice routine which keeps GFW from going insane and keeps the freelance work getting done in a timely fashion.  However it hasn’t exactly left a lot of time to spare for pet projects.

I need to get back to doing what I need to do.  I need to make stuff.  It has been too long since I’ve made something. (and I’ve got to finish those dang oil paintings!)

What Have I Been Doing?

So for posterity’s sake let’s do a quick re-cap shall we?

  • Consulting work = good.  Got a nice workload of it that’s just about ready to wrap up.
  • Swiftthought Games is now a real entity (ooohh!)
  • Banking stuff is set up.
  • Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! is down to 40 illustrations to go. Then a get a new proof set to do a couple rounds of playtesting.
  • Baby is cute and a handful.
  • I wish I had time to paint!
  • Wenderflonia’s store is almost ready to go.

Time to get rolling!  First priority, finish the MSETE! website and illustrations.

I’ve got an Idea percolating for a smaller board game that I need to make a quick playtest mock of.

Oh and if you’re interested in game design in general you need to see this http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train) (you might have to register but it’s free)

What I’ve been Playing

  • Starcraft II – so apparently has everyone else on earth.  It’s very good if a bit old school.
  • Elemental – been playing the betas, it’s come a long way in a very short time and the release version promises a nice Master of Magic type fix.
  • Minecraft – highly addictive and still early in development.  Mining and building and monsters. There’s a couple free old versions available to play, but the latest alpha builds are only available if you buy it (around $13 but going up soon)
  • Bejeweled Blitz – 60 seconds of crack in a pretty match 3 shell.

But first

Quakecon! this coming weekend.  Me and Parker are heading downtown for 2 days of massive lan party goodness and whatever else there is to see.

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Good grief, what happenend to the summer?

Man, what happenend to the summer?  There was so much I wanted to get done and yet all I’ve managed to do is stay sane an knock out more freelance work (which is a good thing btw).

So its time to re-re-rededicate myself to get going on all my dang projects.  Well, hopefully, the freelance work will keep coming, so I’m taking that into account as well. 

Regardless, expect more posts and goodies to start popping up around here starting next week. 

No really…  this time I’m pretty sure I mean it.

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Work Work and new hobbies

So here we are once again.  Another couple of weeks gone and the list of things I’d hoped to get to and deadlines for my pet projects are but fading memories.

Remember that ‘SUPER PRODUCTIVE MEGA AWESOME WEEK?!!” a couple weeks ago?

Well it turned into 2 days of productive (freelance work and 6 sheep done, not bad) 1 day of errands and chores, a day of packing an dinner with the parentals for doggie sitting and then I was off to see GFW, Parkzilla and Baby J at the other grandparent’s for the weekend.  So yeah.. not so productive.

However, let’s not dwell since it was an awesome relaxing de-wired weekend and thus worth it.

Wenderflonia.com Business Card

So since then.. Freelance stuff picked up speed and culminated in a long work full weekend this weekend, but I’m almost caught up 🙂

But (and this is the exciting bits!) I’ve fallen in love with Oil Paints (the water soluble oils, for the ease of cleanup and fumes)   So below are some pic of the second piece in progress, and I have plans to do a collaborative piece with GFW, which should be interesting.

So the theory is, I want to be working on around 3 pieces at a time,

One in polishing phase:

The Polishing Phase Just Started

One in the ‘ugly’ mid stage:

Deep in the ugly stage

and one at the beginning roughing, concept stage.

[No pics yet]

And here’s some pics for posterity’s  sake.

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thedailywhiteboard.com and other progess.

What’s that weird thing above about?? Well Every day at work I have a whiteboard behind me, and Every day I make a little scribble or something while warming up my first cuppa coffee (shade grown, south american organic breakfast blend FTW!)

So I’ve collected them together and started a pseudo comic thingie.

you can see em all Here http://thedailywhiteboard.com/ The last 60 days have been counting down an office mate’s trip to Kenya and started with a simple scribble of a lion in the top left corner along with a number.   Unfortunately I didn’t know I’d be keeping them all so I only have 18 or so images so far.   But the basic story seems to come across.

ALSO!

Ok so remember that super productive week thing?.. well ok It tunred out to be a couple of days.. then errands etc etc kinda ran interference and messed up parts of it.

I’ve got some awesome oil painting getting done and and super excited by the amount of cool freelance stuff that’s pouring this way!   However, the sheep.. well… I got a handful done.. so the traction is a little slow in getting going on that front.  Also GFW is having all sorts of fun with Kelly Rae’s Flying Lessons e-Course and that’s been educational for us both.

More funs stuff coming along all weekend, with plans galore of starting the whole health food thing againg and more happy crazy goodness.

Anyway, I’ve got a sleeping baby and a canvas to go screw up.

laters.

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Super Productive Week – day 1

Super Productive Project Week is on!

So I’ve got the house to myself while GFW and Co. are out visiting grandma in Merkel.  Which means it’s a rare opportunity to listen to loud music till the odd hours of the night and work on All those things that I’ve been meaning to get done.

But, first things first.  Today was wrapping up some consulting for Kell. And also getting an awesome start on the Jones Communications website / CMS re-design.    After today I’ve got the element layout of the site in place so tomorrow I can focus on getting the content styling in place, and then gradually flesh out the pages and programmatic requirements of the site.

Additionally in order to further my adventures with water soluble oil paints, I’ve decided to start a second piece while working on the first.  Its a significantly larger size (14″x18″) But I’ve got plans for attempting something resembling a portrait… But the texture of the canvas in the first piece has become a hindrance so this new piece I’m starting out by layering many coats of gesso and then once dry, sand it back to a smoother surface.  Hopefully the texture will help my control of the paint. So tonight has been spent putting down 4 coats so far and hopefully one more before bedtime, and then allow it to dry fully overnight.

So the theory goes the remainder of the week will be a couple hours of website work, followed by some sheep illustrating  intermingled with breaks  on the paintings.    It might all be too much to do but hey.. its summer vacation and I can sleep in til 7:20 now 🙂

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Old Wars and Putting the Sheep in Gear

Well summertime is here and that means it is time to kick things off and do stuff.

No Really..

I’ve been pretty stuck in idle for a while but a couple little things have started getting some traction.  Granted the freelance design work has been pleasantly steady which helps alleviate the guilt. 🙂   But really there’s been two projects that have gotten me going again. (ok, that and the baby finally deciding on a sleep schedule so there’s actually a couple hours that are useful on a regular basis doesn’t hurt either)

First http://www.beautifulbasics.com is up and running. It is still in its infancy but between me and GFW (whose site recently good a lovely makeover) we’re hoping that it will grow into a thriving community about family,tradition, and living a simple healthy lifestyle.

Second, I finally cracked open my tubes of winsor newton water soluble oil paints, they dry like oils but you can thin em with water instead of turp. It is a nice change from the usual acrylics and I absolutely love the drying time. The only downside so far is the color change while the water evaporates is going to take some getting used to. So the paint seems to dry in two stages, first the water evaporates leaving the darker pure oil color behind, which then takes the usual few days to dry.  Oh, and the cleanup with soap n water is a snap and the fumes are nowhere near as bad as old fashioned oils.

Distractions and Games? I’ve got plenty, but primarily playing Red Dead Revolver on the 360 and the indie strategy game ‘Hegemony, Phillip of Macedon‘ are tying up most of my mental breaks.  That and I’ve got to get a full day to get some people together and play a full game of Arkham Horror.  I will say that the Hegemony game is a wonderful new addiction.  It’s an absolutely massive undertaking for a small indie game company to make.  While it’s got some clunky features, it more than makes up for it in innovative new features that are sure to be copied by everyone else (Total War guys I’m looking at you) .  Unlike a lot of other Real-time Strategy games there is an emphasis on maintaining supply to you cities and units on the march that makes for a good time.

So, how does this lead me to getting my backside in gear and get cracking on the damn sheep you ask?

As luck would have it, GFW is taking the kids and heading west for a week come this Friday.  That’s going to leave me with a lot of downtime and I’ve got plans to make the best of it.

In theory, a bud will be coming by for some programmy consultanty help and if that happens that’s cool and that will probably take a couple hours every day but hey money talks 😉

Other than that I’m attending Akon (as a guest this year) Saturday; building an initial pass at a joomla website for a client; and designing a 1 page sheet, hopefully all this weekend.
So in theory, that leaves many hours are available every night next week for some serious sheepage! Oh, and I plan on blogging more (daily?) updates.

Let’s see how things work out, but hopefully there will be a ton of progress to report very very very soon.

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Time.. can I haz some more?

Well the swift summer days are here again. Somehow the motivation levels have deflated a bit, probably due to being super super busy at the 9-5 and a good showing of freelance work this month.

Well that and babies appearantly seem to need more and more human interaction as they grow, and I’ve gotta do my part to keep gfw sane 😉

So sheep productivity has seen more active days. That’s ok though, there’s nothing wrong with being busy. 🙂 even if its not the kinda busy i’d prefer.

Oh well at least I got a couple sheep done last night so it’s a start. Oh and I can live vicariously through gfw’s adventure in Kelly Raes e-course, whic shell be blogging about over at her Wenderflonia art blog.

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On the road to nowhere

Well.  So according to “the plan” By now I should have had 28 sheep wrapped and packed.

Turns out it’s more like 4, well.. not like… it’s exactly 4.

On the other hand, though, I do have 20 sheep drawn, inked and scanned ready to paint, and that’s good.  That was all last week but I’d qualify that as keeping up on the schedule.

So this week just didn’t lead to any real work getting done.  Worked on some freelance stuff and started messing about with what will be the marketing site for Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth! Which I’ve the photoshop files all ready to go on. And ninjababy has been taking up all the time that’s more or less left over at the end of a work day.

Baby Jude earns his Ninja Legs at 8 weeks.

So, I’m not gonna fret.  Just buckle down and give it another go.  And I’m gonna be a better blogger and actually post on a semi-regular basis, there’s actually a series of game related things I’ve been meaning to get put down.

For now.. It’s time to crawl into bed and plan to assault next week with renewed vigor.

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A sheep a day

Short update on sheep development.

For the last week I’ve been maintaining an average of finishing a sheep a day.  As of today I’m racheting that up to 2 sheep a day with the allowance to either work forward or catch up as needed on weekends.  However, at midnight every Sunday 14 more sheep will be completed.

This puts me at 31 days for the next round of beta testing.  Give or take a day or so for a pass on the card files and rules to get updated with the more updated rules from the existing rounds of playtesting.

I know, 2 cards a day doesn’t sound like much.. but it’s probably going to work out between 1 1/2 to 2hrs a day.  Which, with a 2 mo old baby and normal household duties and freelance work piled on top.. It’s going to be a challenge and I forsee several late Sunday night cram sessions in the not too distant future.

However, tonight, I’m on top of the world and on schedule.  Which feels damn nice.

Some quick random notes from the gaming world.

http://www.frozensynapse.com/ is a fun turn based combat a-la X-com but with the whole future retro graphics vibe.  Games are very quick (5 -10 turns) and you don’t both have to be online at the same time. You can snag 2 beta keys for this excellent indie game for $25 (one for you and one for a friend)  Anyone playing feel free to shoot me a challenge (Drakkehim) I’m pretty terrible but it’s a heck of lotta fun.

http://www.sleepisdeath.net/ may be one of the more important Art ‘games’  that’s out there. Its 2 player always.. no ai.. freeform collaborative storytelling.  The community that’s serious about it are making filly, fun and sometimes deeply touching and moving stories together.  I’ve got 1/2 the cast of buffy built. 🙂   It’s all user generated content.  But content travels between players which is very cool.  So the more you play, the more stuff you have to play with.

http://www.taleworlds.com/main.aspx Mount and Blade – Warband is a very nice update to Mount and Blade which is probably the coolest mounted warfare game ever.  Made by a very talented bunch of guys from Turkey.

http://www.kings-bounty.com/eng/ The kings bounty series is just crazy turn based fantasy strategy that’s incredibly well done.  The Rock Paper Shotgun guys talk about it here.  And it just happens to be available on whatever digital download service you prefer. (steam, gamersgate, dirct2drive etc)

Oh, and they’ve announced Witcher 2…  yeah.. if it’s half as good as the first one it’ll be amazing.

That’s it.. I’m done.. -G’night.

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Quick update 50% marker passed!

Just tooting my own horn.  I just passed the 50% mark on the art asset creation for the sheep decks.

Just 62 more cards to finalize..

Here’s where things stand as of now:

Cards Drawn 78 remaining 47 total cards: 125
Cards Painted 63 remaining 62 ready to paint 15
Cards Placed indo Deck Files 63 remaining 62 ready to place 0
Cards Tested in Gameplay 1 remaining 124 -<this isn’t exactly accurate but I know what it means>-
Known Text Revisions To do 3
Proof  for Press complete remaining 125
Done 0 remaining 125

Drawn 78 remaining 47 total cards: 125Painted 63 remaining 62 ready to paint 15Placed 63 remaining 62 ready to place 0Tested 1 remaining 124 Known Rev 3 remaining 122 Proof 0 remaining 125 Done 0 remaining 125

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A minor change of Title

So with the acquisition of a planned fun little markting site for Mutant Sheep, the game has undergone a Minor Title change.  It’s now:

Mutant Sheep Eat the Earth!

[read that in a booming movie trailer voice]

So with the arrival of the new scanner  and spring mental cobweb cleaning done, it’s time to get down to brass tacks.

The big things to get done:

  • Art – lots of art still to do
  • Trademark/copyright  the game name/title
  • File actual paperwork for Swiftthought Games n stuff
  • Playtest the new version of the rules and card changes.
  • Create Marketing site mentioned above.
  • Make tutorial videos that explain the rules for above mentioned website.

Yeah so that’s a decent chunk of work..  Ok I’m gonna go watch SG-1 and draw 5 sheep before bedtime.

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Updated look for the site

Digital Spring Cleaning

Well it was about time for an update around here,  a bit of spring cleaning you might say.  It was a bunch of  fun.. especially trying to get Comicpress to integrate without going insane..  Still have to have to fix the navigation on the posts and subpage.. but it’s functional for now and I’m happy with the new look.

I got the basic layout and tweaks done and found some new widget plugins that will make things a bit easier to manage.  After I did a bit of housecleaning that is..  A bunch of old templates, junk files etc etc got wiped and some leftover images got resized.

Next up is www.wenderflonia.com getting a facelift and some tweaks and then both sites are going to get some core content cleaned up and moved about.

But for now, it’s back to baby training, working on the template project and maybe even enjoying the weekend a bit.

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Incubation And Spreadsheets

State of the Sheep

So after a couple days of taking a look at all the assets I feel like I’ve got a good grasp of where things stand in Mutant Sheep Eat the Planet!

In Short..

Cards Drawn 75 remaining 50 total cards: 125

Painted 62,remaining 63 ready to paint 13

Placed 60 remaining 65 ready to place into deck 2 (this is a short and easy step but it’s important which is why I track it)

So that’s not so bad.  Only 50 illustrations left and then 63 color jobs.   Granted the biggest hurdle is that I no longer have a scanner and the whole ‘transition to an all digital pipeline’ just doesn’t seem to be happening.   So I bought a scanner and it’ll be here in a couple days.

In the meanwhile I’ve started revising some basic rules, and updating the text on the cards so as to get mystelf start thinking about the rules etc and balance.  Hopefully I can make edits to the cards while watching baby Jude perform his nightly antics.. So a new round of playtesting will  be in the immediate/near future.

Then there’s a couple other steps for the cards, proofreading, final alignment, etc but those are what I’ll make friends n Family do 😉

Other Projects that Eat Time

Irismel.com

Ok so this is currently a formative tech demo.  But the thought of a multiplayer online web based rougelike with a live DM has been percolating around in the back of my mind forever.  So when I needed to figure out jQueryUI standards I whipped together the beginning’s of a web based map editor.  The downside..It more or less kills IE.. something about absolute positioning 5,000 32×32 divs makes it crawl.   But I’ve got some ideas to improve performance drastically.    Oh and what’s already up at Irismel.com is my first level editor for Blood Soaked Deadly Dungeons of Doom! But Irismel is a project that’s growing out of research projects not a driver for research, which is why I’m looking to use CakePHP for the foundation, because it’s something I want to learn.

Template Driven Microsites

The project that’s primarily eating away from SheepTime(tm) is an easy to edit microsite development tool.  That’s all I’m saying for now.. but it’s pretty cool and easy to use and has the potential to actually ‘Earn Real Money’.

Freelance Work

Yup just a trickle at the moment, but at least one item in the immediate future.

Misc Gaming News

So the Christmas Deluge has come and gone and it was good.

The highlight was clearly Dragon Age, easily the best game of last year.

Currently playing Mass Effect 2.. and it’s absolutely spectacular, also playing some Sins of a Solar Empire : Diplomacy for the strategy fix.. and it’s good and a handful of tiny Indie & Casual games that are just lots of fun (Trine, AI War, Soliumn Infernum, Boowork Adv 2 etc.)

The top 3 acquisitions that I’d like to make that just came out in the Spring Bonanza are: Bad Company 2.. Multiplayer shootem fun, Final Fantasy XIII for the jRPG fix and Settlers 7 for the build a world fix.. except it’s covered in UBI’s super evil DRM so it’s getting a pass until they come to their senses.  But really I’ll probably just go and play more Arma2 and Witcher and Empire: Total War.

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Firing up the ol engines of creation!

So now that Jude

aka Milkface

has come into our lives things are slowly settling into a routine (granted it’s one with less sleep than we’d like, but it’s a start).    That means there is starting to be some periods of non super stressful time where freelance work and pet projects can once again start to flourish.

On the freelance side of things, things are picking up nicely with more design work for KELL

And the Big paintings were a big success and look beautiful on Jude’s wall.

Sun Elephant

So that leaves the much neglected games projects, and the sheep are getting hungry.

So starting tomorrow it’s time to take a good hard look at where things stand and what still needs to be done.  I have a sneaky suspicion that it will involve spreadsheets and maybe even some project planning stuff.. YAY!  And more playtesting.  I have an XML based card shuffler program I whipped up to teach myself Python that will let me run a couple hundred pulls of the decks and see how things work mathmaticlly so I can see if I can find some solution to the whole endgame issue where players don’t have enough clout to affect the outcome.

Lots to do, and it promises to be exciting.  Oh and I’ll be blogging more, and possibly adding some more game industry ramblings / reviews n commentary.

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Bebbeh?

The first of 2 paintings for Jude’s baby room is finished and the second one is on the drawing board.   So that’s progress.

Hang the Stars from the Moon

Freelance work has actually been pretty busy so that’s been sapping a good bit of the ol’ come home from work and work on pet projects enthusiasm.  However I’ve got a good chunk of time mentally set aside here in the near future to get to grinding out the updated art for the cards.   So hopefully I can get the Mutant Sheep out the door.  And start one of the other two game ideas that have been percolating for a couple months. Very exciting stuff.

But right now, it’s pretty much all baby all the time.

On the games front there’s a couple little tidbits worth sharing.   I finally beat Mirror’s Edge which was surprisingly good and different, not sure why it go panned so bad when it came out.   Metaplace, Raph Koster’s mmo brainchild, closed down, which isn’t entirely unexpected since it felt so un-rooted and essentially wound up more of a chat room than it did a fully customizable world.  It’s still kinda sad after following his blog and twits for a couple years and knowing how hard those guys worked for it.  Dragon Age, is deep and spectacular, and definitely not default to easy mode, which is nice.   Solium Infernum, is mind bendingly complex and looks to have the award for best Play By Email game of the decade wrapped up.  (anyone up for a game? email me)

Board game wise..

My copy of Pandemic has arrived and we’ve played a couple games.  It’s a bit of a mental twist to be playing cooperatively against the game, but very refreshing.  So far we’ve mastered easy mode and haven’t lost yet and need to kick it up a difficulty, the awesome thing is that you can play a game in about an hour to hour and 1/2.

Also glaring evilly at me from my shelf of recent aquisitions is a copy of Arkham Horror, also an entirely cooperative affair we’ve yet to play it, as it looks to be a 2-4 hour thing and we havent had that kind of time (and go figure it’s gonna take longer for the first game).  Interestingly enough, it allows 1 player games as well.

And we need to play more Decent while we’re at it.

Hmm wonder if we can mandate a monthly game day in the house?