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.
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?
Ok, been a bit hectic and I’ve been a bad blogger. 🙁
I feel I can blame it on the impending arrival of offspring and get on with it.
the Devil
Couple paintings are done and there’s now a nice angel and demon in 24×24″ panels in the front hall. You know.. to scare people away from the good art that covers the rest of the house.
So the current plans (subject to revision but hey I feel better when I can pretend life’s going according to some sort of plan) is to prep the baby room and get the 2 paintings finished in time for baby Jude to arrive. Then it’s baby time and squeezing in the last touches on Mutant Sheep Eat The Planet! and get that finished out by Summer in addition to getting some more freelance work and getting Wenderflonia all set up and ready to take over the art world.
So progress in sheepsville has been..well.. slow..
I’ve got another dozen or so sheep painted and ready to go into their cards, but overall, progress has been a fraction of what it needs to be.
The upside, however, is that I’ve gotten a bunch of freelance work (that’s right, I’ll work for money) and that’s pretty much all wrapped up for now.
I’ve started the process of reworking the site theme. Currently I’ve got the new headers and superfish menus in place, and gotten a jquery lightbox up and running, the menu’s need a bit more work though. Also, we now have a gallery.
All that remains is the re-styling of the content and sidebar and drawing a new site background image.
But first up, www.Wenderflonia.com is gearing up for a massive overhaul and that’s #1 in the priority list. Keep an eye out for it, we’ll have art commissions, prints and more goodies coming soon.
And more sheep. I must make more picture of sheep, and get an accurate count of exactly how many I still have left to finish.
All the text on the cards were wrapped up by Sunday night as hoped! This included the 30 something painted cards and a blank placeholder for the ones that have not been painted yet.
It turns out that there will be 8 blank cards in the set so I’m thinking of making them a couple of rule summary cards instead of leaving em blank.
With the basic decks assembled, I ordered a copy of the game from thegamecrafter.com (as the designer I only have to pay manufacturing and shipping which makes it more affordable in case I need to do multiple iterations of some core mechanic (which I don’t think so .. but you never know))
So I just got the shipping confirmation email and the UPS guys say it should be here by Friday. So that gives me a couple days to catch up on some pet projects and freelance stuff.
Whoa, I’ve been a bad blogger. It’s been over two months since I updated this thing. Time to get back in the swing of things then.
So after finishing the monster of all paintings, creativly, I was a bit drained. So I spent about a month not really doing anything.. just recharging the old batteries. Then via Raph Koster’sblog I heard of something super exciting!
A couple guys had gotten together and done a Print On Demand website.. where you can print Games!
Consequently my brain went into hyperdrive and threatened to explode. I glanced at one of my little doodles at work ( a gigantic 3 eyed sheep stomping around a landscape) and my next pet project was born.
So here I am, a little over a month later, over 50% of the way there with the final art (drawing and painting in photoshop 125 sheep is a lot of work, it turns out.) And the cards are 90% of the way defined. The immediate goal is to have all the cards put in their final state by next Monday, and then order a playtest set, for tweaking the numbers and mechanics while I wrap up the art.
So it only took a little under 7 months, this weekend I finally wrapped up the behemoth that’s been hanging in the kitchen since January. The biggest change was wiping out the sun, which I spent so much time into getting perfect the first time around. However it just wasn’t working. Once the sun got off the canvas the remainder just fell into place.
While it was fun for the most part, I’m seriously gonna think twice before starting another canvas of that size. It just takes so long and so much effort you wind up just tired of it before you’re halfway, and then once part comes out brilliant, just as imagined, everything else seems sub-par. Thank god it wasn’t in oils though, or I’d just be starting the glazes.
Next up, a commissioned (I barter for exotic liquor) series of cute jungle animals for a cute little niece. Lions, gazelles, giraffes and a penguin(?) oh My!
However now it’s full steam ahead! GFW is moving in next week and tons to do around the house before then.
Playing a bit of the Sims 3 and it’s very good and a radioactive black vortex that you can easily dump seemingly endless amounts of time into.
Then as soon as live gets settled and the summer excercise routine gets picked up again (ate too much on vacation and now I have a bad case of Bahamian Guilt) then I’m itching to spend some time wrapping up the monster painting that’s been hanging unfinished in the kitchen for 5 months now.
Ok so it’s been a bit hectic with a bunch of things that just had to get done, which turns out to have sapped my usual laser like (HAH!) focus.
But the creative itch is growing and I have a feeling I’ll be cracking open the acrylics soon. (that and I owe lil sis some cute animal pix for superbaby’s room).
With the help of GuitarTricks.com I’ve been attempting to get a grasp on the whole playing guitar thing, and I’m getting better. The best thing I did was to buy a decent guitar (Rouge acoustic/electric Dreadnought from musiciansfriend.com), not having to slice your fingers trying to jam down the strings makes a huuge difference, and it sounds better too) .
Other than that, a super co-operative project with GFW is underway and we’re having fun and getting some serious progress made.
Programming at work, however, is pretty much making sure it’s the last thing I want to go home and do as well.. so BSDDoD! may have to stay on the backburner for a while.
So, I’ve been running around in the total overwhelmed mode for a while and it’s time to steer the frantic caffinated ADD besotted herd of cats that is my attention span back onto track.
Some basic concept art got created, and then I wandered off the project to illustrationland and then got mired down in EPIC project full of GRAND ideas etc etc and just essentially spent some time thinking myself to exhaustion. Time to think less and do more.
I’ve made a list damnit! With a great big list of bite size (a week or 2) tasks to do. I’m going to pick one and just do it and then simply rinse and repeat. Theory being that this will decrease the amount of time spent bashing head on desk/wall/art table/sidewalk by not getting overwhelmed by any one thing or medium.
So Progress on the main project has been really slow this week. That’s not to say a bunch of stuff didn’t get done.. It’s just not tangible stuff. I got the high scores put in and it seems to be working fine, and then I just ran into a mental brick wall of ‘now what?’. So I just let things stew in the noggin while I did other things.
So what other things did I keep myself occupied with one might ask?
Well, such things as going ocd in trying to lean guitar.. step 1. hurt fingers daily until you can press a string for more than 10 seconds without pain. well.. im still working on that one.
More interestingly I dusted off my lightwave 9.6 and started digging in to finally trying to learn the damn thing. Sloooowly making progress. I have managed to make a cube and some ovals and give them a texture. The whole layout side of things is making a bit more sense as well with the lights and timeline etc etc. Anyway the results of this is:
And in the meanwhile, I’ve been jotting down whatever ideas that have popped into my head as things to add to the game and I’ve now got a pretty handy idea of what i need to do next.
Well ok so I’ve got a valid excuse for not getting a whole lot done over the last week.
However, I did manage to get the whole loading, saving, entry and displaying of high scores implemented.
So.. that’s a plus. Still a couple bugs to work out but 90% there. Next up … hmm.. not exactly sure.. maybe I should iron out some details so I can see what I need to do before calling it Finished.
Whew, so It’s been a while since I released alpha 2… Soo much has changed and been improved. Here’s a brief changelog of stuff I can remember off the top of my head.
New main menu and faster startup times.
Lots more assets to load at startup so it’s actually doing stuff while you have to look at the pictures.
New map. A huge dungeon assembled off arenas from the web map generator.
Rooms seal upon entry and then depending on how deep you are get harder and harder.
Sounds! ok just some basic sounds but man does it make a difference.
New look for gameplay areas and tiles.
Lots of hooks are ready for easy insertion of new enemies, powerups, and the special items that will be included in the store you can visit between levels (soon).
Overall I’m incredibly pleased with the amount of progress. I’m mostly excited about having reached a point where I can do so many thing (new graphics, monsters, quests… the mind boggles!!!)
For now, I’m just gonna play a bit.
As always you can download it here(~12mb), and as always use it at your own risk, I make no claims that it won’t terrorize your cat, melt your eyeballs, or do any other unpredictable things.. But it seems to be working just fine for me.
[edit] changed out some sounds for better samples of what I intend for the end product. [/edit]
Just ran across a pretty good article on Game AI and how it’s all smoke and mirrors as opposed to real AI and a brief introduction to some of the basic concepts, such as finite state machines etc etc.
Pretty good introduction to the topic. The full article can be found here: http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2009/03/05/how-ai-in-games-works/1
Its been a bit of a slog to make much progress. Tons of little ‘try this.. er.. hmm well how about that.. ooh that broke it… humm well then how about ….’
BUT the upside.
The player now triggers doors when he/she walks across em. (yes the collision polygons need some tweaking but basically it works). This causes a recusive floodfill to determine all the tiles that are available inside the room. There was an issue where it caused the game to stutter while the fill ran but with the use of some scheduling calls I actually wound up with a smooth and more even area determination.
So.. why does that make me happy?
Well, glad I asked.
So now I have a nice and easy way to get all the available tiles in a room, with just some minor tweaks the monster spawner (in the inital Alpha) will be able to find an open spot and start spawning critters.
Esentially I’m just a few minor tweaks from having a playable core base to work off of.
Then I can start going crazy with different monsters, powerups etc etc.
It’s been a bit longer than I’d like for this post. But It’s been a hot wet, take it easy kind of summer break. But it’s time for school season to kick off and that means a return to a… Read more: Slow hot summer doldrums
