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Posts Tagged ‘focus damnit’

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.

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.

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:

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

So now that Jude

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.

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.

Wow time sure does fly, and whoa am I so totally not going to make the Oct 31 deadline! Which more or less means that November and December are going to be choked with Holidays and Family.

And it turns out there’s a little baby boy inbound, eta Feb 25(ish) (holy crap!)

So that has got to be more or less the last deadline, beacause somehow I don’t think there’s gonna be much free time after that for a while.

So, you might ask, what the hell have you been doing for the last 18 days.   Well, Mutant Sheep progress has been slow… much slower than I wanted but I seriously needed a break. More After the Break, Pictures too! Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Here's some of the cards

Current statistics:

• Total Cards: 125
• Cards Drawn: 64
• Cards Painted: 44
• Cards Text Written:  75