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Posts Tagged ‘Games’

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.

Time for a little progress update, eh?

Ok so some more sheep have been done but it’s time to assess the situation and get a firm grasp of where exactly I stand.   But first a picture of the prototype tuckbox that the game will be shipping with (some assembly  required)

Why Include something as silly as a tuckbox, when it will surely impact the bottom line One might ask.  Well the answer is simple,  with the last couple playtests it’s become obvious that the system of green tokens to track the value of the current place is massively cumbersome.  So I decided to put in a little track sheet that you can just put a couple counters on to track the value of the current place as it is eaten.  And the price difference between a 4×4 board and a board big enough to have a tuckbox to be cut out is negligible. So the tuck box is almost free.

But anyway… back to the current state of the game development process.    So it turns out that 85% of the time it’s taking is art.  That’s right.  It’s taking much much longer to draw silly sheep than it is to creating the game and the cards and exporting them and uploading them and writing / editing the rules etc. etc.

Crazy eh?

As of RIGHT NOW, I have Drawn and Painted 60 of 125 sheep.  Of those 50 have been placed into their final art location in the inDesign files that are the decks.

I have 65 sheep left to Draw, ink, and paint.   A happy estimate would be that if I totally buckle down I can probably do a sheep every 2 hours, maybe a bit more.  So let’s call it 90 min.  So that’s just a hair short of 100hrs of ART work left to do.  Not too terribly bad.

Other than that I probably have 6 hours of editing and tweaking on the cards’ text to make sure they’re clear and are easier to understand.

Then toss in the other little things like re-writing the rules and finalizing the web and packaging art, realistically it’s probably closer to 120 hrs of work.

That’s some really long weekends in my immediate future if I’m to hit my goal of having it launched by my birthday.

Time to buckle up, it’s gonna be one helluva ride to see if I can do this.

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

Ah, it’s been a blissful vacation.

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.