kedaunglandlord

Or, at least, trying to get back into it. So here's where the current build stands, because no one wants to hear about any of that other stuff. The framework is all in place, with the exception of a few of the reward options, which are mostly variable-based anyway, so not really difficult to implement. The writing for about half of the stuff still needs to be done, which is what's really killing me: for some reason, I just can't seem to actually write anything. I know how the scenes are supposed to go, but I just can't seem to get my brain to actually write  them. I'm still pecking away at it. In the meantime, let's talk about Britney (Brittany, Brittaney)'s mission, shall we? The idea is simple: Maria wants you to help her. But the idea of help is poorly defined at best. It's obvious when you meet her that the girl has two things she likes doing: drinking, and fucking. Maybe Maria meant for you to dissuade her from those paths, or maybe she meant for yo

A nice shout out and preview of the Mortis and 15mm/1:100 scale Crusader.

Enjoy!

I had a few people asking for a scale comparison of the upcoming 15mm scale Crusader and a 28mm miniature. You can see it scales nicely for the 28mm crowd, the head is large enough to fit a pilot into and the overall size looks good .

Spoke with some of the folks from WGF and they said that they had quite a few backers come say hello... Makes me very sad I could not attend. I would have loved to meet the folks that made this possible. Here is a shot for Gencon Next year come hell or high water, I will be there.

Unfortunately I did not make it to Gencon this year, real life issues of hunting for a new residence intruded on my fun. If you can make it to Gencon, Wargames factory will be previewing the 15mm Leviathan Crusader and the 28mm Leviathan Mortis, both were painted for WGF by Matt Leahy. I think he did a fabulous job on these! Yes, that is the 15mm Crusader, all the details found on the 28mm model are present. For those of you like myself who cannot attend Gencon, I just wanted to let you know that Wargames Factory if having a 25% off sale. Just be sure to use the discount code on checkout. Wargames Factory site. GENCON SALE! All Wargame Factory and DreamForge-Games products on sale for 25% off! Sale ends Sunday August 18th at Midnight!   Use the discount code of conspecial in our webstore shopping cart to receive the discount. (Please note that our 3x and 7x deals do not apply during this sale)  Leviathan Mortis 15mm Scale Leviathan Crusader

Working through some personal stuff, here. I'm not giving up yet. Sorry for the delay.

Still working on the next build when I get the time and am not exhausted. Just changed commenting to require that you log in. Getting tired of anonymous jerkasses that can't be bothered to say things in the open, and so have to hide behind the veil of anonymity. In the future, when I turn anonymous commenting back on, I'll just report them as spam and let the problem take care of itself.

The build broke. I wish there was more to it than that, like "Hey guys, I decided to include all this cool shit  for the next update and it only took me an hour whooooo~!" but sadly, that's not what happened. What happened is the build broke. It's not as bad as last time, where I had to rebuild most of the item groups from scratch, but for some reason, the game is returning errors immediately after the Britney mission, which means that I can't test the actual completion of it, when Maria shows up. There's no reason  for it to be returning errors that I can see, and all my attempts to fix it have just frustrated the crap out of me. I'm working on getting it fixed, and will release the new build as soon as it's ready, but given the fact that I don't know what's wrong yet, I don't know when that will be. Hopefully soon .

Unfortunately, it turns out that I can't do anything for more than 5 minutes today without an interruption. The next update is ALMOST done, but not quite. I should have time to finish it Saturday, so the new date is the 6th. Sorry about that.

You keep telling yourself things in your head, and you forget that what's in your head is not automatically disseminated to everyone else. July 4th is the target date.

(This is one if those rare wholly positive posts. You heard it here first, folks!) After launching the Greenlight page I knew I could expect some great feedback and ideas from the folks who pledged at Kickstarter. (Everything from survival to crafting has been adjusted based on Greenlight input, and they haven't even played the game yet! Who knows what will happen during beta testing?) What I didn't expect was the wild diversity of professions and perspectives. It could just be an illusion caused by the format but the Greenlight camp always felt like a pretty narrow demographic. In contrast the game's Kickstarter backers have been all over the map, literally & figuratively. Since launching the campaign I've been in touch with not just dozens of artists and musicians and writers but also geologists, linguists, historians and architects, all eager to help me shape the world into something that lives up to their own unique expectations. Not that I ever could - to plea

A  while back I was searching for a painter that could handle the Leviathan Crusader and Mortis as well as a few Eisenkern Stromtroopers. My search lead me to Poland, arguably some of the most talented painters in the world.   I was searching for a painter that could take the large open surfaces and give them a nice shaded worn and weathered look, someone who could bridge the gap between historic vehicles and Sci-fi. I stumbled on Przemyslaw Szymczyk , an extremely talented painter who had all the qualities I was looking for, and to my good fortune, an opening in his schedule.  You can see what he did with the Stormtroopers here   Here you can see some W.I.P. pics of the Crusader. I think you will agree that his work is simply AMAZING! Przemyslaw has expressed an interest in painting the Leviathan Mortis and I am more than happy to oblige.  I hope that I have the opportunity to work with him on future projects as well, he is a fantastic artist.    Enjoy    Lol.. NUTCRACKER and hello Ki

I have been working on Cursed the last few days, but only for less than an hour, which I planned and therefore didn't feel was really worth streaming. Someone (anonymous) suggested a couple posts back that I try to work on it every day, even in small amounts, so I've been trying it out. It's kind of surprising the amount of work that you can get done in 30-45 minutes when all you're doing is writing and don't have to worry about keeping people entertained. That doesn't mean I won't ever stream Cursed stuff again, though. The nice thing about my new job is that it's extremely predictable when it comes to scheduling, something I haven't had the luxury of in almost 5 years. That means I know when I'm working a half day, when I'm working on a weekend, and so on, and the good news is I usually have Saturdays and Sundays off. Sundays are when I do other stuff, but Saturdays are pretty open, barring some last minute schoolwork. And who knows, maybe

So, I got the job, and while the first day (Tuesday) was 9 to 5, the rest of the week, including today, started at the ungodly hour of 7:45, which required getting up at the even more ungodly hour of 6am. Ergo, I've been fucking tired off my ass all week. I mean, who goes to bed at 10pm? Honestly, what the hell kind of scam is that. The good news is that I'm mostly used to it now (and my new job offers free coffee to make up for the rest of it), so by Monday, I think I'll be able to get back to serious coding. I'm gonna take this weekend to unwind; there are few things more mentally exhausting to me than meeting a shit load of new people and convincing them I'm not an asshole. So yeah. Updated. I do want to have the next version out by the end of the month at the latest, if not sooner.

Note: This story is biased but it isn't a hatchet job. IndieGoGo may have promised something they couldn't deliver, but e veryone I dealt with was personable & pleasant to work with and  I believe they did what they could to help the campaign succeed within the constraints of the platform. IGG a good platform for a lot of projects - just not gaming projects. Decisions, Decisions The trailer went live and I thought to myself, I believe this game has a chance. Time to crowdfund. The question is which platform? Kickstarter, or IndieGoGo? I knew Kickstarter was the 'default' choice but I'd also contributed to successful gaming campaigns on IGG, like Ghost of a Tale and Darkwood . And I knew FRONTIERS had some global / casual appeal, which could make IGG a good option... hmm, decisions. In one of those weird (not-so) coincidental moments, I got a phone call from IndieGoGo. They'd seen the trailer and wanted to extend a helping hand. They made a pitch that involv

More coding, it seems. And by "coding", I mean writing. ...man, remember the days when I used to get up and work early, and consistently? I miss those days. Edit: And then I got a call about a job that may start as soon as tomorrow. Which means now I have to do all the things I haven't done since April. Sigh.

I was going to stream now...but since I have to clean the apartment a bit, and do some homework, I could only work on Cursed for about an hour. Then I realized, there's this whole time in the evening when I don't do anything productive. Maybe, just maybe, I should do something productive then. So that's what I'm gonna do! Stream should start between 6 and 7pm EDT. Edit: So I remembered why I don't normally stream at night: my wife is usually home and likes us to spend some time together. STILL! Late though it may be, I'm all about the stream now. Edit 2: I got some of the writing done, plus almost all of the setup, so that really all that's left is the writing. Of course, there's a lot of that. I also fixed some more bugs, so hopefully when the next release goes out, things will be more properly playable.

The one question I get asked more often than Can you build structures in game * is How can you make a game this big by yourself?  Or, if phrased less diplomatically, Dude there's NO WAY you can make a game this big by yourself. Crash and burrrrrrn, that's all I'm sayin! Part of the reason I'm running the crowdfunding campaign is because, frankly, they're right - I need to outsource some art and writing and possibly programming tasks to get this thing done by January. (Thank goodness the game is modular enough to permit this.) But in another sense they're wrong, not because I'm somehow doing the impossible but because the game isn't 'big' like they think it is. Oh the scale of the world is big - I've said so repeatedly - and there's a lot of stuff to find, and I've already talked about the structures, etc. But the game is 'big' in the sense that a basement-sized miniature medieval town made of Legos is big. The size is impos

It's laundry day again, so expect me to take at least two breaks to fold laundry. There's some bug-fixing on the plate for today, and then more Britney stuff. Tune in for good music. Or decent music. I need to figure out a playlist so I'm not bouncing between music all the time... EDIT: Okay, so it ended up being all about bug fixes, but I found and squashed quite a few. So there's that.

Time to work on Part 2 of Britney's quest. Also, I changed the "On Air" thing a bit. It now shows a preview of what I'm streaming (in theory). You can even watch it from there, though I wouldn't recommend it, because it's fucking tiny. You can click on the video, or either of the links, to tune in with a bigger window. Oh, and today is laundry day, so expect me to have to deal with that a points.

Let's just pretend Friday didn't happen and move on. I don't want to talk about it. Working on Cursed today. As promised, I'm working on the Brittany mission, which I hope to complete within the next couple of days. I might only be working for a couple of hours before cleaning duties kick in, but if I get into a groove, we'll see what transpires. EDIT: Well, part one (calling Britney) is done. Part two is interacting with her at the apartment, which I'll do tomorrow. Part three is dealing with completing the mission (for good or for ill), with Maria's return. There is an additional part, which is dealing with Britney after  the mission (she can be removed from the game if you do things a particular way, but she can either be a drinking buddy, fuck buddy, or friend otherwise), and in the interest of actually completing  content, I'll do that before I move on to anything else, but I can release a new update after part 3 is done.

A week ago very few people knew what FRONTIERS was. A few playtesters (all onsite), maybe a couple hundred folks I'd reached out to personally or on the gamedev forums, and my wife. I posted my trailer thinking hey, maybe I'll double that. Now I don't even know how to estimate. A hundred thousand? YouTube alone is cooling off at around seventy thousand. That's not to say they everyone who saw it gives a shit, but the logo has touched their eyeballs. I still can't process it. And it was mainly due to one article. ONE Rock Paper Shotgun article that I had no idea was coming and suddenly the trailer was getting waaaaaay more attention than I was ready for. The internet is INSANE, man. And the craziest thing of all? 100k is small potatoes. Spuds, really. Look at the views and visitors that some Indie games are working with. It can be millions of people. How the hell do they handle it? I know at some point I'll have to at least try and court that level of exposure

EDIT: All game files have been uploaded as zip files. If you've been having the "unreadable" error, try downloading now. No, not de com pression. Although, I guess, sudden decompression... Anyway, it's been a rough couple of weeks. Had a couple of job prospects that didn't really pan out for whatever reason, despite what I thought were good interviews, so I'm still looking. Might have to work at McDonald's at this rate. Wouldn't that be fun. But no one cares about that, so here's the deal: not going to be working on anything again today, but tomorrow, I will be. The only way to get out of depression is to crawl out of it, right? So, I have to force myself to do so. So then why am I not working on something today? Because I looked at my email box and realized that I am an asshole and haven't answered emails since January . Which is such  a dick move. I'm going to go through that backlog and reply to everything , whether it's out of date,

  I thought I would pass along some shots of the Eisenkern APC. When last you saw the design it was pretty much a roughed in hull, the final version received more details inside and out. This kit will feature see through window sections so that you may view the interior, movable quad ‘Scorpion’ weapons system that provides enough arc, azimuth and elevation to clear unwanted guests from your doorstep. Linked and movable front suspension, doors and hatches that you may leave open or closed (Due to the scale I could not create full working hinges on the smaller doors and hatches, you may need to decide if you want to glue the smaller doors in the open or closed position, the larger rear hatch has full hinges). The Kickstarter backers will receive the full crew compliment, 10 riflemen, driver and gunner. I won’t know if we can include the ten riflemen in the general release until we know how many sprues we will need to complete the kit.   I was able to shrink the vehicle down a bit from

FRONTIERS is about exploration, and exploration is largely about mystery. And mystery is about guessing without knowing. It's about sensing the shape of things - it's that lump under the blanket in the garage. Is that a handlebar? It sort of looks like a bike but what's that blob near the back? Wait, did it just move? The game knows what's under the blanket but you don't. And long as that tension exists you want to keep guessing / playing. Take away the blanket and suddenly it's just a raccoon sleeping next to a rowing machine. Sure you get that momentary thrill of discovery but there's no reason to keep looking at it. A few months ago I realized that this is going to be a problem. Here's why: Dramatic vs. Backstory Mystery Mystery comes in two forms, dramatic mystery and backstory mystery. I completely made up those terms so if there's a third form, whatever. It's not relevant to this problem. Dramatic mystery is about plot resolution. Who's

Just a heads up, now that I've got an offical FRONTIERS page up and running I'll be posting fewer promo bits here & sticking more to personal thoughts.

Some time back I sent Dennis over at Bruckenkopf the last release of DreamForge kits.   For those of you that don’t know, Bruckenkopf is a premier gaming site over in Germany, they host discussion and review covering all aspects of the hobby. Google translate makes quick work of the site for those of you such as myself, who barely speak our native tongue :) Last week I sent Dennis an email, asking if he had an opportunity to review the kit, he let me know it would be up in time for the German gaming events circuits that are now making their appearance. I just wandered over, as I am apt to do, and I was blown away by the review they posted on the Crusader. They said this would be the most comprehensive review in their history… they did not exaggerate… Over 100 pictures and a wall of text, explaining the assembly and his thoughts, good and bad on the Leviathan Crusader.     Here is what Dennis had to say in his closing remarks (translated by Google) We strive to critical reviews, hi

Some gameplay videos for your enjoyment. Just a few tidbits to whet your appetite for the proper trailer I'll be releasing in a week or so.

The Leviathan Mortis is now production ready! This was actually the first of the new generation of Leviathan I designed back in 2002... I still have a soft spot for the Mortis. Unlike the old resin kits the fingers and scythe will remain completely poseable. Just like the Crusader, the Mortis is highly dynamic, arms move, legs move, waist moves.... great fun and ready for some smack down. When will this hit retail? About 3-4 months, we hope... We will not make this available until all the Kickstarter backers have been shipped and are well on their way. Stay tuned for updates! Cheers Mark