kedaunglandlord

(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.    Enjo...

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.