I Do Not Have Too Much Time On My Hands

01.03.2012

I have no 2012 resolutions, but I'm still in the process of figuring out what I want to do this year. But they're not resolutions. Honest. I hit about 50% following through on resolutions I make, so I'm skipping it this year.

I do have plenty I want to do, I just have to find the time to do it. I'm generally pretty good at managing my time, as I stay realistic. I've learned to factor in time for the little things that take up extra time before (or during) the allotted time.

For example, one of the things on my list of things I want to do is more board game prep. This can be anything from painting miniatures to putting together paper model scenery. I've already decided Tuesday nights are the dedicated night for this. It's easy enough to say I'm going to paint Tuesday nights, but I'm not going to sit down from 5:00 to 10:00 painting.

• I've got to wind down after work, so if I got home at 5:00 it would be at least 6:00 before I got around to painting.
• Even if eating during the wind down hour, dinner prep, consumption, and clean-up is going to take at least an extra half hour.
• Got to factor in nightly surfing, email, and phone calls.
• Regardless of all of the above, I've got to be in the right mood/frame of mind.

So after it's said, I should be able to fit in 2 or 3 hours of quality hobby time on a Tuesday night. Fair enough, but what all am I wanting to hobby forth and do?

• The aforementioned board game prep. There's a wide enough expanse of what I want to do that I shouldn't have to worry about getting bored for a while. The main thing is that with painting miniatures I'm slowly getting better, but I'm nowhere near as good as the pictures I see on various sites I surf and even the other people that I know that paint. But I still enjoy it, as it's relaxes me away from the computer. I need to talk to Jer and Keith about a regular (monthly) Widgey night, too.
• Unity development. This has been on the back burner for a couple of months. I've got a Unity/JavaScript tutorial book to start on, which will also serve as a good refresher back into Unity. I also lack 1 program being able to complete the Poser->Unity workflow, so I should just spend the $60 and get it over with.
• [Fun] Web development. There's a couple of tweaks to this site I want to make. I haven't tweaked anything in a while. My tweakers are getting rusty.
• Read. I tend to take the Comic/Graphic Novel route for my quality time bathroom visits, but I've got 3 novels that have been sitting on the bookshelf for months that I want to read. I'm a horrendously slow reader, and these books aren't reading themselves!
• Play around with Motion on the Mac Book. I've still only turned the laptop on once since buying it back in November.
• The treadmill at the wellness center beckons me.

There are subsets of the above, but I've got plenty to do, especially if you factor in Gina time and keep up the Monday Night Raw @ Matt's tradition.

Whatever type of schedule I come up with, it still has to be flexible enough for the little things that pop up. I don't want a schedule with something to do every night. I know there are nights I just want to flake out and watch a movie. This Thursday I'm going with Gina to Nashville to pick up the young'uns from the airport (or drop off a car, I'm fuzzy on the details). I think a good schedule has you doing something 3 out of 5 open nights, that way when something else/more important (at least in someone's eyes) you can shift things around without getting behind.

So that leaves me 2 nights to fit in Unity, Web, Reading, MacBooking, and Treadmilling. I see nights with a weekly featured hobby popping up.

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Merry Christmas from ThinkGeek.com!

12.28.2011

I make a purchase from Think Geek annually, as they tend to have something nerdy on sale around Christmas that will end up being right up the alley for either me or one of my nerd cadre. This year, it was something for me.

In the clearance section of the Think Geek website was the Lilliput USB Monitor, a 7" monitor that can be hooked up to a computer via USB (2 ports needed, as it draws extra power from those ports to power the monitor). A couple of years ago, I got 2 of these little monitors and integrated them into my home setup when they weren't hooked up to a laptop in order to give me a little more real estate. I've gotten used to having a 7" area devoted to download status or constantly having a browser window open that I can see when I'm working on something. Dual monitors have gotten me spoiled to when I'm working on a laptop, it's hard to see everything in just 17"!

Since purchasing my new MacBook I haven't done much with it. Some extra screen area would come in handy, so an extra USB monitor for the laptop would be nice. The 2 hooked up to my desktop don't go anywhere - they've become an important part of my setup there. I need a new monitor for the laptop! A monitor on sale!

The monitor from Think Geek is normally $100. The clearance sale had marked them down to $75. Thanks to signing up to receive actual postal mail from the company, I had a $10 off coupon code which would almost take care of the $8 shipping charge. I placed my order and all went well with arrival set to be after Christmas as I was placing my order on Dec 21. I was in no rush, so that was fine by me.

After my order was placed I started poking around the site some more, and noticed they no longer showed the touch-screen version of the monitor. I remember it a touch-screen version being made by a different company, but the product page always listed both monitors together. A touch-screen version would be cool. Extra nerdy! I think they used to be an extra $50 or so, but that might be worth it at Christmas time. But alas, none was listed. Maybe this is why the USB monitors had headed to the clearance section?

Yesterday parcels arrived on my stoop, with a Think Geek package among them. I opened the box and found the 7" USB monitor. The box looked a little different than what I remembered from my first order of these those few years back, but who keeps the same packaging these days? I looked at the box, yep, "Lilliput", and then farther down "7 inch USB touch screen monitor".

Touch Screen? What the huh?

7" plug & play touch monitor.

I went back and looked at my order. My invoice showed the regular, non-touch monitor. The product page shows the regular, un-touch monitor. I could find no mention of a touch version anywhere on the site. But they managed to read my mind and send me the monitor I really wanted. That would make it hard to return, especially since I wanted what was sent more than what I ordered.

Since Think Geek didn't list the touch version anywhere, I found one at Amazon for $165 for comparison to the $75 I ended up spending. If Think Geek had the touch version listed I might feel obligated to try and return it, but since it's not I'll just rationalize that as a good reason to not bother them about all of this and enjoy my $75 touch screen Christmas present from Think Geek.

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Scheduled Painting Day #1

12.27.2011

Part of my holiday vacation has been spent painting gaming miniatures. Painting these little buggers is more therapeutic than anything else. It gets me away from the computer. It relaxes me. I don't even play the games that the figures I'm playing are meant for, I just like them. It's taken the place of gluing together models from back in the trailer park days.

With the thought of relaxation fresh in my head, I thought it would be a good idea to have a regular painting night, or perhaps just a boardgame prep night. One of those nights I try and stay away from the computer and not just sit in front of the TV. Tuesday is a good night for this, so tonight, or today since I'm still on vacation, I broke out the paints and decided to see what kind of a mess I could make.

I have a set of Warhammer Jungle Fighters that I must have gotten a couple of years ago. I went to the trouble of painting camo pants on the lower bodies.... and that was it. I didn't even prime these things. I've since learned the importance of priming. With that said, I thought the camo was pretty good, so I removed the lower bodies from the sprues and primed what was left. The boots with the pants needed painting (unprimed still), so I went ahead and globbed on paint for footwear. The rest of the unpainted fighters got primed and a first pass of flesh. I'm playing more with washes/thinned paints, and I noticed a lot of the detail from the base figs was showing through. I like how this is working!

It's ahrd to tell in the pic below, but the sprue on the right has a slightly darker flesh tone than the one on the left. And yes, it's intentional.

Around Thanksgiving I picked up various zombie themed miniatures. Vampifan had done a good job on his zombie strippers, so I thought I would pick up a set and see what I could do. Mainly this would start out as an exercise in how to get the right "zombie flesh" color. I tend to prefer the green tinted zombies over the grey, so that was the direction I was going to go. I started out with white primer, then added a couple of coats of a heavy green wash, followed up with a couple of coats of a flesh colored wash. I think it went pretty well for my first time trying this out. I managed to do a halfway decent job of painting the muscle/torn flesh, tipped dollars, and even hair before I screwed up the eyes, but this is a learning process.

Now what am I going to do to fix those eyes? At least I've got a project for next Tuesday!

Permalink gaming miniatures

Gaming Economics

12.23.2011

I was reading a post over on Wife-Aggro that got me back to thinking about how the model of releasing games (video mostly, but also and board games to some extent) is changing. Prevalent these days on the social networking sites are free games you can play with the option to pay for expanded content. I've seen more MMORPG's move to this once the game has been out for a while. World of Warcraft will let you play for free up to level 20. DC Universe has moved to a base free-for-play model (not sure what premiums you can pay for there, I haven't looked in a while). My big "dissapointment" game of 2009, Star Trek Online, is moving to free to play on Jan 17. Some may say this is all due to today's economy, but I think people are just smarter with their money.

It used to be that when a new game came out, you were lucky if you could get a demo before slapping down an average of $50 for the real thing. The demo might be a level out of the game, or lacking certain features. Just enough to whet your appetite. Now I see a proliferation of smaller publishers. With smaller publishers comes cheaper prices, and unfortunately a better chance of getting crap. Demos are still out there, but so often it's easier for somebody to just charge $10 for a download. I mean, it's only $10, right?

Then you always get somebody bitching about what they got for $10, because mentally they're used to spending $50 and want five times more quality/story/play time.

I've still got my 7-game Road to my Wrestling Game planned out (no, I haven't made any more progress on it that this time last year). It's not going to be a money maker, but I think I know how to make it a money maker if I wanted to invest the time, effort, and get more people than I want to involved in the development.

Lots of games focus on downloadable content once the game is released. Just take a look at games on Steam and you'll see that most $50 games have tons of extras you can purchase. Borderlands has map packs, Space Marine has alternate armors and weapons, Arkham City has, well it has extra stuff but I'm not sure if it's extra people or re-skins. Here is where I think the key for independent game publishing lies.

Let's say I have a magical year and my wrestling game is playable. I would release the game for free. The game would be fully functional - save games, create characters and venues, whatever limited online stuff existed - and have the equivalent of 1 local wrestling organization of fictional NPCs. No licensing from anyone required at this stage. People can download the game, see if they like it, make sure it works on their system, etc. If they enjoy it, then they can come back and pay for extras.

What extras would be available? In the perfect world, each wrestling organization would work as downloadable content. I will always be too small to get the ones that have "real" games like WWE and TNA, but there are plenty of smaller groups that would see this as free advertising. Groups that publish DVDs (Ring of Honor, PURE, etc) would be fine targets that already have a fan following. The classic territories from the 80's would work, and may be beyond licensing requirements since they're no longer in business.

Besides my wrestling game, this model would work great for first person shooters. You get the basic shooter game and a couple of maps for free. Monthly, a new map pack with some different weapons would be available for a nominal fee. This translates wonderfully into a continuous revenue stream. I know, I'll never retire on that stream, but I like the model. I think for this to really work, even though the game is free, the additional content you're paying for has to be inexpensive. People buy magazines and never think about what they cost. If you can keep the cost of extras to the cost of a magazine, a price that doesn't even show up on their radar, folks will be much more likely to plop down a little money to get something extra. Plus, if it's cheap enough most people won't go to the trouble of trying to pirate it (yeah, somebody will always pirate it).

I've bought lots of crap games for $50. There are some games I've gotten way more entertainment out of than what I paid - Matt and I played Smackdown Vs Raw pretty much every Monday night for a year, not even counting the 16 virtual seasons I played through at home. If I have the option to play a game for free, I'm more likely to try it out. Like Dog Robber mentioned, I'm also more likely to tell 10 other people I'm playing it. Although I may not opt to pay for extras down the road, the chances are good one of those 10 people I told might.

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Wahammer Fighters

12.21.2011

Well, after starting 4 months ago I finally got around to finishing the squad of Warhammer soldiers I started. I'll be the first to admit they're not the best painted/constructed figures out there, but I've got to admit that the 2 Saturdays I spent watching Scott paint figs at The Deep improved my finished product. The key things I learned from Scott were:

• As little paint as possible on your brush tip.
• Prime with white (for me it makes the details I'm painting easier to see)
• Use washes, it brings out the details naturally

It would have been cool to have soldiers with expressive faces, eyes filled with rage, and nametags you could read. But honestly, this was the first batch I had painted in years (decades?). I was really shooting for "better than a 3rd grader". Although not award winning quality that I've seen from Lazuli or Vampifan, I'm pleased enough to show off what I made. Plus, I managed to have fun while putting everything together. I forgot how relaxing painting miniatures can be, if you don't count the frustration.

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