Card Back Evolution

03.12.2013

I've had a couple of productive days of boardgame development. I've updated the written rules that I had been putting off for 2 weeks 3 weeks at least a month. After that I went about revamping the playing cards a little bit more. Thanks to a couple of different graphics programs and their various filters and brushes, I finally got pretty close to the look I originally envisioned.

Above is the original card back, with a nice zombie horde of arms I stole from somewhere on the internet which more than 1 person has noticed. The font for "Zombie Mall" I actually purchased! For all of $8, plus it came bundled with 3 other fonts (1 of which will make its debut in the next card). Although I couldn't use this picture for the back over the long term, I liked the look of it. I decided I would try to design something similar, yet original. Inspired by sounds good.

Thanks to a mix of Poser and Paint Shop Pro, the above was my first completely original pass at the card back. I used Poser to create a generic, green hued figure and just played around with arm poses. I took a lot (19?) screen shots of those arm poses and took them into Paint Shop Pro, where I fiddled with the hue, brightness, and added some weird cross between dirty smudges and blood. At this point the cards had been split into "Loot" and "Objective", so I color coded the card backs to match. Instead of everything having a black background, "Loot" would sport a red background while "Objective" would have green. This may have been cheating, but I just applied a colorize filter to the black background to get the red and green that I wanted. In addition, the "Loot" font is one of the extra 3 fonts that came with the Zombie Mall font. I'm getting my $8 worth!

Lastly (for now) is a more comic book inspired layout thanks to a graphics app I got that probably does all kinds of things, but it has a 1-click button that applies a filter to give the image a nice comic book color palette. Part of the filter is just boosting the vibrance of the colors, but I still like the look.

Now I've uploaded and sent off another order to Hong Kong to get this last batch of cards printed - I like printed cards. They make me feel like I'm making a game with some substance. I know it's all in my head, but I don't care.

This last version is also what I'm using to put together the PDFs for the downloadable Print-N-Play version of the game. The cards will be laid out so that the back and front fold over at the top (thus forming the front and back). A lot of people just stick the folded paper/card into normal card sleeves and play with them without worrying about the hassle of printing on proper cardstock and trying to glue everything together perfectly.

My goal is to have a complete Print-N-Play version together by the end of the weekend. I have to put the card & token PDFs together, and that's mostly fiddling with a bunch of fine-tuning the placement of already made graphics on the page. Lots of graphics. There are 162 cards, and I can fit 3 cards (front and back) per page. I've also got 5 or 6 pages of tokens, but those aren't optimized as far as their layout yet so that number will probably go down.

54 pages of cards to layout and convert into PDFs. That might take longer than I think it does.

Permalink game dev zombie mall

Shuffling

03.09.2013

Today I've been moving board games around. I have a lot of board games and board game accessories. I got more for my birthday. Yesterday I picked up a new 6"x4" wireframe shelf to put in the bedroom closet to hold some of those games. In all actuality it's purpose is to hold the games that get played so infrequently that storing them in the bedroom closet won't be much of a big deal.

After 2 hours of screwing shelves together and moving games around, I'm done. I have a lot more free room in what has traditionally been my game closet. I have to make sure not to take that as a cue to go buy more games.

Part of the fun - I had to make some part of this fun - was trying to realistically pick out what would get played and what wouldn't. That's not to say that the "wouldn't" games will never get played. For those I'll either piddle around and figure out the rules myself, or maybe we'll get a wild hair to try something a lot different from what we normally play.

There were at least 3 games in the "wouldn't" pile that have been played before and have a real, real low chance of getting played again. I should try to sell those. I won't, because I hate selling stuff, but I should.

Now I'm going to take a break. Maybe watch some more of the 3rd season of Spartacus.

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Picture Playing

03.02.2013

I've been playing with graphics today. It's been a while since I just up and played. The first thing that I played around with until I got something that was "finished" was a new profile pic for my Facebook account.

I tend to put something goofy up for my profile pic, so the above worked out well. Most of the time I'm wearing the wrestling mask Brandon got for me on his trip to Mexico.

I was also playing around with a logo for the website I set up to host the Zombie Mall game and the plethora of games to follow. So far the name of the site will be Workshop Games (it's already changed twice before reaching a domain name, so who knows if I'll stick with this one). I had an epiphany Friday that the logo should have something to do with a workshop and dice, so I thought of a guy dressed kind of like a carpenter with a drill, and he would be drilling pips on a giant die.

The guy dressed like a carpenter never made it. Partly because I was doing this in Poser and I have no carpenter guys. I had the girl set up from an old game idea that never went anywhere, and she had the goggles that would fit a scene with some sparks so I just went from there.

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10 More Pounds

02.26.2013

So it's been 2 weeks since I mentioned my weight. Instead of reporting in every week with what could be a miniscule or awe-inspiring weight report, I decided to just pop in every 10 pounds. So the 1st 10 pounds took 1 week, the 2nd 10 pounds took 2 weeks. We'll see if the 3rd 10 pounds takes a month.

I've been sticking to my diet, mostly. I may have fudged on the carbs a couple of non-contiguous days. With the Phentarmine and paying attention to when my stomach says I'm hungry I generally eat 2 meals per day - lunch around 1:00 and dinner sometime between 5:00 and 8:00 depending on the day. If I'm not really hungry enough for dinner I just have a snack or some protein shakes (still drinking Muscle Milk, which isn't really low-carb friendly but I think the protein content is making up for it). I've also been sticking to my multivitamin and B12 every day. Part of why I skip breakfast may be the handful of pills I take in the morning, once you add in my blood pressure medicine and a couple of Aleve that helps keep my knees from hurting.

But progress. That's the key. The next step is to start back to at least a semi-regular exercise routine. I can walk from the parking lot at work to my desk without huffing, puffing, and thinking I'm about to pass out anymore. Dare I venture back to the treadmill at wellness center? More importantly, do I see if the bicycle tires can still hold air?

This could make for an exciting 10 pounds if I don't just sit around for a month.

But, to summarize:

---

Was: 437lbs.
Am: 417lbs.

Was: Having a hard time walking halfway in to work without stopping to catch my fat-ass full of breath.
Am: Successfully lugging my fat-ass all the way in to work without thinking I'm going to die.

Was: Actually kind of miserable, but I was trying to cover it up.
Am: Having a good day on average.

Permalink diet

I need to PRIORITIZE!

02.25.2013

I've reached another one of those points where I have too much to do, hobby-wise, at least if I sit down and try to do something without planning ahead of time. Here's what all I've got on my to-do list (which may be more of a "keeping me busy" list):

• Zombie Mall - this part I need to break down a little.
  • Rules update: I still have to get the rules ready for the next round of play testing. It was on my list of things to do over the weekend, but I decided to be lazy with Gina all weekend. It was then on my list of things to do today at work, where I expected it to be slow, but then I got busy tracking down database stuff. I just need to get this done so I can at least schedule the next test game.
  • New modular map: I'm not releasing my free game to the general public with a 30"x40" map to print out. The goal was always to have a modular map, so now I just have to break up the map. It's not a simple cut & paste, as some of the dimensions have changed to make the map modular-friendly.

• Unity 3D - it's been a long time since I played around with the old 3D game engine. It's time top get back to it. The bad part is that it's been long enough that I really need to start over from scratch with the tutorials I was working on. There are also a couple of bullets that fall beneath here.
  • Poser/Models - There's still 1 program I have to get in order to import the vast library of Poser models I have into Unity. $60 I've been putting off spending for 2 years. I've slowly gotten back into playing around with Poser over the past couple of weeks.
  • Unity 4 learning curve - Do I stick with the old version of Unity I have (if it will still install) or switch to the updated version? Any changes in the interface will have to be hunted down if I change, but the new version is supposed to automatically do some of that old, hard stuff for you. A qundry, that's what it is.

• Painting & Modelling - I've got even more paper craft buildings to put together now. Gaming figures, too, as I've been looking at the Dust Warfare rules and they're starting to look good to me. Tangentially, I glued together the War Rocket Imperial space ships Jerry got me for Christmas. Next I need to fill in some cracks with green stuff before priming and painting.
• The game after Zombie Mall - I started thinking about rules for a combat skirmish game about the same time I started working on the Zombie Mall rules. I've taken what I've learned from Zombie Mall and started the process of tweaking those original rules, which so far has meant throwing away 90% of what I had. The idea is still valid, so I still want to work on it and see if I can make 2 games that people would play!

All of it I want to do. I just get hung up on which to do first.

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