Well, sort of.
It has to be said that I have not been busier than I have been in the last couple of weeks for a long while. The up side of this is that I am feeling really positive about the work that I am doing. The down side is that no one is, as yet, paying me for my work. But then it has only been about a week that I've engaged in such activity so early days yet.
I guess this does leave me with something of a quandary. I will need some income eventually, after all. The thing is I am finding that I have more energy and do more useful work when I'm not actually, you know, going to work.
I'm finding the removal of the salary safety net has had, paradoxically, the opposite effect than one would expect on my mood and outlook. I just hope that someone would like to retain my services before I have to return to the haven of being someone else's employee.
The other thing that's been really good is that I have met lots of other self-employed people who do a staggering number of different things and meeting these people is far more interesting than going into a work place and meeting people who are employed by the same employer as you. People, on the whole, are usually interesting for one reason or another, but people who are pulling their own weight and going their own way in life are just more interesting in and of themselves, or maybe it's just novelty.
Before I go I should draw your attention to the new link on the top right to my new freelance services page. I hope to expand this with case studies and examples shortly but it is there and available, that is the main thing.
(By the way, hope everyone is getting along with the new look. Let me know.)
Showing posts with label plans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plans. Show all posts
5 November 2014
4 July 2014
Assassin's Creed III - Vision vs. Reality
Kotaku is, obviously, following the chequered alt-history of the Assassin’s Creed franchise as it stumbles from episode to episode trying to give the players what they want. It hasn’t always worked out, as the largely negative reaction to Assassin’s Creed III demonstrated.
There’s been some early speculation about the anticipated awesomeness of this year’s AC:Unity which I shall be commenting on anon. However the article telling us all the things that would be awesome in Unity made the mistake of linking to a previous article that told us all the things that would be awesome with ACIII.
Some of these features were there, but not really all that awesome either way; some were not there, but nearly there and this article just seems to highlight how not awesome the finished product is in comparison to the brash assurances of the pre-finish dev team; or just not even there at all in the end and hence a bit irrelevant, leading to the obvious question “why lie?”
Before we go any further I should point out that I ended up rather enjoying ACIII, although the story team had been given, maybe, way too loose a leash and ended up in a self-indulgent land called “The Land of Let’s Do Things In A Video Game Story That People Never Do In Video Game Stories”.
Unfortunately their excursion deep into this dark continent did not produce a clever, immersive story that thrilled its way to an epic conclusion. Instead it produced a lumpy, slightly pretentious, difficult but ambitious story that was lovable but, tragically, hard to love.
I provide this short list of gripes about promise versus reality as a counterpoint both to the giddy anticipatory tone of the linked article but also as a counterpoint to a similar article looking forward to the next major chapter in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, comments on which will follow shortly. In the end I just find it curious that a laundry list of broad general aims can have been missed in so many different ways. The first and most obvious misdirect in the linked article is a simple picture of Connor in a canoe.
Connor never uses a canoe in ACIII. Aveline uses a canoe in Liberation but the code and whatnot never made the transition. I can kind of forgive this, the canoe stuff in the bayou wasn’t really all that fantastic and there was no real point to it honestly. Still, it seems strange that as they had an engine lying about for it that they didn’t just shove it in.
Except, of course, most memorable bodies of water in the game were rivers and maybe the physics of white-water canoeing just weren’t feasible. It is a great shame because being able to leave the reservation at the beginning by canoe instead of hoofing it across the unmapped frontier would have been pretty cool. Also it might have made more fast travel options possible.
In the rest of the article there are a few more things that are just plain wrong, many are trivial but then you get the odd one like:
Nor, indeed, do they ever, because I never once encountered ice. Snow, yes, loads of bloody terrible snow, but ice, I believe it is possible that ice maybe never made it into the game? Not sure. At the very least it would appear that if you wanted to use the ice mechanic, if such exists, you will need to seek it out. A quick google reveals that no-one particularly has.
This is most probably because wading through snow was one of the most irritating frontier experiences of ACIII. Winter on the Eastern Seaboard was no fun at all. I get that I was supposed to be tarzanning my way through the trees but the environment did not always support that. Indeed that whole aspect existed and was pretty good fun but when it comes to statements like this:
This points to a place where there was such fail, much desultory, terrible fail. I don’t know whether this was because of my mistrust of the enemy AI but I always assumed that if I picked off a guy in a column of redcoats from the trees the AI engine would have all the others see me, start shooting me etc. Maybe I’m wrong. Trees, though, are not stalking zones. You aren’t hard to spot up there, at all. Maybe if they had introuduced the idea of a tree-level stalking zone this would have worked a lot better.
(IMPORTANT NOTE: Of course, to date I have not actually tried to do this. I may pop the disc in over the weekend, head off to the frontier and see what happens... I will, of course, report back here.)
I can actually see the mechanics now. Tree level stalking zones, vantage points for clear visibility and swing/climb only zones, making a forest canopy fun zone from which you can take out the guys below.
Of course, then you’d have to tweak the enemy AI. You’d have to program these guys so when you took out the first one they huddled and grouped. Scanning the forest for signs of your approach. Then once you’d managed to pick off a couple more they would scatter. Many panicking running off through the trees, another couple trying to watch one another’s backs. What would be even better there would be if, in their panick, they got turned around, running in circles. Then you drop in or whatever and pick them off. Alternating high stalking zones with low, dividing, conquering, becoming one with the forest.
Needless to say, none of this is the case. You can clumsily slaughter a bunch of soldiers, you can run across pre-determined canopy obstacle courses and, as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, you can stalk to a degree. But it’s nothing like the stated aim of the development team.
I had to loose a chuckle when I continued on to read:
But then the rope dart was pretty much just that in the finished product. You could lose them, and they made a mess of hunting kills, but they were pretty fantastic in their operation. They were a fun weapon, ruined partially by the unimaginative way the enemy AI reacted to them e.g. you could rope one sucker but then a sword fight was bound to follow.
The Batman: Arkham series did a much better job of this stuff, building in a panic aspect to enemies, so they changed their behaviour when they knew you were near. So I know such a thing is possible. It just seems like a lot of fluff in a game when it’s added with no real consequence.
Finally, there was this gem:
Ahem, yeah, whatever. I never zipped through an upstairs room, I did see women in second story windows but in forty hours of game play I never got the impression that they, you know, did anything other than provide scenery. I did occasionally trigger a ground floor cut-through, but never in an actual chase. The mechanic was definitely there (at least on the ground floor) but ultimately not useful for much.
The problem here is the old “accidentally run up a wall” thing that has always been the unpleasant side effect of the parkour mechanics. As a seasoned AC player during a chase you attempt to do precisely nothing that will lead to your assassin accidentally running up a wall by accident, bouncing off an unclimbable arch and hastily drawn into combat that you really just wanted to avoid.
Over the franchise’s development time the notion of running away almost seems to have become more and more shameful to the development team. In ACI the whoosh of the successful escape signal was as much of a victory as slaughtering a dogpile of city guards. Over time it’s come to feel more and more like a sort of grudging shrug as the game puts away its fighting mechanics and slopes off into the background again.
Overall the reasons one might eventually end up liking ACIII are nothing to do with these supposed innovations many of which were half-baked or simply non-existent. As to why, despite these misdirects, I did like ACIII is a topic for another day.
All images are (c) Ubisoft of course and are used for illustrative purposes.
There’s been some early speculation about the anticipated awesomeness of this year’s AC:Unity which I shall be commenting on anon. However the article telling us all the things that would be awesome in Unity made the mistake of linking to a previous article that told us all the things that would be awesome with ACIII.
Some of these features were there, but not really all that awesome either way; some were not there, but nearly there and this article just seems to highlight how not awesome the finished product is in comparison to the brash assurances of the pre-finish dev team; or just not even there at all in the end and hence a bit irrelevant, leading to the obvious question “why lie?”
Before we go any further I should point out that I ended up rather enjoying ACIII, although the story team had been given, maybe, way too loose a leash and ended up in a self-indulgent land called “The Land of Let’s Do Things In A Video Game Story That People Never Do In Video Game Stories”.
Unfortunately their excursion deep into this dark continent did not produce a clever, immersive story that thrilled its way to an epic conclusion. Instead it produced a lumpy, slightly pretentious, difficult but ambitious story that was lovable but, tragically, hard to love.
I provide this short list of gripes about promise versus reality as a counterpoint both to the giddy anticipatory tone of the linked article but also as a counterpoint to a similar article looking forward to the next major chapter in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, comments on which will follow shortly. In the end I just find it curious that a laundry list of broad general aims can have been missed in so many different ways. The first and most obvious misdirect in the linked article is a simple picture of Connor in a canoe.
 |
| *Canoes not included. |
Except, of course, most memorable bodies of water in the game were rivers and maybe the physics of white-water canoeing just weren’t feasible. It is a great shame because being able to leave the reservation at the beginning by canoe instead of hoofing it across the unmapped frontier would have been pretty cool. Also it might have made more fast travel options possible.
In the rest of the article there are a few more things that are just plain wrong, many are trivial but then you get the odd one like:
There is some sort of system involving ice, possibly involving hiding below it to ambush troops, but the developers aren't getting specific about it yet.
Nor, indeed, do they ever, because I never once encountered ice. Snow, yes, loads of bloody terrible snow, but ice, I believe it is possible that ice maybe never made it into the game? Not sure. At the very least it would appear that if you wanted to use the ice mechanic, if such exists, you will need to seek it out. A quick google reveals that no-one particularly has.
 |
| Mmm... Connor loves snow. Press O to build a snowman in this winter wonderland. Lies. |
"Our goal with the assassin was to make him as capable in the wilderness as Ezio and Altair were in cities, to do this for a forest," [the game's creative director, Alex] Hutchinson said. "For us, trees are 3D navigable space. You'll be able to go up trees, along that branch level, moving around. Some of the early fantasies we were talking about—it's fun to reference movies to get the team to paint a picture in their mind-if you think of the Predator, the original movie, not being [Arnold Schwarzenegger's soldier character] but being the Predator and the Redcoats being Arnie and [his] guys. This unseen force picking them off one-by-one from the trees? This is what we wanted. We want you to be a terrifying force of nature in that spot."
This points to a place where there was such fail, much desultory, terrible fail. I don’t know whether this was because of my mistrust of the enemy AI but I always assumed that if I picked off a guy in a column of redcoats from the trees the AI engine would have all the others see me, start shooting me etc. Maybe I’m wrong. Trees, though, are not stalking zones. You aren’t hard to spot up there, at all. Maybe if they had introuduced the idea of a tree-level stalking zone this would have worked a lot better.
(IMPORTANT NOTE: Of course, to date I have not actually tried to do this. I may pop the disc in over the weekend, head off to the frontier and see what happens... I will, of course, report back here.)
 |
| Yeah, that's right biznatches I am your hidden doom and... NO! Don't look up! That's not fair *cries* |
Of course, then you’d have to tweak the enemy AI. You’d have to program these guys so when you took out the first one they huddled and grouped. Scanning the forest for signs of your approach. Then once you’d managed to pick off a couple more they would scatter. Many panicking running off through the trees, another couple trying to watch one another’s backs. What would be even better there would be if, in their panick, they got turned around, running in circles. Then you drop in or whatever and pick them off. Alternating high stalking zones with low, dividing, conquering, becoming one with the forest.
Needless to say, none of this is the case. You can clumsily slaughter a bunch of soldiers, you can run across pre-determined canopy obstacle courses and, as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, you can stalk to a degree. But it’s nothing like the stated aim of the development team.
I had to loose a chuckle when I continued on to read:
Connor has a rope dart that he can use to hang people from trees with. It's more of a lure than a projectile weapon. An earlier, more aggressive version was more of tethered knife that was thrown from a standing position and then reeled in. "It felt too fantasy, " Hutchinson said. "It started to feel like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat."
But then the rope dart was pretty much just that in the finished product. You could lose them, and they made a mess of hunting kills, but they were pretty fantastic in their operation. They were a fun weapon, ruined partially by the unimaginative way the enemy AI reacted to them e.g. you could rope one sucker but then a sword fight was bound to follow.
 |
| Oh goodie... I've managed to provoke yet another un-stealthy bloodbath... |
Finally, there was this gem:
The highlight of the Boston section is what is called a chase-breaker. Connor has barged past some Redcoat guards, who give chase. What would be a standard run through an Assassin's Creed city's street changes radically when a woman in a second-story window opens some shutters to breath in the fresh air. Connor, clambering over a stall in the middle of the road, turns 90 degrees to his right and runs through the open window, shocking the woman. He zips through the interior of her house and out the window on other side, losing his predecessors in one of the coolest moments an Assassin's Creed development team has ever shown to the press.
Ahem, yeah, whatever. I never zipped through an upstairs room, I did see women in second story windows but in forty hours of game play I never got the impression that they, you know, did anything other than provide scenery. I did occasionally trigger a ground floor cut-through, but never in an actual chase. The mechanic was definitely there (at least on the ground floor) but ultimately not useful for much.
The problem here is the old “accidentally run up a wall” thing that has always been the unpleasant side effect of the parkour mechanics. As a seasoned AC player during a chase you attempt to do precisely nothing that will lead to your assassin accidentally running up a wall by accident, bouncing off an unclimbable arch and hastily drawn into combat that you really just wanted to avoid.
 |
| Eyes front, avoid the walls... avoid the walls... OOOH Pretty wall! (attempts to scale, gets shot, desync) |
Overall the reasons one might eventually end up liking ACIII are nothing to do with these supposed innovations many of which were half-baked or simply non-existent. As to why, despite these misdirects, I did like ACIII is a topic for another day.
All images are (c) Ubisoft of course and are used for illustrative purposes.
4 March 2014
Normal? Service Will Be Resumed...
I live in Wales.
I still haven't racked up more than four days on the trot yet, the downstairs of my house is full of boxes and laundry (and boxes of laundry) and light on furniture, but the fact is inescapable. Not that there aren't signs of domesticity. I think that getting the bedroom into a decent state (or close to at least) has been essential. Also, while waiting for the arrival of the "Sofa of Destiny", we have furnished my little upstairs cubby hole, this serves as "Lounge (2)" for the time being.
So, hopefully my plans to return to the keyboard a bit more regularly in 2014 will soon be in a position to be realised. Right now I have to go to another keyboard where I shall continue to wrap my head around Microsoft MVC. Later, clearing space for the Sofa of Destiny.
I still haven't racked up more than four days on the trot yet, the downstairs of my house is full of boxes and laundry (and boxes of laundry) and light on furniture, but the fact is inescapable. Not that there aren't signs of domesticity. I think that getting the bedroom into a decent state (or close to at least) has been essential. Also, while waiting for the arrival of the "Sofa of Destiny", we have furnished my little upstairs cubby hole, this serves as "Lounge (2)" for the time being.
So, hopefully my plans to return to the keyboard a bit more regularly in 2014 will soon be in a position to be realised. Right now I have to go to another keyboard where I shall continue to wrap my head around Microsoft MVC. Later, clearing space for the Sofa of Destiny.
20 September 2012
Getting Things Done
The last couple of days have been particularly productive. CS1: The Silent Majority has come out of editing and is awaiting my typographical and artistic skills to put together a beta package for my ever-so-kind beta readers.
I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.
I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.
That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.
I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.
I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.
I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.
That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.
I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.
5 July 2011
Chance Would Be A Fine Thing
Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.
They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.
We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.
On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.
I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.
They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.
We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.
On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.
I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.
23 September 2010
Back In The Saddle
So yes.
Been a while. A good while. Those of you who have been following the continuing saga of No Dice will know that I've been putting all my effort into what I shall now dub "No Dice Phase I". No Dice Phase I consists of: The Core Book, Random Encounters, Levercastle, Shadow Cities and PULP RP and represents a full cycle of work.
If No Dice has any BIG IDEAS trust me most of them are in this Phase I. Sure there are plenty more ideas in Dreamtime Stories and Marauders and so on. But these are all derived from the BIG IDEAS in Phase I.
No ideas are bigger in this phase than the ideas behind PULP RP, the last publication in the series which is what I am getting down to now.
So that's what I've been up to. The other main piece of news is that I have acquired an eBook, which has swiftly become a great boon. I have been able to catch up on my reading as I prefer PDFs to regular published books. It's been great. I shall soon be returning to my duties as a POD book reviewer as I've chewed through so many books in the last fortnight that I shall no longer feel horrendously guilty for not reviewing things people send me in a reasonable amount of time.
Currently submissions are closed. But when they are open, be assured, you will know.
I think that's all for now. I'd better go and see if Sue's Sim 3 is now working as it was having memory issues.
Been a while. A good while. Those of you who have been following the continuing saga of No Dice will know that I've been putting all my effort into what I shall now dub "No Dice Phase I". No Dice Phase I consists of: The Core Book, Random Encounters, Levercastle, Shadow Cities and PULP RP and represents a full cycle of work.
If No Dice has any BIG IDEAS trust me most of them are in this Phase I. Sure there are plenty more ideas in Dreamtime Stories and Marauders and so on. But these are all derived from the BIG IDEAS in Phase I.
No ideas are bigger in this phase than the ideas behind PULP RP, the last publication in the series which is what I am getting down to now.
So that's what I've been up to. The other main piece of news is that I have acquired an eBook, which has swiftly become a great boon. I have been able to catch up on my reading as I prefer PDFs to regular published books. It's been great. I shall soon be returning to my duties as a POD book reviewer as I've chewed through so many books in the last fortnight that I shall no longer feel horrendously guilty for not reviewing things people send me in a reasonable amount of time.
Currently submissions are closed. But when they are open, be assured, you will know.
I think that's all for now. I'd better go and see if Sue's Sim 3 is now working as it was having memory issues.
13 January 2010
2010: The Year We Got Busy
I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.
The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.
Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.
We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.
Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!
2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?
P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.
The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.
Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.
We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.
Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!
2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?
P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.
8 December 2009
Of Monsters And Magnets
Quick one today. I'm going to reclaim my lunch hour to get some Dreamtime Stories stuff done for this weekend's session. After all the harping on about how difficult magic is in RP this magic system seems to have sprung, unbidden, from my mind and is looking like making pretty cool RP.
The only thing I have a slight issue with is that each type of magic needs an associated circular geometric design. That's a lot of geometry.
Anyhow. It occurs to me that yesterday I said nothing about the Monster Magnet gig that I went to on Saturday. Quite by chance RP Matt got in touch and asked if anything was happening and news of a Monster Magnet gig piqued his interest. Sue graciously handed her +1 status over to Matt so Matt and I got in on the guest list.
The opening act was an instrumental metal group. They weren't bad but they weren't sufficiently beyond riffing to make their prog metal designs work. Monster Magnet were chuffing excellent. All you could imagine a psychedleic metal band confident in their abilities to be.
Mrs has an issue with the fact that they're mostly old enough to be her dad but hey, what I say is if you can raise hell then whyever not?
Just a mini-blast today because the allure of the dreamtime is calling. Enjoy Tuesday!
The only thing I have a slight issue with is that each type of magic needs an associated circular geometric design. That's a lot of geometry.
Anyhow. It occurs to me that yesterday I said nothing about the Monster Magnet gig that I went to on Saturday. Quite by chance RP Matt got in touch and asked if anything was happening and news of a Monster Magnet gig piqued his interest. Sue graciously handed her +1 status over to Matt so Matt and I got in on the guest list.
The opening act was an instrumental metal group. They weren't bad but they weren't sufficiently beyond riffing to make their prog metal designs work. Monster Magnet were chuffing excellent. All you could imagine a psychedleic metal band confident in their abilities to be.
Mrs has an issue with the fact that they're mostly old enough to be her dad but hey, what I say is if you can raise hell then whyever not?
Just a mini-blast today because the allure of the dreamtime is calling. Enjoy Tuesday!
10 September 2009
Okay so...
It's definitely been a while but I think given that I had a wedding to help organise I can be forgiven. Also I fell victim to the usual August malaise that seems to affect everyone. Having said that we punted out a couple of podcasts and got some RP done even despite this.
It's only the poor old blog that seems to be suffering. I have to say that it hasn't really been a time for profound thought, or indeed even interesting thought. Mostly I've just been getting through stuff and ploughing ahead.
Mrs, myself, the doodler and another friend have all booked and paid for our places at the upcoming games weekend organised by a friend in the wilds of Derbyshire. The experience is unfailingly a complete escape from reality for a few days. I myself have never experienced the specially extended version of the weekend that goes from Wednesday night all the way through to Monday morning but I imagine the sense of reality dislocation is going to be the most intense it's ever been.
The good thing about that is that you come back to real life suffused with the feeling that you have actually experienced a Narnia-esque amount of time in a parallel dimension. The bad thing is that the reality shock sucks really really bad.
Still, the highs of such an experience are way in excess of the lows, so bring it on!
The cat has been to the vets for a little family unplanning and is staggering around the house with stiches in her side and one of those funny collars on. It has to stay there for ten days. It's quite upsetting because we're used to her leaping about the place full of beans and looking, well, like a cat. Now she's trying to be energetic, but also trying to ditch the collar and the stitches appear to have had more of an impact than she'd like to admit.
I'm looking forward to ten days time when she might start, once more, to look more like our cat.
We're having a board game session tonight followed by the Season 2 finale to our Over the Edge campaign on Saturday. So for the next five weeks life looks set to be fairly normal.
I guess I can cope with that.
It's only the poor old blog that seems to be suffering. I have to say that it hasn't really been a time for profound thought, or indeed even interesting thought. Mostly I've just been getting through stuff and ploughing ahead.
Mrs, myself, the doodler and another friend have all booked and paid for our places at the upcoming games weekend organised by a friend in the wilds of Derbyshire. The experience is unfailingly a complete escape from reality for a few days. I myself have never experienced the specially extended version of the weekend that goes from Wednesday night all the way through to Monday morning but I imagine the sense of reality dislocation is going to be the most intense it's ever been.
The good thing about that is that you come back to real life suffused with the feeling that you have actually experienced a Narnia-esque amount of time in a parallel dimension. The bad thing is that the reality shock sucks really really bad.
Still, the highs of such an experience are way in excess of the lows, so bring it on!
The cat has been to the vets for a little family unplanning and is staggering around the house with stiches in her side and one of those funny collars on. It has to stay there for ten days. It's quite upsetting because we're used to her leaping about the place full of beans and looking, well, like a cat. Now she's trying to be energetic, but also trying to ditch the collar and the stitches appear to have had more of an impact than she'd like to admit.
I'm looking forward to ten days time when she might start, once more, to look more like our cat.
We're having a board game session tonight followed by the Season 2 finale to our Over the Edge campaign on Saturday. So for the next five weeks life looks set to be fairly normal.
I guess I can cope with that.
5 August 2009
The Glorious British Summer
Well, after a week off resting it's taken me about two days back in the cut and thrust of every day life to feel like I need another holiday. The silly season is well underway now, dead buses in the morning and a general apathy in just about everyone.
Ironically we have been doing quite a bit of role playing at this time. Polishing off one off play testing, exploring a hack or two. Yup, no slackness here on that front. I'm starting to think that the time to compile all of our endeavours is not long off...
I can't help but notice the insistent rain. I wonder if this will drive people back to their PCs and hopefully help revive the forum.
Ironically we have been doing quite a bit of role playing at this time. Polishing off one off play testing, exploring a hack or two. Yup, no slackness here on that front. I'm starting to think that the time to compile all of our endeavours is not long off...
I can't help but notice the insistent rain. I wonder if this will drive people back to their PCs and hopefully help revive the forum.
16 February 2009
Prologue Time
Well, it's games weekend week. So I currently feel like I'm already living through a prologue to the real business of the week. Leave aside the fact that the weekend brought an absolute avalanche of tasks into view for Mrs Monkey, the Doodler and myself to contend with. We started looking through the Nottingham What's On, moved on to the UK Roleplayers event calendar and ended up with a calendar packed chock full of stuff for us to do.
If half of the plans we're trying to put into operation are going to come off we're going to be heinously busy this year but that's what comes of starting a business with no money. You have to put in some kind of expense and all we've got to spend is time and energy.
The good news is that the website is up and searchable, I'm not handing out the domain name as yet because we haven't got all our tubes connected properly. Believe me once we have full web diversion and all that jazz I'll be ramming it all down your throat. I would tell you the site was searchable, but it's not because I just tried to search Google for it and it's not there.
Not that there's much point in worrying about all this until after the Games Weekend anyway. We won't even be available for comment sequestered in a huge old chapel building in Derbyshire.
Mrs, The Doodler and myself are all putting a lot of eggs and, ha ha, No Dice into this basket. We're hoping it all pays off.
If half of the plans we're trying to put into operation are going to come off we're going to be heinously busy this year but that's what comes of starting a business with no money. You have to put in some kind of expense and all we've got to spend is time and energy.
The good news is that the website is up and searchable, I'm not handing out the domain name as yet because we haven't got all our tubes connected properly. Believe me once we have full web diversion and all that jazz I'll be ramming it all down your throat. I would tell you the site was searchable, but it's not because I just tried to search Google for it and it's not there.
Not that there's much point in worrying about all this until after the Games Weekend anyway. We won't even be available for comment sequestered in a huge old chapel building in Derbyshire.
Mrs, The Doodler and myself are all putting a lot of eggs and, ha ha, No Dice into this basket. We're hoping it all pays off.
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