Litt’le Green Guys & Cat Spit

The 100+ degree weather meant I stayed inside most of the weekend. Actually, I normally stay in all weekend, unless the Wife makes me step outside and integrate with Humanity (which I of course strongly oppose). However, the idea of 100+ temperatures did mean I had a very good excuse for staying home most the weekend, and I used that time to work on the paper miniatures.

I now have 42 different miniatures (that’s 126 separate renders for those keeping count). I think that’s enough to sell, even though I haven’t included any robots or creatures in the collection. But since the supplement is called Cardboard Citizens (not Cardboard Robots and Creatures), I think that’s okay. I still need to arrange them though. I’ve been thinking about doing it by social class and then by race for the non-humans. Speaking of the latter, I did the Magna over the weekend and I’m happy with how they came out, especially in color. They’re muscular, green-skinned guys with horns so you can’t get much better than that!

Friday, I printed out one sheet of miniatures that I already had done and, with help from the Wife, put them together. Now I have a little army of 15 miniatures on my desk waiting to be devoured by the Cat. I’m going to be using them (or at least the ones not covered in cat saliva) when I run some combat scenarios later this week.

Toro! Toro!

I’ve come up with another playable race for the Destination: Rochan module. I’m calling them the Tor, based on the word Toro, meaning Bull. Basically they’re a race of minotaurs that live underground in intricate tunnel systems (ie: mazes). Since I had already talked about the other playable race, the Klixians, living underground, I decided to change that race to being above ground (since they are better suited for the radiation on the surface of Rochan).

As I was driving home, I started coming up with a back story for the two races: there’s a Tor myth about the planet, saying how it had once been a beautiful paradise before the Klixians laid it to waste, driving the Tor underground. However, there’s no scientific evidence that Rochan had ever been anything other than a wasteland to begin with, yet the Tor still blame the Klixians from robbing them of paradise. For their part, the Klixians view the Tor as filthy creatures, living in the dirt. As a result, the insect race is obsessed with cleanliness and has many rituals related to cleansing the body and soul.

This is all preliminary stuff, but it’s good to set some ground work for the expansion. I like the idea of having two new playable races, each in conflict with the other. It creates a good dynamic for adventures and fits in well with the underlying themes of the Imperium Chronicles.

Yay, I CAN be taught!

Since deciding to redesign my website, I’ve been relearning a lot about design. For example, if you choose to organize the page using a lot of tables, you can expect to be hunted down by the web police and burned at the stake. Tables are out; DIV tags and CSS are in. I knew a little about the latter, but next to nothing about the former so I’ve been teaching myself (slowly) for several weeks. Eventually, I heard a *ding* which either meant I had finally reached a critical mass of understanding or my microwave burrito was done.

So, this week I made some progress on the site design that didn’t make me want to jump out the window. In fact, over the last couple of days, I’ve even approached being “happy” about the results. It may not last, but at least I can enjoy some temporary satisfaction. Here’s a screenshot of a large graphic I'll be including on the main page. It’s not done and there’s still stuff to be added or changed, but I want to give some idea where I’m doing with it:

Meanwhile, the playtesting continues, but without a lot of progress. It’s nobody’s fault actually, but I’m worried about things that haven’t been tested yet. I’m thinking about putting out some more forum posts specifically for people to playtest the combat system since that’s the part that could be really bad if it’s not balanced properly. I’d hoped to be nearly done by now, but it’s looking like testing will go on into August for sure. Delays . . . Delays . . .

The Challenges of Change

Ironically, I didn’t end up using the picture I had in my last post. I chickened out and used the same original, but simply changed the hue to a different color. It looks nice too, but isn’t as stylized. Basically, I added images for the first couple of chapters over the weekend. After doing it, however, I realized that the ones in the Character chapter are going to shift because I still haven’t added the beginning prose. Blah! Seems like I’m always forgetting things -- maybe because there are so many things to remember!

On Sunday I started putting the miniature renders onto a single sheet (or at least as many as I could fit). Each sheet will have five rows with three different sets per row. One sheet will fill a regular page, meaning there’ll be 15 miniatures per page. I’m still planning to call the product Cardboard Citizens and I even mocked up a quick cover. I can’t say the cover knocks my socks off, but it’s only a draft for now.

For awhile I’ve thought about redoing the website. The problem is that I’ve got dozens of pages for the graphic novel and my short story, all based on the current design. To redo the site, I’d have to redo those also. That’s a lot of work, but I could put the stories back in later and just focus on the new pages designed to sell the game. It’s not ideal, and of course I could just keep the current design, but I wanted something new and hopefully more professional looking.

Breaking up the Wall of Text

Well, playtesting is slowly winding down so now I have to think about adding artwork to the game. Right now there’s already some, but it’s mostly boring stuff like pictures to go with creatures, robots, and starships. I need to add a lot more to make the game more visually appealing. Rules are a pretty boring to begin with (just ask my Editor), but by adding art I can at least break up some of the monotonous text.

I’ve already looked at my two online stories and grabbed some art from there, but I felt like they needed to be more unique, so I used some filters in Photoshop to freshen them up (see below for an example). I’m going to create brand new renders also, using my best friend: Poser 7. I haven’t done any big time renders since I finished Magnus Black over two years ago, so I don’t plan to get too complicated. Mostly I’m just going to create some scenes and maybe some portraits and see where that takes me.

Besides adding artwork, I also plan to create an index next month. I’m dreading it, because it’s an enormous pain in the ass. I’m guessing it will be a few pages long, but I’ll need to go through the entire 240-page document to pick out all the words to be indexed. I also have to wait until playtesting is basically done (ie: few if any changes left), otherwise I’ll have to go back and retag various indexed words. From a usability standpoint, however, it’s vital that I have an index, otherwise it’ll take people forever to find stuff in the game. In other words, by being a pain in my butt now, it’ll be less of a pain for players. Ultimately, I’ll have my revenge by forcing people to look at my hackneyed artwork. ;-)