Multiversal Musings

The Steam Engine

I’m considering a long-running series for my YouTube channel. The basic idea is I spend five to ten minutes playing each game in my Steam library. That includes the games I never had any intention of playing even though I own them; various horror titles I picked up in indie bundles, mostly. Should be interesting…

Taking the Plunge

I own a Fraps license that has gone unused for far too long. I intend to change that. I’ll practice my recording technique on Terraria before diving into Minecraft adventure maps.

I have no illusions of becoming Interweb Famous, but if my friends and family get some enjoyment out of it, I’ve done my job.

Quick question for any Warmachine players out there. Should I dedicate myself entirely to one faction forever and ever the end? Or should I dabble in multiple factions, up to say 35 points? I ask because I wouldn’t mind getting more factions down the road, even if it’s just for my kids when they’re old enough to read the cards and do the math themselves. (And heck, maybe my wife too, once she doesn’t have to stay at home with the munchkins while Dad’s out having fun. I always feel a bit guilty about that; I mean, she’s as much of a gamer as I am.)

Mobile Frame Zero

So that Mobile Frame Zero project on Kickstarter? The one I mentioned a little while back? Well, it’s still got 12 days left on it and it just broke $45K. That’s 500% of the initial goal. It’s gotten so big, the guy who’s publishing it is frantically searching for a new printer so he can actually get enough books printed for everyone who’s contributed.

At this point, I’m highly tempted to take one of the worlds from the SpaceTime series and flesh it out into a setting capable of supporting a wargame like this. Call it Tyrona: Shattered Planet or something like that. It’ll be kind of interesting to delve a lot deeper into the conflict that has both affected and been affected by many of the series’ main characters.

And then I’ll have to come up with a suitably steampunk aesthetic for Jaemont. Cheelia’s high-tech look is pretty much covered. Though I think the “all-natural” units of Phytos may cause me more problems than Jaemont’s steampunk designs.

At least The Swarm is easy. They just use whatever they can steal or hijack from the other factions.

I could get into this project, actually.

Window shopping

So I went cruising over to the official Warmachine website to look at the various models I can pick up in the future to supplement my relatively meager starting force and OH HOLY CRAP THIS ONE HAS JUMP JETS

Well, I know what my next purchase will be for this game.

Another “on hiatus” project

Apologies to anyone expecting further progress on the Minecraft map I’ve been doing preliminary work on. Other things have intruded on my time.

Like Warmachine.

Because giant steampunk robots, that’s why.

Further bulletins as events warrant. In the meantime, I’ll be learning how to paint my minis so they don’t resemble the birdhouse I built and painted when I was 8.

Well and Truly Kickstarted

Okay, Kickstarter is awesome. I just thought I’d toss a few examples out there of exactly why this is true.

Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack

I found this thanks to Mike Rayhawk, creator of Brikwars (and awesome concept artist for Lego and other toy companies). It’s a tactical wargame where your scenery and units are all built out of Lego (or some other similar product, but let’s be honest, who uses Mega Bloks anyway?). The rulebook appears to include building instructions for the various robot designs, which is an excellent addition for someone who may want to maintain a unified look for their army.

Double Fine Adventure

If you follow video game news at all, you’ve already seen this page and the absolutely ridiculous dollar amount therein. The initial goal of $400k was shattered in short order, and the game went on to hit a million dollars in less than a day. As of this writing it’s sitting at $2.5 MILLION with 3 days to go. Because the epic team-up of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert should clearly not be wasted on a mere $400,000 game.

Five Iron Frenzy RETURNS

They set a goal of $30k.

The fans blew past that milestone in under 55 MINUTES. This project currently holds the Kickstarter record for Music projects.

Yeah, I’m excited too. I only regret not knowing about the project while you could still pay into it. Still, it’s going to be a day one purchase once the album releases.

Oh, and the OC Supertones are back, too!

As someone who’s been lamenting a lack of creative and energetic Christian rock music of late, I find this to be the rich, creamy icing on Five Iron’s chocolate cake. Two of my favorite bands reuniting after so many years, and so close together! At this rate I may not be able to whine about the dearth of good new music for much longer.

Video Game High School

If you’re not familiar with Freddie Wong, you probably aren’t even reading this blog anyway. He’s a huge hit on YouTube, creative and clever while still being a totally awesome fellow gamer geek. The series is currently in post-production, and I for one am looking forward to its release.

Crimson Hammer? More like PWNhammered.

I just soloed the Tier 1 version of the Spiral Knights DLC mission pack. I’m highly impressed with how well the story elements were infused into the missions, as well as how the levels were set up in such a way that you actually felt like you were making progress through the fortress, even as you were taking side treks to disable defenses.

Even as a T1 delve, it was tough for me to solo, even though I was perfectly geared for it (Nameless Combo, Grey Owlite Shield, AP and Sentenza). I didn’t die until the boss fight, and that dragged out a bit longer than it probably could have mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ll know better next time.

I’m really looking forward to running the T2 and T3 versions with my guildies.

Owning Your Possessions

I finally took the final plunge yesterday and modded my Kindle Fire with a custom UI.

What’s odd is that the one time I decided to jailbreak my iPod touch, I switched back shortly after. And I think I know why.

See, when you get an iPod, you’re accepting the implication that Apple will tightly control your user experience. But you also can be assured that the user experience they do provide will be a solid one.

Using a Kindle Fire was a completely different matter.

If you mainly intended to use it as a Kindle with an app here or a video there, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But if you’re trying to use it as an Android tablet (which, you know, it IS) the default UI starts to get in the way.

So I dropped Cyanogenmod 7 onto it and have been enjoying using my tablet much more than before.

I think this is because I like to own my devices. By which I mean that once I own a gadget, I believe I should be able to install whatever I want in order to make using the thing better. Specifically without the company that sold me the gadget telling me what I’m not allowed to do on their hardware. (And no, I’m not talking about anything illegal, sheesh.) Case in point was being restricted to Amazon’s app store before I rooted the Kindle, which was ridiculous considering the noticeably smaller selection of apps on Amazon compared to the Android Market. I can understand not providing the Market app on the Kindle when it ships, but blocking the competing Market app from even being used on the device? That’s telling me that I don’t own a gadget I spent my own money on.

Until recently, it was pretty much a given that when you bought something, you were given the right to use it as you saw fit. That’s just common sense. Unfortunately, that idea is slowly being pushed aside in favor of “convenience” and “anti-piracy”.

Untitled Adventure Map - Step 1: The Concept

After discussing the idea of working together with the other ELB guys to create an adventure map, it was clear what the core idea of our map would be: the player would be “shrunk” to microscopic proportions, basically half a “pixel” in height. FlashMan came up with the basic idea, and I started doing some concept work from there.

We came to the agreement that half a pixel (if by “pixel” you mean one square of the  16x16 block textures Minecraft uses by default) was an ideal size to scale the player down to, because a 64x64x64 “block” made for a reasonable “mini-dungeon” themed around one of the game’s functional blocks. And I’m just going to add some more “quotes” here because this paragraph doesn’t have “enough” of them already.

But anyway.

Moving from there, we figured that setting the story of the map in a lab made the most sense, and then I suggested that perhaps the shrinking wasn’t the result of an active experiment, but rather an accident that occurred during a teleportation experiment.

Sending the player into the Nether a moderate distance and then back out into the normal world a considerable distance away from the start point worked well on paper, but I didn’t see much of a point in messing with the Nether if the player wasn’t going to spend any length of time there. I’ll probably use a long minecart ride instead.

Next up: Macro-sizing the world.