I’ll be out of town all this week attending Flash Gaming Summit and Game Developers Conference 2010. My lovely resident PHP expert will be looking into the Case of the Missing Comics while I’m gone.
This is a summary of my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition game, played with some friends from college over the internet using MapTool and Teamspeak.
When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon, Zekleinenezzar, who had taken over their town. They took refuge in an abandoned fortress overlooking the abandoned city of Decolay, which has been taken over by kenku, goblins, and possibly other forces. They returned from a trip to the dream world to find kobold worshipers of the dragon making advances on the fortress.
The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner; he is branded Etzlojek the Traitor by the attacking kobolds
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard with a penchant for shapechanging spells
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to have vampire heritage
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.
This is level five.
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I may or may not be heading out in a few minutes to drive across snow-covered Charlotte to do the first character-creation session for the Geist: the Sin-Eaters LARP I’ll be running. Designing for LARP is very different than designing for tabletop or for a digital game; it’s really more about logistics than creativity.
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I made a Twitter account today. Username GregoryWeir. It will likely be a mix of personal and game-related tweets. Bear with me as I get the hang of yet another new service (new to me, anyway).
For those of you who have played my game Exploit and wanted a better way to create and share levels, you’re in luck! The flash game site Platogo has just launched, and Exploit is one of its initial games! Platogo’s got a neat developer API that allows, among other things, level creation and sharing. You can make levels, rate them for quality and difficulty, comment on them, and generally do all sorts of social stuff. There’s even a leaderboard for each user level ranking how fast you complete it, and a global leaderboard for how many user levels you’ve finished.
Play Exploit on Platogo to check out these new features.
(My August game is delayed. I’m still working on it.)
In the process of working on my next game, I found myself in need of a particular photo editing effect: torn paper, as if an image has been ripped out of a magazine and glued in place. I found an excellent method for the image editor I use, the GIMP, but it requires several steps. The solution? Script-fu! I haven’t coded in Scheme in forever, but it was relatively straightforward to put together a new filter.
Save it to your GIMP scripts directory, which will be ~/.gimp-2.6/scripts/ (or something like C:\Users\Gregory\.gimp-2.6\scripts for Windows users). The filter will be added to the end of your Filters menu. To use, just make a selection of any shape, make sure the layer you want to tear out is active, and go to Filters->Torn Paper. The filter will make a new layer with the torn out piece on it.
This filter allows you to make images like the one above. Cool, huh?
Looks like Silent Conversation, my latest game, will be out next week. I’ll post when it’s released!
This podcast episode is about three games that should have been named Half-Life 3: Episode 1, Unreal Tournament 4, and Star Wars Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast: Jedi Academy.
My latest article has gone up over at GameSetWatch. It’s called “Layered Gameplay in Disgaea,” and it’s about how that game lets you get as in-depth as you want with character and gameplay customization.
