(August 8th, 2008)
Posted by Will in Game design.
Hello again!
For me the hardest part of making games is shutting up all the ideas swarming around in my head so I can pay enough attention to pick one. No sooner do I start sketching out ideas for one game than another one pops up and convinces me I have to look into it, and as soon as I set pen to paper on that one a third leaps half designed out of nowhere demanding immediate consideration and recording lest it fade into the writhing mass once more never to be seen again!
One such idea that has been pointedly clearing it’s throat for a very long time is the one I will tackle for these articles and as a test of these new tools. I shall begin with a working title of Hovertank! and three pages of graph paper I have scrawled some ideas and a couple pictures on. I know I want it to be a tabletop miniatures game, that I want it to be a pretty fast play, and that I want it to incorporate papercraft models. So not only do I have to write it, I have to design some cut-fold-and-glue paper models and beg borrow or draw art to match those models. That should use a good mix of all the tools I have installed.
In the interests of disclosure and full honesty i am not starting this project completely from scratch. Sometime in High School I designed this game but was never happy with the way it came out. It was a lumbering hulk of a thing that owed a lot to Car Wars and other rules-tome era games and took the better part of a day to set up and play. I may use a very few ideas left over in the depths of my memory, but this version will, I hope, be unrecognizable to it’s older sibling.
Next up: My first set of tasks are to design the rules and to build prototype models with which to test them.
Some vaguely relevant links
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(August 1st, 2008)
Posted by Will in Game design.
Hello, this is the first installment in a series of articles about using old hardware and free software to design, write, and produce a finished tabletop game for PDF or print.
It’s going to be a rambling ride with false starts and backtracking because I will be learning as I go and writing as I learn, but we will get there eventually and I think i will show that it’s possible to create a product capable of slugging it out with the big boys without putting down thousands of dollars before you can even begin.
Here at the outset I am going to lay down a couple rules for myself. I will use free tools whenever possible and to stay as cheap as I can when it’s not. I won’t be pirating anything or trying to exploit loopholes in demo software, this will be all above board. I will do my best to produce as good a product as I can while keeping it as cheap as possible. And I will tell you when I do something fantastically stupid rather than sweeping it under the rug and trying to look cooler than I am. Sound fair? OK. let’s go!
Part 1: Tools of the trade.
I am going to assume for the purposes of this article that if you are going to follow along then you have access to power and some form of internet connection. Dialup or a nearby library can work or a coffee shop or other business that offers wi-fi. We will only need the internet to gather our initial software, to gather resources (such as art), and finally to publish our finished work.
Hardware
I got a Satellite 4090XDVD laptop for free when the IT department was liquidating old hardware. It came with Windows XP already installed which saved me the cost of a copy of Windows or the headache of making Linux work on a laptop. This particular model seems to sell for $100 to $150 on ebay and is pretty solid if not spectacular in the hardware department. So no expense so far but for those playing along at home a copy of Windows 98 seems to go for under $20 so you could catch up for about $180.
If you want to give up the convenience of a laptop and build a desktop instead you could get a much more powerful system for the same amount or less but for these purposes the only real advantage you will see is in disk size. hardware can be gotten from Ebay, www.weirdstuff.com, www.usedcomputerstore.com or any number of other places specializing in liquidated, refurbished, or otherwise unwanted computers. The value falls fast so there are good deals on perfectly serviceable systems out there.
You may want to consider adding a decent keyboard (free to $40) and mouse (free to $20) as laptop keyboards and tracking devices are not ideal for many jobs and can leave you all cramped up and damaged after a long day. Other useful things to consider might be a Wireless card (free to $20) so you can use cafe wireless, an Extra Monitor (free to lots) if you want a larger working area, and a USB drive ($5 to $20) to supplement the tiny hard drive your older laptop is likely to have.
Software
So far we should be coming in under $200, but that’s a decent sack of groceries or a lot of beer so we don’t really want to keep spending money at this point. Fortunately we get to really cheap out on software. Other than the aforementioned operating system everything we are going to add at this point is completely free.
We already talked about the OS and if you can get a serviceable one for almost nothing to nothing. I’m using the Windows install that was already on the system I got but I could have plopped down $20 for Win 98 and been up and running in no time. My personal experiences with Linux on laptops have been a big bucket of frustration but if you are willing to fight that out then more power to you, all the applications I have picked so far will work as well in that environment. Whatever OS you use try to resist installing all the bells and whistles. I had to go through and scrub out half of the installed software I would never use but that was taking up acres of hard drive space.
I chose AbiWord as a compromise between keeping the text editing simple and compact and wanting a few bells and whistles (like spell check and word count). You could stick to the built in text tools line notepad or wordpad on windows but in those two examples notepad was just a little to simplistic for my needs and I have had instances of having to completely re-edit files coming from wordpad due to unnecessary markup. AbiWord is fairly compact and can save as a plain text document that seems pretty universally acceptable.
Gimp was my choice as an image editor because no other free products seem as powerful. It’s a little dense getting into it, but as I understand it once you get used to it you can do anything you could do in Photoshop. If you are already entrenched in Photoshop there is a version called Gimpshop that mimics the interface so you will feel more at home.
For vector graphics Inkscape seems to be the only rival to Illustrator that anyone mentions. I like vector graphics for their sharpness and forgiving nature when you resize them all willy-nilly during the layout process and I will probably use vector for much of the non illustrative graphic elements.
Scribus is the open source answer to Indesign or Quark and seems like a solid alternative. Last time I tried to use it I was frustrated by some of it’s rough edges but it’s been developing for a while and I hear most of the issues I had then were resolved. One caveat here is to install Ghostscript before you install Scribus to save yourself a lot of trouble later.
After all this the luxurious 6gig hard drive is reduced to 2.31gigs. this could be better if I were using a more compact OS like a stripped down WIN98 or some flavor of Linux. A few megabytes could also be saved by dumping AbiWord and Inkscape, but The features they offer seem worth it to me. I avoided anything like IM software or other forms of communication as they can tend to be a time suck. In my opinion having a browser (Firefox by the way) is already dangerous enough but I do a lot of on the fly research so I may just get a site blocker of some kind to lock up my favorite time wasting sites. You may have a better work ethic than I do so go nuts… keeping in mind the dwindling hard drive space.
I also installed the Foobar2000 media player so I could listen to CDs or internet radio stations, like many people I work best with a bit of background noise and this particular media player is pretty compact and easy on the system resources.
Interesting to note is that all the programs I installed are available in portable versions at www.portablefreeware.com so you could eliminate needing a computer entirely and build your whole suite into a USB drive to do all your work at cafes, libraries, or at very understanding friends houses. But all in all having a computer of your own has a lot of advantages such as being able to work whenever you want.
After having that thought that I un-installed everything except Foobar (which is already portable) and Firefox and downloaded the portable versions. This reduced the available space to 2.29 gigs so maybe that’s not a good path for saving space… unless you want to leave all your apps on a USB key and just use the hard drive for the OS and files which is an interesting but possibly sub optimal way of approaching things. So an hour or so later the portable apps were gone and the regular ones were back leaving me with… 1.9 gigs… which is why I hate windows. So It was time to spend several hours going through the hard drive and manually deleting anything I don’t think I will need (this is a slightly dangerous maneuver and not for the faint of heart.) This got me up to 2.32gigs, a little better than when I started. I could reduce it further by removing all the help files, documentation, and other unused files but I’ll worry about that if space becomes critical. I also added WinSCP and PuTTY for connecting to shell accounts and getting files online without having to move them to another system first.
Finally I grabbed MemTest, StressPrime 2004 and CPU Stability test from http://www.portablefreeware.com to poke at the laptops hardware and see if there was a reason it was in the to be discarded pile. I have been getting a periodic crash as I have been writing this up and hopefully it’s not hardware related. Running these tests one by one and then all at once for nearly 24 hours sounds like a way to get a clear bill of health to me!
Next up: Get to work!
Useful links so far
Hardware
Wierdstuff: www.weirdstuff.com
Used Computer Store: www.usedcomputerstore.com
Software
AbiWord: www.abisource.com
The Gimp: www.gimp.org
Gimpshop: www.gimpshop.com
Inkscape: www.inkscape.org
Scribus: www.scribus.net
Ghostscript: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
Foobar2000: www.foobar2000.org
WinSCp: http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
Putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
MemTest: http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=986
StressPrime 2004: http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=335
CPU Stability test: http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=828
Portable apps in general http://www.portablefreeware.com
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(February 28th, 2008)
Posted by Will in General Blather.
Talking to someone online I had to ask if something was going to happen next year or the following year. In the course of asking the question I typed 2010.
2010
Freaking 2010! That’s the year Megaman 3 happens, it’s when Lisa Simpson gets married, it’s when the Zentradi destroy the surface of the earth forcing the last of humanity into space aboard the Macross! 2010 is the future!
And it’s only 2 years away!
This freaks me out a little bit… thank you for listening.
And because a post without a picture of some kind is boring…
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(February 24th, 2008)
Posted by Will in Playing with Clay.
So dear readers, here is the start of something I have been meaning to do for a while, a weekly clay sketch.
I am going to begin by making at least one little quick clay sculpture a week and maybe pick up the pace later. I may other weekly things too, maybe a drawing or comic.
Some background: I went to a hippy type experimental school as a kid called Open Classroom. Cuddled up against the hillside in a little valley community our hexagonal buildings with their Pods arranged by age were given the tools of learning and minimal guidance (to make sure we didn’t go completely Lord of the Flies I am sure). Given various Stations we were allowed to learn as we liked, moving from subject to subject based on a vague plan we would write up ourselves each morning then promptly ignore.
I am sure this was a great idea (and it continues to this day apparently) but for me it utterly failed to prepare me for the rest of my school career. After re-entering the mainstream educational system it took me the better part of a year to actually understand that I was supposed to be in a particular class at a particular time, a concept that still sits uneasily with me.
It did leave me with two very important things. A complete disregard for, and ignorance of, the times-tables (new math requires that I multiply in my head by adding up sets of imaginary blocks really quickly) and a deep love for the joys of modeling clay.
The clay stuck with me and I always keep some around to do little three dimensional sketches. When I had fewer demands on my time I would make entire little dioramas, then destroy them in a joyful apocalypse of recycling. The last few-to-many years have seen the box of clay get shoved further and further back on the shelf to gather dust, but NO MORE I draw my line in the sand and on this side I get to play with clay!
I sort of let the thing I am making just happen so no step by step “how I sculpt” guide here, maybe another time. For now here’s the first in a weekly series, some sort of little tank with a rocket launcher.
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(February 2nd, 2008)
Posted by Will in General Blather.
Still working at getting the RobotNest squared away so I Haven’t really gotten my hands on a soldering iron or anything for a bit. My Lightsaber parts and lowfi synth kit are staring at me with that -you never call, you never write- look.
Ah well soon, soon…
In the meantime here’s an update.
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(January 5th, 2008)
Posted by Will in General Blather.
So to start this year I have a bit of one of those stories where a fellow wants to get something done but first he needs a basket. He hasn’t got a basket so he needs to get a jar of honey to trade for one. He of course has no honey so he needs a two stroke motor in order to build a honey gathering device, and so on.
My version of this is a pile of exiting projects that have been backing up, but first I need someplace to work on them and all my tools and materials.
Enter project 1: The RobotNest!
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(January 2nd, 2008)
Posted by Will in General Blather.
Hi there, I am Will Robot and this is where I will document my projects, discoveries, and random endeavors as well as the more interesting things I come across in my wanderings that I feel need to be paid attention to.
Topics will include (but will not be limited to) Game Design, Writing, Experimental Music, Electronics Abuse, Giant Squid, Space Pirates, and Food that Should Not Be.
So shall we begin?
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