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Showing posts from October, 2008

Fantastic Contraption

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT DO NOT PLAY FANTASTIC CONTRAPTION!!! It's highly addictive and will prevent you from doing other more important work like designing games of your own, posting in forums, feeding the dog or completing assignments. If you really do need to play this game, here's some ideas that I constructed to get through two of the tougher levels. http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=3681201 http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=3682060 But it's probably easier if you just forget that you ever saw this post.

New Sequential Art Project

I've started developing a project that links into one of my other hobbies...sequential art, commonly referred to as comics, but often encompassing a wide variety of media. There have been some ideas sitting in the back of my mind. Ideas that have festered for quite some time, like many of my game design ideas. I think I've hinted at a few of these ideas during previous entries of my blog, but I'm just too lazy at the moment to go back through them all and read what I may or may not have written. It's easier to just go forward with my plans and hope that if I'm repeating anything, then a subconscious and instinctive memory pattern will prevent me from making the same mistakes I might have made in the past. I've spent the last few nights generating some archetypal characters for a story, I'll have to see what I can do to load some of these images up to my photobucket account, or I might try to resubmit some work to Elfwood (though the images of characters don...

Dreams

Have you ever had one of those dreams that seems really symbolic at the time, you wake up getting the feeling that you really need to act on the subconscious messages contained within. I had one of those last night. Seeing people from my past, people who were apologising for actions they had done, while other members of my private history were telling me not to forgive them. I'm sure there could be a whole lot of things read into this dream. But I'm not sure if I want to...how much would be read into it and how much is actually a connection to a global subconscious dreamscape??

Rookwood

This morning I decided to take a quick drive around Rookwood Cemetery , the largest working cemetery in the southern hemisphere. This has caused me to revise some ideas for some concepts I've been working on. It's a common anthropological theory that funerals are a ritual for the living, not for the dead. Visiting graves is a similar concept that helps the closure of a persons life within the space of their cultural footprint. Those who are more influential within a family draw descendants to their graves, those who have a wider impact on the community (through fame, wealth or other influence) draw visitors to their final resting place beyond their families. Visiting the Chinese part of the cemetery was a truly interesting part of the journey. I don't know enough about the origins of chinese funeral rites (whether Buddhist or Taoist), but I do know that they believe in many hells. People are believed to spend time in these hells to atone for their sins in the mortal world, ...

Framework for New Website now works.

After encountering a mysterious glitch that stopped most of my pages from rendering on any web-browser other than Firefox 2, it now seem that new updated version of the Vulpinoid Studios website now works. As for some of the questions about why the website is currently designated version 2.2.0, that's pretty simple, but it goes back a while. To cut a long story short, I had a previous website in the late 1990's and early 2000's, I even had a domain name registered for it. The various iterations of that website fall under the category of the 1.X.X series of version numbers. You can probably still find copies of it on the wayback machine , or by googling Ukiyo Zoshi, which was one of my earlier game concepts that was run by a few German groups in the early 2000's and still seems to be used as a object of modification by some game designers. The 2.X.X series of version numbers represents my second serious web presence. Where versions 2.1.0 through to 2.1.6 were different i...

Site Upload Version 2.2.0

This afternoon I'm going to start uploading the new version of my website. vulpinoid studios I don't know how much of it will actually reach the web this afternoon. But hopefully the next day or two should see a revitalised presence for the Eighth Sea and my other games/projects. Fingers crossed..but I don't know how conducive listening to Ozzy Osbourne is to work...

Sydcon Debrief

It's been 8 years since I last attended a game convention in Sydney, it's surprising how many familiar faces are still around the scene...how many people recognised me...how old some of the crowd is starting to look. The Eighth Sea was run 7 times over the course of the convention to various degrees of success. I really have to accept the notion that no game can be for everyone. Some people really just don't get the concept, it's a bit different from the other games that are regularly seen at conventions and anything that deviates from the norm will either resonate more strongly with an individual player or it will just seem a bit off key compared to their regular playing style. I tried to play with the notion of restricting genre within the system to see how the game would play under a different series of constraints. 3 options...1950's Pulp Sci-Fi, Victoriana Steampunk, and Modern Dramatic Sci-FI (a la Stargate SG-1, Firefly, etc.), I threw in a fourth genre twoar...

Polyurethane Resin

Image
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on some more physical projects, and this has meant the blog has been put on hold a bit. But on the positive side, I've now got some new pictures to show what I've been doing... These are some coins and some Steampunk goggles I've been sculpting to go with some of the games I'm working on. The coins are designed to be used as meta-game currency in The Eighth Sea. The larger coins being used as "Pieces of Eight", which are used by players to purchase changes in the storyline. The smaller coins are use as Wind tokens, to modify difficulties within the game. At least that's the theory so far...I might end up swapping these two types of coin around depending on how well they play at Sydcon over this weekend. The goggles are for a number of purposes, but mostly just for use as a fun prop in Steampunk games. I'll be using them at Sydcon over the weekend, and hopefully they'll generate enough interest tha...