I’ve opted to start making some silly cosmetic uses out of the custom fields functionality made available by WordPress, namely a little ‘current mood’ end-of-post blurb featuring a tiny little ‘me’ graphic. I used the following page as an example when it came to making the necessary theme tweaks and it makes for a fairly good introduction into the use of custom fields.

So far, these are the mood (or non-mood ‘status’) graphics I’ve had a chance to make:

-Tom

Run away!

I don’t work well in Summer, heat gets to me and makes my brain turn into angry mush but overall I’ve been having a weird ‘ho hum’ kinda day today so I’m goings to blurb myself into a stupor…

Rediscovering Magic: The Gathering

Duels of the Planeswalkers launched fairly recently on Steam along with the first DLC pack for it. Magic was something I very briefly collected but never really had very many people to play against and wasn’t inclined to seek out official tournaments or groups and it was something I briefly tried to court again when WotC modernised it in the wake of what the Pokemon CCG did to the market, which presumably depended on your angle… To me, it appeared that MTG just kinda vanished behind the sparkling anime. I remember the Harry Potter equivalent which I have to admit/confess holding a like for but that never blazed quite so brightly.

A long story short, I’m quite impressed by this digital offering and M:TG on-line in general. I’m almost tempted to start collecting the cards themselves. The digital table is beautiful, with wondrous animation and emulation of play.

Painter 11 acquired…

It’s a pretty daring leap ahead for me and makes ArtRage Studio Pro a little defunct (Though I foresee potential areas where it may be handy or manage work better… I enjoyed ArtRage and I highly recommend it, it is worth the money.) though it will take a bit of time to get settled with Painter. I’ve taken up a subscription with ImagineFX as part of my journey and will be indulging in issues of the official Corel Painter magazine. My aim is to work through tutorials and workshops between the two whenever I get the time. Most of my work in Painter 11 will be for Anno Geometrica and The Steamshaft Chronicles, I hope to be able to share that progress (and the learning that went into it) with you every now and again.

Steam Summer Sale

It just made my bank account it’s bitch. I’ve picked up a few games I was planning or pondering a purchase of prior to the sale and gifted a fair few to Nicola or friends. Some real bargains popping up on 24hr cycles not to mention the longer duration savings off large swathes of the Steam catalogue.

-Tom

That is all.

A little bit after work on the forum.travian.in staff bars I was approached by the lovely Faith (MH manager & forum mod) and tasked with creating a set for forum.travian.no which has a slightly smaller team and some small variances in role. In some way the resulting bars are a combination of the .in work and the much, much earlier bars for .co.uk staff (and users), being less extravagant than the .in theme but retaining a fancier bar design and taking up the shields that are familiar to .co.uk users. As a matter of interest, that simple shield was first made as part of some ideas I had for another browser game called Dawn of Myth… I think it still functions in some form but hasn’t really gone anywhere development wise for years, in which time is has bored/scared off pretty much all the community it once attracted.

Version 1

Requested edits after that were a red bar for the overall game server admin, and a short time after they were implemented there was a request for Norsk characters on the Translator and Operator bars…

Version 1 w/ Modified Game Admin bar

Example of Norsk character addition

Staff ranks: Active (Can be seen in use on http://forum.travian.no)

They decided to add ranks for the IRC staff under the moderator theme but in discussion we opted for a lighter green and additional imagery to make the difference between the two a little clearer, those ranks are as follows:

…and I really need to remark on how much I love the way Tullia has used them on the team listing page here.

-Tom

I’m melting…

I was recently poked with a stick by Tullia, the forum admin at forum.travian.in who I had worked with very briefly at the tail-end of my (by then, soul destroying) duties on travian.co.uk and was tasked with developing a set of staff bars around a concept she had devised. I agreed to begin work on this set (Having worked on minimalist staff & user ranks for the forum at travian.co.uk previously) and the rest of this entry collates the various stages of that process, from the early drafts to the subsequent edits based on feedback from the server/community team…

The 'rough round the edges' feeler draft of the staff ranks

Tullia wanted to match the staff ranks to the national colours and symbols of India, loading meaning behind the different types of community role. The first set was very much an attempt to court the simplicity of the .co.uk ranks with the more vivid imagery, which broke away from the simple shield motif used on those .co.uk ranks. Feedback from staff was varied (and in some cases conflicting) but the poor old ‘cute’ Tiger got the thumb down for the crime of being cute. The ‘life bar’ Ex-Crew was also a no and someone even believed the tiny text for each symbol would lead to confusing… Really? Someone is going to be confused by that? You’re honestly telling me someone will go, “Is that a Multihunter or A TIGER?!” But overall the feedback made a lot of sense.

Many (if not most) Travian domains mark the Forum Admin in similar colours to the game server (overall) admin or removed from the Mod/SMod colouration, Tullia wanted to ensure her Forum Admin rank identified clearly with her sphere of responsibility.

The Feedback Fatality

The response to the massive feedback dump made Tullia wish she’d limited the feedback she sent my way, because I went and ticked pretty much all those boxes and made something I didn’t much like and which actually ended up departing from the sort of thing we were aiming for. I should take this time to point out the less cute tiger is based closely on an existing tattoo design, though I’m having trouble pinning down the originator so I can credit the reference…  If I had my way we’d be using my cute tiger. I won’t say these are bad ranks, but they were a bit too corporate, clinical, forum chic? I can’t even find the word for it but they didn’t really fit with the community.

Note: The crowns marking seniority of roles between the different crew areas were expanded to introduce ‘senior’ Support and MH staff tiers, a Head MH was provisioned for even though there isn’t one on .in at the moment.

Version 3, Tweak 1

The tweaks of the third version staff ranks (above and below this text) offer one set with a border to the bar and the other set border-less with a small, grey ‘Travian.in’ text. While trying to solve the lack of concept for the Ex-Crew bar I proposed using the stars (replacing crowns as marks of seniority) to create tiers to Ex-Crew that would allow the community to identify more experienced Ex-Crew when seeking help or gauging the authority of Ex-Crew insights. I also found an excuse to save the cute tiger from the graveyard. Discussing the Ex-Crew idea with Tullia and the Admin of the server, the three star Ex-Crew was marked for a change to Ex-Admin. The borderless set with text emerged as the favourite and was a few tweaks away from being implemented.

Version 3, Tweak 2

Just about there... (click to see full)

Many Travian servers have a Head MH but .in has none and there are no plans to have one in the near future, in the final set above (and the earlier feedback based revisions) we provisioned for the existence of that staff rank… Due to width constraints it was made to mimic the senior ranks and the Head Supporter bar was modified for the sake of consistency. The Head Supporter rank in actual use does not have this treatment and will be retired if a Head MH is introduced. Feedback acted on includes dropping the flag colouration on the admin stars and making the Lotus flower a little bigger.

They were put into active use a few days ago and this is the part of the announcement where Tullia explains the design concept:

b> New Crew Userbars and Colours

We wanted to refresh the look of the forum and bring in something unique to this forum, and to show a real Indian inspiration – and so we used the colours of the Indian Flag and the national symbols for the new userbars.

Multihunters
The saffron represents courage.
The national animal, the tiger, symbolises the hunter and protector.

Forum Crew
The green represents hope and growth
The peacock, the national bird, represents beauty and creativity.
The SMods and FA are now green instead of having our own colours, to show unity and make it simpler for users to understand who does what. However, SMods and FA have bold names to make us stand out a little more.

Support
The blue represents truth and serenity.
The Lotus, the national flower, represents wisdom and learning.
The Head Supporter is now blue instead of having her own colour, to show unity and make it simpler for users to understand who does what. However, the Head Supporter does have her name in bold to make her easier to find!

Admin
The purple represents leadership and power.
The Flag unites all three strands of Crew together in one role.
OK, it’s a little cheesy… but nice. We believe that the symbolism tells you something about each of the roles.
There’s also a new set of userbars for ex-crew which show what level of Crew they were, through the star ranking.

There are some ideas floating around about event and reward ranks for users, any one of them could possibly happen… and here are some demo ranks along those lines. I have discussed one system at present for user ranks but it could be quite some time before it is considered.

Some example (demo) user ranks

Werewolves vs Villagers: Werewolves reward (aPNG)

Staff ranks: Active (Can be seen in use on http://forum.travian.in)

-Tom

Sleepy errors must always be excused! zzzzZZZZZ

Anyone who has read my mini-rants on Twitter will know that I’m really liking the Inktense pencils from Derwent, the above gallery tracks my work this morning on @DrMagister in wondrous re-enactment mode…  (I added a tiny bit of graphitint cloud/cool grey to the background white, can see them in the final photo snap. )

-Tompl

Started work on transforming this old sketch (featuring a battle royale of sorts between monsters and heroic figures) into a coloured splash image for the currently in-active Paper Mages site, Paper Mages will be the home for Steamshaft (when it is finished) and is also going to be the web home for Anno Geometrica and a few other British authored roleplay items.

Those of us behind Paper Mages come from a background of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, wargaming (Games Workshop), Advanced Fighting Fantasy and other very Britishy products… No shock then that we enjoy keeping alive the things that made those products so great for us. Fairly early on when I was drafting the steamshaft I realised that I was making an upside down Necromunda in many ways, what a shame that Games Workshop never considered making Mordheim a more direct fantasy imagining of Necromunda… part of me hopes it would be much like the Steamshaft.

We’re not going to get rich doing this but we do get to put out our work and hopefully see it get used, that is a reward in itself. We’re still going to have fun setting games in our own worlds whatever happens. Generally we’re giving stuff away free in a wiki format, as a word document or PDF. Sometimes (at great struggle) we will have a print release on the table, the first such release is likely to be the ‘Anno Geometrica’ core rules and will be via the likes of Lulu. With a print copy we’re putting in effort to produce the best possible version of the freebie we can, normally in the form of art or exclusive material, so it will only happen if we have demand. The good thing with a print copy is that you can stroke it lovingly and we might get a few bob to spend on a pint or a packet of crisps, we also get to buy our own copies and pretend we’re real game designers… But this is talk for a later time!

The finished image is now up on http://www.papermages.co.uk/

-Tom

Somewhere during the second pint after arriving in Edinburgh (a semi-dreadful journey weakened me!) I realised I was probably going to fail with the taking of pictures and writing/typing of words, even the sketching would take a back seat… In the end I took photographs of the Signspotting Project madness and the Christmas Shop, the latter purely because it would amuse Nicola and her mother. So yes, I failed to capture my antics.

The literary pub tour was probably the highlight, really good night with sore heads all round the morning after and shockingly light wallets too.

The 9hr (More like 10hrs when you include the car and bus side of things) journey that took me from Edinburgh to Haverfordwest, “hello Midnight!” Was tiring and allowed me to relearn all my favourite football chants courtesy of lads celebrating their exam results before Cardiff… I had to laugh and thankfully they were all in such a good mood as to leave the crazy-haired (I got annoyed and had loads cut-off, the survivors are in open, curly rebellion.) geek alone.

I’ve spent the past week and a bit in a sleepy, beautiful part of Pembrokeshire being both distraction, motivator and luxurious layabout to my wonderful geekette. She has a dissertation to finish and I’ve always been very ‘Hakuna Matata’ on the academia side, very much the stubborn rogue who would much rather they let him do his own thing than suffer the enforced, rigid and ultimately damning modular approach to study. Modules are awful when there are too few to choose from, the idea surely was to make it easier to cater a degree to the needs/interests of individuals like myself?

The lack of updates has not all been laziness, truth be told I feel more comfortable working on my desktop… I have plans for the blog, plans I hope my bakery lifestyle does not delay too much, plans that involve pretty things and longer entries. There are a few blogs/sites I’m going to quickly link to because they should be in my blogroll and indeed will be when I’ve had a chance to sort them a little graphic… in no particular order:

http://lurvalamode.wordpress.com/

Sometimes, you find a blog quite by chance via an unusual series of web leaps that you wish you’d found sooner. lovely use of sidebars and absolute dedication to devouring literature towards creative, exciting reviews. (Twitter: KMont)

http://www.ponor.info/blog/

P O N O R is new(ish) to wordpress, a creative and fun individual. (Twitter: ponor)

http://girlygeekdom.com/

I know too many awesome (and dangerous) girl geeks to dare neglect them for too long… (Twitter: girlygeekdom)

-Tom

On holiday at long last, though I’ve lost a day of travel I’m ready for Edinburgh tomorrow. I’m going to try and update the blog during that time with photographs. I may even find the time to finish off two entries that I’ve been meaning to post for some time now and which don’t slide into my current format of sketchy postings. The biggest thing I’ve been missing are my little audio updates, I’m going to try and sort that side out in the near future to compliment the doodles and broken writing. Speaking of broken…

You might notice that the previous entries link at the bottom doesn’t work, annoying! I think I know why it is broken but I’ve been far too tired to tinker/dig for fixes and I might be changing the theme anyway. For now the archive will serve as a hopping point, please forgive me. All fixed with the new theme now, hopefully…

I’ve been a bit quieter this month for various reasons, work for one thing has been very intense (lots of 3am starts) and I’ve been preparing for holiday. Beyond that I’ve been crafting in secret patches of blissful free-time, a little something something for another site. The best thing about this casual ‘twitter-sourced’ project was that I got to use my vast experience in drawing cute, silly versions of my girlfriend to great effect.

I’ve dotted the entry with a few of my favourites by way of penance, they are designed to be seen at a smaller size so some of the line thickness and colouration choices are deliberate. If/when they go live and I get the nod of permission I’ll share the whole lot (including concept/draft sketches) in a single blog entry about casual design projects.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make a blog update on the train between Crewe and Edinburgh, First Class is nice… especially when it is free.

-Tom

Currently reading:

A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet

I’m about half-way through this, it was recommended to me by a lecturer and has positive reviews… I started reading it quite some time ago but got distracted and have only recently returned to it.

—-

Just some quick ‘flash reviews’ of books I’ve read recently:

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Easily one of my favourite books of recent months, I already had an inkling of the quality from my ladies excited discussion when she first read through it. It is one of the most unique takes on the time travel story and proves surprisingly easy to follow.

The Difference Engine

I enjoyed it as the steampunk classic that it is. Anything further would just involve omgoshing over William Gibson to the embarassment of all.

Smoke & Mirrors

Gaiman <3 in this collection of short stories and poetry. A friend summed this up when he said, “It just makes me wish I’d thought of those stories first.”

American Gods

As a confessed and shamed ‘late to Gaiman’ Reader I have been devouring his tasty offerings in quick succession, while I still consider Neverwhere my favourite I rate American Gods highly.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Read many times now and still loved with equal measure.

Jennifer Government

Another reread, I have a soft spot for this book and really want to see it as a film. The Nation States game was an inspired way to bring it to wider attention.