Excel is neat
Well actually this post will be both about the magic of using Excel for statistical analysis, as well as serve as the first post on my blog about the very directly named Anime Card Fight. I’ll go ahead and introduce the second bit first.
For the vast majority of you guys out there (the ones who haven’t seen us at Texas anime conventions), you’ve never heard of it. ACF’s general theory is to be a fun card game where you can include characters from different animes (and with me: plain old non-Japanese cartoons) in your deck. And before somebody brings it up: no, we’ve never played Ani-mayhem, and had never heard of it (and its commercial failure) until after we had started work on ACF.
Anyway, people who have gotten to try demo runs of the game have enjoyed it, and I’ve been hard at work on a set for it. I’ll save announcing of the game’s initial lineup of animes and cartoons for after we’ve gone through the licensing process with the companies that can issue the licenses, but initial reactions have been promising.
Anyway, today I made an Excel sheet for the characters in my set. It makes balancing them within the set a lot easier, and makes clear the trends in my assigning of statistics. Plus, it’s just neat to be able to see the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation for every stat, plus a table of how many instances of each value for each stat occurs.
Anyway, if we’re really lucky everything will work out by April, but June is a more realistic release date. The only reason I can forsee us releasing after A-Kon in June is if the licensing gets hung up with every company we’re contacting. Since I can’t see that happening, get ready to open up your wallets. 
Hopefully in a few days I’ll be able to post up a sample card. We’ve upgraded from Tony’s archaic MS Paint mastery to some major GIMP-fu (layers for the win), and I’m really proud of the template I made for the cards.