Mysterious Mysteries

Unfortunate delay

GC13 — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:49:53 +0000

Well, unfortunately the Anime Card Fight project will be delayed while Tony joins the army. To be honest, we actually haven’t been doing anything with it in the past month or so because as his project, it would be rather difficult for him to coordinate it from boot camp.

And of course, while I’m talking about projects that are delayed, I would like to again mention The Company. I mentioned a while ago that I didn’t like the way the writing came off. Well, I certainly haven’t given up on the game, but I can’t honestly say I feel any urgency to get it out either. Of course, with the end of the college semester, I’ve been wanting to get back to it after I got done with some very involved goofing off.

So the plan for The Company is this: rather than trying to spice up the manual with annoying fiction, I’ve decided that a good avenue to try would be to make the whole thing an in-fiction instruction manual. Actually, with the thinking I’ve been doing, it will probably make it easier for me to get across the atmosphere originally meant for the game.

So huzzah.

Grudge Match: Nidhoggur vs Thanatos

GC13 — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 01:01:17 +0000

Such a hard fight to call, yes?

Well, since diving headfirst into the battle to finally boost the Nidhoggur with my executive summary of Capt Rob’s Boost the Nidhoggur thread, I’ve looked at one of the less sexy aspects of the Thanatos vs Nidhoggur imbalance.

While many people focus on the Nidhoggur’s poor bonus (come on, speeding up your remote capital armor/shield repairers may make you repair faster, but it also burns capacitor like nobody’s business), others mention that not only does the Thanatos have more powergrid than the Nidhoggur (which makes sense, since the Thanatos’s slot layout favors armor tanking), but it also has more CPU!

Now, I’ve done a bit of math on the subject and I think that the Thanatos only really deserves 670 CPU (as opposed to the 725 it gets). I’m using the fact that the Nidhoggur gives up 75 CPU to get 125,000 power grid (both relative to the Chimera). Holding such an exchange rate, the Thanatos only deserves 45 CPU for giving up 75,000 power grid (relative to the Archon).

Of course there are other ways to interpret the exchange rate you find when you use the Archon and Chimera as zero points for their less tank-heavy cousins, but the Nidhoggur already has enough CPU problems as it is, and doesn’t need a buff to power grid either. That’s what they tell me, anyway (hey, don’t ask me, I just summarize it).

Steady as she goes

GC13 — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:21:30 +0000

There hasn’t been much to report on any front, really. Right now we are calmly waiting to see what official licenses we can get for the card game so we can get to work on those sets.

However, licensed sets aren’t the only things we are interested in doing. We’re also kicking around ideas for sets based on our own original material, rather than limiting ourself to working with the intellectual property of others.

We will require artists to work on the illustrations, however. While we could hire them, any money would have to come out of our own pockets, so if we could find any skilled artists who would be willing to work free of charge, perhaps for the exposure instead, that would be a big help to us indeed. Anybody interested can contact me, and I’ll get details.

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to give you an update that includes the basics on the storylines we’d like to pursue for our sets, and give you a taste of the flavor the sets will be having.

A new template to show you…

GC13 — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 04:04:52 +0000

Well, after getting some feedback from some rather in-the-know individuals at RPG.net, I’ve re-worked the template into something that should hopefully be more visually appealing.

Poop Dawg and Bill are now here for your viewing pleasure.

I like the new template a lot more, and Tony’s even signed off on it, meaning my efforts were not in vain. Still, I’m totally open to anybody else with something to say about the format. Got a better idea for the background in those individual text boxes, for instance? I’m liking the cloud background I set for the whole card, but I’m just settling for a light grey (#E0E0E0) with a light canvas for the text boxes.

The draw of 0.0 is strong indeed

GC13 — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:10:37 +0000

I still feel it within me, empire carebear though I am.

I can only assume that the power of 0.0’s allure is what caused my Derelik Trading Company venture to go nowhere. Though I was quite capable of making money supplying the Derelik region, I was staggeringly unable to bring people to the corporation unless they were newbies (who proceeded to either quit without telling me or jump ship to their own corporation after I taught them how to play). I actually did get one good experienced player, but that was after a lot of effort chasing others.

So while there are tons of carebears in empire, they’re either new or in corps and not looking for another one. Bah, bah I say. Oh well, as anybody who’s read the two entries below this one can probably guess, I have a new project to step in to take place of DERTC. I’ll still be playing Eve, but I’m not going to have the time or inclination to be a CEO of an active corporation while doing the card game.

My new long-term in-Eve project: piloting a Nidhoggur. Yeah, I know they’re the worst carrier, but maybe CCP will fix it by the time I get it, and even then my tech 2 large artillery would benefit from Minmatar Battleship V quite nicely anyway. Of course Dominixes benefit from Gallente Battleship V plenty as well, but I’ll just try to put that one out of my mind.

Reading my thread in the market forum, it does make me feel good to hear that people would have been or still are willing to help out with DERTC, but DERTC would just be too time consuming for me with this new project that wasn’t on the horizon (for me, anyway) a month ago.

Thanks for the support anyway everybody, and may I get a chance to greet you on the space lanes some time in the future.

A sample card

GC13 — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 05:51:03 +0000

Ah, I think I’ve finally tweaked the template to a point where I’m happy with it. The only thing we’re still pondering is the background, and I haven’t found any that really grab me, though I think the white with the canvas effect looks nice.

So you wanted the demo, did you? One gangsta coming up. Poop Dawg is the greatest one-off character in a cartoon in… probably forever. It really is a shame that I’m only posting that low-res version, but rest assured that the version on my computer is much larger than that, and prints out handily to the size of a Yugioh card.

Anyway, I like the layout and everything, but I’m always trolling for opinions.

Excel is neat

GC13 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:11:46 +0000

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.

Ikkicon report - rage against the bootleg

GC13 — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:46:34 +0000

Well, I’ve been delaying writing this for a while. On Sunday and Monday I was just happy to be back home. Tuesday and Wednesday I had a pretty nasty case of the stomach flu, and up until now I’ve just been deciding if I should write about this. Well, I have.

Unfortunately we most likely will not be going back to Ikkicon. It’s not anything about the people there (they ranked among the friendliest con heads I’ve dealt with) or about the overflow hotel (much cheaper than the ones we normally stay in, just as good, and I liked actually getting a free breakfast (donuts rule!)). We just didn’t make enough money.

You see, Saturday is usually the huge day for selling things at an anime convention. This time, we sold roughly the same gross on each day. Now, this is probably due to two factors (or at least these are the two we’ve seen): First off, the venue is too small. We noticed it as soon as we walked in (a bit after one AM, because we never manage to leave for a con on time) on Thursday. They had to restrict how many people could enter at once, and hurried people past our booth right by the front.

Second, we do a lot of wallscroll sales, and there were several sellers of cheap imported wallscrolls that are, to our knowledge, not even supposed to be sold in the United States anyway. They’re classic bootlegs: No copyright info, no UPC on the paper slip in the package, and poor print quality. And yet they are crowding us out by the virtue of being a cheap substitute good (for you economists out there).

So yeah, no Ikkicon for us again unless they get a bigger venue and crack down on those bootlegged wallscrolls that are killing us. Seriously, I wish the bootlegged wallscrolls were the first and only thing that’s killed us by being illegally imported, but we’ve had problems with the Naruto headbands in the past (wonder why we don’t sell those anymore?).

It’s almost time for Ikkicon

GC13 — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 03:43:24 +0000

Well, Tony and I are getting ready to ship out for Austin tomorrow so we can sell anime merchandise to the convention goers at Ikkicon on Friday and over the weekend. Unfortunately we won’t be able to bring very much Ramune with us (the wholesalers only have three boxes left), but we have plenty of strawberry pocky to sell. And a bunch of wall scrolls to sell, and our PVC pipe wallscroll display to hang some of them on.

So if anybody reading this happens to be going to Ikkicon, drop by the dealer’s room and say hi to us at Eroth Productions. We’ll be the same odd pair we always are, long-haired me and short-haired Tony. Heck, Tony even tells me we should be directly to the right as everybody enters (not that conventions have messed up our location before, mind you…).

Introducing A Newbie’s Guide to Caldari Ships

GC13 — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:07:58 +0000

Well that was a strangely productive way to spend an all-day downtime. Rather than sit around bored all day, I decided to dust off the half-finished draft of my new guide and finish it.

So enjoy it guys. The link to where I host my guides is, as always http://evefiles.mysterious-mysteries.com. I plan on updating it later with some specific setups and information about ships larger than destroyers, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Also, I eventually want to do a similar guide for Minmatar ships. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Amarr or Gallente ships to really do guides for them, but who needs them anyway?