Mysterious Mysteries

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.

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.

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.

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?).