Game in a Weekend: Ludum Dare Success

Ludum Dare is over, and the result is I now have a "D" next to my name on Kongregate. The "D" dear readers, stands for developer. I have now published a game on Kongregate. My development partner has published his own entries on his Kong account, so I got to put this one on mine.

Here it is: http://www.kongregate.com/games/hakoMike/fade

The theme of the event was "minimalism" and graphically it is quite minimal. Is it great? No, not at all. Is it a functional game (albeit with no losing condition) created in a portion of a weekend? Yes. Yes it is. As a learning experience it was great. I feel equipped to take on more ambitious gamedev projects now. You will likely hear of them here.

Ludum Dare ... Game Jam Time!

This weekend is Ludum Dare, the themed game development compo/jam across the world. I attempted to do something solo for the competition a while ago but didn't get very far. This time around I will be working with my coworker jomomomo and our families to produce something for the "game jam" portion. There's no competition for this part, but you get an extra day and we're looking forward to using what we've learned on our gamedev lunch sessions.

So far, we've been putting together a quickie vertical scroller, which will eventually become a shooter. It's hosted at http://github.com/jmorast/LunchHaxe if you want to see the code. It's all in Haxe using the NME and Flixel libraries. Good stuff, Maynard. The cool part is it ports directly to my android phone with no coding changes required.
And now I'm going attempt to embed the silly little WIP.....


Hey, it looks like it worked! The arrow keys move left and right... and that's it! No shooting. No collision. Nothing. Yay. The part about cross development for Android is exciting to me. It can do iPhone as well, but I'm skeptical about my ability to do this with no iPhone or Mac of my own. From what I can tell in this how-to videos, the process isn't entirely straightforward.

I just can't connect all the dots from start to finish...

 The Ludum Dare theme will be announced at 9:00PM Eastern time!

Legend of the Nurglecorn

In the grim darkness of the far future, yadda yadda yadda. From the same novelty store that sold the flies that I made into Nurgle Furies, this $0.99 plastic unicorn becomes ... something. I'm not sure what yet. He's on a 40mm base, so I could either use him as a spawn, a beast of Nurgle, or maybe even something like putting a chaos space marine lord on him and counting it as a bike. Or a palanquin of Nurgle maybe... the options are endless.

I started by hollowing out the abdominal cavity some (influenced by the KD:M antelope no doubt) and carving the mouth back and the eyes out. The original mouth was closed, so that was a bit of work. The intestines are milliput rolled out and given segmentation by rolling a stick of balsa at intervals. My wife suggested the ragged skin at the abdominal opening (love that woman!) and that is made from thin paper towel and super glue. I just tore a strip of paper and glued it to the border, soaking the strip, The tear was ragged enough to do most of the work, but I reshaped some of it with snips after the fact.

The mane and tail were, go figure, originally green. The unicorn was pink, I think. Funny, I can't remember now. Anyway, he got a base of the usual corrugated styrene that I've been using plus some Vallejo heavy gel with a light drybrush of Praxeti white. If you haven't used the new Citadel dry colors, they are awfully strange, more like a gel than a paint. They remind me of oatmeal with not quite enough liquid in it.

All those years in art school won't help you now Eldar

Kingdom Death Resin First Model

I know Monster is a long way off, but I thought I'd show my one and only Kingdom Death model, in all its completely unassembled glory. The model in question is "Beyond the Wall" which depicts a survivor hiding, terrified. The vignette feels like there is more going on than one can see. I love that untold story feeling. The pic on their site shows the model well.

Notice the "not aimed at crotch" angle

The packaging shows how a boutique manufacturer differs from a mass manufacturer. From the stamped card box to the included art print, even to the black tissue used to pad the mailing box, it just drips with classy execution.

Presentation means a lot here

The resin is absolutely gorgeous. I don't have a ton of experience with resin models, but this one is far superior to what I'm used to. The cast is absolutely flawless. Only the McVey models I have rival this level of quality. Two torsos are included, one of which is dressed as in the illustration. The alternate torso does not have all the armor but is still clothed (to an extent.) The legs join the torso where the stockings end, so assembly should not require too much smoothing. The head is my favorite part, with deep crevices in the tousled hair and great expressive eyes.

pictured with the art card in the box

The base is nondescript, and honestly a bit disappointing. The wall is nice, but the circle is just too plain to warrant using resin. A 50mm styrene base would have accomplished about the same. I will probably either paint faces into it (a la Monster) or sculpt something more interesting.

The piece also comes with a postcard artwork prominently displaying the subject's crotch. Way to keep it classy, guys.

This is in contrast to the portion of the illustration shown on their web site, which oddly enough is the exact aspect ratio of a postcard in landscape. Oh, the choices we make.

Eye-rolling aside, it's a nice model. The attention to detail on the sculpt and casting makes me anticipate getting Monster all the more. 

The $5 Nurgle Fury Unit

I have been playing around with Chaos Daemons, more from a fun approach than a game approach. There is a local novelty store across the street from The Model Cave, so I decided to see what they had in terms of a fly for a fury proxy.

As it turns out, the plastic flies they had were pretty much perfect and I bought a full unit's worth for $5. To bulk them up a little and give someplace to put the brass rod I added some black milliput to the abdominal cavity. The paint job is mostly Nurgling Green drybrushing, with some of a lighter green too (the name of which I can't remember.) Tamiya clear yellow (thank you, Javi!) was used to tint the wings. The eyes are Vallejo air color silver (my single favorite brush on silver of all time) with a coat of Tamiya clear yellow over it, then a green wash on the bottom half of the eyes. The legs are not changed. 

A base, a little cork and some Vallejo plastic putty snow later we have a full unit of these pretties.