I’ve updated the character designs so they now have hands.
As is probably fairly obvious, these are for a new cartoon. All the voice recording has been completed, it’s just a matter of finishing up the animation. Should be ready to release fairly soon!
Still toiling away at various projects. Here’s a peek at what I’m working on now:
Just uploaded a new cartoon to Newgrounds and YouTube, check it out!
For any newcomers here from those videos, stop by the forum and say hi!
More thorough post tomorrow when I’m more awake.
Last week I finally got a chance to run a game of the Leverage RPG based on the show of the same name.
For any of you unfamiliar with the show it’s a fairly light-hearted heist show along the lines of the Oceans 11 movies or a decidedly 2000s flavoured A-Team. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it, it’s not going to change the world but it’s completely enjoyable popcorn entertainment.
Anyway, back to the game. I must say I’m rather impressed with it. The most notable aspect of the game is that, in keeping with the heist genre, there really isn’t a definitive failure state. If one of the players fails at a given task one of the other teammates can usually pick up where they left off or,(the more fun option) it can later be revealed that the failure was actually all a Part Of The Plan.
This is done by the players establishing a flashback to something that occured earlier, influencing the present. Say the team thief is unable to evade the guards and gets caught, cue a flashback to establish that the guards are on the team payroll and are just there to help the thief get where she’s going. Failure almost always turns into a significantly cooler sucess than the original sucess would have been.
The other fun part of the game is Complications. The more involved the task the players are attempting, the more dice they’ll be rolling. If they roll any 1s that becomes a Complication, these have no bearing over whether they succeed or fail, but rather introduce something that didn’t go exactly According To Plan. This can range anywhere from “sprained ankle” to “they saw my face” to “the target has mob connections.”
For both the players and the gamemaster, this is a game that is best if you enjoy thinking on your feet and being willing to change plans at a moment’s notice. For the players, you should always be on the lookout for an opportune time to explain why everything that has seemingly gone wrong is all going exactly as planed. Conversely, for the gamemaster, it’s a blast to come up with a variety of wrenches to thow at the players plans.
The game I ran took place almost entirely at a retail warehouse during the Christmas rush. My favorite flashback involved one of the players establishing that he was in fact the trainer during orientation for all of the temporary workers so everybody there knew and trusted him. The most amusing Complication occured when the team hacker re-routed a phone call from the villain to go to one of the other players, this action was sucessfull but the complication ended up causing all calls in the building to then re-route to the same player. I then found every excuse possible to have the villain call someone new, and the player getting the calls had to keep fielding all of these calls without the villain catching on that he’s talking to the same guy.
Overall the game was a sucess, though I admittently did not give enough for the team Hitter to do. This will certainly be addressed if I run any subsequent games.
I would highly recommend this game to any role-players out there who are up for a game where the storyline has the potential to completely turn on a dime and are willing to just run with it. It requires minimal prep work from the GM, but be ready to think fast to keep things moving.
The old forum had pretty much crashed and burned. It’d been completely taken over by spambots and after salvaging it, although existing users could post it wouldn’t accept any new users.
So I’ve installed a new one from scratch, feel free to sign up and post. Let me know what you think of the new format, and what you’d like to see in the future.
And, because everything is funnier with hats:
I’ve been mad at myself for not updating anything or having any sort of online presence lately. So I figure I need to not be afraid to just post STUFF. Doesn’t haven’t to be a finished cartoon. I draw all kinds of things when I’m supposed to be working, why not post that?
For example, this is what I did last week, not quite finished, no hands yet and soforth, but you’ll get the idea:
Anybody have any fun requests for who you’d like to see in a Floating Hands style? Post em here, inspire me!
Here’s a little teaser of one of the next shorts I’m working on.
Finally, after over two years, I’ve published a new cartoon!
The Newgrounds version of it can be found here!
You can also see it from the Cartoons tab, but it’s cutting off the sides on this particular blog theme, I’ll have to sort that out. I’ll also be uploading a YouTube version soon.
Hope you enjoy it, it’s a bit dated (I started it three years ago, before all my tablet broke down on me) but it holds up better that I’d expected.
I just got my first real reply post to the blog.
I’ve gotten several other posts but they’ve all been incomprehensible spam. Kinda clever actually, the link is in the username, while the post itself is something like “You made a number of good points there. I did a search on the theme and found the majority of persons will go along with with your blog.” (I’ve gotten that exact post from 3 different screen names.)
Anyway, not surprisingly the post, and several e-mails I’ve gotten, are asking if I plan on making more cartoons. The short answer is yes.
Unfortunately my tablet laptop exploded, so I’ve been without means to produce cartoons for some time.
No seriously, it exploded, sorta my fault though. The power switch broke, so I took it apart to fix it, put it back together and must have put one of the screws in the wrong place because when I turned it on there was a flash and a pop from inside, and smoke started pouring out.
Oops.
The good news is that I’ve been working on different means of producing the graphics by hand and I think I’ve finally found one I’m happy with, so I’m trying to produce something new as we speak. I’m starting with a nearly finished cartoon I was working on when I lost the laptop. it’s just been sitting unfinished for over two years, mocking me with it’s increasingly outdated pop-culture references.
Once I do that I hope to work on something new. I’m trying to draw the art by hand and it’s completely nervewracking (where’s the undo button for my india ink!?) but turning out rather nicely so far.
I’m also writing a proper comic book, but I’m keeping pretty quiet on that for the moment. You’ll hear more about it once it’s closer to completion.
I just found a retro-styled RPG game on X-Box Live called “Cthulhu Saves the World.”
This is just one of those things that, regardless of whether it is good or bad, is completely review proof. Not unlike “Plants vs Zombies” based on the name alone, people already know whether they want to buy it or not.
The catch is that “Plants vs Zombies” was actually a surprisingly fun and robust tower defense game. I don’t know if Cthulhu is nearly as good, but I’ll find out, it was ridiculously cheap, and I had to find out.
Like I said: review-proof.