The Retreat

You ever have one of those days where you get an idea, it looks simple, but once you knock out the obvious parts it starts getting ugly? Yes, this project is like that. From the top. This is what it looks like (by intention): Fairly simple, right? It's a simple Pokemon Go Pokestop, that weird location where you put out a finger, give it a spin, and it showers you in presents by shooting balls and sticky potions in your face. Perfectly sensible as an inspiration. This is what burped its way out of my brain: A perfectly sensible translation, at least if you intend to stick it on a tree. There are a couple subtleties that can be pretty easily overlooked if you're in a hurry, like the fact the outer ring has a definite inner lip, or the fact that there are multiple floating parts that we don't currently have maglev or anti-grav to keep in the air without some kind of through-post to suspend them -- which needs to at least be notionally strong enough to keep the bit...

Taking A Look There was some discussion on my previous "pokemug" design that suggested at least one  person wanted to see a more ambitious design, something with a little more of the classic Pokeball going on. Never let it be said that I am not accommodating. Let's talk about some of the issues with taking a classic Pokeball and turning it into a usable mug. Firstly, it's a sphere. You know upfront that you're going to have to trim a little off the bottom in order to create a surface for it to sit on stably. No one wants to knock their mug and watch it go rolling away spewing coffee in all directions. That would be a terrible idea, and as a designer, I would have to take myself to task for doing something so stupid. So, flat bottom, right up front. Secondly, it's a sphere. You know you're going to have to cut a little bit off the top in order to have something that one can actually physically drink out of. This is actually a bigger d...

Team Instinct Mug, but what's wrong? Learning About Failure I've written a lot about the positive side effects of failure in other posts, especially in regards to some of the video education stuff that I've done. (If you're interested in specifically the Collection regarding video education, you can find that over here: https://plus.google.com/collection/wBTgQB .) This is a short version: Success doesn't teach us anything. Success is the flag which tells us that we have finally achieved what we were aiming at; it's an end flag. End flags are important because they signal us that we should finally have that shot of serotonin that creates the reinforcement of seeking success. But that neurochemical signal is as much a punishment/signal flag of failure when we don't get it and have come to accept it. Some of said that failure is what you get when you don't get what you want. Others have said that's experience. They're both true...

This story seed is intended to be used with Kingdom as a means of quickly assembling a game session setup for 3 - 5 players. Times of sorcery and intrigue always have at least one extended family whose dabbling into things unspeakable, either magical or social -- and frequently both -- become the stuff of legends. The House de Calmar is one such, an extended family of depravity and indolence, propped up with sorceries, cunning political intrigues, and simply enough gall to both shock and fascinate those outside the House. The necessity of "keeping things in the family" is never lost, and much time is spent managing the affairs of the outside world to maintain the mirror-finish that those without the blessing of being accepted as insiders see from their vantage. Families often find that their members are both their best friends and worst enemies, sometimes within the same conflict. Likewise, blood is thought thicker than water, leaving those who might wish to intervene...

Best description of highly realistic space combat I think I've ever read: "You and your opponent are glued onto the top of trains going in opposite directions. You have laser pointers and can try to blind the other guy from 35 miles away._ If you fail to blind the other guy, you can throw hand grenades at each other as the trains make their closest approach. Those hand grenades are small nuclear weapons…and if you're very quick, you can shoot them down with the laser pointer. You have no real way to change the speed of the train, or to take it off the tracks." It only gets better when you realize that you're wearing nothing except a big, glowing, neon sign that points at your arm and your butt.

As we all know, not all techniques are created equal. Sometimes, you've got crazy things that work amazingly well and you've got highly complicated things which don't really reached the level of success you would like. I've tinkered around with some of the images that I have in my library to see what can be done in the intersection between these notional spaces. All of the images are from my Lytro, light-field library , meaning that the native source is roughly 1030 x 1030 with the addition of a 330 x 330 grayscale depth map. Given that data, I can create an image from the seven 1030 x 1030 slightly offset image slices that Lytro can export, align and stack them in Photoshop, then feed them into another tool for presentation altogether: in this case, Depthy . Let's start with something simple, the key ring that came up with my Homeworld Collectors Edition preorder: Homeworld on a chain. Pointedly, not in use. This is animated with #Depthy from the afor...

Story Seed – DarkRun This story seed is intended to be used with Kingdom as a means of quickly assembling a game session setup for 3 - 5 players. The future has arrived in a long black limousine with windows so deeply shaded that you can see the reflection of the nothingness over the city. Cybernetics are old hat; you can go out to grab a cheap Chinese dinner and get the colour of your eyes changed as easily as a crappy tattoo. Behind the dirt and the hustle, the old dance between corporations, governments, and the individual still turns, as brittle and stately as a retired debutante. The chrome and plastic and clean concrete hide something altogether different that only a few see but everyone feels. Some go just a little bit mad and rip open tiny holes between worlds to let their madness out. Some ignore the lure of implanted steel for grafts from creatures no one has ever seen walking the Earth. A few make deals with alien gods and demons, trading a little bit of blood, a hand...