Sam on Maui

Game Dev Tycoon is available for a variety of platforms, and is just a great little game. No DRM, even! I’ll be posting impressions later on, but for now? A little something to help you along! When you make a new combination of game type and genre, you get a  New Combo x.2 bonus for it. But, if it’s a Great Combo? Add in another .2. You’ll go from x1 to x1.2 to x1.4! To help you out, I sat down and went through the first six genres and available combinations I’ve found so far. Use the garage studio to experiment; each genre and game style has things they like during development. As such, go through the various combinations, figure them out, regardless of whether they're a one-time bonus or not. It'll help in the long run. Fantasy + Action = Great Combo Fantasy + Adventure = Great Combo Fantasy + RPG = Great Combo Fantasy + Simulation = no bonus Fantasy + Strategy = Great Combo Fantasy + Casual = no bonus Racing + Action = no bonus Racing + Adventure = no bonus Racing +...

Week 4 and doing pretty well! I’m not entirely sure how I should decide which way to really track my weight. The weekly, predictable fluctuation makes me wonder if I should pick the results from a certain day (say, Friday or Saturday) as my milestone or not.

I recently bought Privateer Press’ Formula P3 Modeling & Painting Vol. 1: Core Techniques . As a relative new comer to painting miniatures, I felt it’d be a helpful introduction for me. They had a nice little sample, which gave me some nice ideas, plus a helpful trick for painting gold metal. I went ahead and ordered it. Since I’m watching this a bit at a time, as not to be overwhelmed, I thought I’d share my thoughts as they came.

One of the coolest parts of any board game would be the custom parts. But, one of the worst parts of any board game would be the custom parts. Particularly custom dice. Why? Because they’re harder to fake having, to improvise. So, as a result, I figured I’d better map the dice on these two games, lest I lose them, the dog eats them, or they go off to the 5th Dimension without me.

Last night I got around to priming the individual COGs; Cole, Baird, Dom and Fenix. Rather than using the gesso like I did the Locust, I used Army Painter’s spray primer. The reason why is I didn’t want the primer to shrink away like the gesso does, and the thinner layer of the stuff meant I should have a little more detail with the figures. Why the concern? Because they’re the player’s pieces, I wanted them to be better looking and more detailed than the Locust. They are the heroes, after all. Moreover, unlike the Locust, they’re well defined characters as a group, the protagonists of the series, and really the guys you spend the most time with in game. As such, they really deserve more attention.

The Drones, the Boomers, the Theron Guard, the Kantus, and the Berzerker. Primed and painted. I started with them Saturday night, did a bit more Sunday, and finished up tonight. How did it go? I think it went along pretty decently!

Gears of War is probably one of my favorite gaming franchises right now, and definitely one of my favorite things on the Xbox 360. Its an excellent, well done 3rd person shooter from Epic Games, and one I’m actually really annoyed that is on the 360 only. Only the first game is on Windows, and its not on the PS3 at all. Really, its one of those games that could’ve been truly huge, if not for the fact its tied down to a single system. Anyhow! There is a board game based on the series , published by Fantasy Flight Games, designed by Corey Konieczka. I don’t actually know who the guy is, but I do know he made Space Hulk: Death Angel the card game , which I also have. Given they mentioned him by name, I’m assuming he’s actually a big deal, and from my play-through a few Saturdays ago? I can understand why. But, I can give my impressions of the game another time.

On the official boards I've seen a number of requests to make life easier for small fleets to advance in the Fleet system. Now, looking at the fact that the size of a fleet doesn't directly correlate to the amount of people (the fleet I'm in is small, has a high number of contributors, and is pretty high up there, or so I'm told)? The problem isn't the size of the fleet! Its the number of people pitching in. Anyhow, this is my suggestion from off the boards.   If you look at Dave Ramsey's recommendation for getting rid of debt, he uses what is called the Snowball Method.  He admits it isn't ideal mathematically, however, its easy to understand and it works for people mentally. This idea, this mentality, works for exercise and fitness goals, weight loss, etc. Have a plan, go one step at a time, and you'll get there.  That's the problem with the current system - you're presented with these large, gargantuan projects that can be summed up wi...

Update: Chart revised! Took out period where I wasn’t tracking everything, and managed to add the Z:D price chart into it. Its showing the trends/movement of the price, and is there for reference. Season 7 has been out for a while now, and I felt it was a good idea to bring out another chart. What is it this time? The overall volume of the market! What is this? When I get the daily Z:D prices, I also record the top 5 buying and selling lots. Now, this does not show the value of the Z:D market, just how much is flowing through it. For instance, Tuesday, October 30th had a tremendous spike in traffic, with prices around 1:158. Thursday, September 27, was a incredibly low volume day when prices were 1:165. The obvious question is, is this due to price?

Ah, Thanksgiving. Since I’ll hopefully be busy cooking, eating and sleeping tomorrow with friends and family, I’m doing the tracking a day early. And, well, its still been a busy week! Yeah, YOWZA. And things aren’t done yet. Dan Stahl posted on the boards there will be more changes coming, and they’ll be increasing Dilithium earnings while decreasing a few Dilithium costs. There’s a lot more to it than just that, so read up!

Overall History With Season 7: New Romulus having launched on Tuesday, looks like we’ve got movement again! Obviously, its too soon to tell if it because of the new update (although that’s definitely a factor), or a return to weekends being a low price period. Just off the top of my head, however, I’m wondering if the relatively flat period represents people taking a break until the new update. Certainly, when I played City of Heroes, there was something called “the mid-issue blues” (or “blahs”). If you haven’t read the patch notes, now would be a great time to do so . One of the changes since test was they removed the Refined Dilithium requirements from the Reputation system. Previously, it would serve as another Dilithium sink, which made it unattractive to casual and alt-heavy players. I’m not sure how they compensated for that, as one of the purposes of that was to slow down the speed at which players could progress through the system. While the Reputation system was made to el...

I had a thought, and drew up another graph in Excel. While things have been relatively flat for the past while, I wondered how much variability was there? Looking back, there were four weeks where the market fluctuated tremendously during the course of a week. Two of those were wild fluctuations, followed by two lesser weeks each before returning to normal. I’m going to have to start doing some research if I’m going to speculate what caused these wild swings, though! Times like this I really wish I had more of a history for the market. It’d be really interesting to see how often this sort of thing happens.

Yesterday I went ahead and got Serif's PagePlus X6 desktop publishing software for Windows. Serif's DTP software has come highly recommended to me as a good, competent, low-end program. As such, its direct competition would be the Open-source program Scribus , and the rather reviled Microsoft Publisher . Comparing it to programs like QuarkXpress and InDesign would likely be useless, as their target market has very different needs, desires and workflows. That said, I'm coming from QuarkXpress (even if its several years after the fact), and thus I'm having to make sure I keep my expectations in check. Moreover, I'm coming over to this from OSX to Windows, so that's even more adjustment. What I primarily want is a competent desktop publishing program for my own, personal use. Given how many smaller RPG/game shops use Serif, I think it'll be quite functional for me. Moreover, I really want to start getting into creating ePub eBooks; my old Adobe CS2 coul...

Dan Stahl announced that Fleet Actions were going to see increased rewards , as following: Gold = Purple + 1920 Dilithium Silver = Purple + 960 Dilithium Bronze = Blue + 960 Dilithium All others = Green + 960 Dilithium One of the posters politely pointed out they were concerned that this could be damaging to the social atmosphere of Star Trek Online. Dan acknowledged this , had already spoken to the other developers, and said he was bringing the feedback from the thread to the rest of the team. Today? Dan posted a followup : In addition, we have decided to nix the X2 Dilithium bonus for Gold and instead provide a x2 Purple gear and keep the Dilithium consistent across all players. Its still a good reward, but not nearly as overbearing as the double Dilithium in my opinion. Will it get tweaked further? Its entirely possible. But the economics of double Dilithium was too good; some people immediately quit STFs if the team misses secondary objectives, after all....

There's a lot of great reasons to use Cloud storage like SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. I love that I can work on files between my smartphone, laptop, and desktop. But, sometimes I wonder, "How do I back this up?" Thanks to a quick internet search, I've got a simple way to mirror some of those files!

UPDATE:  I was told about the Exchange bug! Yay! That completely threw off the value of A. As such, its probably one of the most attractive options you have. UPDATE: There's a revisiting of this with more current numbers. I’ve been going on about buying Energy Credits using Dilithium and Zen for a while now. And, honestly, its great! Those with an abundance of Dilithium or Zen can use their resources to get things they want from the Exchange, contribute to their Fleets, and more. Its very useful, relatively simple, and pretty straight forward. But, what if you wanted to do the opposite?

Well, its now been 4 weeks tracked! My first month! And, as such, I’m finally getting a view of the “bigger” picture. It was rather nice to get up, log on, and see the 64 Zen I placed for sale at 1:165 had sold, leaving me with a nice sum of over 10,000 Dilithium. Knowing that when rates go back down I’ll be able to make a small profit on that is even better. I know, I know, you want charts, don’t you?

Come this Thursday I'll have hit 4-weeks worth of tracking. On top of that, the price of Zen has gone up from the low to mid 150's to 160. I'm hoping, if not betting a little, that it'll hit 165 before the end of the month. One of the nice things about the Dilithium Exchange is you can place offers and let them sit there. I currently have offers to buy a total of 68 Zen at 1:154. I also have an offer to sell 64 Zen if it should reach 1:165. Right now 1:154 is the highest price I'll buy Zen at, with more than a bit done at 153. This, in turn, should get me a nice little profit when the pendulum swings back the other way (about 704 Dilithium, or 4 Zen at 1:154). Sure, its not a lot, but it is a reasonable amount for not doing anything other than being patient. My stipend hits towards the beginning of next month, so I'm debating whether or not I'll hold onto it or not. We'll see.

Cryptic/PWE just unveiled the latest lockbox for Star Trek Online: the Temporal Lock Box . Its time-travel themed, with all sorts of neat ships, consoles, etc., both to be won on random chance and via Lobi. You should really take a look - they're very cool looking . Now, given that Master Keys cost $1.25 each (well, less if you buy 10-packs), you might be hesitant to go after them. You might also be leery of the whole lockbox scheme. And, that's understandable. Goodness knows Pavlovian responses aren't limited to just dogs! So, how to play without paying...?

Earlier on I posted my excitement over Unreplicatable Materials . It looked like a gold-mine, but I was also wondering if what I saw might be a bit too good to be true. Well, a quick look-over this morning and yes, it was indeed so. The weekend market had been emptied out, leaving only the highest priced posts in the Exchange. Whoops.