Crafting challenge, week 30

I finished off my dungeon stacker stackers this week.  Well, my second try at, anyway.  The first ones were built too small and wouldn't fit on top of the stackers.  These are supposed to be ancient light stone constructions that have been left out in the elements for millennia.

The wall tops are Readi-board with the paper pulled off of one side and textured with a Green Stuff World rolling pin.  The walls are XPS with the smaller sections textured the same way.  The larger piece intended for gates was hand-textured with a ball point pen and rolled up foil wad.

If I had it to do over again (and I might) I'd probably draw on the bricks like the big gate piece since that looked the best.  The texturing on the smaller pieces is weak and the wash didn't pick them out as well as I'd expected.  I probably should have started with a darker base coat in either case.  The only piece that looks reasonable is the big one so I might have another go at these.

This week I also did a bunch of design work but there isn't anything to show there.

Crafting challenge, week 29

This week marks the first in five months that I haven't done a video and I might not make one next week, either.  I made it through 22 consecutively which is its own accomplishment and looking back, I probably made six or so that I thought were OK (the rest were crap).  I'm not going to miss the stress of figuring out what to say, how to say it, and then shouting into a microphone for several hours each week. 

Instead, I've been doing other creative things.  The ships shown here are more bits from the post-BrickCon excitement.  We're planning a collab hopefully to be shown at BrickCan 2020 if all goes well.  I've got a lot more to build but there's time yet so other than my pals crushing it in the "build ships for a collab next year" department, I'm not in any particular hurry.

Also this week, I started building some dungeon stacker stackers because we're going to have some wall combat action sometime real soon, maybe next weekend, and I like to be prepared.  They're built and primed but painting will be a couple days yet.  Unless something goes terribly wrong, pictures should land here next week.

Last but by no means least, I've started redesigning my fantasy game.  I've got some ideas on how to make it work better and honestly, I can't leave well enough alone. I'm pooling my learnings from the Sci-Fi game I mostly built earlier this year and additional learnings from Fate and Blades in the Dark to hopefully streamline some stuff even further.  Part of me wants to wait until I've had time to study Genesys but given the size of that book, I figure that's a ways off yet. 

So far, the new system looks a lot meaner and a lot leaner.  Combat and other resolution rolls should be streamlined and some of the last corners get knocked off of the majority of mechanics.  As an added bonus, something akin to aspects in Fate should replace the normal belief system that players find so hard to wrestle with.  I'm not 100% sold on it yet, but it's also in its infancy.  If all goes well, we can trot it out sometime soon--hopefully in time for chapter 2 possibly in a couple weeks' time.

Crafting challenge, week 28

I am starting to be stupidly busy (again) and it's way past time to wind down the video a week thing that's been such a rollercoaster.  At the very least I'd like to not have a release when my Saturday game runs because I feel like the quality of the game is dropping because I'm thinking about it less.  This week's video is here.

Last week was BrickCon and one of the things I like best about going to cons is all the ideas and excitement that they ignite.  The problem is that I'm usually suuuuuper tired and by the time I've recovered I'm busy with something else or the excitement has died down.  This time I made a conscious effort to build right after the con and here's the first postable result.

In other news:  we're looking pretty doomed to finish 100 minis by year's end.

Crafting challenge, week 27

This is a video-only week (here) but mostly because BrickCon ate up most of the time.  And for those of you who noticed that I post-dated this one, it's because I forgot to publish it amidst all the BrickCon festivities.