My six year old daughter watched me get the images ready for the previous post and went off with her pens and did her own version of Cthulhu:

(My original:

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She also did her own version of the plus symbol for the dice design as well:

(My original:

)

Now to get her programming and gaming…

So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

While I’ve been on holiday and not doing anything on TDO Mini Forms, others have been quite busy:

How to use custom taxonomies in TDO Mini Forms (from ilovecolors).

TDO Mini Forms is one of the best plugins for WordPress to allow visitors or users to publish posts and upload files without having to access the admin area. You can select categories for the post, add tags, title, content, etc. However, even after WordPress introduced UIs for custom taxonomies in version 2.8, TDO Mini Forms (or tdomf for short) won’t allow you to select custom taxonomies. In this post you will find how to modify the categories widget for TDOMF to enable custom taxonomies.

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

Got to the bottom of not being able to drag and drop in my TDO Mini Forms plugin after WordPress 3.0 upgrade. The fix will take a bit of time to do as it requires a little re-engineering of the Create Forms screen.

The problem occurred because with WordPress 3.0, they also updated their jQuery libraries and re-engineered how you load them. To be honest, I didn’t expect a jQuery update would break existing jQuery-based code, but sadly it’s nothing more than I would expect.

I’ll get a proper fix out for it something this week.

I’ve just spent a good hour updating all my sites to the latest drop of WordPress 3.0 (I’m amazing I’m running so many, anyway…). As far as I can tell TDO Mini Forms is still mostly working okay. Certainly you can upgrade right now if you’re security conscious. Submitting post and previewing seems to be okay. But the drag/drop in the form editor is broken, so you can’t edit or create new forms. I’ll see over the next week if I can fix it. Please feel free to log any issues about upgrading here and I’ll see what I can get through.

If you notice anything else that doesn’t work after upgrade, feel free to drop a comment here. I don’t have the bandwidth to test every feature, so I’m sure some minor feature or corner issue may also break.

Even finding time to write this blog post is problematic, having to push it into the few spare minutes during my lunch break. I simply have not found the time to work on TDO Mini Forms. Well that’s not entirely true, I haven’t found time and motivation this last six months.

Part of the problem is that I implemented TDO Mini Forms for fun, a neat little plugin for WordPress I could use on some web projects (all dead now by the way). Then it was driven by my love of coding and the small crowd of users. But I changed projects in work several months back and could no longer slip the time in to bash away at some code for myself, at least during the daylight hours and now there is a mountain of support requests on the forums that I can’t even comprehend getting through and a slow disconnect between what I enjoyed about it and what I wanted to enjoy about it.

Essentially, it’s not fun any more. It’s bug fixes, RTFM and maintaince upgrades (with WordPress 3.0 is coming and that’s like a big stomping unstoppable giant, which I fully expect to splat my plugins…) it becomes daunting. I’ve added too many features (that can do wonderful things), and people either complain about them (“it’s too complex”) or demand more (“editable image uploads ftw!”). The whole code base of TDO Mini Forms evolved chaotically and the idea of re-writing (and having to maintain some degree of backwards compatibility) it’s quite off-putting.

And then I’m working on another creative project that I’m genuinely motivated about, but isn’t software. And when I have free time, I dive into this project, because I want to, not because I have to.

It might be more interesting if I was getting more out of it, say I was a web-developer (I’m not, I’m embedded engineer) and it was promoting my career or getting my clients, I was a big wordpress-advocate and people were coming to my blog to hear the cool things I say (I don’t have much cool things to say, unless you like tabletop roleplaying…), I was making enough money from donations I could afford to get a new gadget every once in a while or it was powering a big project I loved, but it’s not.

So I’m not sure where that leaves TDO Mini Forms. I think probably it’s been on an unofficial hiatus for the last while already. I don’t want to dump it, but I’m not sure of when I’ll get back to it. I have been thinking about it a lot, but not working on it. (I may write up those thoughts in a future blog post).

One thing I will say, if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and hard to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.

I have to send out a big thanks to all the people who have donated to the plugin. I really do appreciate it and it’s why I went so far with it. Thanks for listening.

My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind.

Like what excites me in tabletop gaming, it’s the experience I’m after when I play a computer game, be that pure fun or a thrilling adventure. One of the first games I got for the Wii was Resident Evil 4 (I never played any of the others in the series) and the first few hours of play were great. A lovely creepy, mysterious and thrilling experience. I’m not sure how much I’ve done of it, but it’s gotten to the point that the experience has worn off and I’m just playing a game; managing ammo, expecting the ridiculous and impossible twists, the pointless searching of tunnels and out-of-place puzzles. I think this is because I have the time/attention-span of a casual player but the desires of a hardcore player. I don’t play long enough that the experience carries me most of the way. (Zelda has done the same to me, I can’t believe after getting the armour together I have to go explore yet another nine dungeons or something.)

We've watched it twice, once in 2D and once in 3D. The 3D doesn't add much. Still loved it, loads of gamer references

Watching How to Train a Dragon again, the final battle between the Vikings and the great dragon, just reminded me of the trailers and screenshots of Monster Hunter Tri, and it struck me. MHT has a wonderful simple premise. One that would work just as easily as a quick game or a much larger roleplaying experience. Though I’m not interested in computer gaming roleplaying (this isn’t a slight against WOW players or anything, I’m just not interested in it), it occurred to me that it’d make a great premise for a tabletop roleplaying game.

My big chip about tabletop RPG fantasy games is that they are often highly detailed evolved worlds. Lots of rich source to explore when you play. A lot of people love this I know, but I guess I’m a little different. This, to a degree, puts me off because it presents a learning curve to the world. To make a proper character to roleplay means you should, at the least, have a good idea of the world you’re creating the character for. A detailed fantasy RPG makes me feel I should have a strong knowledge of the world before play and, quite often, you have tons of choice. And when you have too much choice, you have no choice, in a way. I could pick up a Lord of the Rings RPG because I’m a fan of the books, but Exalted wears me down. Riddle of Steel has a great combat mechanic, which makes it stand out, but the setting is detailed and dense, putting me off the setting part.

But that’s why I think MHT is fascinating. It doesn’t offer a fantasy world. It offers a premise. You are a hunter of monsters. You have seven (I think) different types of weapons to specialise in (compared to pages of detailed descriptions of medieval-inspired weapons for example). But by using different materials, buying charms, etc. you can make these weapons quite unique. The game starts you in a village, and gets you to hunt different types of monsters (and doing some grinding too) and you learn about the monsters in play. You don’t start with a big list, you build your knowledge via experience. You don’t have tons of choice, you are a hunter and you have several weapon-types to specialise in, but it does offer quite a range of customisation the more you play. (Which was one of the things that attracted me to the game, being able to create a fairly unique character.)

If you had a decent tabletop RPG mechanic for combat fighting the monsters, you could adopt a similar premise. Start small, add bits to the world (new monsters, towns, NPCs) as the players get better. Having such a simple premise would make it easy to layer on top bigger narratives as the players get more confident and attached to the world, suggesting hints of a possible invasion or conspiracies of a far away empire, etc.

Great old school RPG and I had a great character, a young teenager trying to become a warrior... which he did and became scary good!

My GM has gotten himself an job (good for him) and is now travelling the world, so we haven’t gotten to finish our “The Enemy Within” campaign, set in the Warhammer Fantasy world (1st Edition mind you so “old school”). This campaign worked because all of the players rolled up characters instead of creating them. Our initial choices were made by the dice. It allowed us to create basic characters with not that much pre-existing knowledge of the world. The campaign then set us off with our group direction and carried us around the world to the point we learned the world in play.

Anything that gets in the way of experience, takes from the whole thing. Just as with writing, anything that jars the reader from work is bad. You don’t want your reader to be correcting your grammar or laughing when they shouldn’t be at the way one of your character’s talk, how will they take anything else seriously? The same goes for roleplaying books and playing them. And for me the “burden” of a huge setting that I can’t relate it to or hang it on something is really off-putting. Warhammer fantasy is sort like a European medieval/renaissance alternative history (with Elves and Halflings) and it does it well. There’s my hook. Post-apocalyptic settings are also based on the modern world but imagined after the big bomb. Modern day games, such as urban fantasy concepts (like most of White’ Wolf’s World Of Darkness games), I can grok too.

The same also applies to far future based worlds, where the technology and science are so far advanced, they are incomprehensible as anything other than magic. Though I sometimes feel that there is something more interesting in such settings, because they ask the question, what’s going to happen to humanity? But then you’re playing, not a human, or at least not a modern human, but someone or thing so advanced that they are effectively alien.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me some what about fantasy worlds. They often shoe-horn in modern perspectives in very different worlds. Sometimes this can work when the setting doesn’t take itself too seriously, or it’s close enough to the readers world that its easy to get. But it can sometimes lead to claims or appearance of “cultural misappropriation” or it can be used by players to hide anti-game decisions (“that’s what a follower of X would do!”). So personally I prefer human or close-enough to human type characters. I’m not saying you can’t have a game or play a game where characters are significantly different, but there is a point when a human becomes too alien to play convincingly or to have a good experience with as a player, unless it’s down simply for kicks.

In Lost Heroes I make an explicit ruling on this. I say something like: “you can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but you can’t play a dragon that turns into a human.” The difference is subtle.

Okay, this post has become a lot longer than I intended. Must stop rambling. All really to say I think the premise of MHT would make an interesting tabletop RPG game.

Yep. There is one change that would make me buy an iPad.

No it’s not implementing Flash. While I can live without Flash, I dislike the motive behind Apple not supporting Flash. And Flash games too, some of them are fun. But no, it’s not the lack of Flash.

It’s not that Apple are becoming the next “Evil Empire” with their vendor lock-ins, walled-gardens markets, their worrying editorial powers (no porn on the ipad/iphone? Shouldn’t that be my choice?) or forcing app developers to do things their way. I could accept all those limitations with just this one change.

It’s not the lack of camera. Sure the camera would be nice, imagine video conferencing with that sort of device? That would indeed be “awesome”, to use a popular American adjective. You could even take snaps of documents rather than carry those documents around. But the camera, I could do with out. Sure wasn’t I using mobile phones before they had cameras?

It’s not the lack of an SD slot or USB ports either. Seeing now I trade stuff between my devices like the Wii, my old Palm, my DSi, my mobile phone, my digital photo frame and even different PCs using USB drives and SD (and micro SD), I could get by, particularly because I’d probably be forced to use iTunes to transfer my videos and photos and it’d have to convert everything from mp3 and divx to Apple based right?

I hate virtual keyboards. That tech is old, my Palm supports a virtual keyboard and I never used it. I’m forced to use it on the DSi and it drives me nuts. Pen based input is only slightly better but not great. I can text like bloodly bejesus on my phone, but I wouldn’t write a blog post or compose a long email that way. It’s a pity it doesn’t have pen based input. That would be a huge plus but it’d have to be decent though, it would have to be  accurate enough. The Palm and DSi work great, but when it comes to drawing or writing I find them a bit frustrating, turning my bad writing into an barely readable scrawl and the delay between the pen and when it appears can hamper the free-flowing nature of drawing. But at least then I could write and annotate ebooks and stuff I manage to get on the device, or draw on-the-fly maps for gaming sessions.

I could live with all those things, with but one change. The price.

Man I wouldn’t pay more than 200 euros (that’s about 270 US dollars at current conversion rates) for a device like the iPad. Sure I could imagine forking out 300-400 euros perhaps for the top of range one with the 3G feature. I bought a Wii for more than 200, but then I was excited about the Wii and I bought in full knowledge I was paying more than the value that I would get out of it. (Even the Wii does flash, mostly). So I get the fan-boy lust for the iPad, honestly I do.

On the other hand, I forked over quite a lot of money for my laptop when I bought it. Much more than I could really afford at the time. That laptop is now 10 years old and I’m still using it every day to do the internet-thing, write and program and create. It’s starting to show it’s age these days, but it’s still got life in it. I got my value out of it, I’m still getting my value out of it. I’m really not sure the iPad would give me that much value. I couldn’t use it to write. I couldn’t use it to program. I could use it to read the internet, but not interact with the internet as freely as a I do with my laptop (as in I can consume the internet, but not necessarily add to the internet, due to the lack of a decent form of input).

Perhaps, truthfully, I’m just a little bit saddened to hear that the Microsoft Courier device is dead. The signs where there from the beginning though that it was just vaporware, yet I ignored them all, in the hope that the device would be made, I was that excited about its concepts. I’d probably pay more quite a bit more than the top-of-the-range iPad costs to get it.

I heard about the Courier before I heard about the iPad and really I only heard/cared about the iPad because the Courier demo shots and videos were being compared to the then rumour-only “iTablet”. I did hope that Apple, being Apple, would blow Courier concept out of the water with their iPad because the Microsoft Courier made me think that tablet PCs could indeed be the future, the perfect digital companion device. The fact that it was able to handle input via fingers and pen-based so I could get the accuracy of using a pen for writing notes and drawing and it’s model for working (clipping images from webpages and ebooks into “infinite journals” for example) would argument and even replace stuff I do using paper. I use printouts with written notes and paper notebooks with lots of diagrams in my work and I’m not a fancy shoe designer (I’m a programmer). The Courier would be able to handle all that digitally for me and even add more value to it. The iPad would not, in anyway, add value to the things I already do. Sure it might be useful as an entertainment device, but I want a little more I guess. With the Courier, I could have dropped my sketchbook and pens, my large notebook and wads of paper-based stuff and even my DSi and left them out of my “man-bag” that I take everywhere. The iPad would be in addition to the stuff in my bag. It might replace my DSi (I haven’t “played” an iPad yet). But then I can slip my DSi in my pocket when I don’t want to take my bag somewhere.

Or perhaps to put it another way, I bought my Wii because it was cool. It was exciting. Even though, Nintendo operate their own version of the walled-garden and won’t allow games on it that they don’t agree with and as a father and working full time, I knew I wouldn’t have the time to get the real value of it. I have tons of games like Zelda and Resident Evil for it now but none yet that I’ve finished to the end. I have to make time in my precious spare/downtime to use the Wii, so I better enjoy it. The iPad feels like a device, I’d have to make time to use as it has been hyped as a “new category of consumer devices” and I saw one review describe it as “an itch you didn’t know you needed to scratch”. Do I really want to pay so much for another something to consume my time without producing anything?

That’s just my feeling of course, you are free to disagree with me. But personally, I think I’ll have to wait a while until tablet devices really make me excited again.

Back when I was wee, there was a TV show called Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap was about a Scientist named Sam Beckett who got caught in a botched experiment and ended up “leaping” into people in the past (but within his lifetime) and changing and improving their lives. Putting aside the whole “higher power” thingy going on, it was a great idea.

I remember when a teenager discussing with my friend what you do if you leapt back in time to a younger you. It was a fun thought-exercise. And for some reason I started thinking yesterday… “what if I, the adult me, leapt back into being a teenager?”

The amazing thing I realised was that I’m a completely different person. Completely. My attitude, my opinions and my perspective are all different. Besides all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated (which would be enormous advantage… imagine knowing how big the web is going to go big…), the way I approach things and life has changed. Part of that is probably becoming a father, your priorities change but also part of it is just life experiences, getting married, buying a house, working in a professional environment and so on.

While I would never willing leap back to being a teenager, I realised that I’d wouldn’t want to change anything either, good or bad. It’s not about regret or not regretting. I love my wife, love my kids. Changing the past, even subtly, could change everything that I hold dear.

What a life-affirming conclusion!