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OK
Go - White Knuckles
12 Most Creative
Objects Inspired by the Rubik's Cube
"But even cooler than the Fluxx cards
is realizing that the Looneys made enough money selling them
to quit their jobs building space shuttles. That's the dream,
right there - whether we like it or not, money makes everything
happen; everybody has to make some, and a few are lucky enough
to make some doing something fun. Like making card games. LIVE
THE DREEEEAM." -- Rich Abdill, in the College Park
Patch, March 30, 2011: Living
The Dream: Space Shuttles, Monty Python And Zombie Ballerinas
The Rash.Log
is on hiatus.
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I've Been Animated! |
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 First, sorry
it's been so long since I updated this page. Last
time I said these updates had become almost monthly, but
this time it's been almost 3 months! But as I also described
last time, I've been extremely busy.
Everything is on track for the two new games we're releasing
on June 24, Seven Dragons and IceDice. Everything is at the printers
and we're hard at work creating marketing materials and getting
everything lined up to start shipping.
At this point we have the process of releasing a new game down
to a science. We have a standard timeline we follow for each
new product, with various marketing elements having becoming
standard procedure (such as a new promo card postcard for each
game, along with poster, sell sheet, etc). Anyway, we've now
begun making short video introductions a standard part of each
product roll-out. We did the first couple entirely in-house,
with iPhone video of me explaining the games, and they've proven
so successful at increasing awareness and pre-orders for a new
launch that we've decided to step up our production value and
have started contracting the job out to a local entrepreneurial
film-making friend of ours, named Alex
Bradley. Since he's also an artist and animator, Alex replaced
me with a cartoon version of myself, and I gotta say, it's just
wonderfully delightful. I just love the way "animated Andy"
appears in the IceDice video, and his storyboards for the Seven
Dragons video look even more fun. The IceDice
video is available at the Looney
Labs Fan Club site, go check it out!
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In other news:
 It's
been several years since I invented Zark
City, and having played it many times since then, I've found
several things I want to fix and improve. I think that Zark City
was already once of my best pyramid games, and I think it's even
better now. It does play a bit differently though, so we're calling
it Zark City 2.0. And what are the differences between the original
and this new version? First, you now get an automatic draw at
the start of every turn. More importantly, attack values are
now scaled, so that Kings do more damage than Jacks. But the
most interesting change is with the Aces. Instead of being attack
cards, Aces now grant the power to "fly" a card to
another location (akin to the power of the Moon in Zarcana).
It's really cool! Check it out!
- In HR news, we've brought on 3 new part-time helpers, Julia,
Jean, and KrisOsk. Julia has become Kristin's executive assistant,
Jean is a bookkeeper who's helping Robin with various A/R and
A/P tasks, and KrisOsk will be helping us update our webpages.
- Alison has become a bee-keeper! She took a course on the
subject, and entered a raffle at a bee-keeping workshop, and
just happened to be the big winner of a complete fully-operational
beehive! So the bees moved into the backyard at Pepperland and
are already at work pollinating the neighborhood.
- In the previous update's summary
of new product news, I mentioned that we were planning to sell
Rainbow & Xeno stashes of pyramids only, packaging very simply,
alongside the new IceDice & Treehouse zippered-bag game sets.
I'm happy to report that the packaging style for these Pyramid-Only
Products has been upgraded, from ziplock baggie with a cardboard
display flap, to color tuckboxes that are the same size as our
standard two-piece card game boxes. You can get a glimpse of
these new boxes in this new marketing poster
I just finished.
- I was flown down to Georgia to speak to a Game Design class
at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). I posted
a report
on that trip at the Looney Labs Fan Club website, complete with
the handout I created for the talk, called How I Design a
Game. More recently, I was invited to contribute to a book
on Game Design some of my game designer peers are writing, so
I wrote an essay based on this flowchart.
- Lastly, Origins
is starting to loom. If you want to help us run our awesome Big
Experiment, please get signed up at our new Fan Club site! Also,
I'm happy to report that Back
to the Future was nominated for the Origins Award for Best
Traditional Card Game!
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 Thanks
for reading, and have a great Whenever!
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