G'Day....

So, I have gotten a lot sidetracked recently!! A number of things have been competing for my time!

For starters when I started to learn to programme, I found the time by scaling back my model painting.  By model painting, I mean miniature painting. You know, little sci-fi armies and stuff. Yes, I am a geek! So what? What to fight about it?! I recently bought some fancy new paint.

These are a cool new minimal paint line that focuses on colour mixing and produces a great mat finish. I have been spening a lot of time playing with them more than working on my project! What is so great about these paints is that instead of trying to sell you a shade designed for a single purpose from a paint line with 200 pots in it, this line is tiny. In fact, the entire line is in this image above. What they have done is work hard to make pure liquid pigments (so no grain) with a hyper mat finish that is designed specifically for you to mix your own colours on a pallet. So trying to bring traditional painting and colour theory to game art.  So yeah.. been painting a ton of stuff instead of sitting at my computer!

Also, I decided to update, read "rebuild" one of my old mods for TableTop Simulator. For those of you that do not know, TTS is a "virtual tabletop" that runs in Unity. Basically, "game" made in unity that is designed specifically to be modded. All it really does is run a physics engine and provide a number of tools to allow you to assign bitmaps to things and move them around. It uses a lot of stuff to make it work, but the idea is that it creates a virtual environment to play boardgames online with your friends and provides tools to allow you to scan your board games into images and use them inside the engine.

There is a lot of talk in the boardgame community on the legality of virtual tabletop apps (there are a huge number of them) but in general most boardgame companies do not seem to mind them, and even actively encourage them, sometimes even making their own. Only big companies that are building their own apps are asking for people to remove their mods.

Anyway, my very first stumbling into programming was learning basic LUA, which is the scripting engine TTS uses to build my mods. I have been out of the TTS scene for a while as I wanted to learn more advanced programming and started to feel like I was putting so much effort into modding (I host a number of top mods in the community) that I was missing an opportunity to build my OWN projects, rather than just copying other persons. 

Even so, I decided that I would do an update to one of my very first mods..MAGE KNIGHT. For those that do not know this is one of the truly great games of the "co-op era". It is one of the early ones, and is not a full cop-op, it, in fact, has a competitive and solo ruleset.. but it is still one of the truly great boardgames of recent times. It is to complex to go into but it is a hybrid adventure game and deck builder basically.

Anyway It was my first ever TTS mod, and back then I didn't even code anything. I got help from another person. So this is a update with my new skills in programming to produce a more complex mod that is easier to play but still retains the feeling of playing a virtual tabletop. 

Here is an overview of the mod....

Mage Knight (Tragically Scripted) - [2nd Edition] @SteamWorkshop

If you are curious about Mage Knight, I have started a new playthrough on my chan as well if you would like to see it in action!

Mage Knight (Scenario: Dungeon Lords) - 4 Handed Solo Lets Play @uTube)

Have Fun!

-A4L