Storyboard problems, computer problems, Dune the Board game.
November 16, 2007 in BOARD GAMES, BOOKS, MOVIES, MY WEEK, THE SIMPSONS NEWS
THE SIMPSONS NEWS
Well, so much for having fun storyboarding. I finished working on storyboard revisions on one show and I got put on storyboard revisions on another show. Problem is that all the fun stuff has been done already and all I get to do is the grunt work. The shots have been figured out already by the director and he just gives me a bunch of roughs to clean up. This means I, first have to interpret the roughs and second, I have to draw them pretty clean. Problem is that the show is so behind that everything is do yesterday. This means that what ever I get, I have to do as fast as possible and under a ton of pressure. Not only that, but some of the shots I have to “board” are already in layout. This means that the work I’m doing doesn’t have any practical use. The layout artists are working off the rough version of the shots that I’m trying to clean up for the “board”. This does nothing but frustrate me because the director is just as picky over the storyboard shots that are not going to be used by anyone as he is with the ones that are. Why? Because apparently there is one producer left on the show that is not on strike and we have to make the “boards” on the show perfect so he doesn’t make too many changes to it. It’s so impractical. It just feels like a waste of my time to me.
I was put on the show last Thursday and it seems that ever since then, the moment I come to work I get an instant headache. This stinks. I was suppose to start on Lance’s show on Monday and I haven’t which means that I’m going to be behind on all the things he gives me from the very beginning.
MY WEEK
My laptop is just not connecting to the internet anymore and don’t know why. It’s really frustrating. First the wireless router started acting up so we just unplugged it and after I did that and I connected the computer to the land line, it just wouldn’t load the internet pages. It gets the signal but it just won’t load. Has this ever happened to you? If it has, how did you fix it? I tried uninstalling the router program but it’s not even in the computer. I don’t know what to do.
BOARD GAMES
So instead of telling you that I played three games this weekend (Bohnanza, San Juan, and Vegas Showdown), I thought I’d write about how I made my own. No, I didn’t design a game, I just put it together from a pdf I downloaded. The game is Dune, the board game.
If your a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune books, this is a must have. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a long time. This game plays up to six player and each person plays one faction from the Dune books, The Fremen, the Harkonnen, the Atreides, the Guild, the Bene Gesserit, or the Emperor . The best part is each faction has a bunch of special “powers” that thematically go with the faction and the essence of the books. It’s so cool! There is just too many interesting things about this game to write here. If you want to read more about it, click here.
This game has been out of print for years and it has the reputation of being one of the best games ever. It’s ranked #45 on board game geek. If you were to try to buy in on e-bay it would cost you over a hundred dollars. Fantasy Flight has bought the rights to use the game system but were unable to get the rights to use the Dune License so they’re going to use a different Sci Fi theme. It just won’t be the same.
After having printed out and played the Pocket Civ game, I thought to myself that it would be pretty easy to print out and make another game. Since I felt like doing it again, I needed a game worth making. I’d downloaded the Dune game about a year or two ago and I thought that maybe it was the right time to put it together. So I began trying to figure out how I was going to go about doing it. I had card stock so that wasn’t going to be a big deal. So first I started printing out the cards, the problem was that the cards also had backs to them. When I turned the paper around and printed on the back of the already printed image in order to give the cards a back, I found to my dismay that they didn’t line up. So I thought the only way to do it would be to print the front and back on two different pieces of card stock and glue them together later. I also had lamination paper and after I printed out all the components I started to laminate everything. Once I did that I went to the craft store and bought some glue spray. I then went to the local copy store to use the paper cutter they had there. I was there for about two hours cutting out the cards for the game as well as the actual game board. I put the cards together using the spray on glue and they looked really great. They actually don’t even looked hand made. Next I went home and cut out the rest of the components with some scissors. In all, it took me about five to six hours and I still wasn’t able to finish that day. The next day at work, I used my exacto knife to cut some slits in the “shield wall” pieces and I also finished putting together the “Combat Wheels” of the game with some help from my light table at work. Now all I have to do is go back to the craft store to look for some components that I might be able to use for the armies and the “spice tokens” and the game is ready to play. It was fun to do but it was an quite a lot of work. Can’t wait to play it.
BOOKS/MOVIES
I’ve noticed something. Some of the most influential Science fiction/fantasy books and movies all seem to have a world religion “foundation” to them. For example:
Star Wars, is kinda Buddhist.
Dune, is kinda Muslim.
The Matrix, is sorta Gnostic.
The Lord of the Rings, is very, very, Catholic (it’s Christian but it’s specifically Catholic).
I understand that all religions may seem the same on the surface and therefore people (like Joseph Campbell) have put forth the proposition that they are. Though I disagree with Campbell’s proposition I think he’s right in that these stories do to hit a “mythic” core in us. I heard somewhere that Tolkien thought myths were very similar because it was a way for humanity to recognize Jesus as the Savior even if you’re culture didn’t have a bible because it was written in everyones psyche. (Can you tell I’m Christian?) I find this interesting non the less. I wonder if the next big sci fi/fantasy book/movie will be Hindu or Jewish. Unless there’s already one and I don’t know it.
I proposed this idea to some friends at lunch and they pointed out that Star Trek and Blade Runner don’t fall under this world religion foundation view, though they do have a philosophical ideological foundation. For example:
Star Trek is a bit secular humanistic.
Blade Runner is…well…huh…I guess it’s just asking a bit fat question, so I guess it would be Socratic?
What do you think?
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Do you think board games are just for kids?
December 7, 2007 in ANSWERING COMMENTS, BLOGS, BOARD GAMES, BOOKS, THE SIMPSONS NEWS
THE SIMPSONS NEWS
So, some of us are really starting to feel the effects of the strike. I, thankfully, am not. At least not yet. I was talking to a fellow co-worker and he told me that the crew he’s on has been told to take their time on their scenes. Once they are done they won’t have any more work and might have to go on hiatus. Yikes!
Meanwhile, the show I’m on still has a lot of work to be done on it. As far as making quota…uh…we’re suppose to finish ten scenes a week. I managed to finish four. They were heavy acting scenes. Still, it looks bad. The next scenes I have to do are riot scenes so I don’t think I’m gonna make quota again. Maybe they won’t mind because of the strike. Guess I better make the scenes look good anyway, just in case. Hope the strike is over soon. Our animatic is due the week before Christmas and without writers, who will give us notes on what to revise? Without revisions I don’t have a job next month.
BLOGS/BOARD GAMES
Do you think board games are just for kids!? You know, it never occurred to me that someone would actually think that way. All this time I’ve been writing about board games and I bet a lot of people just skipped that part of my post because they probably thought I was talking about kids stuff. I bet if I was to talk about animated movies or shows they would probably think the same thing.
The reason I came to realize that people might think this way was because I read a blog article called 60 second primer on modern board games, at Yehuda Berlinger’s blog which I really liked and highly recommend because it gives you a quick over view on modern board games and how people might view them.
This is a really great professional blog. (Boy, I’d love to live off my blog. Bet it takes a lot of work though. I think it’s sooo cool that he’s sponsored by board game stores). I found out about this blog because he had linked to me. The strange thing is, the day I found out about the blog. I was listening to a board game podcast called Into the Gamescape – Show 22. It’s a British based podcast with three guys who generally just talk about the games they play and review them. Well, in the episode I was listening to, the Gamescape guys were talking about a game they played called, “It’s Alive!” (this was about 50:23 minutes into the show). It’s basically a card game about putting together a monster out of body parts a la Frankenstein. I remember because the Gamescape guys forced the winner to yell out “It’s Alive!” in order to win the game because it was in the rules. If he hadn’t done it, they were not going to count his win as a win and they were just going to keep playing. Anyway, I listened to that podcast on the way home in my car and when I got home and thought nothing else about it. Once home, I got on the computer and discovered Yehuda’s site. I went into the “About me” page and found that he was also a board game designer. I clicked to see what game he designed and wouldn’t you know it, it was “It’s Alive!”. That was just the weirdest thing.
In any case, I recommend the blog. The other article I really liked was 100+ Ways to Rejuvenate the Games You Already Own. It’s very cool. Lots of ideas as to how to make an old game new. I own a book called “New Rules for Classic games” but this blog article may very well be better than that book.
BOOKS
Speaking of books, my friend Aimee has a book coming out this month. It’s called “Japan Ai: A tall girls adventure in Japan“. In this book she recounts the story of her trip to Japan. It’s done in a similar way as my “Illustrated trip to Italy” but it’s mostly in color, longer, in book form and, of course, in her own personal style. In fact she told me she got the idea after looking at what I did with my trip to Italy (the same way I got the idea from someone else). It took me a week to do mine but it took her quite a bit longer to do hers, and it shows. Click here to go to the official site for a preview. From what I’ve seen, it looks darn funny and lots of fun. I’m gonna pick it up, I think you should too. It looks like a lot of fun.
PODCAST
Rosary Army has got their “That Catholic Show” DVDs out. Now you can take the show and watch it in really good quality on your TV. They make good Christmas gifts too. Go pick one up at the official “That Catholic Show” site and help support them. Yay!
BOARD GAMES
As I’ve stated before in “Comparing the pros and cons of Video games and Board games” one of my all time favorite video games is Sid Meier’s Civilizations II (I haven’t played the new version, Civilizations IV because the game is too big and my computers can’t handle it). I like the game so much that, about four or five years ago when I discovered that there was a board game made based on the computer game, I bought it. In fact, trying to discover more information about the game before I bought it was the way I discovered Board Game Geek (BGG). Back then, I wasn’t into board games as much as I am now. Anyway, once I got the game, I was very surprised at how many bits came in the game. Well over a hundred different bits and things. The other thing that was crazy was the size of the board, 36” by 46”. The rule book had two sets of rules the Standard Rules and the Advanced Rules. The Standard Rule was a very simplified way to play the game it almost seemed like a game of Risk, which if I wanted to play, I’d just play Risk. The Advanced Rule on the other had was a little more like the computer game. The game gives you the option to play three different games at different lengths. The shortest game lasts two to three hours, the medium length lasts three to four and the longest lasts four to six. Those are really long! At the time that I had bought the game though, I had no one to play it with, so it just sat there collecting dust, even though I really wanted to try it out.
The first time I played the game was with my wife Alesha (at the time, she was just my girlfriend). We played the Standard Version and I wasn’t very impressed, we ended up thinking that the next time we’d play the game, we would play the Advanced game. This happened almost three years later after I married Alesha, and we played the game with my brother-in-law. We made a few mistakes that night:
We played it late at night when everyone was really tired.
Since I hadn’t read the rules in a long time, I was reading them as we went along (This is the worst way to play a board game).
I got quite a few rules wrong.
In any case, the game was taking a really long time and the game required a lot of up keeping that we weren’t prepared for. Not only that, but my brother-in-law decided to play a very militant game which slowed the game down even more because the battle rules of the game aren’t very good and because production of technologies slows down so much the game doesn’t move ahead. Needless to say, we didn’t finish the game and it left me with a bad impression. I didn’t touch the game again.
An e-mail conversation I recently had with a friend of mine has lead me to take another look at the game. After having played the Pocket Civ game (as mentioned in Playing too much, sleeping too little) I thought that maybe I could use some of the rules of that game and maybe “plug” them into the Sid Meier’s Civ board game . I thought that if I did that it might play more like the video game. Thinking about it some more I started thinking up a lot of other things I might be able to add to the rule of the game to make if feel more like the video game.
Now, you may be wondering, why bother making the board game play more like the video game if I could just get up and play the video game. The answer is a very much like what I wrote in “Comparing the pros and cons of Video games and Board games” . I want to play the game on a table in the company of family and friends but still enjoy the Sid Meier’s Civ experience. I don’t want to sit in front of a computer screen by myself clicking on the spacebar.
In any case, I took out the game again for the first time in years, opened it up and re-read the rules. (Which I later discovered have been revised for the better. I download the new revised rules from the Sid Meier’s Civ board game website.) After I read them I realized that the game wasn’t as bad as I remembered and it really did seem like the video game. I tested out my house rules anyway and I discovered that they actually made the game move faster. I also found different battle rules on BGG that are better than the ones that come with the game so I’m now going to use those.
All this has actually gotten me exited about playing the game again (both the board game and the video game). It’s really too bad that the game takes so long and the board is so huge. Unless the people I play the game with are big Civ fans, it will be very tricky to get anyone to play it with me. Who knows, maybe with the new house rules, I might be able to convince some people. Now, if only I can find a way to automate the up keeping parts of the game like the computer does. Getting a board game to play like a computer game is very tricky.
ANSWERING COMMENTS
Greg: Glad you liked the cartoon. I’m glad you used it on as the podcast picture for the show. I was really flattered.
Mike : Thank you, for the compliment about my cartoons. I’ve heard wonders about your podcasting programs.
Tony Scarfone : I agree with your opinion on the Samus’ translation of Beowulf. That’s the one I read. That’s why I put it on the site. It’s really good. I also noticed you have a podcast. I’m make sure to check it out.
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