Yes.

You know I haven't written anything for a long time. I'd like to think thats because I didn't have anything important to say, rather than just being a slacker. Truth is, I've probably been spending all my creative juice on designing Galactic Adventures.

Maybe.

Do you have a Steam account? Why not? Even if you don't have a Steam account, do you like 40k? I was made very happy by my Steam account.

Because in 2011, Space Marine is not just a console shooter.*

It's on PC. And it's available from Steam.

Now, Steam and Relic and 40k are not a natural hit. Really good odds yes, but not a shoe in. On the other hand, Destroy All Humans fairly rocked - the first one at least. THQ has done a very good job of adapting 40k to RTS in both Dawn of Wars.

I know its a long way off, and I haven't seen any game play footage.

But thats an Astartes Heavy Bolter.

Look it up.

*I feared this greatly, following my disappointment that Rockstar was not making a version of Red Dead Redemption for the PC, and noting that the first trailer I saw made no mention of PC on the tail end. The new trailer on Steam clearly has a PC/DVD ROM logo on it.

Bless your weapons.

Slow Dev Curve

So I have about 4 designs up in the air right now. 1 is real close to final - which for us means ready to proof - i.e. we print all the stuff and look at it to see if any of it looks silly.

Time management has never been one of my strong suits.

On the list:

Galactic Adventures (almost final title we think)

which is set in the PGE environment. Each player is a starship captain for one of four powers. Complete missions, earn prestige, get a bigger ship, rub it in the noses of your fellow captains.

Colony (working title)

which is also a PGE universe game. This one is about taking on the role of a colony founder, and building your claim up.

And two others which are in the idea cloud stage, so not worth mentioning. Sometimes stuff makes it out of the cloud. Sometimes it's only got enough endurance for a bits sheet done in Corel.

Get the behind me

Off Facebook again. Never really liked FB, but I put up with it for a while, in order to do some promotion. No traffic generated by FB. Which means that the deluge of spam I'm being hit with is not worth it. You may remember that last time closing my FB account reduced my spam to a trickle as well.

Spam. Pfffft.

Part 4 of the Fate, Politics and Heritage Preview

I thought today I would change it up and present one of the cards from the intrigue deck. It's very cool card that is quite self explanatory.

Part 3

In my continuing introduction to the races of the galaxy in Portable Galactic Empire, as presented in the Fate, Politics and Heritage expansion, I bring you the Node.

Node 126 was a semi-autonomous battle computer developed for border defense by the United Earth Protectorates. This particular unit went rogue after developing sentience. Although only conjecture, it appears that an overambitious plan to link several battle groups in a single command net may have caused the "error".

Node 126 went off station with 4 battle-groups worth of autonomous hardware. It has since evolved, but appears to be ambivalent to its former masters.

In the game the Node represents an advanced player race. The player playing this race is limited to a 3 card hand.

Stay tuned...

Part 2

Continuing with my pre-release look at the races of G.E., I present the lizard men. Or as they prefer to be refered to - the Aeshva.

Another beginner race, these guys reproduce like nobodies business. Some think this is because they are very resilient and can flourish in almost any environment. Others think that this population explosion is only a current trend. The Aeshva are allied with the U.E.P. and have sided with them many times in conflicts with the Jaal Riin empire.

Stay tuned.

New Stuff on the Way

Soooooo...

We've been hard at work at Castle, trying to tune up the expansion for release. We got some good stuff going on now. I decided to go back and re-address the art, especially for the races. I thought I would give you all, my faithful, first crack at seeing some of it in the wild. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, the expansion for Portable Galactic Empire is imminent. It will include (very likely, but possibly subject to change) an expansion deck of Intrigue cards, a set of player race cards, a set of tiles that may be used as resource counters, an instruction sheet, and two more of "the worlds smallest dice". But the dice are red, to go with the influence red colour.

And btw, there not the smallest dice in the world. Those would be the tiny d6 included in the "Pirates of ..." card pack games. Those dice are like 3mm.

First up, one of the off the wall races:

The Echandii:

The echandii are descendant of some form of space faring crab or lobster. They have an exoskeleton that makes them very hardy. They have traditionally ignored both human factions, though lately they have begun entering into technology exchanges with the U.E.P. in order to achieve the upper hand in their centuries long conflict with the Dor Un Dos. They, however, have a very large and well respected merchant marine. This means that they have influence with all of the races in galaxy.

In the game the Echandii are a beginner race. This race should be given to a player with little experience in the game.

We should also be producing a new fancy die to add to your collection - the Influence/Government die. When I have pictures of the prototype, they'll get posted.


Oh, hay, if you forgot, Castle Games Inc. is here.

Strike 1 off my list

Wrapped the expansion for Dawn of War II last night. Reasonable, though in the end I had to exploit the AI of the final boss to beat him.

I like the idea of the two fold campaign, but I avoided any hard choices. At no point was I in any real danger of becoming chaotic. I even deliberately chose to equip some warp tainted terminator armor on the basis of the fact that you can't send normal marines into a space hulk. They get eaten. But I balanced that off by using up one of my one time use artifacts to set the taint back to zero.

I am curious to see if the campaign unfolds different if you go for chaos stuff. The stats on the tainted artifacts are always very tempting.

Overall, it's more of the same for the single player, so I liked it.

Updated

Geeze, I got a lot of work to do. My list, as it stands:

1 Get to 80 on WoW
2 Borderlands
3 Gta IV
4 Assasins Creed (yes the first one)
5 Dragon Age:Origins (yes, I'm way behind the curve on that)

And thats only looking at the stuff I own. I have yet to pick up Mass Effect 2, or Bioshock 2, and the expansion for DoW II is out next week.


AND I need, need, NEED to finish work on the expansion for PGE. Hey, have a card shot.

Windows 7

Hey, I'm OK with it. I now have Win 7 on all three of my home platforms. And even on Larry it runs quite well. It's much less of a pain than Vista was. The 3 weeks I had Vista on my tablet were excruciating. It's much better than Vista.

I'm not convinced it's better than XP. I used XP for a long time, and was very comfortable with the admin side of it. Some of this is new and moved and changed on 7, but so far not in show stopping ways.

I recommend Windows 7, even for XP users who are thinking about Macs. Come on? You really want to be forced to live with a guy who wears a black turtle neck?