The first two lines of 30 Rock.
I love how 30 Rock was about something.
I love how these lines totally set up the power dynamic that was at the core of the show - the conflict between Liz in the world, but also, the conflict between old white men with power and everybody else.
I love that this guy is the kind of person Tina Fey hates more than anything in the world and that she made a show about her and a guy like this learning to be friends. The first line shows Liz’s inability to let herself be freed from the rat race and the second line shows the person responsible for the rat race existing.
30 Rock was about the trade off between power and happiness. It was about Liz learning that to enjoy her life she had to give up on her dreams and ideals just a little bit. But she had to work for that failure. Settling has to be earned.
It was a really beautiful message.
What a good thing.
(Source: 30rockasaurus)
KC Green just finished storyboarding the Story War cartoon! Here’s a few choice frames! Ha ha ha can you believe our most ridiculous Kickstarter reward is actually happening ha ha ha wow I kind of thought we were going to just apologize and under deliver on that one.
Next step: Lindsay and Alex are gonna actually animate the frickin’ thing! The storyboard is so good you guys. KC Green is so good. This cartoon is gonna be great.
Brad asked for pictures of the Witch-ness so, yeah…
This is only the hair, make-up, and
first attemptpointy latex-ears of a full cosplay I’m planning to wear to MCM London, so if any of you are going, look out for me!(for my non-Story War followers, the Witch Card)
ohhh my GOSH
Oh my GOD!
!!!
The final art for the Winter Wand - previous iterations shown below. (Previously called Frost Wand.)
Hey! I just noticed we haven’t really updated about what we’re doing with the cards and stuff in a while! Today (toDAY) is the deadline for sending the cards off to the printers. We’ve spent the last few weeks doing minor revisions and trying to get a consistent look and feel across all the cards, replacing art that’s always bothered us, and doing some last minute adjustments based on our PAX playtesting.
Since we brought Lindsay and Alex on board to help with the cartoon, they gave us some really good advice on making the character faces appear more consistent and expressive and cartoony across the board. So we’ve been doing things like that. Here you can see the wizard’s face updates! He went from a glowy-eyed halpert-faced guy to a really expressive cartoon guy which is a much better look, I think!
Once we send the final deck off to the printers we’ll ALSO release an updated print-and-play version of the game, that will more closely resemble the final game!
I’m trying to find a picture of the platonic ideal for an aurora for a Story War card and it’s really difficult. When I think “aurora” I think of a snaking string of icicle-shaped lights but all the photos of real auroras just look like smudges of color.
Not a single photo or reference for an aurora is representative of what I think of when I visualize an aurora in my brain. The closest I can find are auroras from video games (except Pokemon which has garbage auroras) and movies. Where did this “platonic ideal aurora” imagery come from? The Observatory room in Luigi’s Mansion? The movie Frequency? Why do I recognize this shape that does not exist in nature.
Anyway here’s the mockup I ended up making:
I had to photoshop two auroras together, a raggedy one and a smooth one. This is for the Winter Wand, we’re having trouble visualizing how it freezes things so we decided that meant we should probably make a definitive visualization and put it on the card so that everyone playing Story War is on the same page as to how it freezes stuff.
video game journalism
”The stories that I like the most are where he kind of goes a little nuts trying to achieve his goal, and then he dials it back and realizes what’s really important,” says Bozon, who cites Scrooge as one of his favorite fictional characters. “He’s very relatable. He’s not a superhero, he’s a thinker and nothing gets him down, he always bounces back. He’s like Ash Ketchum but with money.”
— Matt Bozon of Wayforward on Ducktales Remastered
I’ve been playing a lot of the best-selling free-to-play games on iOS lately. I’m really curious to see how the different free-to-play models work because I want to make my own mobile games. I really like a lot of them, like Clash of Clans (which lets you buy gems to speed up construction time) and Fish Out of Water (which lets you buy little power-ups, though you can get them for free and it’s possible to get a perfect score without them). And a few days ago I downloaded Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga by King.com and I was really enjoying them until I realized they were dark-sided.
Candy Crush Saga (which was recently featured in Psy’s newest video) is essentially a combination of Bejeweled and rogue-like gameplay elements - you have to clear a specific mission in a specific number of moves. If you run out of moves without clearing the mission, you lose. The game is a series of missions with specific goals (clear all the jelly, get the chestnuts to the bottom, get a score within the time limit, etc) and gradually increasing complexity with each level. That, by itself, is a really cool idea. It’s actually super fun and addictive. (Bubble Witch Saga is the same thing but it’s based on Puzzle Bobble instead of Bejeweled.)
But there’s a twist… most of the time it is impossible to win. The tile layout is randomly generated in such a way that even if you play with 100% efficiency the game is rigged against you. Unless, of course, you buy in-app purchases to get extra moves or special powers. Like a carny’s game, you won’t realize the cans are glued together until you buy your third softball.
Hey everybody, we have some big news today!
These gifs are test animations from the Story War animated short! Making a cartoon was our Kickstarter’s $200k stretch goal, and I bet you thought we were bluffing, didn’t you? You totally did.
The short will be animated by Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera (who made Baman Piderman and the gifs above) and it will be written and storyboarded by KC Green (who does Gunshow and the Regular Show comic). We’ll be posting about the cartoon’s progress on this blog, and we expect it to be finished by the end of the summer.
Our Kickstarter is over, but you can still pre-order Story War here!
