Recent Gaming (spring 2025)

Lots of gaming lately. Here's some highlights:

My Amber Diceless Roleplay campaign continues to go strong. It's rolling on 5 years now, roughly twice a month, so we've recently crossed our 100th session with the same characters. Dworkin/Oberon's universe was destroyed, and the action now takes place in Corwin's universe and another universe that Fiona created, plus the occasional scene in the tiny islands of primal matter in the Abyss that were left when the old universe imploded. Those are basically the only place where Brand can exist without the "immune system" of the other universes trying to destroy him.

I just wrapped up my Feng Shui 2nd Edition campaign about a week ago. The players foiled a really major push by the Ascended to conquer 2 of the 3 Junctures they didn't already control. This caused a Critical Shift (the second one of the campaign) and after a truly epic battle we ended with the PCs stepping into a portal to a future they don't know.

For the same group (as played Feng Shui), I'm now prepping a Cyberpunk Red campaign. Scroll down to my last post, from earlier this week, to read about that. 

It was a bit of a toss-up among the group whether we wanted to do Cyberpunk or Pendragon, so in the next few months I'll be reading The Great Pendragon Campaign and the Book of Uther and doing bits and pieces of light GM-prep for that, so that when Cyberpunk wraps up, I'll have that in my pocket and ready to go. But, given that the last two campaigns for this group ran multiple years each, I'm not too worried about getting Pendragon ready in a hurry.

I'm also now playing in an RPG as well. A friend of mine is running Night's Black Agents, aka spies vs vampires. In NBA designs their own vampires and determines whether vampirism is supernatural or superscience or literally infernal demon hell-powers. Our campaign is taking place in the 1980s, so in the two sessions we've played thus far, we've had to sneak across the Berlin Wall three times now. Our characters have rescued a journalist, and the goons who were holding her captive had weird mysterious creepy stuff going on, but we haven't really connected that they (or their leader) is a vampire yet. There's one of them that makes us instantly nauseous when we get near them, but we haven't really figured out why. A different one jumped on top of our car and ripped the roof open trying to kill the journalist, but the roof-rider burst into flames when we shot the heck out of her. We're not at all certain what to expect, or what we're up against. Unraveling the mystery is pretty fun, and the uncertainty makes it easy to tap in to the fear and bewilderment our characters are experiencing. 

This weekend I got together with some friends and played the card game Innovation and the board game Thunder Road.

Innovation is really good, but kind of overwhelming the first time you play.I had really good early turns, or so I thought, as I was in the lead in points and achievements.  Unfortunately, in the mid-game I just could not manage to draw cards with any synergy at all. Well, really the problem was that I had a great hand, but I foolishly commented on it, so someone Melded a card that they could then use via Dogma to steal my hand. I didn't even know that was a possibility... but, duh, I should have, it's not like this is the first game to ever let you steal cards from another player. I just never recovered. Good game, but boy does it have a ton going on.  It's sort of a civilization-builder, where every card is an invention or cultural breakthrough. You start in the stone age, and end in the far-future. Every card in the game is unique, and they all have multiple unique ways to play them. So while I liked it a lot, I imagine its' not going to be good match for everyone.

Thunder Road is much simpler. Just good chaotic Mad-Max style shenanigans. Sort of like if Gaslands or Car Wars was a streamlined racing boardgame. We played with the Chop Shop expansion, which adds cool asymmetric super-powers to your cars via a drafting mechanic at the start of the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, and may end up buying the game and that expansion. Based on just one play, it seems like the core game without that expansion is very light beer-and-pretzels without much depth, but that expansion made every turn interesting and unpredictable. 

I continue to play the occasional solitaire-RPG or solo-skirmish miniatures game when I have insomnia. For the solo-RPG I've been mostly running D&D, with one PC (a Satyr Circle of Stars Druid) and a rotating cast of lower-level NPC sidekicks. When I started I had to lean a lot on the Solo Adventurer's Toolbox and its sequel. I'm a little more freeform of late, but that book is great for getting you started and comfortable with solitaire play.  

And every once in a while I boot up Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to be careful with those because man can I ever lose an entire evening just rearranging my darned inventory. When that happens, I feel like I've wasted a resource (my life, my time) that I'll never get back... and yet, I love both those games so much.

King Of Birds (Dredmor Mod)

 Back on the old Dungeons of Dredmor kick, eh? Back on it? Naw... still on it. 

I made another Dredmor Mod: King Of Birds! 

Birdwatching. Carrier Pigeons. Falconry. This Kingdom is for the birds!

Link: Dungeons of Dredmor Mod: King Of Birds

King of Birds is a support skill for (bird-brained) Warriors with big ambitions. It's a tool-box of useful tricks and upgradable equipment, with a side of random buffs to super-charge your Warrior build. While it does have some attacks in the skill tree, it's not really intended to be your main attack skill by itself. Your falcons are here to bolster their King, not steal his glory nor his throne.

This is a new mod by the maker of Interior Dredmorating, Swashbucklers, Aztecnologist, and a bunch of rooms from various official Dredmor DLCs.

King of Birds showcases a 7-level Warrior Skill, bolstered with a series of related items and corresponding crafting recipes, a half-dozen new rooms that support the themes and mechanics of the skill, and other silly surprises.

Aztecnologist (Dredmor mod)

Been on an old-school Dungeons of Dredmor kick lately. Tonight I published an entirely new Mod for Dredmor. 

Link: Dungeons of Dredmor mod: Aztecnologist 

Your degree in Applied Temple Trap Engineering from Mayincatecnical College will make those pesky Archaeologists feel appropriately unwelcome!

Archaeologists the world over plunder mighty tombs and temples, braving all manner of horrific traps to bring the power of scholarly tools like bullwhips and dynamite to bear to rescue the misty past from its rightful owners. Who maintains those ageless death-traps, and keeps them functioning generations after their installation? You do! You went to college for it.

This skill provides damage and resist boosts for Piercing and Toxic damage, and several levels of Trap Sight and Trap Affinity, but the main draw is the crazy activated abilities.

Re-Delving Dredmor's Dungeon

 I've been playing a bunch of Dungeons of Dredmor lately, and it inspired me to return to my old mods for the game, and spruce them up. I just posted version 1.3 of Interior Dredmorating to Steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=74589366

Compared to the version that was available at the start of the year, this one has 75 more rooms, several new monsters, locked doors and mini-side-quests, 2 new Diggle Gods, a few new items specifically for the late game when the loot starts running thin, etc. In addition to lots of new content, I also fixed bugs and improved a lot of older content from previous versions of Interior Dredmorating and YTTG ("Yes Time To Grind" a mod I'd released on the Gaslamp Games forums back in the day, before the Steam Workshop was a thing). 

It's great to be back in the dungeon. I'm really enjoying modding stuff again for this old favorite game. I have a big list of ideas I want to work into future versions, and I've also been working on a Skill mod for the game.

 

Recent Gaming 9-29 to 10-5

#WhatDidYouPlayMondays #GameLog for 9/29 - 10/5/2015

Card Games: Dark Gothic / Colonial Horror, and Guillotine
RPG / Story Game: Forget Me Not
Board Game: Shadows of Brimstone
Video Game: Sir, You Are Being Hunted!

On Friday I played Dark Gothic with the cards mixed in from the Colonial Horror stand-alone expansion, as well as the smaller Smuggler's Den, Curse of the Werewolf, Dryad of Harper's Wood, and Forgotten Island expansions. I played this with Mark Walters and Laura Mortensen. It was a tense game that ended in defeat for all of us, as our second Villain was The Necromancer. He has two powers that make Minions move to the Shadows, and we kept drawing new Minions to replace the old ones. My deck was really working well and I had multiple turns where I had the cards in hand to defeat the Necromancer but couldn't because his Fight ability would cost us the game. Our bad luck in top-decking only Minions for two full rounds around the table eventually doomed the town of Shadowbrook.

Guillotine is more or less light filler, but it's always an enjoyable way to cap off an evening when the brain power or energy is starting to run low. Long enough to wind down properly, short and light enough to not wear out it's welcome as you do so. We play with the house rule that starting hands are only 3 cards, instead of 5. I first invoked that house rule at least a decade ago when doing demos at the game store I used to run, with the intention of making it easier on new players and speeding up the demos. What I found was that it actually enhanced the game greatly, and I've used that rule every since. With a full hand of 5 cards, there's often a card or two that you never feel the need to use all game long because you've got better options (so they just sit there dead in your hand). 3 cards to start opens up the need to occasionally play one of the weaker cards, and makes it feel more challenging. In the process it provides a little more variety to play experience, which is a good thing when you've had the game in your collection for 10 or 15 years. This time, Mark won, and Laura and I were tied for second place just behind him. 

On Monday I got together with Mark, Laura, Erik and Devon at Card Kingdom, and we played a fun RPG / Story Game called Forget Me Not. It was a riot. Our plot was over-the-top and our characters masticated all over the scenery. The Sheriff was crazy, the local avant-garde artist was murderous and possibly even crazier then the Sheriff, and eventually most of the town was driven just as batty as them by ergot poisoning at the bake sale (or the need for revenge). Very goofy and hectic. Pretty far from the tone of the source material (it reads as basically an unlicensed Twin Peaks RPG), but so damn much fun! I really love the way the randomized pregens and randomized subplots gives the game a solid structure, but mixes it up from one play to the next. Hugely enjoyable. 

On Thursday I went up to Flying Frog Productions' studio to help with playtesting and proof-reading of top-secret Shadows of Brimstone expansions. That's all I'm allowed to say about that at the moment, other than "OMG you guys, there is so much cool stuff coming up for Shadows of Brimstone! Trust me, you're gonna love it!"

Speaking of which, on Saturday and Sunday I spent a little time each night assembling miniatures for my own personal copy of Shadows of Brimstone. These were GenCon preview figures, stuff that will eventually show up in Wave(s) 1.5 or 2 of the Kickstarter. I built the Serpentmen of Jargono and the Masters of the Void deluxe enemy sets, and the Scourge Rats enemy set. The Serpentmen come with a Shaman who has magic trinkets and a deck of spells, and despite the name they are not purely restricted to Jargono (they can and do show up in the mines). The Masters of the Void has some sorcerers that I like to call the KKKultists of KKKthulhu. Tentacles protruding from creepy hoods. They also have a spell deck. The two spellcasting Enemy types each has a very different feel to their magic (and the "AI" that determines how they act each turn), and they really shake up the game quite nicely. Masters of the Void also comes with some other (non-spellcaster) figures that have mechanics that kind of invert which characters are likely to be effective in the fight. The high-initiative xp-gobblers in the party will have a hard time hurting Void Hounds, and the slower PCs will be able to claim a larger-than-normal share of the glory. Scourge Rats aren't nearly as "sexy" as either of those two sets, but they're mechanically simpler and seemed like a good choice to balance out the extra complexity I'd just added with the deluxe spellcasters. I've got several more sets to break out and assemble in the near future, but decided that I could play a session or two with just these three expansions (plus the two core sets and Caverns of Cynder) before I needed to add in more.

That decision left me with an hour or two open at the end of each of those nights to play a video game to unwind. I chose Sir, You Are Being Hunted! which I picked up inexpensively as part of a Humble Indie Bundle this week. It's sort of like a first-person shooter, except it's more about stealth than combat. That, or I'm just really bad at the combat parts. You're on a random archipelago that feels very British, and (as the name implies) you're being hunted by prim and proper robots. I am _so_ terrible at this game, but it's fun enough I'm sure I'll give it another go sometime soon.

Better Bunker Bureau

Cortex Command is a computer game I've enjoyed in spurts off and on over the past 5 or 6 years. It's been in beta that entire time, and is far from complete or bug free, but it's pretty amusing. Link to publisher.

In a nutshell, in Cortex Command you control a brain in a jar (or sometimes in a robot body) that in turn controls mobs of stupid little soldiers. You build bases and blow people up. The terrain is very destructible, with huge fortresses being demolished appallingly quickly, as every gunshot knocks stray pistols off of the landscape. There's a short campaign game, that can be pretty arbitrary and punishing, and it also comes packaged with a number of little one-shot scenarios. Delightful mayhem in a cartoony 8-bit retro aesthetic. It is stupid fun. 

However, I feel like the base-building part of the core game is poorly balanced. It's a huge part of the metagame, and completely out of whack. Tiny little blocks of concrete cost as much as large pre-fabricated bunkers of concrete and steel. Whenever I play it, I feel compelled to spend time designing unique bases, but doing so involves a lot of frustration over the in-game economics. There have been a few mods that addressed it (and I took a stab at it myself back in 2009), but they were all for previous versions of the game, back when it was a pain in the butt to install mods. Nowadays, the game is available via Steam, and mods published via Steam Workshop are easy to install.

As much fun as it is to complain about things on the internet, sometimes I actually feel compelled to do a little work to improve the things that bother me. So, this week I uploaded a mod, the "Better Bunker Bureau", to Steam. Download Link

It's pretty straight-forward. For starters, I took the existing elements from the base game, and re-organized them so they'd be easier to find the things you wanted during the campaign (stairs and ladders together, tunnels organized by size and shape, etc). I adjusted the in-game prices on all the terrain pieces, so if one wall was clearly superior to another their prices would reflect it. (Though this does break down a little amongst the cheapest items.) I also tweaked the materials files so the pre-fab bunker sections now have rubberized floors that better survive the normal wear and tear of heavy robots tromping around (and falling from the rooftops) all day.

While I was at it, I added a few new terrain elements and pre-fabricated construction modules for base building. Some of these were obvious holes the game was lacking, such as making mirrored and rotated versions of existing bits so you didn't have to orient your fortress in a particular direction. Other new bits were a little goofier, like wooden walls and platforms, and piles of old tires, mostly included to provide a bit of set dressing and variety. (Seriously, if concrete and metal get nibbled away with every bullet, wood walls vanish in the blink of an eye.) If it's not obvious by now, my goal was to make the game more playable, not necessarily more winnable.

Most of the work was stuff I did back in 2009, with a bit more in 2012, and some finishing touches this week (2015). Just like playing Cortex Command, this mod is something I've toyed with from time to time over past several years.

Kickstarter for Infinite Space

One of my favorite video games ever is a game called Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. Weird Worlds was a sequel to game called Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, which I also liked, but WW:RTIS was the one that really hooked me. I played it to death over the course of several years, crafted and published multiple mods for it, and I still dust it off from time to time when I need to kill 30 minutes or an evening. Great game, and pretty much the best thing you could ever do on a lunch break.

There is currently a Kickstarter going for the upcoming third game in the series. Infinite Space 3: Sea of Stars. They've got two weeks left to go on the Kickstarter and are over 80% funded. If you pledge just $10, you'll get a copy of the game. Totally worth it. I got several hundreds of hours of play out of the previous titles in the series, and this one looks to be even better. Check it out.

Swashbucklers of Dredmor

Yesterday saw the release of my latest Dredmor mod project, a collaboration with fellow modder Ruigi. Our Swashbucklers mod adds dozens of new items to the game, focused primarily around a Pirate theme and the Rogue skill archetype. There are also new rooms to spice up the dungeon layout, such as hidden treasure rooms with undead pirates, and a place known as cannibal island. It's been several months in the making, and I think you'll really like it.

You can download the files, and/or read the detailed synopsis at the Gaslamp forums.
 

ID, YHTNTEP, and DOD - Download them today!

That unhealthy looking fellow is Lord Dredmor, a terrible Lich with plans for global domination. Those little brown things moving his sofa are Diggles, oppressed and brainwashed drill-beaked penguiny people who do his bidding. It's okay to kill them, unless you're Vegan.

Why am I sharing this with you?

Today is the day the "You Have To Name The Expansion" Pack releases. It's a free expansion to the Dungeons of Dredmor game. It includes a good chunk of content that I created, polished up and included as an official expansion to the game. I'm really proud of it, and honored to be a part of this project.

To celebrate the release of You Have To Name The Expansion, Gaslamp Games is putting Dungeons of Dredmor and the Realm of the Diggle Gods expansion on sale for 70% off for the remainder of today.  The game was already dirt cheap and a heck of a bargain, but today it's just a couple bucks. Go buy it now. NOW.

While you're at it, you should also download and install Interior Dredmorating 1.2.6. Starting today, ID1.2.6 is available via the Steam Workshop. It's a mod I created for Dredmor, and I'm really proud of it, too.  Seriously, this is a good day to be me.

You don't want to ruin my good day, now, do you? GO BUY DREDMOR. GO INSTALL INTERIOR DREDMORATING. DO IT NOW. Thank you. Have fun.

Purchase Dungeons of Dredmor here
Download You Have To Name The Expansion Pack here
Download Interior Dredmorating here or here

Hittin' the big time. (You Have To Name The Expansion Pack)

I'm finally allowed to share the great news I've been sitting quiet on for several weeks.

 

There's a new DLC for Dungeons of Dredmor, and I helped create it. A large portion of my mod, Interior Dredmorating, was chosen by the fine folks at Gaslamp Games for inclusion in the latest official expansion. With like, production values and stuff. It's been a lot of hard work, and I'm really proud of it. Go me.

"You Have To Name The Expansion Pack" is the name of the expansion. When you download and install it, it prompts you to name your own personal copy whatever you'd like, which then displays on the title screen. My copy will no doubt be named some self-serving bit of puffery about how amazing I am, probably with the rest of the world being referenced by the collective noun "bitches".

Full details, including a few screenshots of content I contributed, can be found at the Gaslamp Games blog.  We don't have an exact release date just yet, because we're on "valve time", but it should be available for download in just a matter of days.

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In other "I'm freakin' amazing, everybody loves me, and I'm so darned modest, too" news, a total stranger in Holland saw some of my doodles on the "Best of Draw Something" website, and sent me a game request so he could get more of my artwork. That was pretty flattering. 

This is shaping up to be a good year for my ego.

Interior Dredmorating

A while back I blogged about how I was getting a lot of fun out of a graphical roguelike computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor. It's darned good - PC Gamer awarded it Indy Game of the Year for 2011.

I enjoy it enough to do some significant modding for it these past couple months. It's high time I provide a link here to my mod, Interior Dredmorating. ID is now on it's 1.2.1 release, and it's been pretty warmly received by the Dredmor fan base.

Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/Interior Dredmorating 1.2.1.zip

Sometimes a dungeon isn't really a dungeon.

Primarily my mod adds new rooms, items, art and flavor text to the dungeon. While there are a lot of mods out there for Dredmor, most are skill-and-spell based, the sort of thing you plug into the game to up your character's power (or your build options). Mine's not like that, it's more about providing new challenges and new things to explore. Not surprising at all to those who know me - I'm usually happier being the dungeon-master than being a player.



Those interested in the full details of what the mod adds to the game should check out the thread on the Gaslamp Games forum:  http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/interior-dredmorating-1-2-1.2158/

Dungeons of Dredmor

Get used to seeing this screen a lot. It ain't easy, but it's fun.

My Continuum campaign is on hold till the new year, so I've been filling my time playing (and modding) a wonderful little computer game called Dungeons of Dredmor.  It's essentially a roguelike, but with nice graphics instead of little ascii glyphs that populate that genre. So, more like Diablo, but with a wicked sense of humor (much of it fueled by anachronism and a keen understanding of the tropes of the genre. The remainder is fueled by lutefisk and booze.).

Dungeons of Dredmor has a ton of variation and is highly replayable, largely due to the various character builds interacting with the dungeon in completely different ways. It's not class-based, you chose your own combinations of 7 of the roughly 30 skill trees. If you can teleport, turn enemies into meat products, build your own armor from items found in the dungeon,  and rob from vending machines, you'll get a very different game then if you choose to be a vegan archaeologist with a pet mustache-golem. I'm not making that up.

Best part: Dungeons of Dredmor is dirt cheap. I got mine via one of the Humble Indie Bundles, but you can pick it up on Steam or Desura for $5 and the expansion is just another $3. The wife and I have logged over 170 hours playing it, and have shown no signs of slowing down. Seriously. You can't beat that value for your money.

As mentioned, I'm working on mods for the game, which I'll link to from this blog when they're ready for release.

Modding a Feral Beast

A while back I mentioned the Humble Indy Bundle, which was a set of 5 or 6 downloadable computer games. Very cool little titles, of which the cream of the crop is a beautiful game called Aquaria. My wife and I have logged a lot of time playing Aquaria. It's one of very few computer games I've ever felt the compulsion to truly play all the way through. After about 50 hours of play, we not only reached the end but also amassed nearly all the in-game achievements.

Then we broke out all the mods we could find for the game. Most of them were pretty short, though, so Sarah and I decided we'd take a stab at modding it ourselves.

Download Link
Our mod is called Feral Beast. What's available from that download is just a preview; enough to keep you busy playing for an hour or so. The mysterious beginings of the story, and the first 5 map levels we got finished. There's a few hints towards the eventual plotline, but it's mainly just an exploration mod at the moment. Poke around with it and have some fun. You'll need Aquaria to play, of course. You should carefully read the installation section of the readme.txt file included in the download, as the new recipes don't install automatically, and must be manually placed inside the game folders.

Additional chapters will be added as we create them. The actual level editing stuff is fast and easy, but there's some significant time investment in designing new creatures and coding anything particularly interesting, so it'll be a few weeks before you see an update.

By the time you read this, it will probably be too late...

...to get the Humble Indy Bundle at the amazing price of "Pay what you want". Sale ends tonight, and I just found out about it twenty minutes ago. If it's still Monday when you're reading this, it's worth popping over to http://www.wolfire.com/humble

It's a bundle of five computer games in a bundle that you set the price on. You can even decide how much of what you pay goes to the developers, and how much goes to charity. I paid $20 total, divided evenly. The friend who told me about it had paid that much, and it sounded reasonable to me. I've never played any of them, but $20 seemed worth risking to support this business model, and get to try 5 games I know next to jack about (the only one on the list I'd even heard of before was World of Goo). Zero downside to me, not like $20 is gonna break the bank or anything.

High Scoring Vulgarity

Last week while my wife was convalescing from a back injury, we tried out a new little video game. It's called Clockwords. It's a little bit like Scrabble or other word games, but with a timer element that is represented by a battle between a steam-tech robotic weapon system and invading insects. It's actually pretty cool. Here's a link. She was bedridden much of the week, but she could still shout words at me.

Fun game. Very different from the sorts of games we usually play.

The majority of words you spell score probably around 50 points of damage. But I got vulgar, and it paid off. :) 394 damage from "Vulgarity". The yellow "R" is what did it, it made the 4 bronze letters explode while the evil insects were crossing each others trails.

Drives'R'Us, v4.0

I just uploaded the absolute best version yet of my Drives'R'Us mod for the video game Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space.



The 4.0 version of Drives'R'Us expands on my 3.1 version with 4 new spaceships, and over two dozen new quests. I've added colonies for most of the alien races, a few random invasion fleets to attack Glory, larger maps, and even the fabled fortified vault of Fomax. In addition to all that new stuff, I've also ported over the best bits from my "Teeming With Life" and "Sgqwonkian Crisis" mods. The variety of encounters and experiences is very high, to maximize the replayability. The file size of the download is nearly 3 times that of the previous version. I put a lot into this.

• Download Link

Future Plans:
Since the best bits of Teeming With Life and Sgwonkian Crisis are now in Drives'R'Us, it's unlikely those mods will see any future updates. There'll no doubt be a 4.1 version of Drives'R'Us somewhere down the road. There's always little things worth tweaking. A musically-gifted friend of mine offered to make me some new music for the various quests, so as he finishes up those sound files, I'll be updating the mod, probably with new quests and items.

I'd also like to make a mega-mod that incorporates content from other people's mods into one hugely unpredictable compilation. There are some technical limitations to the game engine, though, which I've been looking at and trying to chart out how much I can actually accomplish. If I go ahead with this, it would probably be published as a separate mod, not a new version of Drives'R'Us.

Even More Modding (Drives v3.0, plus a wiki)

More weird worlds modding this past week. It started with a tiny little update to Drives'R'Us, that was supposed to be just v2.2. And then, that snowballed into major changes so significant that if I didn't call it v3.0, nothing would ever qualify for that title. It's only been a little over 2 weeks since 2.0 went up, but I saw no reason to delay something that was a radical improvement in every way.

Here's a download link for Drives'R'Us version 3.0



Brief list of changes in 3.0

• Added 4 new mercenary / ally vessels.
• Radically improved graphics on all 6 of the custom ships from versions 1.11 and 2.0, and tweaks to the stats on most of them.
• 7 new items (on top of the 30 new ones from just 2 weeks ago), including the Shroud of Primordius, which is definitely my favorite of all the items I've ever added to the game.
• Miscellaneous minor tweaks to various graphics and game play elements. Very numerous, but none of them major.

I'm finding modding to be much easier than it was when I was doing it two years ago. Not sure what's changed, but I'm grokking all sorts of things that had been obfuscated from me before. And since I was having breakthroughs, I thought I'd share them with other modders. So I set up a wiki for Weird Worlds modding, and I'm giving myself a goal of adding at least one page to it every day from now until either it's exhaustive, or I'm exhausted. Hopefully, it'll encourage some more modding, as the community is a little slow and sparse these days.

Here's a link to the modding wiki. Should any Weird Worlds modders care to contribute, the secret code to signing up is "shrapnel and eel". You don't need to sign in to view it, but you do need the code to edit anything.

On a related note, I've been helping one of the other modders at the forums (ExplorerBob) debugg his mod. He's got a really neat set of quests that make the relations with various races unpredictable. So in one play, the Muktians might hate you from the start, and then next time you play they're friendly and amicable. It's pretty clever, and spices the game up a lot. I'm looking forward to his first real release, not just the partial beta test / debugging files he's given me.

Mods 'R' Us

I put up another Mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

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This one is the 2.1 version of my Drives 'R' Us Mod.

Changes from the 1.11 version (which I'd made almost 2 years ago) include:

• Recalibrated prices on everything. I did extensive testing and number-crunching to arrive at more-accurate values for almost every item in the game.
• Technology items are now split into Civilian Tech and Military Tech. The Military mission focuses on military tech, and the Science mission gives a little bit of emphasis on civilian tech.
• Changed the starting equipment for all Terran ships, and what spawns on Hope.
• Over 30 new items!
  • 9 New Weapons
  • 3 New Drives
  • 2 New Sensors
  • 1 New ECM
  • 4 New Combat Computers
  • 5 New Repair Systems
  • 5 New Thrusters
  • 2 New Shields
• Miscellaneous tweaks to various systems and weapons.
• Added a couple new ship variants. Should mix up the fights a bit.
  
• Bloodfang is very different from the main game, and better balanced than he was in version 2.0.
  
• Removed all the Superweapon KEYS. The sheer quantity of items in this mod makes it unlikely you'll get a large stockpile of so-called superweapons.
  
• Tweaked the Civil War event. It's now a little more unpredictable (there's two versions), and no longer claims to be a supernova after the fact. I'm much happier with it now.
  

If you're thinking I jumped from 1.11 to 2.1, I didn't. There was a 2.0 version that I forget to link to from here, but it was only up for 3 days before I found some minor issues that I fixed in todays version.

Here's the download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=35857&page=

Have fun!

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I also updated Tech Transparency 2.1 to v2.1.1.
It's just a small fix concerning the text on the repair units.
Download link: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44512

Teeming With Life mod, version 1.4

I just posted a new version (v1.4) of my "Teeming With Life" mod for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.




Download the new version here.

I'm much happier with the look of the mod now, but I still really need to go tweak the amoeba-ships. Getting those to the level I want may take some time.

Return to Infinite Modding

My favorite video game is once again Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space, the game that lets you explore an entire galaxy on your lunch break.

For nearly a year I couldn't play it. My old computer died, and I'd somehow failed to backup my download of it.

A couple weeks ago, I got the game again. So! Much! Fun! I'm left wondering why I didn't rush out and buy a new copy the second I lost the old one.

And, of course, I immediately felt the desire to mod welling up inside me. Feeling the creative urge...

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I very quickly released a new version (v 1.3) of my old "Teeming With Life" mod. No real new content, but several bug fixes. It's amazing how problems and solutions stand out so clearly after taking a year off from something. Download Link

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I followed that up with a quick and dirty little mod called "Tech Transparency". It's significantly less ambitious than my other mods (and you can tell by the generic text-only banner).

After a year off, I just found I no longer knew which weapons and items were worth the trouble, and which ones were total junk. I realized it'd be a simple task to make a mod that displays all the relevant game data in the pop-up-window for each item. If I was going to make such a tool for myself, I might as well make it available for others, and thus Tech Transparency was born. Download Link

Now, some would say this mod is almost against the spirit of the game. Weird Worlds is all about style and mystery, not comparing game stats to maximize your efficiency. Those folks are right, but they have the main game and plenty of other mods they can enjoy. I will admit the mod certainly lost some of the cleverness of the original game, even a few of the sci-fi in-jokes had to be cut for space reasons, but I think it's worth it to figure out which three-coin beams are worth installing, and which ones are just trade-bait.

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Does this mean I'll return to full-blown modding? I don't know. Those were both easy to implement, and took just a couple of hours. I've got plenty of ideas for mods, but the loss of my Weirdyssey mod before it could even be released was pretty heart-breaking. I'd put way too many hours into that thing, and never got to show it off. Not sure I'll try anything that extreme again, especially considering how dead the WW:RTIS modding community is. I'd love to see the mod forums become active again, but that seems unlikely. Then again, I wasn't playing for a year, so maybe some of the other prolific modders will return, too. It's hard to mod with your fingers crossed. :)