Battletech Billboards

I picked up some terrain pieces from the Acheson Creations booth last year at ORIGINS (a few pics 1 2 3). Although they painted up well enough, they still didn't look right. They needed something more.

From Battletech Billboards

Because I always intended these to be barriers for a Solaris style arena, I thought it might be cool to turn them into billboards for various sponsors. All I needed were some ideas for sponsors, and I had this idea I've been wanting to try. I did some digging among the Battletech blogs I follow for banner or icon image, a little image editing in Paint.Net, and sent it to the color printer.

From Battletech Billboards

A bit more work with a good pair of scissors (the Perseus and Thug helped), and then some glue ...

From Battletech Billboards

 ... And viola!

From Battletech Billboards

Steve's Battletech Reader billboard was the most work (image editing, I replaced "Classic Battletech" with "The Battletech Reader") and turned out the least legible. So I might have to redo that one (Hey Steve, got any banner ideas?).

I was so happy with the results, I decided to turn it into a mini tutorial. I have a Picasa album up with the full set of Battletech billboard photos.

From Battletech Billboards

Lesson #1: Try some different sizes, and (if you can) print a black-and-white copy first to check the final size before going to the expensive ink. I did three sizes for the Catalyst Logo, and only the smallest would fit. The MechCorp logo was too big entirely and I'll need to rework it from scratch.

A dry fit to see how the finished piece will look is always a good idea.



Put a drop or two of glue on the back of the paper, right in the middle. A single drop will do for smaller bits, but with larger pieces it helps to put a small amount of glue near the corners.


Next is the part I couldn't take a picture of - place the paper on the piece as you did with the dry fit, then press down with your finger and slide the paper around to spread out the glue underneath the paper. This pushes out bubbles and excess glue, and should give the paper a good bond. The glue starts setting pretty quickly once you do this, and you will feel it getting harder to push around. Get it set where you want it and press down on the corners to make sure they stick. Wipe away any excess glue (I just used my finger). In the event you end up with a corner that isn't glued down, use your hobby knife to place a tiny amount of glue underneath and press it down again.

From Battletech Billboards

It was an easy project, and I've got some attractive new terrain pieces to show off. Follow the link if you want a copy of my billboard images (MS Word).

Games That Teach Math

Terence Tao - one of the premier mathematicians in the world - has a post up asking for Suggestions for Games that Promote Mathematical Thinking. The suggestions are pouring in, including a few of my own. If you are an educator looking for resources, you will likely find something interesting. Click thru to What's New - Terence Tao's blog.

The Psychology of Video Games

 Today I'm spreading the word about a new blog, The Psychology of Video Games, written by Gamer and PhD Psychologist Jamie Madigan. Today's article is about Social Identity Theory and the Psychology of Warfare (see
How Social Identity Theory Predicted the Console Wars of ‘07), but there are a number of other articles up already that I am looking forward to reading.

[Hat Tip 2 Raph Koster's Website]

Gamers Love Math

I've written before that gamers are fascinated by math and probability, and I am happy to bring two fine examples to your attention.


The first is Paint-it-Pink, a new blog by a science fiction fan, model maker and writer, with a long connection to Battletech going back to the FASA days. Her most recent post is a nice method of cost-effectiveness analysis for Battletech weapons.

The second is Orloff Military Academy, a blog featuring content for the Battletech community. Kit wrote me last week about doing a guest-post, and his article on the Math of 2DX Dice Systems will be appearing tomorrow morning.

I have added both of these to my list of Battletech blogs and bloggers in the first sidebar. I encourage you to visit and leave a word of encouragement welcoming them to the Battletech blogging community.

20 Sided Women

If you combine a friend and a blogger, do you get a blend or a frogger? :-)

My fellow blogger D20 Sapphire has started a new blog, the 20 Sided Women Project:

Sapphire writes: So what is this project, you say? Its simple in concept. Essentially I don't feel like there is enough out there about women in the role playing game community. There are a couple essays here and there, but there hasn't been a real investigation. So I decided to investigate.

Good luck to Sapphire, I'm very curious to see where she takes this. Go investigate for yourself what else she has to say at the 20 Sided Women Project.

Battletech at the Warpshack

Some nicely done Battletech maps done on foam core board. See more at Warpshack's Blog.

GENCON Tales

Over at The Scrapyard Armory you will find some nice summaries of Battletech events and more from GENCON 2009 (posts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7). Of course, Brian ALWAYS posts good event summaries, and these are no exception.



I wound also like to officially thank Brian for linking to this blog, as The Scrapyard Armory is now the top referrer here, finally surpassing the Blog-of-Note referrals dating back to December 2008. Hopefully I can return the favor by sending some of you his way.

[More of Brian's photos at (can you guess?)]

A New Trenchbucket for Trebuchet

In response to a previous post, Steven Satak sent me something to review; a page of text and art from the upcoming fan-produced TRO:3063 Vehicle Annex.


This drawing is by artist Vadim Antonov (Vladimir3D at Deviantart, where you can view his Battletech gallery).


Steve wanted to know if the writing was up to snuff compared to the other Battletech TROs. It is; the "Trebuchet TBT-8K" is a fine addition to the Battletech universe, and the writing style nicely fits with the official TRO series.

I offered a few minor suggestions for the text and noted a minor technical bug in the artwork. I offered to try to correct this bug, and Steve took me up on the offer. The results of my efforts are on the left.


These images are intentionally of reduced size and of low quality, because I don't want to take anything away from the project itself. I've always enjoyed the TRO series, and I'm very happy I got the opportunity to contribute in a small way. I am excited about seeing the finished results. I will be posting occasional updates when more news is available.

The Battletech Reader

I just discovered Steven Satak's blog: The Battletech Reader. This blog has been around for a few years now, but Steven has recently become very active. He is compiling material for a fan-produced TRO: 3063, and he's lined up some really good art for it too. Nice work Steven - I look forward to seeing the finished product.

Fire and Motion

I'm linking you to an article about productivity, which is interesting in itself. I happened to be thinking about military sim games when I started reading it though, so in my head I was thinking how the military strategy aspect applies to games and game design.

[From Joel on Software] When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

I remembered this for a long time. I noticed how almost every kind of military strategy, from air force dogfights to large scale naval maneuvers, is based on the idea of Fire and Motion. It took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn't matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can't move forward?

There are two aspects of this I found interesting, and the military strategy aspect is the obvious one. I'm not sure I have ever seen any games where this is directly modeled, though I think I have observed it indirectly. In a two player game of Battletech, one player might choose to "take cover" from the opponent by moving into a good defensive position. This might help the other player "Fire and Move", or it may not, depending on how and when the first player finally decides to attack. There is no automatic advantage just for "laying down fire" aside from the odd lucky shot.
In many-players games of Battletech, such as the storyline battles that take place at the Cons (often 8+ players per side), Move and Fire really starts to express itself. Sometimes one side takes advantage of cover, avoiding line-of-site to the other team. Any player who ventures away from cover then become the only target for the other side, and so quickly gets their Battlemech destroyed. Consequently, no player wants to be the first one to venture out from cover. There may be some brave rallying attempts, but always some players cautiously hang back, leaving their braver teammates to face a hail of concentrated fire. This is not written into the game, it's a consequence of psychology and players putting their own performance (not getting damaged) ahead of the team. Fire and Motion works for the team that is able to restrict the actions of the other; Not because it is a rule of the game, but because it takes advantage of group psychology. If the team in cover would all move out to attack as a coordinated unit they would stand a decent change of success. In a two players game each side is fully coordinated, but with many players per side coordination is a serious issue.

The other interesting aspect is that of game design, and the idea that creating something - anything - it a lot better than sitting around and just thinking about it. This is one of the main points Ian has been pushing in his class.

[Hat Tip 2 Paperpools]

Optimal Racing

A while back I wrote about the Graph Paper Race game, and it continues to be one of my most popular posts. Now computational geometer/topologist Jeff Erickson has written a blog post "How hard is optimal racing?", which give a good description of the problem with a solid mathematical perspective (and far better than my own).

And he linked to me too - Thanks Jeff!

I think the lesson from this is that problems that arise in games are non-trivial and can entertain the brightest minds. That's why we like to play.

Darius Kazemi Takes Good Notes

In preparation for the Game Design Concepts class I'm signed up for this summer (taught by Ian Schreiber), I'm doing some reading on the topic. This is from Darius Kazemi's blog: Tiny Subversions, and is an interesting summary of Ian's GDX talk.

Here are my raw session notes for Ian Schreiber's GDX talk, Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

Understanding Comics

This book is one of the optional texts for Ian Schreiber's Game Design Concepts class I signed up for this summer.

Ian Writes: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by McCloud. While this book claims to be about comics, many of the lessons within can be applied to game design and other forms of art. It also happens to be a comic book itself, and fun to read.
[image scottmccloud.com]

Ian is correct, it's a great little book and I can easily see how most of it can be applied to games as well as comics. I did a little web searching on Scott McCloud and quickly came up with even more good stuff: Scott McCloud's Web Site including a blog and much more, Scott McCloud's TED lecture, and of course you can pick up your own copy Understanding Comics for $16.55 + shipping at Amazon.

Here is the Scott McCloud video from TED:

Prepare for the Robot Apocalypse

TPL writes about the Robot Apocalypse at Nothing's Simple. Pay him a visit and discuss your favorite world conquering robots.

History through Battletech

Fraggmented has an interesting interpretation of the Battletech storyline, as a reinterpretation of modern civilization.

I'm not saying anything particularly new when I say that science fiction is rarely about the actual future. It's really more about the present, translated into an allegorical form, and the venerable "Battletech" franchise is no exception. It doesn't even really disguise it, with the various Great Houses of the Inner Sphere being clear analogies of various Earth nations--it doesn't really make much sense when you sit down and analyze it that these lines of sheer demarcation between a Japanese monoculture, a Chinese monoculture, et cetera would actually translate across hundreds of light years and centuries into the future, but it makes emotional sense to us because it's a recognizable allegory for our world.

The big surprise is when the historically familiar Houses are attacked by the unknown Clans, which quite literally set the Battletech universe on it's ear ... but I'll let John Seavey finish the story.

D&D with Junior

Chris Hanrahan of One Bad Egg tells of playing Dungeons & Dragons with a 5-year-old in the group, and making it work for everyone.

[Hat Tip 2 Sean Brady]

More Tin, Less Coin

Purple Pawn reports that Reaper Miniatures is lowering it's prices on some figures, apparently because the price of tin is going back down.

Will Iron Wind Metals, maker of Battletech miniatures, follow suit?

Touchback

I just figured out how to better use my followers list, or maybe there are new features I never noticed. I am skimming thru and picking out anything even slightly gaming related (and a bit more, but not SPAM). This should be considered a partial list. I haven't had time to review all of these in any detail, nor am I certifying the content in any way. This is sort of a way of saying "Thank you" to some of the people that have been paying attention to my ramblings (Thank You!) and building up some blog reciprocity. If I missed anyone who thinks they ought to be included here, email me so I can add your blog here.

VASSAL Notebook, Thoeursday Night Fight Club [sic]
Swizza - Video Game Guru
Creating a t/ccg/card game
Arcade Stories
Gamer Living in NYC/with Health issues
Puzzles From Monkey
Game Headz Chronicles
20 Sided Woman
City of Amathar
Toyriffic
Games - Fun - Entertainment
Brandon's Blog, CgCook38's Poker Blog

This and That

Want to know what happens when your blog gets "Noted"? The chart to the right is my web traffic from December 12th through the 31st (via StatCounter). It's actually a bit frightening.
I wrote a full post about it on my other blog.


How simple can a game be, and still be a game? Greg Costikyan writes about MS Paint Adventures at Play This Thing.


A site called SCIFI CHROME; and interesting mix of scifi, martial arts movies, gaming, how to tie a necktie, Battletech novels, anime, and ... wait ... what was that part about neckties again?


Finally, Zero Punctuation reviews Prince of Persia. I don't play the game, I don't plan to, I don't even know what platform it runs on, but I never miss a Zero Punctation because Yahtzee makes me bust a gut laughing every time. If you aren't already familiar with ZP, well ... just make sure the kids aren't in earshot.

Guitar Hero Q&A with Alex Rigopulos

Guitar Hero fans (not me I'm afraid but my nieces like it), there is Q&A with Alex Rigopulos at Freakonomics. Video games on a Big Time blog!