I checked to see if Metalsnail released any new Paper Pinball tables and discovered his new project, Who’s in that Egg?, tiny virtual pet zines. It’s a collection of tiny Tamagochi-inspired zines. He suggests they could be put in Easter eggs–what a cute idea!!
I was trying to think of creative things to put in the eggs for the Easter egg hunt this year. Even if we don’t do a big family hunt we’ll still do something with Minnow. I used to put little toys in the eggs but I’d been wanting to move away from that since it’s hard to find small, inexpensive toys that aren’t junk. Minnow can’t read yet, but most of the kids can, so these tiny booklets would be fun to try. We were also thinking of bookmarks, and things like that, or even having a little Easter egg store where they trade in their eggs for prizes which would help avoid the size limit.
The PNP files for Project Dreamscape are unusual. They spaced out 6 cards per page and there is double-whitespace (whitespace around each card PLUS gutters). The resulting file is 38 pages, which ends up being 18 sheets of cards printed front/back. That’s a lot of laminating, printing, and cutting for a small card game.
Now that I have Nandeck-foo I knew that if I could find a way to easily extract the individual cards I could lay them out however I wanted, including a 9-card layout which would only require 6 double-sided pages for the 52-card base deck. I decided to open the .pdf in GIMP, crop the layered image to 1 card space, then export the layers as .pngs for all 6 card spaces. The only issue I encountered was the plugin would overwrite each set of cards. The plugin doesn’t provide an obvious way to change the exported image filenames without renaming the source file or the layers, so the easiest solution was to change the pdf filename each time.
'Size definitions
UNIT=MM
PAGE=210,297,PORTRAIT,HV
CARDSIZE=63,88
'Cutting Guides and removing borders
BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0.1,MARKDOT,#0000FF
FONT=Arial,128,,#000000
TEXT=1-{(images)+(cardback)},{§},0,0,100%,100%
EDGE=1,NULL
DUPLEX = 1-{(images)},{(images)+(cardback)}
PRINT=DUPLEX
'Create a list of images files from a folder
[images]=DIRFILES("C:\Users\neonaut\Pictures\pnp\templates\modifiedprojectdreamscape\base",*.png)
[cardback]="C:\Users\neonaut\Pictures\pnp\templates\modifiedprojectdreamscape\card-back.png"
'Put an image on each card
IMAGE=1-{(images)},[images],0,0,100%,100%,0,P
'Add image backs as duplex
IMAGE={(images)+(cardback)}, [cardback],0,0,100%,100%,0,P
The booklet I got from PNP Arcade was also formatted oddly, four pages to a single PDF sheet. Fortunately I found a proper 1-page formatted rulebook on the website. I have no idea why they included the weird pdf in the commercial PNP files. The game also uses 5 tokens, numbered. These are static value markers so you could create a playmat or go without. I made simple laminated counters with rounded corners.
Grousing about the files aside, the artwork is really cute.
During times like these it’s important people blog, journal, keep diaries–keep contemporary accounts, essentially. My desire to blog has unfortunately dried up, but I need to put something down.
So, week one of social distancing due to Coronavirus. In spite of being introverts the social distancing has been hard, and we have a been a little stir-crazy, but we are powering through it. We’re outdoorsy anyway so we’ve been taking walks in the woods and visiting parks. My free time is generally limited to the time before Minnow wakes up in the morning, which could be a few minutes or up to two hours, and time after they go to bed. I have found being able to write fiction in the morning improves the day and if I can get out even 300 words it helps a lot. My Big Mood is PNP and playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’ve got a small backlog of solo print-and-play games I’ll be getting through in these coming weeks.
I am very angry right now. I am angry that we have a situation that clearly demonstrates the need for socialist safety nets; that demonstrates our capitalist system is broke-ass, lopsided, and unsustainable; that shows the real BACKBONE of this country is not the coddled wealthy class but the workers; that reinforces the worker controls the means of production; and even now we have Democrats crying for socialist interventions while actively rejecting candidates with socialist ideas at the polls this very moment. The Blue party does not meet the needs of the people.
Normally I would try to avoid political rants on this journal, but the pols and the current political climate are intricately tied into this situation so it’s like trying to talk about a massive storm but not complaining about all the water that’s seeping in damaging your freaking house.
I finished im sad, a Bitsy game I started several weeks ago. It’s a game about being cast out from society but making friends anyway. The game is best played in a Chrome browser. It doesn’t even work in Firefox, which makes an itch.io upload tempting as it will resolve that issue.
Some of the sprite designs are taken from Arachne’s 1-bit roguelike assets, and I used Borksy to sharpen up the pixels and allow invisible tiles.
