Crikeymiles.com

Series of custom Roborally boards, built using the Roborally board editor, and tweaked in Photoshop for extra grime. Designed as a ‘print and play’ expansion. They are small, only 6×6, and designed to be laid out in a row, forming a sort of raceway or dungeon (hence the name), but may also be grouped together to form a standard 12×12 size board. I have included a double ‘Avalon-style’ starting board, as I prefer to play that way. Here is an example of the ten boards, and the complete set may be downloaded as a zip file:

Brief styling job for my friend Ian, who is a freelance video editor. He is using a creative community CMS turnkey called Cargo Collective which is a pretty decent solution for non-techhead creative types (although I dislike their lack of markup in the output). Visually, Ian wanted something very clean and simple, which put the video screen at the centre and didn’t fuss about. Here ’tis:

Professional site for actor Kerry Gooderson. Built in Drupal with a theme based around a photo shoot we did in the dressing rooms of the Criterion theatre in London’s West End. The background image was built from the photo shoot images, and a film-frame by Struckdumb, which I found on DeviantArt.

I used pretty standard modules – CCK, Views, Login Destination, Lightbox2, Audio – although I wrote a (10 line) custom module to display a user guide node on an admin url, so that it could be viewed using the admin theme. I also didn’t use the Image module. Custom CCK content type for images + Views = much more flexible and powerful gallery.

I’m very pleased with how this site turned out. Nice tight design and a very tidy admin experience (I hope Kerry will agree!).

I played a great abstract board game recently, Vector, which is unfortunately long out of print. Partly out of compulsion, and partly because it made a great home-made gift for my parents and parents-in-law, I put together my own version of the game for printing.

The game itself is Poker bluffing meets chess row/column pressurisation, but in two partnerships. Inspires a lot of “so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me” type double-think as you try and predict what wickedness your opponents are trying to trick you to walk into. Brain-melting and very fun.

I made a full colour board, a set of full colour cards to be printed from ArtsCow, a rulebook and scoresheets. Download them here:

• Vector board (PDF/ZIP, 7 MB)
• Vector cards (JPEG/ZIP, 9 MB)
• Vector rules (DOC, 33 KB)
• Vector scoresheet (XLS, 30 KB)

Or download everything as a single ZIP file (17 MB).

Mike Woodman and I are planning to write a text adventure. You heard me. I woke up one morning recently with a Doc Brown-esque vision of how I might make one in PHP. It turns out there are much better ways of making them; like Inform – an open source interactive fiction authoring tool. In order to learn the tool, I set myself a challenge:

Okay. You’re a DOG. You have to find your MASTER’S SLIPPERS and return them to him. Your MASTER is sitting in a chair in the living room. The shoes could be anywhere in the house. There is a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. There is also a garden. There are two shoes. They will be in different places in the house. There could be other people in the house or it could be empty.

What could be simpler? It turns out: (a) Inform is effortlessly simple to use, and (b) writing little blocks of descriptive text is actually really fun.

In one afternoon I came up with this little beauty. I call it “The Crux of the Biscuit“, after the Zappafest I went to over the weekend. [Hint: good verbs are 'look', 'open' and 'take'.]

WizKid’s Pirates of the Spanish Main reminded me greatly of the classic Buccaneer board game, one of my most dearly loved games. In it a single Treasure Island is placed centrally and players race to collect (and safely store) the most treasure, whilst fending off other players, travelling to other ports to trade and pinch crew and treasure, and suffering at the fickle hand of Fate.

After playing the basic rules of Pirates, I immediately wanted to blend Buccaneer in with it. I wrote these house rules to play with friends, and we haven’t actually played anything but these rules for about 18 months now.

Buccaneer had several pleasing mechanics that translate very well to PotSM. The first is a central ‘Treasure Island’ location, which forces the players to squabble over a central point in the playing area. The second is the risk/reward aspect of the Treasure Island event deck, meaning that you might choose the option of just pootling around trading for treasure, or plundering it, whilst others risk the more lucrative (and dangerous) shores of Treasure Island. The third is the representation of mutinous and infighting pirate crews by use of the two different coloured crew cards, which I always thought was very elegant.

These house rules attempt to introduce all of these flavours into PotSM, whilst retaining the central charm of the WizKid’s game; primarily the beautiful components, and the simple combat system.

Download the Rules and Event Cards Buccaneer-House_Rules_for_Pirates.zip (ZIP, 9.6MB)

First attempt at a little generative audio piece, as an answer to the activity posed by Charles Céleste Hutchins in his SC tutorial on tasks. It’s different every time, but here’s what it basically sounds like:

I dropped some marbles (MP3)

Code is here.

Messing about with the GeneralHID class in SuperCollider. First steps towards a joystick instrument.

Code is here.

After the success with Rael’s website, he has essentially been acting as my agent; having got me the Finzi gig, and shortly after that a site for his friend and professional colleague Matt Robertson. [Thanks Rael!]

Matt Robertson is a composer/engineer type, working on film and commercial music projects. He wanted a smart but creative looking CV site to act as an online business card. It needed to be simple to update and look great, but not be particularly dynamic or rich – just text and images.

It was scratch built in PHP and HTML, and the background image is a detail from a painting entitled “Orange Strip” by my immensely talented grandfather Michael McLellan.