First attempt at Papercraft Crypt of the Phantasm

For Halloween this year, we've been batting around the idea of giving out coloring books, activity books, or other fun giveaways rather than candy, the idea being to extend Halloween beyond November 1st, and to give out something that sparks kids' creativity rather than rotting kids' teeth. Thanks to Raven's Blight, the idea came to create Carnival of Souls themed papercraft goodies.

Unfortunately, we'd never done any papercrafting before, so I just took a shot at making a papercraft version of our Crypt of the Phantasm from last year. Here's what it looked like when I had assembled it (with my craptastic papercrafting skills):

Everything you see for this model was built from a single sheet of 8.5"x11" card stock, including the base (the idea being to hand out one sheet per model). Not perfect, but not bad for a first attempt at this stuff - I expected to go through more revisions to get even this far. The fonts on the tombstone didn't come out, and I didn't bother to build the other tombstone, since it became obvious that I needed to sacrifice the page real estate to add a ghost to the crypt, but other than that, I think it turned out pretty good.

The final version, if we go this route, will be black and white for the kids, so that they can color their crypt however they like.

How-to for LED-based faux lanterns

Unpleasant Street has a how-to for making cheap glowing lanterns using a cheapo store-bought lantern and an ultra-bright LED. I was going to use faux fire, but I might go with lanterns instead for the mausoleum.

Virtual Relay for Life

As you probably already know if you've been reading my blog, we're participating this year in the American Cancer Society's yearly fundraiser called Relay for Life. We're building a wild west town with games and activities for kids to enjoy while the adults are making their rounds on the track.

But the people over at Second Life are building something, too: a Virtual Relay for Life. Hey, why walk 'til your feet fall off when you can just hold down the up arrow, eh?

A new A List Apart

The awesome and handy A List Apart web site has just undergone a transformation. It's now AJAX-capable and sitting on Ruby on Rails. Sexy. Zeldman even expounds on what they did.

You know, just when I think I'm starting to catch up, the industry leaders speed ahead again into new, cool things that I just don't have the time to dabble with, dammit. But bless 'em, without their efforts, I'd still be writing HTML code like back in the Netscape 4.7 days, so it's good to see innovation, even if you're only watching from the sidelines.

Shadows Over Camelot Review

The Games Journal has an interesting review of Shadows over Camelot, a new cooperative card and board game from Days of Wonder. It sounds like a good game, especially if you like cooperative gameplay.

The review author makes an interesting point at the end of the review about replayability of games like this, and whether a reviewer should recommend games that are great on the first play but not so great once you master the game. Personally, I don't get to play games often enough to master them, so for me, it's a no-brainer: it sounds like a good purchase.

Unfortunately, when you don't get to play games often, that also tends to discourage buying games that are in the $50 price range. So in this case, it's a Catch-22: for it to be worth the price of the game, you have to play it a lot, but if you play it a lot, it's no longer worth the price of the game. Oh, well. It's a good thing the game components look so beautiful - at least you'll feel that the money is going for some great visual design...

Making a Case for Medium-Length Games

Gamasutra posted an article called Making a Case for Short Games, in which the author of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space expounds upon the virtues of short games.

Now, I'm on board with a lot of what he says, but using this game as the example undermines his argument. SAIS is a fun game, to be sure, but I don't think I've ever played a game that drove home the need for longer gameplay than that one. SAIS is basically the moral equivalent of a quick jaunt into a dungeon in a standard RPG; you start out with certain small abilities, you go exploring, you fight some stuff, get better equipment, and then come back out when your resources run low. But unlike most RPG's, the game ends when you get out of the dungeon.

I don't care for that. Most games you play, you visit five to ten stars, where something random happens to you, and you get back home either buff or banked out, and your score gets tallied. Sometimes, you'll get some great item that you never get an opportunity to use. I'd much prefer a longer-form game that allows me to explore more of the so-called "infinite" space, put the buffs you earn to good use, and generally have some more continuity to the game. Just when the game feels like it's getting going, it ends, and you're bumped back to square one for the next game.

There's certainly a middle ground between a 50-hour RPG and the 20-minute game. SAIS's charm is that it's unpredictable and random, so it wouldn't suffer the "story games go on the shelf after you've played them once" fate. But ultimately, SAIS is just too short. They didn't have to make it as long as Escape Velocity Nova to distinguish itself - an option to control the length of the game would have been a simple matter to add, and would allow people to adjust the length of game they wanted to have.

First Carnival of Souls puppet show design meeting

We just finished our first design meeting for the black light puppet show that will accompany our Carnival of Souls Halloween celebration.

Last year, we introduced the neighborhood to Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour, where they met Madame Sarita, a kindly young witch looking to flex her mystic powers, and a host of summoned ghosts, including the evil Marius Blackwood, the old carnival ringmaster and dabbler in the dark arts.

This year, the story will pick up where we left off. Sarita, having narrowly saved the ghost of the beautiful Sarah Beaumont, has been doing her research all year, and now thinks she can take out Marius once and for all. All she needs is to wait until Halloween night to be able to summon him again. But are her newfound magic incantations strong enough to defeat a minion of the Dark Powers of the Earth? Will she finally allow the spirit of Sarah Beaumont to rest, or will she find her own destruction? I guess we'll find out on Halloween night...

We've come up with a host of great visual ideas for this year's show, and we'll be cutting back on the narrative in favor of a more action-oriented display. We've got an outline of the plot, and a list of effects we think we can accomplish, and by next week, we're going to have the first draft done and a list of effects to build. Boo scary!

More Haunted Dimensions papercrafting

With our recent interest in spooky papercrafting, I should point out that Ray Keim has put up a new papercraft project, the Haunted Mansion Entrance Pillars. They look really good.

Day four of Carnival of Souls construction cancelled. Go to the Deming Duck Races instead

Sadly, I woke up today with a hella sore throat, so I cancelled the construction day. It's cool with Daniel, because the annual Deming Duck Races are this weekend, and he's got some kiddos to take.

If you've never been to the Deming Duck Races, and if you're within reasonable driving distance, consider going - it's great fun. There are lots of food, music, and crafts, and the activities include karaoke showdowns, hot air balloon ascensions and nighttime balloon glows, horseshoe tournaments, poker runs, outhouse races, carnivals, green chile cookoffs, and of course, the world-famous and ever-popular duck races. I tell ya, nothing is funnier than the high-speed waddle of a running duck.

Big Lots run

Managed to sneak in a trip to Big Lots today, and picked up a few things.

First, I picked up two more "bluckies." Bluckies are blown plastic almost-lifesize skeletons, way cheaper and lighter than buying the anatomical teaching skeletons. They look like crap out of the bag, but with a little corpsing, they look okay, especially if you replace out the deformed-looking head with a proper skull.

Second, I picked up two skulls to attach to the bluckies. Heh. These were the typical foam skulls that get sold around this time of year, but these had an interesting aged effect to them that might save me some trouble.

Third, I picked up some more rats for our "Rat toss" game.

Finally, I picked up a big bag of spiderwebbing so that we can choke the ceiling of the mausoleum with spiders and spider webs. Should be a pretty cool look.

There were other things there I'd like to buy, but they were either unusable for our haunt or overpriced. My son liked their animated gargoyle. Sort of. He was fascinated by it, showing a proper interest in spooky items, but when it did its roar and flapped its wings, I could feel him cling to me tighter. Still, he kept pointing at it, wanting me to set it off again, so I accommodated him. Hopefully, he won't have nightmares about it tonight.