The Fire Hose D&D Campaign Begins!
Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!
On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.
That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.
The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?
Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!
July 31, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Games
Tags: adventure, D&D, diaz, dragons, dungeons, fantasy, game, josh, kobold, playing, role, rpg
Jacques’ Artwork on the Autodesk: The Area’s Homepage!
Jacques, one of our awesome artists, recently had a piece of his artwork showcased on the Autodesk homepage! Sweet!
This piece of art isn’t related to one of our games – but it’s pretty awesome in its own right and great that Jacques’ work is being recognized.
For a link to the image’s page on the website, click here.
July 28, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: News, Random
Tags: artwork, Autodesk, Jacques, Pure Garbage
What We’re Playing: Don’t Eat the Mushroom
Don’t Eat the Mushroom… what can I say, the game is hilarious, unexpected, and a ton of fun to play. It’s guaranteed to be different from just about anything you’ve seen before, and if you’re anything like us you’ll be cracking up the whole way through. I don’t want to give away too much because of spoilers, but I will say that it’s probably ok to disregard the advice in the level title. Go give it a shot!
Most of the time the games we post on “What We’re Playing” are simple browser based games, and don’t require complicated setup. This one is a bit of a doozy, but trust me it’s worth it. First go and download and install Knytt Stories, which is pretty badass in its own right. Once it’s installed go and grab the user generated level Don’t Eat the Mushroom by Uncle Sporky. You might have to sign up to get on the forums, which also sucks. Once you’ve downloaded the level use the built in installer to pop it into Knytt Stories, and enjoy! There are several endings, so you might want to play through several times.
Of course, if you like it there are many other user made levels for Knytt Stories, but I’ve yet to find one as awesome as DETM.
July 24, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Games, What We're Playing
Tags: burger king, don't, eat, funny, generated, knytt, mushroom, nifflas, sporky, stories, trippy, uncle, user, what is love
Happy Birthday To Us!
YESSSS! We are one year old today! Woo-hoo! We celebrated this weekend with an awesome BBQ. The weather was perfect, the food was awesome, and the cake was almost entirely typo free. Tons of fun! Want to wish us a happy birthday? Do it in the comments section!
Special thanks to all of the people who made hitting this milestone possible:
- The amazing talented Fire Hose Team
- The various friends, interns, and freelancers who provided us with help over these past few months
- Our awesome advisors who give us the best advice and feedback.
- MIT, GAMBIT, the Ed Arcade, and their super encouraging environments
- And most importantly our families for sticking behind us while we walk the tight rope that is the start up world.
Here’s looking forward to year two!
Lots more awesome BBBBQ pictures after the jump. (more…)
July 21, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Events, Random
Tags: BBBBQ, BBQ, birthday, cake, family, food, friends, grill, old, one year, thanks, typo
Sand Castle Tower Defense
I spent the day at the beach yesterday, and decided to muscle in on Ethan’s territory and start with some sand castles. Here is our first one of the summer, a game we call Sand Castle Tower Defense. As you can see we’re up to our necks in creeps, and building towers to defend as quickly as possible.
That is, until the tide comes in and kills everything.
Props to Keith Brown and Sam Ribnick for helping me build this.
A well placed water tower would destroy those sand balls, but a fire tower would be ideal for the seaweed monsters. Maybe we should have played on a harder map?
July 12, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Random
Tags: beach, castle, creep, defense, keith brown, sam ribnick, sand, summer, tide, tower
Bike Fail
As seen outside of Fire Hose. Yes, it is locked up, and yes, the handlebars and seat seem to have been stolen. Awesome.
July 9, 2009 | | Comments (2)
Category: Random
Tags: bike, fail, funny, stupid
Team Steel takes 5th in Heavy Metal Challenge
Last weekend I took part in the Heavy Metal: Amped on Wind Power challenge at the Boston Museum of Science. It’s an incredible one day engineering challenge in which high schoolers from all across the US meet up, are randomly broken into teams, and have to rapidly design, prototype, test, and build a huge mechanical structure to lift a giant metal trash can three stories into the air using nothing but wind power. The competition was a ton of fun, and I was assigned as a mentor to Team Steel, the most hard core group at the event. As such I gave them guidance and advice for what to do, but the team actually came up with and implemented the awesome device you see above. And it’s a good thing too, since they had much better ideas than I would have ever had.
We had few materials (mostly cardboard, duct tape, and pvc piping), and our only power source were two giant fans blowing hurricane gusts. After a lot of discussion and failed designs the team settled on the waterwheel device you see above. The cups on the bottom would catch the wind, spinning the whole device around an axle made out of two cardboard tubes coated with torn up trash bags to decrease friction. As it spun it would wind up a rope which was attached to the trash can through a pulley, hoisting it to the ceiling.
So how’d we do? Pretty damn well! We raised the trash can the full 27.6 feet in only 83 seconds earning us 5th place out of 32 teams. Only 11 teams raised the can the entire distance, so it was quite an accomplishment (the winning team shattered the previous record, finishing in 29 seconds. Wow!). The most impressive part in my mind though was how the team iterated on design after testing, and how quickly they settled on an idea to try instead of debating endlessly. Hopefully some of these super talented kids will wind up getting interested in game development!