I just watched FlimsyFirewood try poprocks for the first time in his life. With consternation, he says “there is something happening in my mouth.”

Olithew just opened his mouth so we could all hear the sound of poprocks exploding.

Flimsy says “thanks, I think.”

I need to pick up some poprocks for my toddler.

Poor blog, I’ve been neglecting you!

Currently working on: Update 7 polish and bugfixes.  I have my grubby little paws on the capstone dungeon, among other things.  The dungeon boss is pretty stinkin’ awesome, if I may say so.  Though, my apologies, I can’t get more specific than that.

One of the challenges we have been faced with on DDO is that we have very little art that was intended to be used for run-of-the-mill building interiors.  And typically, when art-budget planning comes around, new art for the insides of buildings isn’t at the top of the priority list.  (Awesome boss monsters usually top the art list.)

But this leaves me with a fun puzzle: given a bunch of blocks that easily combine to make dank dungeons, how do I make a space that looks like it’s above ground and is inhabited by regular people?  How do I combine some pillars and arches with a campfire to make a fireplace?  Given a limited set of furniture, how do I illustrate where people at different strata of society eat, sleep, and work?

I was a bit strapped for time when assembling the capstone, so alas, I cut the restroom.  We’ll just have to pretend that it’s down a hallway somewhere.  But there is space to park your caravan cart, and there are leftovers in the kitchen, and the tables are all set up to serve breakfast.  The badguys, of course, have made a bit of a mess, but we’ve hired a capable janitor to sweep up.   Somebody is going to have to re-file all of those papers that got spilled on the floor.  Maybe we can offer XP for that.

Somebody sent our team a bar of bacon chocolate!  I feel so loved.

Someone unlucky soul here went away on vacation and has had their cubicle entirely covered in aluminum foil.  Monitors, desk, water glass, lamp, walls, floor, trash can.  Even the baubles hanging from the ceiling.  This is even better than the time we filled the CEO’s office with balloons and left him a nerf-bat studded with tacks.

There is too much of the color brown in DDO, and I am getting rid of some more of it.

That is all.

I’m busy revising and expanding yet another existing public area.  It’s getting some extra room around back for more stuff to fit in.

I wonder if I could clear enough room for a bowling alley?

Funny, with the fog turned up, from my bird’s-eye vantage point, I can see some plateaus off in the distance.  I wonder what area that is?  Oh, it’s the Menechtarun caravan quest.  LOL!  Why did I put it here?  I thought I had clustered all the desert areas together down on a lower portion of the map.

Not that our map has any relevance to the actual Xen’drik map.  We place new areas based on more important criteria, such as “where did the cheeto bounce off the screen when I tossed it with my eyes closed?”

Which reminds me of a conversation I overheard once between two braggarts who were comparing their experiences of being hit by darts.  Why is it that darts are allowed in the same establishments where alcohol is served?  That seems like a recipie for disaster.

. . .I’m learning some scripting.  Yum, tasty, cool, delicious logic!

Of course this is the equivalent of a programmer scribbling on a notepad and calling it art, but I’ve never been one to define art.

. . .has a garbage chute.  That is all.

Everybody knows that swamps are dank, dreary, decay-filled places smothered in fog. Skeletal, dead trees drag their fingers across the moon and monsters slink about through the mud, rising up to eat lost adventurers. A swamp is a step down from a graveyard, suitable only for horror stories.

 
This is what we are taught by pop culture. It brings to my mind a childhood memory, when I visited my grandparents on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Even as a child, I could find nothing pretty in the suburban sprawl, strip malls, and refineries of the Galveston area. But when we drove along the coast, there was this unbroken vista of coastal wetland grasses, a beautiful change of scenery. “They should fill that in” said my grandfather. “All it does is breed mosquitoes.”

 
And there lies the roots of our collective dislike of wetlands. Wetland is a no-man’s land. We can’t plunk a subdivision or strip mall or golf course or a road on it without first hauling in tons of dirt. Build a castle on it, and the castle will catch fire, fall over, and sink.

 
Some time ago I was asked to build one of those nasty pop-culture horror swamps. My instructions: make it creepy, rotting, foggy, and full of dead trees. (Why dead trees? Did the monsters kill them?) It was my job, so I built it, but ever since I’ve wanted to make a proper wetland to make up for it. A proper, beautiful, wetland.

 
Fast forward to Phiarlan. It needed work. The original Phiarlan was made of nice pieces, but the whole of it wasn’t laid out well. Visually, it was easy to become lost, and then right in the middle was this stagnant mud puddle, like a big pile of glue that you had to run through.

There was some push from the team to pave over that annoying swamp to make room for the carnival, but argh! I just couldn’t perpetuate the swamp-is-bad mentality any more.
My own real-life backyard, which we willingly purchased, is a verdant, lovely swamp. My town, along with two others, it the official headwaters of the Charles. We may soon be requiring that local business install artificial wetlands in order to clean the water and slow it down – to prevent flooding - before it gets to the river. Wetlands are actually so useful that we’ll be building more of them! That has me jazzed. Wetlands are wonderful.
I hope the Red Fens and the newly revised Phiarlan has given you a new appreciation for wetlands. Enjoy!

This is silly - I just changed a few dozen virtual lightbulbs!  I’m messing with another area that, like the Gold Wing Tavern, will exist in two versions.  Each of the two areas needs a different type of light bulb, since in only one of the two areas there will be a full day-night cycle.  And it turns out that I can’t use the automagic “replace” tool to swap them out, because all of my settings on the light just go “poof”.

At least changing the lightbulbs was a one-dev job.

I also discovered today that if you accidentally copy a piece of dungeon onto a landscape, Worldbuilder excretes something rectangular, catches fire, falls over, and falls into a swamp.  I almost had to call in the Smart People to help me sort through the wreckage.  (Instead, I set it on fire a little more and threw it off of a building.  Then I redid my work in a location far, far away.)

Well, on to the next task.  I get to go move around some stuff in one of our existing public areas.  This always gives me such a delightful feeling of mischief!