"multifeed" via yaypaul in Google Reader

Extra Life charity event this weekend

2009-10-16T04:01:53Z

This weekend is the Extra Life event. That’s right, it’s time for some 24 hour charity gaming action!

Team Meerkat, the 4 of us, start the Extra Life event at 8am PST (that’s 4pm GMT in the afternoon for you euros) on Saturday, and will continue to play games online for a full 24 hours until 8am (4pm GMT) on Sunday.

There are a few ways you can keep in touch with what we are doing and make sure we’re actually playing games, not goofing off;

Firstly, we will be streaming as much of the gameplay from the event as possible via two streams. We’ll also record the start, finish and any ’special’ moments for repeat viewing.

You can view the live steam from my computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-live-reishi

You can view the live stream from Alik’s computer here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/team-meerkat-extra-life-event

We will also be making an appearance on MAD-Radio twice. Our first appearance will be at the start of the 24 hours to get things underway. The second appearance will be on Sunday, so you can hear how much we are hurting with only a few hours to go.

You can listen to the shows live at;
iTunes/VLC/Winamp – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88/listen.pls
Windows Media Player – http://mad-radio.sytes.net:88

You can also follow our progress on twitter @teammeerkat

It’s going to be fun!

Core CSS 1.2 update

2009-09-27T02:15:39Z

I’ve being using Core CSS at every opportunity, for both personal and production sites. Using the code so frequently has helped me find some flaws and add a few classes that we’re sorely missing. Core CSS gets an update to 1.2.

The first thing I noticed that needed changing was the way the standard width classes were named; fullWidth and quarterWidth while intuitive just aren’t as intuitive as width100 and width25. Switching to percentages made way more sense. I’ve listed a full change log below, but I think you’ll agree Core CSS has become that little bit easier to use.

As always; using this code requires you include Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS before Core CSS. This can be included either at the beginning of Core CSS or in a separate file which is called first – I prefer the first method.

Change log 1.0 > 1.2
1. – Removed standardized ‘P’ style (I found there were far less bugs if this was set per project).
2. + Added ‘P.mini’ class (complements P.open nicely).
3. + Added ‘fixed’ class (useful for quick positioning).
4. -/+ Revamped all width definitions to exactly match widths required (fullWidth becomes width100 etc).
5. + Added ‘lightestGrey’ class (useful for dark background small-print).
6. + Added ‘lightestGreyBg’ class (helpful for footer backgrounds etc).
7. + Added ’superLightGreyBg’ class (extension of lightestGreyBg, again for footers, box backgrounds etc).
8. -/+ Revamped ‘input’ styles to be more neutral (should now be a proper option, rather than just a reminder to change the styles).

There are three ways for you to download the code.
1. Copy and paste the code listed below.

2. Download a file containing the full Core CSS.

3. Download a file containing a minified version of Core CSS.

/* core.css Paul West [http://www.yaypaul.com] */
/* Version: 1.2 - 2009-08-22 */

body{background: #fff;}

/* Block level */
div{overflow:hidden;}
.visible{overflow:visible;}
p.closed{margin:0;}
p.open{margin:35px 0 0 0;}
p.mini{margin:10px 0 0 0;}
.float{float:left !important;}
.floatRight{float:right !important;}
.relative{position:relative !important;}
.absolute{position:absolute !important;}
.fixed{position:fixed !important;}
.hidden{display:none}
.block{display:block}
.top{position:fixed; top:0; z-index:10;}

/* Page frameworks */
.frameworkCenter{margin:0 auto;}
.frameworkLeft{left:0; top:0; position:absolute;}
.frameworkRight{right:0; top:0; position:absolute;}

/* Page layout */
.width100{width:100% !important;}
.width75{width:75% !important;}
.width66{width:66% !important;}
.width50{width:50% !important;}
.width25{width:25% !important;}
.width33{width:33% !important;}
.width20{width:20% !important;}

/* Clearing */
.clear{clear:both;}
.clearLeft{clear:left;}
.clearRight{clear:right;}

/* Content control */
.left{text-align:left !important;}
.right{text-align:right !important;}
.center{text-align:center !important;}
.justify{text-align:justify !important;}
.small{font-size:smaller;}
pre{background-color:#fff; border:#333 dashed 1px; padding:10px;}
blockquote{padding:20px; font-style:italic;}

/* Links */
a{text-decoration:underline;}
a:hover{text-decoration:none;}
a:visited{text-decoration:underline;}

/* Colours */
.white{color:#fff !important;}
.black{color:#000 !important;}
.chalk{color:#eee;}
.charcol{color:#333;}
.darkestGrey{color:#484848;}
.darkGrey{color:#666;}
.midGrey{color:#888;}
.lightGrey{color:#ccc;}
.lightestGrey{color:#e5e5e5;}

/* Background colours */
.whiteBg{background-color:#fff !important;}
.blackBg{background-color:#000 !important;}
.chalkBg{background-color:#eee;}
.charcolBg{background-color:#333;}
.darkestGreyBg{background-color:#484848;}
.darkGreyBg{background-color:#666;}
.midGreyBg{background-color:#999;}
.lightGreyBg{background-color:#ccc;}
.lightestGreyBg{background-color:#e5e5e5;}
.superLightGreyBg{background-color:#f5f5f5;}

/* Normalise headings */
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6{font-weight:normal;}

/* Table formating */
table td{padding:2px;}
td.first{padding:2px 2px 2px 4px;}

/* Input formating */
input, select, textarea{font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-right:10px; padding:4px; background-color:#dbdbdb; border:0;}
input:focus, select:focus, textarea:focus{background-color:#f5f5f5;}
input[type="radio"]{border:0 solid !important;}
input[type="checkbox"]{border:0 solid !important;}
input[type="submit"]{background-color:#888;}
input[type="submit"]:hover{background-color:#4aa056;}

Island Nation: custom Sim City 4 map

2009-09-26T03:06:03Z

The last ‘quick-play’ map I posted, Stain, was almost too quick to play. I found that with only small and medium size city tiles available busting any population caps was near on impossible. I did however find the mountainous, water surrounded, terrain fun to play with and it’s that base we start with here.

In designing Island Nation I’ve gone for an archipelago island chain, with a mixture of large, medium and small city tiles. The overall map size is still fairly small, being a long strip, but because large tiles are included the regions population can get much higher. Each tiles land mass is surrounded by water, in all cases this is enough for marina to be an option, very helpful in the later game to bust those aforementioned caps.

You’ll also notice I’ve gone a lot more realistic with this map. There are still large areas of flat land in some of the city tiles enabling large-scale city building, but the overall feel is closer to what you’d expect from an actual volcanic island chain. You’ll also find reclaiming land from the sea is sometimes your only option to advance.

Download the Island Chain region now!

Island Nation terrain map

Island Nation region preview

Island Nation examples

Galactic Civilization II: Ships of the Reileian Exchange

2009-09-25T02:53:40Z

After the fun I had creating the Battle Fleet Gothic set of Galactic Civilization II ships I decided to create a new civilization with it’s ship style based loosely on another quite popular Sci-Fi IP.

More look-a-likes
Again I’ve gone for designing a close to full fleet of ships, from the small fighter class all the way up to planet killing dreadnoughts. While I admit some of these designs look nothing like Star Wars – again probably a good idea to avoid lawyergeddon – some of the larger variants do have a familiar style I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Again I’ve tired not to accurately recreate anything, but instead put my own twist on a style of ship design I love.

Download right away
This time around I’ve decided not to make anyone ask – and wait an age – for the ability to download the ship designs. I’ve only included the template files again for speedier download, it also allows you the fun of specing the ships out as you see fit. The ships were designed while playing Twilight of the Arnor, so you’ll need that expansion to be able to use them. I’ve also included a readme.txt in case you either don’t know how to, or are having trouble installing the files.

Download the Reileian Exchange ships now

Combat ships
RS Superfin (fighter)

KDS Firetail (fighter)

RS Prowler (frigate)

FI Hunter (assault frigate)

FI Griffin (troop transport cruiser)

KDS Spiker (battlecruiser)

FI Interdictor (battleship)

FI Commandship (dreadnought)

Non-combat ships
All these non-combat ships share the same base hull design. I decided to have the non-combat vessels share a hull to simulate variants coming of the same production line. Some of the hulls differ greatly from their siblings, others have only minor variations.

KDS Colony DSP

KDS Mining DSP

KDS Construct DSP

KDS Trade DSP

Other random screenshots
Heavy-weight group shot (battlecruiser, battleship and dreadnought)

Using the Krynn tech tree helps influence things some what…

Team Meerkat Website

2009-07-31T00:23:09Z

Illustration, website, poster and avatar icon set for Team Meerkat. The team was formed to take part in Extra Life 09, a charity gaming event, they needed fun illustration and an interactive site to help generate sponsorships.

View the Team Meerkat site

Deadly Furry Cute v2, I’m getting there!

2009-06-13T13:20:54Z

While I’ve been super busy with life, work and getting sunburnt of late, I have been steadily working on version 2 of the Deadly Furry Cute website and toys. Coming with the new version are a number of new developments.

A few of these new developments I’m going to keep secret until the site goes live, huge anticlimax there I know. What I can talk about is new toy designs and licensing.

Let me start by saying that over the last few months I’ve had some inquiries from school teachers, either asking if they can use the toys, or asking how much it would cost to use them. Let me state, right now, the toys will always be free for schools to use in the class room. If a teacher can find a way to use the toys in class for fun or education, I’m all for it. What I don’t want is individuals, companies or schools reselling or rebranding my work. To that end I’ll be creating a new ‘license’ page which outlines exactly what can and can not be done in detail, more for clarification than anything else.

Now the fun bit
The new toy designs for Series 2 and 3, yep that’s two new series with the update, have been completed and are awaiting final testing. That testing procedure basically entails a final test run in both thin card and paper, with any updates from previous tests included. Over kill, maybe, but I like to get things right.
I’ve come some way with the illustration style since Series 1 back in 2008, partly because I’ve been doing more illustration work and have getting the practice in, but also I’ve decided to make these toys a little harder to make. Looking back at Series 1, I realized I was trying to make it too easy, all angular and easy to cut curves, you’ll not get the easy ride this time! Having said that I’ve not gone overboard, this change is about getting things more life like. While the new Series are more challenging to make, I hope they’ll be just as fun!

Without further ado, here are some screen grabs to wet your appetites. Can you tell what they are? Shout in the comments if you think you can!

Last chance
This might be your last chance to download Series 1 in their current size, read about why it’s changing, so head over to Deadly Furry Cute now and grab them before it’s too late!

Designer Gamer Geek Website

2009-03-04T16:26:02Z

Website design, templates and Wordpress build for my personal blog site.

See the site in action

RPG Poster Set

2009-02-21T15:26:27Z

Four A2 posters, simply illustrated, RPG game themed. These posters were designed for friends to use around their offices, they were then offered for free via my personal blog.

Get the posters for your self

Gaming Character Illustration

2009-01-04T15:56:45Z

Character design and illustration for an, as yet untitled, gaming project.

LivJewels Shopping Site

2008-12-26T15:04:14Z

Website design and build for handmade jewelery designer Livie Mota. Templates, architecture and build on the ZenCart platform.

Visit LivJewels

Ed and Hen Website Template

2008-11-04T16:08:38Z

Website template and homepage design for online video funny, The Adventures of Ed and Hen.

Lady In Red Photography

2008-06-20T18:15:19Z

Studio series shot for use in self promotion artwork. Modelled by my wife Aaryn.

Vodafone Spend Manager

2008-06-04T16:48:45Z

Layout and templates for the Vodafone Spend Manager application, strictly following the Vodafone online brand guidelines.

TotallyMoney Website

2008-04-04T17:53:29Z

Design, layout and templates for version 2 of the TotallyMoney website. The focus was on consistency and trust across the brands range of products.

See the site in action

Money Monsters Illustration

2008-03-25T17:13:28Z

Playful monster character design and illustrations created for TotallyMoney and their loan product.

TotallyMoney Energy Ads

2008-02-08T17:42:53Z

Online flash ads for the TotallyMoney energy product, animated and interactive.

Personal (website) network branding

2009-04-25T02:02:08Z

I was going to title this post Personal Branding, but then I realized it’s not really about that at all. What I want to talk about is branding my personal ‘network’ of sites and how I’m going to move forward with linking them all together.

Building the network
The number of sites I have has grown, shrunk, consolidated and grown again over the years. Many of those sites are now confined to the world of web caches. But one thing is clear: I always have more than one running concurrently and I do a very bad job of pushing – or enticing lets say – users from one to the other.
Currently I have this blog, a dedicated portfolio, a paper toy project and a number of different places to buy t-shirts I’ve designed. All these entities get traffic – which is great – but almost no users that visit one site link over and visit another – not great. So the task: come up with a way to link these sites together.

What is acceptable
I started looking around the web to see ways in which companies and other designers did or didn’t do this. My eyes extensively scanned the internet for possible solutions and the answer was as clear as coffee – not clear at all. Some sites present you with a selection task ‘where are you’ or ‘what do you want to do’, others are more explicit and say ‘hey check out our other site(s)’ via nicely designed graphical pulls. And others use navigation bars that are network centric. So the question remained: which way did *I* want to do this.

Nonrelevant clutter
My main issue with most of the potential solutions is that they would interfere with the content and context of the site they would sit on. My portfolio focuses on work for a reason, it doesn’t have links to my twitter, news posts or blog content because I want people to be focused on the work, and in most cases only the work. The blog doesn’t have that problem of course, I’m trying to push people all over the web. I do however want a coherent solution, one that works with all my sites. I’m not just being lazy with this idea either. A solution that works for all, also works for the users interacting with it: they only have to learn the tool once, sites by me become easily recognizable – for better or worse – and they have an easy way to jump between those sites.

Designing the bar
There really was only one solution that would cover all my prerequisites: a network bar. Said solution needed to be unobtrusive, it also needed to be well designed, usable and work with any colour scheme I could throw at it. The latter left only one real choice, black. Not really an unobtrusive colour black, but could I make this work…
Take a look at come clips on different colours:

The bar needed a brand, one that is recognizable, not overly distracting, and if at all possible is relevant to me. I tried a number of things that didn’t work or just didn’t sit right with the rest of the page design – it was important not to design in isolation. I ended up going with a simple ‘W’ design, referencing my last name, simple and stylized.
The final result:

Technical implementation
Lets get down some specs here. At the very least the basic functions have to work without JavaScript enabled. Because the bar can’t be cross domain loaded – for security reasons – it’ll have to be small in file size. It should know which site you’re on and disable that link. It should not need to use any files my sites don’t already use. It should also – where possible – add value or services to the page you are one.
Here’s an example of added features I’ve been testing out:

The roll out
Due to the nature of the bar and the potential breakages that could occur to sites already live, I’ve decided to only implement the bar with new versions of the sites I run. Does that mean I’ll have to redesign or tweak my current sites, yes it does. Quite frankly though some of the sites were due a redesign or rework anyway, this site for instance doesn’t really work in many areas, that’s OK though, it’s an evolution.
Expect to see the bar at a Paul West site near you soon!

UPDATE!: You can see the new bar in action on my portfolio site yaypaul.com

Galactic Civilization II: Battle Fleet Gothic

2009-04-21T15:26:56Z

Yes I still can’t get enough of GalCivII, it’s my favorite space strategy game right now and it was made better when they released version 2.0 late last year. With that 2.0 update came a new standalone ship creator and it’s that creator I’ve been playing with again.

Look-a-Like
This new set of ship designs is a veritable fleet of ships based on the much loved, but little supported, Games Workshop [GW] table top game Battle Fleet Gothic [BFG]. I’ve created the fleet using the Imperial ships as a source for inspiration. What I’ve not tried to do is accurately recreate the BFG ship designs, not just because GW likes to protect its IPR with lawyergeddon, but because straight copying something just isn’t fun. I’ve tried to make my own designs, while using BFG as a base and I hope you’ll be able to recognize them at least somewhat.

Combat Ships
Imperial Frigate

Imperial Cruiser

Imperial Battleship

Imperial Dreadnought

Non-Combat
Imperial Transport

Imperial Tanker

Ok so one final Battle Fleet Gothic ship design here - one I’d forgotten I’d done - which is based on one of the larger Space Marine ships. I’ve been using this 4000 troop capacity monster to one-ship-invade planets in the later game.

Imperial Heavy

Updating the blog address

2009-04-19T17:14:54Z

Some advanced warning for my readers and RSS users: today I’ll be switching my blog over to it’s new permanent URL http://www.designergamergeek.com. With the way my server is setup you shouldn’t actually notice any difference and you’ll still be able to access all the content (including the RSS feed) from the current url. I can’t promise it’ll always be that way though, which is why I’m giving you fair warning!

Why am I moving to a new URL?
For a while now I’ve been trying to get http://www.paulwest.com, I already own http://www.paulanthonywest.com and http://www.paulanthonybrianwest.com which both point here. I’m not rich and I’ve got other projects that need money injection, add to that the fact I’ve not ever got a reply about it either way. So I officially quit stalking it and will take my personal branding in another direction (post about that soon).

I’ll update here once the switch over is done.

UPDATE: The move is done and all links in place, everything should be working fine now. Had a few issues earlier this evening when I was a total nab trying to run php5 code on php4 settings, but that was easily fixed.
I’ll be posting some more articles I have backlogged this week and if I don’t get too busy with other things you may even see a re-brand!

Free RPG Poster Set

2009-02-07T21:24:40Z

I woke up one day last week and thought ‘I want to create something quick that I can give away to my friends and that they’ll be able to relate to’. That thinking of course lead me to games. The great connector!

Everyone Loves Posters
What’s a nice easy thing to make, print and give away? Posters! With that decided, all that was left to do was decided on a theme, a theme my friends and I could relate to. Everyone I know, in one form or another, plays games. So it was an obvious choice really. Posters based on different games for different people was out of the question. After all one of my variables was that this project be ‘quick to create’. Something I could do in a few lunch times, rather than a full blown project.

Along comes a theme
It hit me like a well landed swipe from a +10 to parry shield - sorry. RPGs. Now, while not everyone I knew had played an RPG, many had and those that hadn’t could be at least put into a core RPG bracket. I’d decided four posters was a good number for a mini series, and that’s how I decided to split up the RPG genre. Lets face it there are really only four types of RPG player. The ‘run up and beat it to death’ type. The ‘let it hit me until it dies of exhaustion’ type. The ’stand at the back and throw things at it’ type. And those ‘wear robes, a pointy hat and kill it with lightning from my finger tips’ types.

The fellowship
So here they are. Four A2 posters, simply illustrated, RPG game themed. Designed for my friends, offered to you to brighten up your office, home, cave, bastion of doom…

They are saved in PDF format so you shouldn’t have trouble printing them on smaller paper if you need to. Free for Personal Use Only.