S&S Update: Graphics and typesetting coming along

I've been working on the Showdowns & Shootouts book for a few days (off and on). It's now my "after hours" project and I'm trying to get as much done as I can each evening after work, or during the day during downtime.

So far I've got the Table of Contents, Intro, and the the first adventure set up.

This little fella will be part of our page
treatment for the online resources in
the Showdowns & Shootouts book.

I know this doesn't sound like much, but the first adventure includes all the typesetting and design decisions that will be used throughout the rest of the book. So, from a technical viewpoint, this is pretty big.

Yesterday and today I finally settled on the icon and treatment we will use to reference the Online Components to the book -- that is, the PDF Maps Packs and character sheets that are on the Website. Although we'll include thumbnails of these in the book, we're not going to reprint them in the entirety because they would really be a waste of paper.

After all, each adventure includes all the character stats, weapons and info, so even if you didn't have access to the online character sheets you could fill out your own.

The Map and River Packs from the later adventures will be covered a bit more fully in the book, but we still won't be reprinting each and every tile (there are 9 tiles in Dion Duran's "I Hit a Vein!" adventure). There's just not enough value to be had by printing each of the tiles -- but of course, we'll print the one-page map overview.

Anyway, things are definitely picking up steam. Once I finish the page with the online references for Al's adventure, I'll move on to the next. And that one (and the subsequent adventures) will definitely go much faster than the first.

I'll keep you posted as we make progress!

Showdowns Shootouts: Book Cover Ideas

I've been busy with Arnica orders the past week, but I did take a few minutes out to sketch up a few ideas for the cover of the upcoming Showdowns & Shootouts book. For this one I was just picturing a simple brown background with the cover thumbnails on it.

Click on image to see full-sized.

But my second thought is more elaborate, including a 3D image like more of a table with a gun and the cover thumbnails spread out like wanted posters. I might bring back in the 3D whiskey bottle I did for April Fool's Day (I like the way it looked and it could fit nicely in this image).

Click on image to see full-sized.

I'm leaning a lot more toward the second image, but I would need to work the authors names onto the cover. I'll keep you posted about which way I go.

Talk to you again Thursday.

Arnica Hawgleg Update

Not much time for a report today. I did a lot of resin casting over the weekend to fill some orders. I got most of the work done needed to finish out the next two orders in the queue. Those will ship shortly. Plus, I've already got a head-start on the orders after that.

When we started the store, we had about a 3-week period between order and shipment. That's slowly decreasing to about 2 weeks. We're not there yet, but will be soon.

Arnica Saturday Update: Last Saturday was one of the busiest days in casting I've had in a long time. I poured about 5.5 pounds of resin (that's 8 cups, or about 2500 grams). I poured one of everything, except the Mercantile walls because I already have as many of those as I need for the moment.


Hawgleg Update: I've started tentative work on adapting the separate Showdowns & Shootouts adventures into a cohesive book. Since the material has already been written, edited and laid out, there's not a lot to do, but a few of the graphics need to be modified for printing to make a more attractive book. Plus, there will be a few small extras in the book (not a lot, but a few summary pages of the new Specialties, weapons and so forth). If all goes well, this book could be done by the end of the week. Of course, that depends on whether or not I can decide on what I want to do for the cover.

Talk to ya'll again Thursday.

S&S: And the Winner Is...

Well, this is certainly a first. I'm actually announcing news here at the Hawgleg Blog before it hits the front page of the Hawgleg Website. The winner of the Jury Prize in the Showdowns & Shootouts contest is none other than our good buddy, Dan Hash for his great adventure, Hurrahin' The Sky Pilot!

Now, before yuh go gettin' any ideas about us playing favorites, keep in mind that a whole bunch of those fellas in the contest are our saddle pals. Hheck, Richard Nelson even played Gutshot in some of the very first playtests we ever ran, and so did Dion Duran for that matter -- and at the time he started, he could barely see above the table. Now he's heading off to college this year or next! It's amazing how much 10 years can change a boy, ain't it?

Dan Hash won by three votes (28 to 25). His victory didn't surprise us too much, as he got an early start, but other folks started catching up on him and, to be honest, at the end there we weren't sure who was gonna cross the finish line first.

We'll talk more about Dan's victory in a day or so, and give yuh a peek behind the scenes as to what went into his adventure (we used it to debut a new Specialty called Fight to the Death that will make it into the next edition of Gutshot).

See yuh back here on Thursday!

WIP: Waiting for the Jury Prize Announcement

I had originally planned to announce the winner of the Showdowns & Shootouts Jury prize selection today, but that is not to be. As you will recall, the voting on the contest closed this past weekend, so we had our winner. It was actually a fairly close race, with the winner being decided by only three votes!

We sent an email to the winner but we haven't hear back from him. Since we don't want him to read about this before we've personally contacted him, we're going to put off this announcement until next week.

In the meantime, here's a sneak peak at the Work In Progress (WIP) illustration that will run with the story. Once again, I'm using Strata 3D CX6 to create this image. BTW: You might recognize the cowboy on top of the trophy as being the miniature that was in the bottom of last week's whiskey bottle image.

This image is still very rough (and, of course, I removed the winner's name from the plaque). So far, I'm mostly happy with the design (which, I must admit, is loosely inspired by my own Origins Award sitting on a shelf in my office). So far, I like the general shape, but there are some technical issues I need to resolve to make the image look better. For example, flat surfaces do not really look great with reflections. They tend to look lifeless and uninteresting. I may need to add some curvature to the name plaque, or get creative with my reflection maps in order to make this work.

Anyway, hope you enjoy this sneak peak of this image. Oh, and if you're interested in this sort of thing, here's a wire frame view to show you what the image looks like as raw geometry without the pretty textures applied. As you can see, there is a lot of detail on the cowboy figure, which was actually exported from Poser and placed in Strata 3D. It actually has a lot more detail than I need, but I don't feel its worth the hassle it would take to create a good, lower-polycount version of the model.

See you next week when we finally reveal the winner's name.

S&S Voting Report

This weekend we passed the halfway point in our month-long Showdowns & Shootouts Jury Prize selection process. So far, response has been about what I expected it to be with about 50 people voting so far. What I did not expect was that there would be one runaway leader at this point. One of the entries has an almost 2-to-1 lead over its nearest competition.

After these two big leaders, there are several other adventures racking up impressive voting. In fact, every single adventure has received at least one vote (and no, it's not just from the author).

I'm not going to taint the results by publishing who the leaders are, but I will publish the top five at this time (and they are listed in order of their publication number, which does not coincide with who's leading):

• SS001 - Ambush at Coyote Canyon! by Al Theobald
• SS002 - Bullets for Breakfast! by Ross Edwards
• SS003 - 1,000 Horses for Helen! by Carmen Cerra
• SS004 - Hurrahin' the Sky Pilot! by Dan Hash
• SS005 - Holed Up! by Lance Gamble

If you don't see your favorite adventure up there, it's time to vote or stat campaigning to convince your friends and family to agree with your choice and get them to cast a vote, too.

You can read the adventures here: http://www.hawgleg.com/2007_contest_winner.asp
You can cast your vote here: http://www.hawgleg.com/polls_vote.asp?PollID=1

By the way, remember that everyone cast a a vote is eligible to win a saddlebag full of cool prizes!

Voters’ Drawing Prize (valued at about $60) Randomly selected from everyone who votes Whitewash City Starter CD ($15 value)  One item from the Gutshot General Store (approx. $20 value)  One copy of the collected S&S paperback book (approx. $20 value) Gutshot miniature: ($5 value)

See yuh back here on Thursday fer our next, 

regularly scheduled pow wow.

S&S: Why did it take so long? Part 3

The next gap is almost a year long, and it's harder to explain from the news headlines. I was almost put in the hospital again during that time, but was able to recover with bed rest. And Arnica started selling in earnest. And the 10th and 11th adventures we selected were BIG adventures. They were probably overly ambitious because they each included some really cool extras. Dion Duran's "I Hit a Vein!" has a PDF map for a poster-size underground gold mine that can be printed out, one page at a time, on your color printer. And Tom Reed's "White Water, Bloody Boulders!" comes with 13 pages of map tiles to simulate a wild escape on a white water rive raft. Both of these bonuses took extra time to flesh out... But I (for one) think the wait was worth it. These two adventure accessories will turn any game into an ace high fandango!

Remember, you can get all of these adventures for FREE over at our Website: http://www.hawgleg.com/2007_contest_winner.asp

The Last Hurrah

I think the hardest part to explain is the final big gaps. It took us almost a year to publish the 12th adventure, and then another year for the three of us to force the matter and actually vote on who won. That honor, of course, went to Tom Reed's "The Great Dry Gulch Bank Robbery!" Now, part of that delay did come from the fact that we had wanted to print a 13th adventure to make it a baker's dozen. But we finally realized that this had been sitting idle for far too long and we just had to end it. So, end it we did.

And then came the next delay, which is entirely on me. We needed to set up a software solution for people to vote on the winner of the Jury's Prize (that is to say, second place). The problem was, I couldn't find an available solution that we could afford (honestly $99 to run a contest for one month?). And the freebie solutions didn't have the functionality we needed to capture email addresses, or if they did, they limited us to 100 respondents. Since we couldn't find what we needed, we decided that I should write it myself.

The really sad thing is, I got about 80% finished with the coding and back-end tools in two weekends, and then my work schedule went crazy and my computer crashed (my work was safe online but I didn't have an ASP development environment set up on my new laptop). That's when things REALLY slowed to a snail's pace. Countless distractions and other issues just kept putting S&S on the back burner until -- you guys really should thank him -- Paul got me to focus on it again so we can finally put this puppy to bed.

And that's where we are: Finally putting it to bed after starting it five years ago. This puts us 3.5 to 4 years behind schedule. I've got to say... Hawgleg has the most patient fans on the face of the earth. I think they always knew we'd get it done... it was just a matter of when. And, of course, that "when" is now.

Putting it all into a nutshell

I've had time to think about what happened and why. There were some reasons for some of the delays, and hospitalization and hurricanes are darned good reasons as to why we got thrown off track. But (and you decide if this is a reason or an excuse), I think it comes down to this: We underestimated the time and resources we would need to complete all the projects we had lined up and, because of that, we lost momentum on the S&S contest. 

I think we've managed to lasso the momentum right now and will manage to keep it going for the last mile of this journey. We're going to get the prizes awarded and delivered to the patient winners. And then we're going to pull the material into a book for the people out there who would like to purchase a permanent hard copy for their records and, let's be honest, to give one final thrill and some serious bragging rights to the fine gents who entered this contest. When all is said and done, they will have their work printed in a game book that they can show off to their buddies and to woo the ladies (okay, I suspect it will be more showing off than wooing, but you never know...).

By the way, just because we are collecting the Showdowns & Shootouts material into a book does NOT mean we are taking the original adventures offline. Our intention is to keep those up there as free downloads for anyone who wants to mosey by and take a gander at them. After all it's taken to get them up there, it would be a downright sin to do anything else.

Tuesday, come back for a rules discussion on Movement & Modifiers. 

S&S: Why did it take so long, part 2

I think we really started off well. I had the idea for the Showdowns & Shootouts contest in December 2006 and when I ran it by Murphy and Paul, they loved the idea. I then set about getting the prize support for it and together we worked up the rules and came up with the general guidelines of what we were looking for: Class adventure ideas that would be easy to play with 1-4 teams and didn't require strange miniatures or terrain. We also weren't looking for someone to write high-quality prose that fit our house style; we wanted basic ideas, character names and game set-up (maps, objectives, and other cool stuff). We wrote this up on our Website and opened it up to both the Gutshot community and the general public.

Our goal was always to collect at least 12 high-quality adventures and put them online where they would always be available as a free download as a PDF. The idea was twofold:

1. It's a reward for the people who have already shelled out their cash to buy our book.
2. Potential customers might read these adventures and think they were cool enough to invest in buying a copy of Gutshot. (Yes, we're nice guys, but we ain't averse to capitalism!)

When we started, we had no idea what kind of reception we would get. We needed at least 12 good adventures to complete the contest... and in the end, we hand danged near 50 submissions, and there wasn't a stinker among them! Every single person who submitted an idea took our guidelines to heart and wrote something that -- with some level of editing -- could be published as a quality game that would be fun to play. To put it mildly, the only hard part for us was agreeing on which adventure to print next.

The S&S Timeline

The contest opened on Jan. 31, 2007. Our goal was to have all of the adventures published by the end of that year and then wrap the contest up by the first quarter of 2008. As you can see, that did not happen. Here's a breakdown of the timeline, as culled from the Hawgleg Website's news archives:

• Showdows & Shootouts writing contest offers more than $500 in prizes , Jan. 31, 2007
• First Showdowns & Shootouts adventure ready for download, April 26, 2007
• Bullets for Breakfast -- New Showdowns & Shootouts Adventure Online, May 25, 2007
• Sawbones release Mitchell from Hospital, June 26, 2007
• 1,000 Horses for Helen -- New 'Showdowns & Shootouts' adventure now online!, July 20, 2007
• Fourth Showdowns & Shootouts adventure released, Aug. 15, 2007
• Holed Up: New S&S adventure ready for download!, Oct. 4, 2007
• 6th S&S Adventure: Stand-off at Muckhole!, Oct. 14, 2007
• 7th Showdowns & Shootouts adventure ready for download, Jan. 8, 2008
• New S&S Adventure Released, Feb. 25, 2008
• Hawgleg Publishing acquires Arnica Montana Real Estate, April 28, 2008
• Klaus needs a Holiday New Showdowns & Shootouts Adventure online!, June 8, 2008
• Ike Strike -- Hawgleg suspends operations due to hurricane, Sept. 22, 2008
• Hawgleg reopens after Hurricane Ike, Oct. 22, 2008
• I Hit a Vein 10th Showdowns & Shootouts adventure released, Nov. 12, 2008
• Hawgleg announces Draw! RPG, Feb. 5, 2009
• 11th Showddowns & Shootouts Adventure ready for download, May 4, 2009
• Arnica Pre-Release Bonanza Sale!, Aug. 12, 2009
• Pre-Release Sale Closes, Sept. 12, 2009
• Final Showdowns & Shootouts Adventure published!, July 13, 2010
• Showdowns & Shootouts winner announced, June 19, 2011
• Vote now in the Showdowns & Shootouts Contest, March 1, 2012

I've highlighted the 12 adventures' release dates in red.

As you can see, we did really well up until the sixth adventure, and even the seventh & eighth weren't too far off schedule, especially when you consider I spent about a week in the hospital in early 2007 and had a few subsequent relapses of a health issue that kept me bed ridden during that year. No, in spite of that, we were doing okay.

And then we bought Arnica Montana from Mike McGraw. Honest to gosh, we had no idea how much of our time and resources that would take up. This was new territory for us and we don't regret it at all, but it was something new and the learning curve was tougher than we expected. Being honest again, I don't think we're masters of this technology or business model even to this day. But that's another story.

By the Ninth Adventure -- Klaus Needs a Holiday! -- we were almost back on track, and then Hurricane Ike hit. My home was severely damaged and we were without power for 16 days. We left town for part of it (my folks up in the hill country had power and my brother was getting married, so what the heck, we rode out part of the aftermath with my kinfolk). And there was some serious aftermath. 

Hurricane Ike Damage

Yes, that is a tree on the side of our house. If you look closely, you can see the other tree that smashed the corner of our garage... tapping our cars inside (fortunately, our other cars were at my wife's folks' house, so we got a ride over there and were able to drive around the devastated city while Houston limped back to life.

Ike took a lot of wind out of sails and scuttled us for months (hmmm, maybe I should stick to Western lingo and say, this really put us off our feed). There was so much to deal with in the aftermath that we didn't even think about the contest for a while. Hawgleg actually closed for an entire month, and we didn't get our next adventure out until a month after that.

I wrap it all up next Tuesday in Part 3

S&S: Why did it take so long? Part 1

Quite a number of years ago, I was working at a newspaper in the upper Rio Grande valley as a layout artist, typesetter and editor (yup, it was a small newspaper and we all did a variety of things). When I wasn't working on the next issue, the shop also took in additional print jobs to fill the time between our weekly editions. One of these projects was a book for a local author.

As part of the design, he asked for separate left/right page footers so the page number would always be on the outside. This was time consuming and ate up more time than was budget for. When he asked us why we were behind schedule, we told him of this reason and he said, "I don't want to hear excuses." I replied that this wasn't an excuse, but a reason." "There's no difference," he said. "You're wrong," I said. "Very wrong. An excuse is trying to explain why something happened or didn't happen and shift the blame around. But a reason is just a statement of fact. If you asked me why I couldn't make it to a meeting 150 miles away on time, an excuse would be that I didn't leave in time or that I had a flat tire. A reason would be that, you only told me about the meeting one hour ago and my Ford Pinto does not drive 150 miles an hour."

He conceded that there was, in fact, a difference between an excuse and a reason.

What you're about to read here is a combination of excuses and reasons. Some are just saying why we didn't do things when we should have, but I'm also going to state a few solid reasons why it took us so danged long to finish the Showdowns & Shootouts Adventure Writing Contest.

It all seemed like a good idea at the time
For those of you who have met us at conventions or visited the Hawgleg Forums on a regular basis, it won't come as news to you that we've been planning to release a Gutshot Campaign Guide. There were several ideas that we were fleshing out at the time when we published the Gutshot Core Rule Book and, because they weren't finished, we didn't include them. In short, the Campaign Guide in the core book is about one-third of the material we would have liked to include. But, some of it was only half baked at the time and if we had delayed publication in order to work on it, I doubt Gutshot would have seen print until 2007.

So, Gutshot comes out in 2005 and wins the Origins Award for Historical Miniatures Game of the Year in 2006. We suddenly had a lot of interest in our game and, consequently, we had a lot of people visiting our Website looking for game ideas. We needed some additional content to help generate interest in our game and to support the people who had already bought it. We talked about it and decided that we should post some free adventures online for people to download and print as PDFs.

Fortunately, we had a lot of great ideas and they were posted on the site as game reports. I started working on some to put on the site and then it hit me... this was the content for the Campaign Guide. Simply put, the adventures by the Midnight Riders and the Red Leg Gang (which were based actual campaigns) perfectly illustrated the concepts we wanted to include in the campaign guide. So that meant we couldn't use these for that purpose.

So... If we couldn't use the material we already had, then where would we get new material? We decided to have a contest and ask our readers to create some ideas for us. And so, the idea of a contest was born.



We get by with a LOT of help from our friends
What's a contest without prizes? Nothing, that's what. So we asked some of our friends in the gaming community and got a LOT of enthusiastic help from the following fine folks, who promptly offered to donate some very cool stuff to our cause. In all, they ponied up about $400 in prize donations!

Contest sponsors:
Arnica, Montana Real Estate
Knuckleduster
Scale Creep Miniatures
Whitewash City / Hotz Game Mats
	Click on the sponsor's logo to visit their Website.

By the way, when we started the contest, Arnica was a separate company. We bought the company while the contest was ongoing, and that was a factor in why it took so long to finish. In addition to Arnica, we also appeared at conventions and started work on two other project in the interim: the Draw! RPG and Gutshot: Night of the Living Deadwood.

It seems my dad was right all those years ago... you should focus on doing one thing at a time and try to do it to the best of your ability. Excuse #1: We didn't do that. We jumped into new products and projects and didn't always account for the amount of time they would take, nor fully appreciate the impact they would have on our overall progress.

And yet, through all these changes, we just kept plugging along, knowing we'd get it together and have something really great when we finished. And we'll get into that more on Thursday.

Continued this Thursday when we show the entire S&S timeline.
Join us next Thursday for a change of pace with an example of combat movement rates.

Showdowns & Shootouts: Vote Now to Pick a Winner

As I said Tuesday, the time has finally come, mi amigos. We have finally opened the voting for the second-place prize in our long-running and much-delayed Showdowns & Shootouts Adventure Writing Contest. The details are all over on our Website, so you really should mosey over there and read it in detail.

Here's a relatively short version of what's going on:

• Back in 2007 we started a contest where people would send us ideas for adventures suitable for use with Gutshot. Some were real short (set-up and some loose ideas), others were real detailed with character names, stats, and detailed maps and game objectives. The contest is, of course, called Showdowns & Shootouts.
• We selected 12 of them, rewrote them into a standard format and posted them online as free PDFs for people to download for free.
• We got some of our gaming buddies to help sponsor the contest: Arnica Montana, Hotz Game Mats, Whitewash City, Knuckleduster Productions, and Scale Creep Miniatures all donated prizes... in fact, all told we've got more than $500 in prizes! Again, check out the main site for a list of all the goodies.
• Back in last summer (yup, summer 2010) we finally printed the last adventure. Yeah... there was a HUGE delay, which I'm gonna talk about shortly. Then in Summer 2011 we finally got around to decided who won the Grand Prize (we call it the Judge's Prize). It was awarded to Tom Reed for his adventure, "The Great Dry Gulch Bank Robbery!"
• Now it's time to select the second prize, which we call the Jury's Prize. This one will be selected by the general public at the Hawgleg Website. It's a contest that's open to anyone who will (hopefully) take the time to read the adventures and pick the best of the group (not counting Tom's two entries -- he's already earned one prize). You can get the adventures for free here:  http://www.hawgleg.com/2007_contest_winner.asp
• The author who receives the most votes will win the Jury's Prize and get more goodies than he can fit in his saddle bags (again, hit the main site for a full list).
• Now, here's the cool part, everyone who votes in this contest is eligible to win a $60 prize package. Yup, just for taking the time to vote, you could cash in on some cool stuff!

Everyone who casts a vote in this contest will be eligible for a special Voter’s Prize package valued at about $60. The Voter’s Prize includes: Whitewash City Starter CD ($15 value) One item from the Gutshot General Store (T-shirt, mug, etc. approx. $20 value) One copy of the collected S&S paperback book (approx. $20 value) Gutshot miniature: ($5 value)

Not bad, eh? To vote in the contest, just head on over to the Hawgleg Website, kick back and read some great adventures, and then cast your vote for the one you like best.

You know, what, folks? It's late, I'm more than a little tuckered out from getting things ready (wrote the news story at the Website, created that graphic you see above, and even cleaned up a few coding errors I found in the back-end software that tracks your votes). So, I'm gonna sit back and finish my beer and we can palaver about the contest and why it took so danged long to finish during the next blog update on Tuesday.

Thanks fer yer patience, I'm beholdin' to ya. See ya Tuesday.