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.