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CraigEllsworth's profile

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following: 14
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hubskier for: 2111 days

A guy that designs games, and sometimes writes fiction and other stuff.

Game development blog: http://pixelateddice.blogspot.com/

recent comments, posts, and shares:
CraigEllsworth  ·  1311 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 245th Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Leo Moracchioli, aka Frog leap Studios - Metal covers of Pop songs. Hard to pick just one.

Thanks! You're in for a long, confusing haul if you wanna read all the dev logs. Hope it's semi-intelligible! When it's in a printable state, I hope to be able to play test it, and offer easy-to-print instructions so others can, too. I'll probably make a Hubski post about it when it gets to that point. (Don't hold your breath.)

Happy reading!

I usually browse the "Undiscovered" tab in DeviantArt, find students & hobbyists with art that already matches a card I've designed, and ask if I can use it. Sometimes they say no, sometimes they don't reply, but when they say yes I'm thrilled. Sometimes I get risky too, and ask professionals.

Cosmic Encounter was my favorite game in college, and I never got to play it enough. I mixed and matched the fantasy of MtG with the macabre sci-fi of Cosmic Encounter to get the theme of FissureVerse. I wish Cosmic Encounter had more of a story, so that's something I'm goin to be pushing in FissureVerse.

Been working on a card game called FissureVerse on and off for the past... gosh, six years! After a few months of inactivity (working on a novel series mostly instead), I've gotten back into the swing of things. Development logs and cards and such can be found here:


It's a little bit like Magic: The Gathering meets Cosmic Encounter. Still a work in progress (and probably will be for another six years). I should have another post in the next day or two, with 8 more cards.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1440 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Which tech giant would you drop first?

Too bad I had to rank them, instead of putting Amazon, Apple, and Facebook in a three-way tie for first. I don't use any of them at all. Microsoft could easily go next, because I only use them for Windows and if they disappeared, I could learn to use Linux or whatever else pops up. Alphabet gives me my blog space (replaceable with any other service), and Search and Maps--and those would be the hard cuts, perhaps, because their algorithms are so good, but I could survive with another search engine and bring back MapQuest if I had to. I watch YouTube a lot, so if it got cut out there would be an adjustment period, but it would be healthier for me to cut out the mindless entertainment anyway.

I'm in agreement with you, kleinbl00. The author of the article keeps trying to build up the companies like they're big losses, but it just makes me more smug as I read ("How can you do without Office?"... OpenOffice, chief). Kind of funny to me that I don't use much of these companies when I'm seemingly addicted to my computer.

But all told, if they disappeared tomorrow, new companies would rise from the ashes, as they always do. Maybe they'd be better.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1784 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A few thoughts after using Hubski for fifteen minutes

You will learn the ways of the hubski :p


    - This feals so peaceful! No voting, no mods, no wars... I really love the concept!

That's why we like it here! :)

    - The site is too slow. I feel like this could decrease my motivation to come back regularly

That's all about picking who to follow. The more you follow, the faster it becomes. It's also designed not to necessarily keep new content on top, but rather to keep conversations going. A post that's a year old can come back if someone posts a comment and gets a discussion going again.

    - I find it weird to require two clicks to access external content. Any reason for that?

Takes me one? I click the link and it pops up with the external link and the comments page. Maybe it's a setting?

CraigEllsworth  ·  1819 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Boardgames!

Dominion is the one I play most frequently, but Cosmic Encounter is currently my favorite. I've also got on the shelf: Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, Shadows over Camelot, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, and HeroQuest (old Milton Bradley game that's in shreds from too much use). I really want to get my hands on Mansions of Madness, but it's never available at the store I go to. And I've just had Gloom and 7 Wonders mentioned, how good would you guys say those are? I haven't played them yet.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1895 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: My sci-fi world, I'm new to worldbuilding but welcome any and all input!

Meh, it's never the end of the world to discover something similar it what you thought was an original idea. Indeed, it was original to you when you came up with it, and if you're trying to make an original world, I like to think that counts enough.

But of course, if it's a bummer to you, there are always ways of changing specifics to set your world apart. Make your adapted humans look different but act the same; or give them a different culture or function. I've got a race in one of my worlds that I can't help but think look like "Klingon Hagrids", but I try to do what I can in altering their appearance so that my two-word description becomes less and less accurate on both counts. I make their Klingon-like head ridges more exaggerated to the point of becoming vestigial horns or antlers, for instance.

Enough play like that and you can avoid the direct comparison, if that's what you desire to do.

("Call Me" was recorded in 79, but released Feb, 1980, so it counts! It's very 80's anyway, I didn't think it was so early!)

My money comes from my day job. I write during my lunch break, and get about one hand-written page if I'm lucky and flowing. That's some progress. Gone are the days when I could bang out 2000 words by noon, when I was between semesters and had no job.

A quick calculation tells me my current novel will be first-drafted in ten years at the current rate. So keep your eyes peeled and hold your breath, cuz that's just around the corner!

CraigEllsworth  ·  1927 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Found out the critical differences between Bernie and Hillary with this quiz

I just noticed the quiz continues after 10 questions. Be sure to click the "continue quiz" link at the top to see more questions.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1930 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you feel about floating share buttons on websites?

If it doesn't cover up anything, it works fine. I never had a problem with them; I don't find them distracting. I think I prefer them at the bottom of a article, just because they're static, but I have no major gripe with the floating way. And if people don't like them, they can block them with an adblocker anyway.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1930 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski, what do you do when you're stuck?

- Just write anything down, even if it doesn't appear the way you want it to. Revise and edit later.

- Take a break. If you put it down, and come back later, you may find you're refreshed and ready to work on it again. If you come back and you just go "ugh" every time you try, perhaps it was not meant to be.

- Consider a different form to get your ideas out. Maybe you've been writing a piece of prose fiction but the idea might work better as a play. Maybe you're writing a poem, but it works better as a song. Perhaps something completely different that you would never have thought of; maybe your epic novel should really be a board game!

- Doodle with words. Practice on nonsense or pieces that are just for fun. Get good at writing with practice pieces that you have no intention of showing anybody. Starry Night wasn't Van Gogh's first painting.

- Write piecemeal. Don't just write from beginning to end, but write the part that you feel you want to write about right now. Jump around.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1959 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think is the most interesting quality about your world?

The distance varies, since the worlds are constantly shifting around. But overall, the distance and velocity would match so that a trip from one world to another would take anywhere from a few hours to a day. The worlds are also small enough that given such a distance, looking from the ground, one world might look like a moon to another.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1963 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think is the most interesting quality about your world?

Physics is all kinds of broken.

So you've got a bunch of little worlds that float through space in a grand cosmic dance that appears random, but has enough order to it that worlds never crash into each other. Worlds usually (though not always) have at least one miniature star orbiting them to give them light and heat. That's not the interesting part; that's just the setup.

The interesting part is how people travel from one world to another: on each world, there are small pockets of reverse gravity, made visible by waterfalls that fly up into the sky (called waterrises). If you want to travel, you swim down a river and take off up the waterrise to launch yourself to another world. Of course, it's best to have a parachute, and even better to time it properly so there's another world passing by to land on, otherwise you may smack yourself into a star or float off into space for ages.

CraigEllsworth  ·  1968 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: First attempt at world building, feedback or participation welcome

A picture is worth a thousand words. The entire section concerning "To the north... to the east... west of the bay..." etc. describing the land might work better as a map. I think it would give the player something to take interest in, where they can pass their eye over it and see what land forms interest them while you say the rest of the story.

I'd also recommend removing most of the beginning before that, where the player seems to be waking up. There doesn't need to be so much purple prose when you can get to the meat of the story quickly. Start with "You find yourself awoken by an elf on a cold marble platform..."

That's all just literary critique, but as for the world itself:

Consider what will make your world unique, and start there. For instance, do you have any other intelligent beings, perhaps a very uncommon one in fantasy fiction, but is common to your world? Perhaps a species you've invented wholesale? Dewin would be better as one of those. If you're starting with the player character being confused and having no idea where he is or what Dalk is, take the player out of their element, too, by giving them something strange and non-traditional.