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Finally started working on the Fluxx UI in earnest. I ground out the above Keeper icons in about an hour after once again blowing the dust off Illustrator and trying to figure out how the hell the tools work. As usual, through blundering around and pecking at its (sadly kind of crappy) online docs, I did a decent job, and started figuring things out as I went. These are the simplest of the 18 Keeper designs I have in mind, and I may return to redo them once I've learned various things by making the next 14.

The thought bubble is supposed to be "Dreams", by the way. I hope that's obvious enough if you know that there's a Keeper with that name in the game, which is often paired with Sleep -- whose icon I hope is a bit more obvious.

Also pleased to see that Illustrator's SVG output isn't as insane as I thought it was. It's insane by default, but you can tell it to keep all its proprietary metadata out of the file and not embed any fonts or graphics, and (in the case of these graphics) that shrinks the file size from more than 250K to less than 4K. That adds up to many megs of savings in the final game SVG UI file, resulting in that much less work for the renderer to meditate upon before play.

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Dashed-off hypothesis based on my previous poll: Dots and Boxes (under any name) never gained much traction as a traditional children's passtime in the northeast. I believe (based on what I know of y'all) that most respondents who said that they had played it grew up in other parts of the country, and most of those who had never heard of it before (Y.T. inlcuded) grew up around New England.

This is not why I asked about it; it's just an unexpected and somewhat interesting observation based on the response. I asked because I just wanted to gauge how obscure the game was. Obscurity (from the mainstream's perspective) is a prerequisite for a game's being featured on The Gameshelf, and the possibility of an interesting special-guest opportunity made me wonder about the suitability of this game. I suppose I could always bend the rules a bit, especially for a game that appears to be at least regionally unknown.

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For all my activity, I have been rather bummed lately. Not depressed, or even sad; more like the height of my baseline mood has dropped a few notches very recently. For all the blogging I do, you think I'd have gotten around to the personal introspection necessary to attend to this, but no. I think I've gotten too needy about having an audience for everything I write. Peh...

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Hey xach spawned, hurrah. As always I applaud the efforts of my smart friends to reproduce. Even though I generally find babies to be the igriest creatures on earth, I can't help but feel a twinge of existential nervousness at the child-free paths that I and lots of my nerdzoid friends walk (including the paired-off ones). Seeing counterexamples is a relief. I am not kidding.