Author Archives: Captain Spud

Extreme Tropical Splash Tohaa

Last month I posted the first models for my Tohaa army, but they weren’t exactly representative of the paint scheme I had planned out for my army. I owned Tohaa models for a year before I ever painted any, and in that time I went back and forth several times on a colour scheme.

tohaascheme_ref_03

As I generally do when I’m designing colour schemes, I drew a rough paper doll in Photoshop in the shape of the primary troop in my army– the bouncy Kotail Mobile Unit. The studio colour scheme is shown at left, and my first stab at a custom scheme is at right. This maroon-and-lavender scheme was something I thought up a few years earlier as a possible scheme for some Skorne models I never got around to painting, and I thought it looked quite striking on the Tohaa paper doll. However, my first Infinity army already made heavy use of dull dark purples, and while this one wouldn’t be exactly the same as what I used on my knights, I ultimately decided to go with something a bit more distinct for my aliens.

Continue reading

Computers Are Hard

When Infinity N3 was released a year and a half ago, I immediately observed two things about the overhaul of the hacking rules: they were super fun, and they were super hard to remember. To help me keep track of my available hacking options, I wrote a relatively simple web app that could filter the available options down to only the hacking programs that were relevant to the given situation. Originally I made this just for myself and my local playgroup to use, but the local response was encouraging enough that I went ahead and made it pretty enough for general release.

The first 3rd edition expansion book, Human Sphere N3, releases from distributors… tomorrow..? Sometime this week..? I’m not totally clear on the date. In any case, the book contains a large amount of new hacking content, and I’ve spent the past six weeks adding the new options to the N3 Hacking Helper. And since I had the files open anyway, I also decided to overhaul the graphics and add some completely new features to the app.

Continue reading

F*** Subtlety

Last year, Corvus Belli released some models that were, shall we say, controversial.

tohaamon_ref_01

Obvious comparisons were immediately drawn, and the community split into camps: those who liked, or at least didn’t mind, the mild silliness on display, and those who were disgusted by the fourth wall breach that they claimed it represented.

I counted myself among the offended. Not because I objected to an oblique reference to a children’s brand, but because the cowards at CB failed to take this joke far enough. Because you see, while any run-of-the-mill joke may be funny once or twice, the most powerful humour can only be found when a joke is plastered onto the side of a blimp, blasted with floodlights, and then run straight into the ground, rammed through the surface, and pushed further and further until it breaks clear out the other side.

Subtlety, my children, is for chumps.

Let the blimp-ramming begin.

Continue reading

Be Vewwy Quiet, I’m Hunting Smuggwewrs

Disclaimer: This article sort of sucks, because Spud is tired.

Adding this disclaimer at the start is less work than editing.

My local game store, The Hobby Kingdom, has run a Christmas Paint Exchange every year for about the last 6-7 years. I started the first one when I was playing Warmachine, and took the tradition with me when I joined the Infinity group in 2014. The basic idea is that each participant drops off an unpainted miniature, which is then handed off to a random person to paint for them. The mini can be anything, but people tend to drop off mercenaries, civilians, and support models as it’s less painful when those types of ancillary models don’t perfectly match your army’s paint scheme.

This past year, I received my random model, and it turned out to be a civilian belonging to local feline tattoo artist Tom, whom you may recognize as the previous recipient of camels and knights and stacking elephants in addition to probably half a dozen small projects that weren’t worth posting to the blog. In other words, I am already way too good to Tom, and he absolutely doesn’t deserve any more of my beneficence. So when I saw the boring-ass model he contributed for me to paint…

bobafett_ref_01

…I immediately said “screw that” and started pondering what else I could do for him. Technically I already have a few of his other models that I’ve pledged to convert or paint for him, but even those weren’t really piquing my interest.

So, **** it.

I sculpted him a Boba Fett.

As you do.

Continue reading

War Journal

So, right off the bat, I want to explain that it’s taken me four months just to figure out how to present what I’m about to share with you. It’s a sprawling project that incorporates narrative fiction, detailed mission writeups, character art, terrain work, web design, and a ton of homebrew rules. I’ve tried to assemble written, audio, and video commentaries to present what I built, but in each case, I found that giving my usual detailed blow-by-blow of the work just ended up being really long and tedious. I keep going back to the drawing board to find a new way to encapsulate everything for you, and I keep coming up with bad solutions.

I’ve been at this for five months, and I don’t think I’m going to have any more success in the next five than I did in the last five. So rather than continue this fruitless struggle, I’m going to concede that I will probably never figure out a way to present the project with all of the context that I would have wanted. It was just too big.

So, yaknow what?

Screw it. I won’t even bother.

Behold the monster that devoured Spud’s summer:

screenshot

If anyone’s unsure about whether to click that link, here’s a quick FAQ to explain what it is. Continue reading