Caravan Experiment Newsletter #5

Hey Everybody!

5 weeks down and 11 more to go! I’m feeling… steadfast.

Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestions or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Notice: New Collaborative Email List and Chance to Opt-out

I got some feedback recently that the newsletter emails would be more collaborative and engaging if I emailed all recipients together rather than individually . That way, recipients could choose to reply-all and see each other’s responses.

I like this idea. So starting with next week’s newsletter (3/13) I will maintain two newsletter email lists: a ‘private list’ that continues to get the newsletter directly (nobody else will see your email) and a ‘collaborative list’ (anyone in the list can see your email).

There are currently 21 recipients, all of which I know personally. I’m not too worried about any email funny business, so next week I will move everyone over to the collaborative mailing list UNLESS you email me this week and request to opt-out and stay on the private list. Any new email subscriptions I get will be put in the private list by default and only moved to the collaborative list at my discretion (if I know and trust that person).

Call to Action: Arts and Crafts People, I Need T-Shirt Help

For the demo dates I’d like to have some swag available and I have an ambitious idea for a T-shirt design:

What if every T-shirt was made custom with the team of creatures that you played the game with? I am thinking I could order iron-on decals of every creature in the game and then hand them out along with the T-shirt (or even iron them on at the event).

And because that is not enough complexity, I am also dreaming of a T-shirt with a seamlessly wrapped graphic of the deadly gas clouds from the game. Has anyone out there tried something like that before? I imagine that printing a seamless graphic would be pricey, but I don’t know what the tools out there for t-shirt printing are like. Maybe it’s easier than I realize. If printing the clouds is not an option, could we maybe dye the bottom of the shirt in layers to create this effect?

What is the best fabric? What are the best iron-on decals? How could we hand dye the clouds? What companies do the best printing? Would this be too expensive? Does my T-shirt design suck and you could make a better one? If anyone out there is a shirt-master, please get in touch!

New Feature: Potions

These past two weeks I have been focused on adding a bunch of resource management functionality to the exploration screen. Most of it is pretty boring, but one neat side effect of wiring up a bunch of drag + drop stuff is that I was able to easily implement “potions”: single-use items that can be dragged onto a creature for some effect. Here’s a .gif of me using a “slap potion” to deal damage to one of my own creatures:

Notice that my PLANT creature has a special ability called “death blossom”. When it dies, it fully heals nearby allies. Slap!