Epsilon command's blog

Tracon and Ropecon both passed again. Tracon demo was in quite quiet room, but the experience was invaluable. Tracon demo was at as well represented location as the last year, and a bit shorter demo time was nice as the noise was even louder than last time, forcing me to shout all the time to get through the cacophony. Due to few last-minute changes Tracon turned out to be more playtesting event than actual Demo, and gave some invaluable experience. In Ropecon e2o gathered again a lot of attention. Below a few pictures from the events.

Tracon has passed, but due to issues with service provider, I've been without internet connection now for a week, which has given some trouble to the development process. For a big part, this is because of the unit creation process that is tied to the website; all units are created using the website, which will allow everyone to create their own units once the website is launched. Thistime, though, it caused problems as I wasn't able to develop the units in time.

More news later, hopefully I can get the internet connection to work again soon.

Blasts, explosions, havoc, destruction!

From Epsilon to Orion will be seen at both Tracon and Ropecon in 2010! While it has been quiet for a while, be ready for series of previews. It's time for still a little more preparations and (hopefully) final playtestings.

This time, as a small preview you can see a small glimpse of e2o card graphics.

World of e2o is retro-scifi; While it's timeline isn't alternate to ours - at least yet - technology, civilization and whole theme has taken a few steps back due to all the difficulties humankind has suffered. This is where the fascination of retro scifi comes - an interesting combination of new and old. Theme of Cold war, east vs. west, americans vs. soviets is a classic, but there hasn't been many cold war -themed games lately, which also makes the theme fresh.

I was almost ready to publish e2o months ago - it's been over a year since my original intentions of releasing it. I already published small beta-edition in Tracon more than year ago. While e2o is basically still same game, a huge amount of things have changed in it. Essentially, e2o today could be thought of as second edition.

While I had a lot to tell about what's been happening with e2o during the last week, I believe you wouldn't be too interested about that; Developing a game can be quite boring from time to time.

Instead, I'm giving you pics of latest ship models - one prototype model of a burning ship, which works a lot better than just 'burning' marker, and a simplified version of American Cruiser. That's right, you that don't wan't to keep much time modelling will get another model that can be put together quickly - playing with models is much more fun than using just counters!

The gridded starmap -playing field you can find from downloads section will be changed for the final version of the game. This is a change that didn't come up until recently, when optimizing the playability of the game.

The old map will stay available on the site as a free gift; If you want a plain gridded starmap gaming board for your own games, feel free to use this original map!

Preview version of Google wave was released last autumn, but most of the excitement has gone down after everyone wanting an invitation got one. When I got an account and could share invitations forward, I used it a lot. But it seems that many of those that have the account are going back to older means of communication.

Well, a lot. Rinse and repeat once again and this time, it's a revolution. More corners is being rounded than ever, length of the rules has already dropped by a third, and still, almost everything is still in the game, and even more is coming. Some things have been dropped as they had no function. For example, it would be possible that a starship that is destroyed would have slowed down enough so it would essentially be stopped, but it's not really meaningful for the game that wrecked starships would stay static on the board.