Spent Sunday at Lake Artemesia by College Park building up texture and forest pictures for my storybook animation. Spring needs to really kickstart its colors; the lake area was pretty drained of color for the most part.
My card game's rough draft is complete, and I should be playtesting it hopefully over the next few days. It combines that traditional single-player-RPG combat foundation of four party members, and in addition gives the players a deck of cards as well to work with. I went back and played a few minutes of some older RPGs to really get the feel for how combat flows, notably Final Fantasy 3 and 7, Pokemon, and Super Mario RPG. (Side note, Mario RPG's music is fucking boss.) I'll have to play rounds of Magic, VS, and UFS, and see what mechanics are / aren't fun. (Off the top of my head, I will not be adding a mana-screwed feature.)
I'm still trying to figure out whether or not I want this legitimately playable in paper or not. By that I mean, do players make decisions at the same time, or do players take turns with priority which gives one player a potential advantage over the other. This is certainly the case in Magic, where going first can be all the difference between a win and a loss. A lot of RPG combat systems give characters or attacks a designated speed which determines what character attacks first. In paper card game form, it doesn't work so elegantly. ("I'll do attack A on your character." "Then I'll do attack B on your character because it hits him first." "You're a giant asshole." etc) It would, at least, limit options and give faster attacks higher value. Worth doing? We'll see.
