Monthly Archives: January 2010

I spent a few minutes last night making a chart of all the HM2 slots and sets, mapped against which have already been converted and which have not. In general, here are the remaining major sets of items that need to be done:

1. Cape fronts
2. Fantasy Armor (Tops, Legwear, Gloves, Boots, and Headgear)
3. Humanoid companions (would there be interest in having some of the Custom Illustration characters appear here? Like Celestia and the other full-figure ones?)
4. Alien heads
5. Two-handed firearms (rifles, laser cannon, etc.)
6. Non-human Limbs (more stretchy arms and legs, webbed hands, more monster legs like snakes and such);
7. Neckwear Collars
8. Bustiers
9. Musical items

Out of those, the easiest and most fun to do (for me) are the alien heads and the cape fronts. The hardest and least interesting (for me) is going to be rifles -- they take a lot of work, they're basically just tracings, and I am not personally interested in them. Don't get me wrong, I like guns as much as the next guy, but it's not a mainline interest for me.

The largest and most pressing need is obviously the Fantasy stuff, both armor and (to a lesser extent) casual wear. I think as it currently exists, the app is heavily tilted towards supers. Sci-Fi has a clear edge over fantasy now, too. I think that's a major interest for a lot of people (me included) and needs to be fixed for me to feel like the item sets are close to done.

What really jumped out to me when I put the list together, though, is how much is already finished. I really don't have much more to go, and that's both exciting and scary. I can see wrapping up item creation in the next month or two, then it'll be on to basically redoing the code base to work better and putting in the bells and whistles (better printing, better zooming, better control up front of item pre-sets so you can choose "dwarf male" for instance and it'll load up a pre-generated, pre-loaded set of items that are already scaled and rotated and positioned to fit that body style. All that stuff.

But for now, I think I am going to do Alien heads, because that honestly sounds like the most fun. Let me know in comments a) if there are specific non-copyrighted heads you want and b) which other sets from the list you want me to work on next.