Through the magic of creative writing, that interview has transformed itself into a hefty feature article in Games™ issue 122, which went on sale today in the UK. This magazine can also be found at some newsstands and bookstores in the US (at least, Borders used to carry it, before they went kaput), or you can buy it online.

In the relatively short amount of time that’s passed since I wrote this article, I’ve been fairly involved with another Kickstarter project, so I’m even more aware now than I was when I talked to Tim of how much of an anomaly the Double Fine Adventure campaign was. The outpouring of donations—the outpouring of mainstream support for an adventure game—to be honest, with adventures being the niche that they are nowadays, I still can’t really believe it happened.

I don’t think that Double Fine’s experience has fundamentally changed the state of the adventure genre… and although certain crowd-funding doors have been opened for other “old” adventure game designers who want back in on the action (starting with Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, the Two Guys from Andromeda, and, soon, the guys behind Tex Murphy), comparisons to the ridiculously successful Double Fine campaign can actually make the (equally awesome) results of these campaigns seem less impressive. Still, anyone who cares about adventure games can’t deny that Tim Schafer made something amazing happen. A year ago, if you’d told me that all of these adventure legends would be staging comebacks, all at the same time, I would have laughed in your face (probably somewhat obnoxiously). But this is now the reality we live in, and Double Fine’s leap of faith has a lot to do with it.

I hope that the article captures some of the excitement of those five weeks when more than 87,000 people, unashamed, threw an obscene amount of money at Tim Schafer so he’d bring back something they’d lost long ago. And for those like me who never believed the “adventure games are dead” rumor in the first place, I think you’ll find his opinions about said rumor pretty encouraging. It all makes me very excited for the future.

I really like how the flagstone foundation turned out, and wondered if there was a way to continue that for the deck. Initially I was thinking I would paint the deck gray (using one of the stone colors) and add lattice underneath it. I’m not sure anymore what search terms I used, but a Google image search along these lines turned up this image:

I’m not sure what makes a deck a deck, and a porch a porch, but who cares? After seeing this picture, I really liked the idea of extending the flagstone foundation around the base of the deck. I decided to paint the deck white, which is the trim color and also the color of the front stairs and other deck-like areas on the front of the house.

When assembling the deck, I left a gap between boards as advised by the instructions. I tried filling these with paint but the gaps were too big (as you can see at the top of the picture above). So I filled the gaps with wood filler (you can see the first several filled rows at the bottom of the photo).

When the wood filler dried, I sanded the deck (porch?), then painted with a second coat of white.

Next, I cut some balsa to (roughly) fit inside the holes on each side of the deck.

I masked off the white parts of the porch (deck?) and painted the foundation pieces gray.

Then I applied scraps of egg carton, just like with the foundation.

Under the hot tub, I only did as much as you can see. Initially I planned to do the whole surface but I got lazy…

Here are the stones after applying several different colors (brown, gray, lavender, etc.) with a dry brush.

And here they are after applying matte varnish. (They’re still wet in this photo, so they won’t be quite that shiny in the end.)

I’m still planning to add a step leading down from the French door, and a railing to each side of the deck. Wouldn’t want to violate building code…

I’m undecided about the side of the stairs. My original plan was to end a piece of trim to separate the abrupt end of the flagstones from the white stairs. But now that I see this, I’m wondering if I should continue the stones all the way to the front. And if I do, then should I also have flagstone risers, like in the inspiration picture…?

I’m also not 100% sure that white is the right color for this deck. It goes with the color scheme, but it’s an awful lot of white all in one place. I could paint it the same color as the house, but that might look weird next to the blue interior of the hot tub. And I don’t really want to introduce another color. Any opinions from the peanut gallery?

Since I was planning to bash the hot tub into the deck, I thought about just buying strip wood coming up with my own design, but $30 seemed reasonable for the amount of wood that came with it and a set of basic instructions to follow. Plus, there used to be a version of the kit that came with a hot tub and those instructions were included, so I figured that would make the bashing that much easier.

The first step was to build four supports, to be distributed evenly across the MDF base.

Since mine would have a hot tub in the corner, the stairs wouldn’t extend all the way across the deck, so I only built three of these.

For the fourth support, I cut the wood down to fit the length between the edge of the base and the edge of the hot tub.

Originally I’d planned to stain the deck, but because the hot tub was made of plastic that needed to be painted, I thought I could paint the deck to match, applying accent colors with a dry brush for a weathered look just like I had on the hot tub. As you can see above, I experimented with accent colors on the base (and did a pretty horrible job). I decided to paint the support pieces brown and worry about the accent colors later.

The supports are slightly shorter than the base. I used a deck board as a spacer to make sure they were all an equal distance from the front of the base.

Here’s the view from the back. There’s a wider gap between the third and fourth support due to the width of the hot tub.

I’m not sure if this was necessary, but the directions for the hot tub version of the deck had a spacer between these two supports, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to add one. I made it out of a piece of scrap wood from a different project.

Next I lay the boards for the steps. These had to be cut down since they weren’t extending all the way across. Each board is half an inch wide (the finished deck is about three inches tall).

Starting with the top step, I cut the edges of the boards to curve around the hot tub. The instructions said to leave a small gap between each board, which I did.

The kit instructions also said to run the boards diagonally, and it might have looked more interesting to do it that way. I didn’t think their method for cutting the boards seemed like it would work (you were supposed to lay them all without making them the correct length, and then cut down the edges with a craft knife once the boards were all glued… seemed like a recipe for disaster). Figuring out how to cut a nice hole for the hot tub would be finicky enough, I didn’t need to over complicate it with diagonal boards!

Cutting the edges to make a nice curve did take a bit of trial and error, but luckily my changes to the design meant I had enough leftover wood to accommodate a few mistakes.

On the other side of the hot tub, there was nothing to hold up the small boards that completed the curve. Knowing it wouldn’t be visible, I added a support under the longest short board.

The others were short that I was able to get away with just gluing them to the support.

Once I made it to the back of the deck, I realized I had too much of a gap behind my bashed support to hold up the last deck board. I added a piece to the back to make up the space.

For good measure I added a shim on the other side, too, but a much smaller one.

And here it is with all of the boards in.

Seeing the finished deck up against the house, I decided painting the whole thing brown would be way too dark. So I put it aside for a few days to think about how to finish it. More pictures coming soon!

My local dollhouse shop used to stock a Betty’s Wooden Miniatures deck kit with a built-in hot tub that seems to have been discontinued a long time ago. At some point they sold out of the kit with the hot tub and all they had left was a version without the hot tub. So, I bought a separate hot tub kit with the plan of bashing it into the deck. I’ll cover the hot tub kit now, and the deck itself in a later post.

The kit is MBS brand and it’s available at Miniatures.com. I’ll start by saying that at $40, this is a pricy kit considering what you get. It’s all plastic, even the “wood.” If I’d known that I might not have bought it. The Miniatures.com description does refer to plastic siding but I didn’t make the connection. The kit comes with instructions for making the plastic look like wood, but it’s a labor intensive process… much more so than staining would have been.

The tub itself is a molded piece of plastic that looks more or less like a hot tub. They recommend painting the underside, so the paint shows through under a nice shiny finish. This would be easy-peasy with a solid color, but for “marbling” it’s problematic since you can’t keep covering up and blending until you get the effect you want… you’re pretty much stuck with whatever you paint first showing up as the top layer.

Throwing caution to the wind, I started with splotches of white and light blue, applied with an almost-dry toothbrush. After taking the photo above I added some gold, just for kicks.

Once those were dry, I painted over the whole thing with a blue “base coat.” I made this shade by mixing a few different paints (the light blue house color, the dark blue trim color, and another darkish blue I had lying around). I wanted it to look like “swimming pool blue.” Not sure if I achieved that, but it was a valiant attempt.

In the photo above, you’ll notice holes for the hardware. These need to be drilled into the plastic, and the instructions don’t say anything about how to space them or what size drill bit to use. Geoff helped me… we figured out the drill bit after three tries. I tried to center these vertically but it turns out I should have made them closer to the tub itself and farther away from the edge, since the screws that pop into these need to descend into the inside of the “wooden” part. It’s impossible to tell how much of an overhang the tub has at this point in the assembly.

Next it was time to turn plastic paneling into wood. (Sort of like turning straw into gold.) The paneling is a long strip that gets wrapped into a circle at the end of the building process. They give you a little piece to practice on, which I appreciated. The first step is to scribe “grain” into the plastic with an Xacto knife.

Above: the three panels on the right have been scribed and the ones on the left haven’t yet.

I found the scribing easier to do on the practice piece than on the longer, actual piece. My lines were very crooked, which I guess is okay for grain, but it was bothering me. I was holding the plastic horizontally and scribing vertically. I tried replacing the blade in my Xacto but that just resulted in cutting deeper (and accidentally cutting through the plastic a few times). After a while I realized it worked better to turn the plastic 90-degrees, and pull the knife horizontally to score the plastic. Don’t know if this is universal or if it just happened to work better for me.

Next step is to paint the plastic a brown base color. The instructions give recommended shades but I just used some I had on hand. The main thing is to use a dark brown for the base, and then a light brown and an even lighter brown to accent the grain. This is done with a dry brush technique: dip the tip of a sponge brush in the accent color, and then dab almost all of the paint off on a paper towel. Lightly swipe the sponge brush along the grain to highlight it. After this dries, you repeat the process with the second accent color.

The three panels on the left have been accented and the three on the right haven’t.

I stopped taking pictures of the practice piece at this point. Here’s the real thing, with both accent colors. They give it a very weathered look, which I guess is appropriate.

Next, using a dry brush again, you go over the accent colors with the original base color. I followed the directions but I’m really not sure if this turned out how it was supposed to. It looks reasonably like wood, though, so I’m okay with it.

A white piece of plastic forms the inside of the hot tub—it comes as a long strip and you have to wrap it into a circular shape. The kit comes with double-stick tape called “Stick’em,” but nowhere does it explain that this is double-stick, and it’s really not obvious. It just seems like regular (white) tape until you realize that the white part peels off to reveal a second sticky side. I had to look it up on the internet to figure out how it was supposed to work (lame!). Again, the directions left a bit to be desired here. Anyway, I didn’t take pictures of it, but you’re supposed to stick the Stick’em to one side of this piece of white plastic, then stick the “wood” paneling on top of it, and then shape the plastic and paneling into a circle. This did not work well; the paneling kept coming unstuck.

I peeled off the paneling and started again, this time forming the circle first, and then adding the paneling. It worked, however the hot tub ended up sort of an oval shape, not round. And the paneling isn’t very well stuck to it. In particular, I couldn’t get the ends of the paneling to stick together. When the Stick’em didn’t work, I tried glue, which also didn’t work‐the loose end just pulled up, pulling off some of the paint with it. Argh!

In the end I put a piece of Scotch tape over the seam, and even that isn’t holding very well. That part of the hot tub will be mostly covered up by the deck so I’m hoping it won’t be obvious!

I coated the paneling with satin varnish, and dropped the tub in to see how it looked. Perhaps exacerbated by the un-roundness of the base, when I dropped the tub in to see how it looked, some of the paint scraped off, leaving behind a clear area that you could see right through. I touched it up and did a heavy coat of varnish to (theoretically) seal it, but the next time I dropped the tub in the same thing happened. Maybe that’s to be expected when painting on plastic, but it’s annoying. I’ve finally managed to get the tub glued in without noticeably dinging it

Um… my paint job isn’t much like a real hot tub. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts!

And here it is next to the house. The experimental blue looks okay against the siding, at least. And I am happy with how the paneling turned out… even though it took hours and staining real wood would have taken about ten minutes…

So, I have a hot tub! It’s nowhere nearly as substantial as I’d expect for $40, and that’s my main gripe with this kit. For $10, maybe.

Coming soon: the deck!

Two things. One: the Gabriel Knight behind-the-scenes article I wrote for Games™ last year has just been posted on their website. This is a retrospective that delves into the development of the Gabriel Knight trilogy, developed at Sierra On-Line in the 1990s, that I wrote back when the thought of ever seeing a new Gabriel Knight game was nothing but a ridiculous pipe dream. Go read it.

Two: After several years making casual games, Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight (and, more recently, Gray Matter) has gone rogue, launching her own studio with the plan to return to GK-style adventure games. She hopes to ramp up to making two or three new games a year. I’m sorry, could somebody pinch me? What with Telltale’s Sam & Max revival, then Tales of Monkey Island, then Tim Schafer’s insanely successful Kickstarter campaign, I feel like LucasArts fans have had all the breaks. Well, not anymore. At 73% funding with 26 days to go, Jane’s well on her way to bringing us a brand new adventure game by this time next year… maybe two, if all goes well. You can learn all about it here.

A new Gabriel Knight game is still a pipe dream for now, but a somewhat less ridiculous one since I wrote that Games™ article a year ago. Activision, who owns the old Sierra properties, has already shown interest in reviving King’s Quest. And Jane’s confident that starting Pinkerton Road Studio is a step in the right direction for someday making a new Gabriel Knight. (And hey, if that’s what Jane Jensen thinks, who are you to argue? Go give her money already!)

Okay, I lied when I said “two things.” Here’s one more: the Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers theme song performed by a live orchestra. It’s surprisingly moving.

Full disclosure: I helped Jane with PR for the Pinkerton Road announcement. But I’m also one of her biggest fans in the world, and I would be pimping this project no matter what!

Run, Erica! Run!

But I digress. (What else is new?) One of the first things I did at GDC was see Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, and my impressions went up on Adventure Gamers today. The game is being developed by Phoenix Online, the group behind The Silver Lining (for whom I have done PR in the past, but am not currently) and it’s looking pretty damn good. I think fans of crime games and especially of Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers will dig it (partly because Jane is acting as a story consultant on the project, but more because the Phoenix team are big fans of hers and it shows). The subject matter reminds me a bit of Still Life, too (another of my old favorites). In short, lots to look forward to.

Read all about it!

I started by painting the foundation gray, using a flat Behr paint I picked up off the “oops” rack at Home Depot a while back. The painted foundation had a bumpy, concrete-like look and at first I thought about leaving it like this. But my desire to rip up egg cartons got the better of me—luckily, it turns out, since I love the end result.

I started by tearing up three (gray) egg cartons and a (reddish) drink holder into small pieces. I didn’t use a template or anything, just ripped them randomly. Some areas didn’t work as well, like the rigid curves that formed “windows” on the top of the egg carton, so I tossed out those pieces.

Figuring I’d get better at this as I went along, I started with the side that will eventually be obstructed by the deck. I glued “stones” onto the foundation with The Ultimate glue, with the gray paint showing through to form grout lines.

The pattern is completely random. After doing this side, I thought the grout lines were a bit too large—something to fix when I did the rest.

Next I painted the stones using a dry brush technique. I dabbed a stiff bristle brush in a small amount of paint, then sponged most of it off on a paper towel, and randomly dabbed the brush against the stones to give them color. I used five or six different shades of Behr and Glidden brown, gray, and lavender. (A couple of these, I already had, and the rest fortuitously showed up on the “oops” shelf during last week’s Home Depot run. Fifty cents each!) Here’s how they look after painting.

(I know, the siding just above this needs touching up. It’s not as noticeable in person, at eye level, as in this picture. The deck might cover this up, but if not, I’ll definitely fix it!)

While that dried, I moved onto the front of the house. I went right up to where the front stairs start, with the plan of attaching the stairs afterward (easier to get my hands into the space behind the stairs that way).

There’s a funny little patio area beside the staircase, which I added stone to as well.

As far as I can tell it’s impossible to see the back of the stairs, but after painting them I opted to add stones to the back just in case there’s an angle I overlooked. Didn’t do a particularly careful job, though…

Once the stairs are attached, I’ll add stones to them, and also cover up the seams where the stairs meet the foundation.

Next step was to coat the painted stones with matte varnish. This seals the color and paper pulp and it also seems to make the whole thing look more cohesive and realistic, somehow. Some people add grout at this point, but I think I’ll leave it the way it is… the gray paint underneath looks realistic enough and I actually like how the stones stand out from the grout lines, I think it makes them look more three dimensional.

Here’s what I’ve done so far. I’ve finished painting and varnishing the side and front up to the (unattached) stairs, and have painted the stones on the front of the stairwell but didn’t varnish them yet. (In this picture, you can see the difference in appearance between the varnished stones on the left and unvarnished on the right.) I still have the other side, the back, and the stairs themselves to go.

Here’s how the patio turned out. I may use this bird bath here, or a terra cotta fountain that I spotted on my last visit to the dollhouse store…

The Victorian windows Houseworks sells now come with the window sill detached and the acrylic removable for easier painting. The house came with a bunch of older style windows that don’t have these handy features, but I did have one of the newer styles, so this is what I used. Since the sill was already detached, cutting down the sides was easy. Not wanting to cut too much accidentally, I erred on the side of caution to start.

I used the disc sander to sand the sides down, checking the fit every so often. One of the sides broke off the window in the process but it was a clean break, so not a problem.

Here’s where I made a mistake. I used the original window as a guide for the height, failing to take into account the height of the interior window pane. So I ended up making the sides a tad too short.

To account for this, I sanded the part of the sill that forms the interior base of the window down to almost nothing.

This allows the sill to sit flush against the edges of the window, but leaves a crack between the bottom of the window pane and interior base of the window.

I cut one of the mullion strips that came with the window into a piece of trim to cover the gap. Not perfect, but it’ll do.

And here it is in place. Not bad looking for a Frankenwindow! Since this was originally a double-hung window, there are two interior tracks for window panes, and it would have looked funny to leave one pane out. So I decided to make it a dual-paned window. (Better for the mini heating bills!)

Before moving onto the detail painting, I tackled another window bash. One of the windows needed to be modified to fit on the porch, since the pediment bumped into the curved front part.

Lucky for me, the people I bought the house from had already pried off the pediment and cut it and the bracket to fit in this area. I cleaned up the cut parts a bit with the power sander. I also yanked the side off the window since I wasn’t able to fit the window into the hole with it in tact (the porch railing was getting in the way).

Because this was one of the older style windows, the panes don’t come out. Painting these was not fun, both because I had to carefully tape them (which took forever) and because I had to paint “around” them, sliding them into various positions to get the tracks and the wood around the panes painted. They didn’t slide too well to begin with, and now that they’re painted they’re almost impossible to slide. My teeth were clenched the entire time.

With that torture out of the way, I moved onto the detail painting for all of the pieces (plus some touch-ups on the sill belonging to the only other window I’ve finished).

Before gluing the small window together, I carefully cleaned the acrylic, since the “dual paned” nature means there will be an area between the two panes that will be unreachable for cleaning. In spite of my best efforts, I think some dust ended up in there.

Then I attempted to clamp the window while it glued, but soon after taking this picture I picked it up and the clamps fell off. It took a few tries (accompanied by mounting frustration), but in the end, I managed to glue it. I think it would have gone together much better if I hadn’t messed up the length and then sanded down the sill to compensate…

And here it is next to the original. Side by side, it’s like one of those “spot the differences” games. I still don’t get why Houseworks bills this as a Victorian window when it clearly doesn’t match…

And here they are in place. Three cheers for consistency! I need to do something about the area where the small window bumps into the gable trim. Also some paint needs to be touched up, including the cut down bracket under the porch… I painted the whole side blue, but now that I’ve seen it in place I realize the bottom part needs to be white.

That’s it for windows for a little while… even though I have six more of the style without the removable acrylic, and they’re not cheap (about $9 a piece), I can’t stand the thought of having to paint them with the panes in place. So I’m going to buy new ones—it’ll be worth it to me to get the job done more easily! I’ll wait for a Miniatures.com 20% sale…