Every game developer and her nephew seems to be riding on the coattails of Double Fine Adventure these days with Kickstarter-funded adventure games; Jack Houston and the Necronauts is no different, in that way, while it’s extremely different in another way or three.

Its setting makes it kind of a natural for me, to start; the lantern-jawed Jack Houston arrives on swampy, creature-infested Venus only to be wrecked there, and to slumber for a thousand years in the very best traditions of the service.

Where it gets really odd, though, is in the game’s development and presentation: they’re building miniature sets and animating the game characters with stop motion animation.

I’m still marveling and wondering about that one. It’s a really interesting choice that – for a point and click adventure – might just work, in another longstanding tradition (this time, Terry Pratchett’s) of million to one chances. Very interesting.

It seems like a somewhat risky proposal since the budget is by no means high. But what an intriguing concept!

These days I’ve been watching Kickstarter denizens with a little puzzlement, myself, though I do understand their issues. But it seems odd that Kickstarter projects are increasingly viewed less as a way to help the development of something neat, and more as a way to shop for something that is certain to exist.

It’s illuminating (if strange) to read some of the comments of people who’ve arrived at Kickstarter this year. They have preconceptions like "The rewards should give backers a chance to get the XXX for less than a normal customer would pay", for example, which really flies in the face of what it takes to develop small, initial amounts of, well, anything. There have been some interesting conversations at Comics Worth Reading and The Beat – though those are concerned with comics projects, with a possible side dish of games – and in reading some of the comments I end up feeling like an anthropologist lost in the Amazon, peering at the natives and trying to jot down meaningful notes about their quaint and curious customs. Which, honestly, is how I feel most of the time anyway. But still.

Yesterday I mailed out the complete limited edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book to all of those Kickstarter backers who supported it.

Now that the dust has settled, or, I guess, is settling, I have a small number of unnumbered "open edition" copies for sale.

I’ve added to these to the "Support" page at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual where you will (I hope) find them, adopt them, and find them good and interesting homes.

Really, either one of those would be fine. I know it’s not always easy to be both good and interesting. Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s worth the trouble.

The hardcover edition is a little larger than the paperback, at 8 1/2″ by 10 1/2″, and it’s printed on archival paper between its foil-stamped, linen bound covers, and then wrapped in a handsome dust jacket. It’d sure look swell on those bookshelves of yours.

BasRel v1.0 is a plug-in for 3dsMax (2013 only, apparently) that uses the renderer’s z depth, or depth mask, rendering to produce height maps you can use to plot out CNC-routed bas reliefs from 3d scenes.

That might sound like a simple function until you realize that the depth information needs to be rescaled and modified to create the illusion of depth and additional shading in the shallow environment of a bas relief. It’s a fascinating idea of the kind that leads to other fascinating ideas, mainly of the “Hey, I could do this…” variety.

Or, anyway, that “One could do this…”, seeing as how I don’t have a supported version of Max. It’s still pretty dang interesting, if in a sort of abstract way..

The web site is unfortunately pretty confusing. The original incarnation of this idea used Blender, and most of what you find on the site relates to that application and – I think – a series of tutorials that help Blender users build their own copy of a plug-in, at which point there’s a bunch of post work in Photoshop or another paint program. Like I said, it’s a bit confusing.

The results do look very neat. I can imagine all sorts of ways to use a process like that, if I had a supported version of Max, anyway. Below is a video for the Max 2013 plug-in; I have no idea what’s going on during the multiple renderings and whatnot. Still, very neat. They’re getting a lot of detail out of Max’s depth maps (which I’ve found to be a little twitchy, myself).

There would have to be some limitations: since the resulting image(s) is (are) based on the depth map then the process is best suited to very high resolution models without things like opacity maps, bump or normal maps, and so on. And I’ve got no idea how one would get the data prepared for CNC work, which I think involves cutter choices and cutting paths. Chances are that’s just one of the many things that the web site doesn’t explain clearly enough for your humble correspondent, who’s now degrading to the “Get off my lawn!” stage of his development, oddly in the third person. Oddly, certainly.

If you missed it, here once again is a link to the product’s site.