Ruptured Troll Shoppe of Curiosities

As you may or may not know Ken St Andre & Steve Crompton bought the old T&T Phone App from MetaArcade.  This phone app was available on Googleplay and iTunes in many countries all over the world, and had over 20,000 active players. Ken and Steve are not programmers, but the T&T App continued to run on the platforms for about two years. However technology marches on and these apps have to be updated with various security features and other ongoing enhancements to work with new phones and the operating systems. (or they stop working!)

Ken and Steve found two stalwart programmers Bernard Assaf (he’s is a big T&T M!M! fan) and the other James Simpson (he was almost was the original programmer for the T&T phone app when MetaArcade started.) The four of them joined up to create a partnership to upgrade the app and get it up and going again. James and Bernard are eminently qualified for this task!

However the sale of the T&T assets to WebbedSphere caused a bump in the road when Ken and Steve learned that the licensing rights to T&T for the app would not be renewed.  Not ones to give up easily, the team decided to rename, re-skin and adjust the app so it would be for Monsters! Monsters! One of the big hurdles was going to be replacing all the art in the app – that hurdle has now been leapt over!

Steve and the team worked out a way so Steve could go through all the art in the app and remove any images that where owned by Flying Buffalo. As the former art director for Flying Buffalo for over 25 years, no one on Earth is more qualified than he to be able to know what art Flying Buffalo owns the rights to, and what art it doesn’t own. However there was catch – Steve also had to replace all that art with new images and keep all the file names and formatting of the replacement images intact, so that the database would automatically replace the old art with the new art.  And on top of that, Steve also had to try to make the new art be of a similar theme to the original art. For example, if the image being removed was of a treasure chest, he had to find a different illo of a treasure chest. If If it was of an elf, he had to try to find another illo of an elf, if a tavern then another tavern and so on – 530 times!

Here is a collage of some brand new images that will be going into the M!M! app.  These will be replacing the T&T or Flying Buffalo owned images that were in the old app. There are 990 images in the database and Steve went through them all, replacing any that needed to be replaced to avoid any IP infringement. Liz Danforth had also done some new art for MetaArcade, and Steve removed all of those as well, since they were made for specific T&T solos. The rest of the art in the database was additional art that MetaArcade bought from other sources and the team retained the use of that art for the app.

It was a big job and took hundreds of hours to complete! Of the 990 illos in the database Steve replaced 530 of them, that is more than half. Most of the new images that were added are in color, while many of the old images were black and while illustrations – which means the new app is going to be a lot more colorful.  Steve and Ken have a lot of art from various Monsters! Monsters! books, the City of the Gods books, Steve’s comic book art, and other sources.  Steve also created a lot of brand new art as well.  If we need specific new illos for a specific solo adventures in the future, Steve can make them on demand.

With this task now done, the programming team can now really put peddle to the metal and get the Monsters! Monsters! Adventures App ready for release.  Stay tuned and we’ll update you as we get closer to a release date!