What a glorious piece of work this video is. It follows the journey of a solitary creature as he deals with loneliness and inner turmoil. This independently produced animation is done entirely in Flash CS3 by animation artist, Adam Philips. Digging up info on him I came to discover he left Disney in 2004 to create his own ideas with this Brackenwood series and has become one of the highest ranked artists on Newgrounds. That alone becomes a great inspiration to me.

I particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts on the direction for Bitey and his opinions on “controversial” uses of narration (which I find quite enjoyable):

Sure he’s a spiteful little turd, but he’s not evil to the core. I now want the world to know who he really is and why.. to prove that there’s more to the character and his world than anyone imagined. For that purpose, I believed narration to be a suitable expository technique, despite how unfashionable it may be in the eyes of today’s screenwriters and snobbish film students. I know (just as some others wish) I could have made this movie entirely without narration, but I’ve said a number of times since LotD’s release that I have a soft spot for the spoken storytelling tradition which is something that I grew up with.

This totally needs to be made into a feature film. I love hearing stories like these and am always in support of ideas that go against traditional (and tiresome) commercial executions and delivery of entertainment. Kudos to Philips and much luck!

The following blog post is both a monstrosity and a possible work of genius–well, if you are mad man that is. Perhaps my madness will benefit other FarmVille players–irrationally addicted ones and casual rationals alike.

First off, I want to begin by saying that I am NOT a mathematician, I am not a statistician, I am not and accountant or a finance planner, or any other profession of number-crunching aficionados. I am an artist and a writer–but I have the luxury of also having been trained in logical processes and coding and have been a life-ling gamer conditioned to find patterns when anything metric-based pops up in a game.

My natural tendencies gravitate towards an intuitive path on “best reward” pretty rapidly. Once I begin becoming aware of it, more than I’m aware of wasting my time playing a redundant game for a few weeks, then something in me brain tips over and I start a spreadsheet. I do this to once and for all find an ultimate answer to all the metrics swarming in my head.

With Farmville, there are loads of things to distract you in your day (when you should be working… or sleeping). Some people like a quick rise to power, level fast and open up new things along the way. Others take it more casually and plant day crops so that the game has limited demands on their real life (I should take a hint). You can chase XP… or you can chase financial profit.

I am not going to get into tree and animal harvesting or gift exchange and the benefits of those as well with this crunchathon. My main focus here was to find an “X-SCORE”: An ultimate rating score for each seed’s “value”. And yes, the “X” is also representative of yours truly: XEI… because, well, because it’s MY darn score system!

Alrighty, lets get into some of the foundations for the ultimate equation I’ll present you with. Lucky for you there’ll also be an image with the results for your referral. If new crops come out though you can continue this work on your own–I’d just appreciate a link back here if you build on this any further. Think of it as a Creative Commons License (By Attribution)!

VARIABLES

Seed Cost = Base Cost of Seed
Harvest Time = Required Hours to Harvest
FarmVille Day = 23 Hours = 1380 Minutes
XP = XP Gained per Seed Planting
Plow Cost = Cost to Ploy Soil = 15 Coins
Plant Cost = Cost of Seed + Plow Cost
Sell Price = Seed’s Gross Price
Profit = Seed Sell Price – Plant Cost

VARIABLES WORTH DISCUSSING

The following stuff is when my brain started going to some pretty complicated places–at least for me initially. Places I was aware of but ignored because I just assumed it all floated in a pretty irregular and unpredictable variable that can’t be given a constant metric to. That variable is called LIFE people. It gets in the way and throws these kind of breakdowns right of. But that’s not saying you can’t create a metric value for each seed.

What needs to happen first is a common unit of measurement needs to be reached. Seeing as a FarmVille “day” actually comes to 23 hours, it’s pretty simple to turn every crops into an “hourly profit” variable:

Profit Per Hour = Profit / FarmVille Day = Profit / 23

Next thing to consider is theoretically how many times the crop can get cycled through the day… “theoretically” is important to state here as this variable will absolutely be impossible to achieve in the game. Each cycle requires time which I’ll detail below, but for now all I want is a non-hindered-by-real-time variable:

Possible Rotations = Harvest Time / FarmVille Day

This brings us to a non-constant variable because it has to do with how large a user’s farm area is. I’ve called each plotting area square a “unit”. I then created a variable to capture roughly the amount of time it takes for the process of each action to take effect in real time. I’ve found that each process takes about 1 second; so a total of 3 seconds per unit is required to complete one cycle. The “rotation buffer” then is a variable that takes into account this lost time and turns it into a minutes variable:

Plot Area = Max Units Farmed
Action Process = Harvest, Plow, Seed = 1 Second per Process = 3
Rotation Buffer = (Action Process x Plot Area) / 60 Minutes
= Approx. 12.5 Minutes for 250 Units
= Approx. 25 Minutes for 500 Units

Now that the handicap time is resolved, I wanted to correct the “theoretical” possible rotation cycle. I’ve subtracted the buffer from the possible rotation cycle in order to output a “more theoretical” daily rotation cycle. Again, these things can always get delayed for whatever other reasons, like FarmVille going out of synch (annoying), or you start harvesting animals or trees between the processes, or you close your browser by accident, etc, etc. BUT this is closer and I wanted to at least capture it, even roughly, just to put my mind at peace. The following then also accounts for the new daily profit and hourly profit:

Buffered Rotation Cycle = Possible Rotations x Rotation Buffer
Remedied Rotation = (FarmVille Day Minutes – Buffered Rotation Cycle) / 60 Minutes
Altered Rotation = Remedied Rotation / Harvest Time
Altered Profit Per Day = Units Farmed x Profit Per Hour x Altered Rotation
Altered Profit Per Hour = Profit Per Day / FarmVille Day

BRINGING THE VARIABLES TOGETHER

This last part is where I attempt to condense the variables down further into a ONE scalable variable that can represent the “ultimate value” to each crop. This is not quite the “X-Score” that I’m aiming for (that will come later), but this is the closest to being the most relevant for a FarmVillian to plan their strategies around. My method involved converting financial profit into an XP value. This uses the foundation that you can buy things and generally speaking you gain 1% of the purchase price as an XP bonus. This is incorrect with items under 500 coins as the lowest XP reward seems to be 5 XP. But in general this is the model for that:

Profit XP = Altered Profit Per Day / 100
XP Profit Total Per Day = (XP x Altered Rotations x Plot Area) + Profit XP

THE X-SCORE: THE ULTIMATE FARMVILLE CROP VALUE CHART

Finally, what I was hoping to achieve with all this madness: Some sort of crop score that accounted for as many variables as possible. This would ultimately place all other aspects of the crop aside–XP gain, harvest time, gross profit–none of it would matter, because here you’d have ONE score that would indicate OVERALL where the crop was placed against all other crops.

The factor that still remains mostly random and erratic is crop mastery. There are three variables left to place not this whole uber-equation:

• How many times you have to harvest a crop to get Mastery of it
• How much XP each Premium Crop outputs
• What the percentage of return is for how many crops become Premium crops

Thankfully the first of the missing variables can be found collected already on many sites and forums. There is a definite number of times each crop requires to be harvested. This alters the long-term value of a crop’s importance.

Additionally, the amount of XP a Premium Crop outputs can also already be found in numerous places online (if you dig them up… ha… pun not intended). It’s also not as easy as assuming longer crops have larger payouts. Thankfully I found a Google spreadsheet that collected all the appropriate variables that include not only the Premium Crop bonus XP, but also the approximate percentage potential.

Speadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t8oPV_Ww0uWQjyBaZxM2kaw&gid=0

So far I’ve returned a result of approximately 40% on Blueberries which is agreeable with the spreadsheet’s breakdown. It is missing Morning Glory, but thankfully this was the second crop I mastered and collected data on my own and so far it’s outputting a whopping 60% Premium Crop wield. On TOP of that, the Morning Glory returned a +6% bonus per Premium Crop harvested. I’m assuming these numbers will be getting updated as new data gets collected, but for now we’ll use the current percentages.

We can add three Basic Variable to the chart:

Crop Mastery Total = Total Required Harvests to Complete
Mastery Bonus XP = Bonus Premium Crop XP
Mastery % Output = Average % to be Premium Crop

With this data we can add another variable to the XP Profit Total per Day that will increase it’s value and give a better representation of the crops overall “X-Score”! Here’s the equation breakdown:

Potential Premium Crops = Plot Area x Mastery % Output
Premium Profit = Potential Premium Crops x Mastery Bonus XP
Premium Profit Per Day = Premium Profit x Altered Rotations
Master Profit Per Day = Premium Profit Per Day + XP Profit Total Per Day

Almost there! Next I had to get a variable out of the length of time it’d take to even get the benefits of the bonus XP from Premium hauls. I resolved figuring out how many days it would take to complete the Mastery cycle:

Days to Master = Crop Mastery Total / (Plot Area x Altered Rotations)

To get the X-Score of the crop I had to create another “benchmark” of time; I decided on 30 days. This gives a range that can be checked against the benefits of focusing on other crops. With that benchmark I was able to get a total profit value by adding the total profits from pre-Mastery and post-Mastery values. The X-Score I decided would be the resulting total. For a smaller number, divide by 100 (really doesn’t matter ).

Post Mastery = (30 – Days to Master)
First 30 Day Profit = (XP Profit Per Day x Days to Master) + (Master Profit Per Day x Post Mastery)
X-Score = 30 Day Profit / 100

Huff… huff… huff… ok, I hope you all got all that! Enjoy the FINAL RESULTS!

QUICK CONCLUSIONS

For those who don’t care to filter through the Hows and Why and number crunches–that for the most part are just values with no absolute reflection on the reality of playing through it with human tendencies and life distractions, etc. Like it was stated earlier though, that’s not the point: The point is to just get a value that all crops can compare against in order to get an informed and near-omniscient overview (ha… omniscient indeed…) of how to power-play FarmVille.

The results on almost all levels push the berries up to the top tier (except Cranberries). Black Berries seem to be only slightly better than Blueberries, and after 30 days it still won’t make much of a difference. You can sell a Golden Lawn Gnome to pair up the values after 30 days! My suggestion is PICK ONE and forget the other.

If Super Pumpkins ever come back–concentrate on them and ONLY them. This is when I stated playing about a month ago. I flew past all my Neighbours because I gravitated towards the obvious unchallengeable crop and was proven correct with this breakdown.

The only thing that will absolutely destroy Super Pumpkins by more than THREE times after 30 days is the Super Berry. I wasn’t around for this crop so I don’t know much about it–but if it comes back… I better turn into a robot and catch those 2 hour rotation cycles!

Have fun everyone, and remember, seriously: It’s just a game . Get farming!

JUST FOR FUN: Here is the uber-equation

XP = XP
HT = Harvest Time
PA = Plot Area
PR = Crop Profit
CM = Crop Mastery
23 = FarmVille Day
1380 = FarmVille Day Minutes

((((XP+1)*(((1380-((23/HT)*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT)*PA)+
((((1380-((23/HT)*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT)*PA*CP)/100)*((CM/(PA*P55)))+
((((PA*L55)*(((1380-(I55*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT))*
(((1380-(I55*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT))+
(((XP+1)*(((1380-((23/HT)*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT)*PA)+
((((1380-((23/HT)*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT)*PA*CP)/100))*
(30-(CM/(PA*(((1380-((23/HT)*((3*PA)/60)))/60)/HT)))))

DOWNLOAD MASTER CHART PDF

Best Hourly Profit
Best Overall Profit + XP

I just can’t get enough of alternate Batman concepts–probably because I really REALLY dislike underwear-on-top-of-pants superhero designs. I think they are dated and goofy and work against modern day aesthetics. Alas, each has their own thoughts on the matter. But that’s mine. So these crazy concepts are a breathe of fresh air…

Well, not so sure this guy is breathing any fresh air. He kinda looks like he died, went to hell and came back as a Hellspawn. This piece is by artist Halil Ural, his DeviantArt gallery has other great stuff.

Holy crap, this is a work of madness… and by “madness”, I mean PURE genius–LOGORAMA is a 2010 Oscar-nominated, 16-minute anumation where French directors François Alaux, Ludovic Houplain and Herve de Crecy created this world of over 2,500 brand logos in the course of six years.

Summary from News in Film website:

Ronald McDonald is a machine gun-toting fugitive running from the police played by foul-mouthed Michelin men. The E! logo topples amongst the other brand skyscrapers. Big Boy gets into mischief. The Jolly Green Giant tries to hold back a stampede of animal logos.

Not really actually…

But look what we get out of a big Akira fan’s imagination 2 decades later! DeviantArt user, Ulises Farina gives us Batman done in an Akira style. How cool is this? God it’s so grungy and “street” that it may just make Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass look like it’s owned by Disney (oh, wait… no no it’s not technically…) or Frank Millar’s Dark Knight look like “your father’s Batman” (oh, wait, technically, it is nowadays…)

Update: Wow, I just came across a 2nd piece of Farinas featuring Batman–this time it feels like a Batman Mixes it up with I Am Legend. Instead of making a new post I’m updating this one and keeping it all together! Wicked stuff!

BAAAHAHAHHAAAAaaaa… haa.. oh… haha. I love dinosaurs. This made me laugh by myself. And that’s fun. Ya.

From YouTube:

Completed in January 2010, The Moon Bird is a dark fairytale about an orphan girl who must outwit a terrible sorceress with the help of a magical lunar bird. The film is a short animation fifteen minutes long funded through the UK Film Council, Screen WM and CHANNEL 4.

From the Brother’s McLeod Site:

We’ve never done this before but we thought we’d take you through the process, the ups and downs, the long nights and early mornings. We’ve got to deliver the film by August so it’s going to be a busy few months.

The film is titled ‘The Moon Bird’. The story came about after Greg challenged Myles to write a Brothers Grimm tale. We’re going through script tweaks at the moment and Greg is working on style sheets, character and layout design.

Just when I start thinking too much is going on in the Batverse over at DC Comics, and I start fearing the day it’ll all just go back to the same old same old… an artist comes up with a concept like this–Robin and Bat.

So simple. So perfect. So fresh.

The artists’ intent was for this to be Tim Drake with a new troubled teen… but I can’t help wanting this more than the current Dick Grayson as Batman and Damian Wayne as Robin setup. It’s obvious Batman will return after he figures out how to get back from the past–yadda yadda–but lets face it: The day of Bruce Wayne as Batman is coming. Deal with it.

Wouldn’t this be the perfect answer?! The conceptual stuff aside… this Robin design just looks badass and maintains a level of fearful respect that would have been learned during his time as Batman. This artist, “kizer180” needs to get hired asap.

Artist Ulises Farinas has taken a critically acclaimed comic book event done by DC with their Green Lantern Universe… and made it MORE epic by portraying the many characters as LEGO! Instant masterpiece to many a fanboy on the interwebs for sure!

Here’s an animation by Andy Hueng done in 2005. This is interesting, creepy and thought provoking. Here’s the short blurb from YouTube:

A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future.