PDF Level 2 progress

Here’s something that I waited until the last minute, and then some, to do last year:

Actually, if you remember correctly, I waited a long time to design the Lightscribe label for the first PDF DVD, because I didn’t even have a Lightscribe drive until the first rush of orders came in and I could afford to go get one! Hence the infamous “First Fifty” DVDs which were hand-labeled, hand-numbered and hand-signed – really, who the heck cares about my signing the disc? That was just me trying to tiptoe around “I don’t have the money for Lightscribe yet.” If I had waited for that, it wouldn’t have been done in time for last year’s OEGE. Most people seemed okay witht he hand-labeled discs; some folks seemed a little less sure…but that’s okay. The initial batch of PDF 1 was done in a hurry and on the cheap, and nobody knows that – or fesses up to it – more than I do.

One of the things I learned from the CGE DVDs this year was “if you’re going to do R&D on stuff, don’t wait until it’s the last thing holding up the release.” That was the case with the on-disc artwork on the CGE sets – it was literally the last hold-up. I knew vaguely what I wanted the Level 2 on-disc artwork to look like, so I did a few variations of it, got a single spindle of Lightscribe discs and tried it out. The variations were really differences in the background “circuitry” pattern:

…which my camera picked out okay, but my eye has a little bit of trouble detecting in certain lighting and/or certain angles. And that’s exactly the effect I was looking for! I wanted to do a disc that would appear to be just text if you looked at it a certain way, and then you’d turn it slightly and the circuitry would kind of “pop out” at you. Or maybe I shouldn’t use my own eyesight as the barometer for that – I can see the sticker on the front cover now: NEW DISC DESIGN MESSES WITH EARL’S EYES!

Now, I just need to finish – by the end of this month! – the actual content to be burned on the other side of the disc…but once that’s out of the way, I’m already ahead of the curve on having labeled discs. I really intend for this release to be a smooth and orderly process, or as close to one as I can manage.

Before anyone asks, there won’t be any difference between the on-disc artwork for Level 2’s single-disc release and the ones that’ll be in the “Brown Box” bundle.

There’s already an ordering page up for Level 2…minus the actual “ordering” part of course. I’m considering the possibility of pre-orders for OEGE itself – i.e. pay before the show, pick up the disc at the show – but I haven’t decided yet. It’d help me in terms of having a ballpark figure of how many copies to bring, though I think that number can probably be arrived at by doing a head count of Retroputing and Digital Press forum members who say they’ll be there. I’ll try to have 20 copies over and above that number, but who knows, I may go bugf$#k crazy and have a bunch more. (I should also have about a dozen CGE DVD sets on hand as well, if anyone at OEGE hasn’t picked that up yet.)

More news…as soon as I know what the heck it is.